Abundance! Not such a bad idea. Natural abundance. Plants oozing with flowers and fruit. Galaxies of innumerable stars –the infinite, the eternal.

It is not a new idea –who were those people who talked “irresponsibly” about a potential plenty that Friederich Hayek referred to in his 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom”? Perhaps an American accountant, a follower of Thorstein Veblen? How many people have heard of Stuart Chase today? Or of his books? In 1934, he wrote “The Economy of Abundance.” It seems that despite today’s overwhelming abundance such ideas are now very scarce…

Although the idea of abundance seems intuitively undeniable to us, it has been lost within the ethos of what has been “Contemporary Economics” for some time now: that is, Scarcity, whether absolute or relative. Indeed, we are beset by this idea, which is both input and output of social exploitation, hidden as one of Capital’s objectives, but imposed on us as one of Capital’s absolute imperatives (i.e. not simply an ideological “prop”).

The idea of scarcity goes well beyond the sphere of Neo-Classical Economics. In the 1960s, a libertarian anarchist wrote that he saw no evidence of overproduction because millions were dying of hunger in Africa. We might observe that what he was really doing was ignoring the evidence that we live in a world of contradictions. Of course, it is true that people are starving and it is also true that food is being destroyed by the ton –an ugly fact, but true. A fact, by the way, which Agnes Varda has portrayed admirably in one of her films, “Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse.”

We believe that this idea of scarcity permeates all disciplines –including the physical sciences.

Of Isaac Newton, Voltaire wrote the following:

“In fine, the better to resolve, if possible, every difficulty, he proves, and even by experiments, that it is impossible there should be a plenum, and brings back the vacuum, which Aristotle and Descartes had banished from the world.”
(Letter XV: “On Attraction”, c. 1778)

And so henceforth, emptiness replaced fullness? Doesn’t this tell us something about the direction certain minds were moving in just prior to the French Revolution? The wealth is there, of course, but must be wrenched from “nature’s” grip. The physical sciences seem still to be dominated by that type of thinking, but other, more utopian views have long been making themselves known around the fringes:

“Nothing, on the cosmological scale, is virtually everything. It is the home of all the invisible fields, rippling with the activity of every real force. Every kind of matter produces a field, the field all mesh in complex ways, often causing interference with other fields. Fields are the “stuff” of the virtual vacuum. A light particle is nothing more than a large interference in the electromagnetic field. Apart from interaction with matter of other fields a field will not be changed in the vacuum. It will not go away; it cannot. Fields are a fundamental part of the vacuum structure itself. Fields in their most quiescent state form the virtual vacuum itself. Even when everything that can be removed from a vacuum has been removed, the Higgs field remains. ‘Imagine the entire universe permeated with a constant magnetic field’. One need not imagine, for it is true. It is clear from experimentation that certain results appear that are not explainable without the presence of a field. The field consists of an infinite number of one-dimensional North and South poles in an incoherent state –incoherent due to the presence of a multitude of other interfering fields formed by other North and South poles, or particles or quanta. Thus the virtual vacuum is far from empty, far from nothing, it is rather seething with potential energy as the primordial powerhouse of everything in the universe.
(“Nothing is something: The Theory and Operation of a Phase-Conjugated Vacuum Triode”, Floyd A. “Sparky” Sweet , June 24th, 1988)”

Ω

There is no real dividing-line between overproduction and abundance –what changes is a certain modus operandi, which we think can be made clear through a concrete study of history.

Capitalist overproduction gave us the crises of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, during which a change appears to take place, a change that is associated with the possession of economic power –the decay of the old and the rise of new socio-economic formations.

Among the various Empires of the 19th century, the British had dominated, but as is now well known, other powers had been visibly accumulating economic power since the end of that century. Conflicts among these “Great Powers” gave rise to two world wars in the 20th century and big changes in the world power-structure. It was not simply the displacement of some by others –power during the 20th century had for now became concentrated in the United States oligarchy and its world system.

In achieving this position, Capital had appeared to embrace the latest developments in science –developments with the potential to free the whole of mankind from poverty for ever and launch our species on an new and higher path. This had been the hope of Socialism and Communism, a hope that was integrally tied to humanity’s eternal dream of a society that would be ruled (if that is the right word…) by love and truth. If Capitalism were to survive, it would have somehow to dislodge that movement.

We shall not attempt to go into the way Capital’s mission unfolded here –its relative rise and Socialism’s relative fall following World War II –except to assert that Capital’s embrace of science and technology –of quantum mechanics and relativity, or so it would seem –and the rise of computerization, was surely forced upon it by its initial embrace of abundance, i.e. independent of Capital’s will. Thus, in a sense, Capital’s modus operandi was chosen for it.

The abundance liberated by economic growth is again leading to great changes. Abundance has bubbled out everywhere, something that irritates the power accumulated by previous bubbling. What was a mere packet of seeds yesterday has become a forest that covers the world –assuredly, a very contradictory world, in which power’s plans have also created deserts.

October 18th, 2005