What is 'post-scarcity'?

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A post-capitalist society has to be, by its very nature, a ‘post-scarcity’ society. It has to be a society technologically capable of adequately meeting the needs of its people. This capacity constitutes the material foundations upon which the kind of social outlook and values indispensable to the very existence of such a society can arise and truly flourish. Without it, without an ample supply of the goods and services we all need to enjoy a reasonably decent standard of living, a debilitating and scarcity-driven competitive scramble will inevitably set in, undermining our willingness to cooperate with each other and sapping our desire to work for the common good.

But what exactly does an ‘ample supply of goods and services’ mean in practical terms? Obviously, what is ‘ample’ is dependent on how much we are able to produce in the first place, but it is also crucially contingent on what we ourselves consider to be ‘ample’ – our cultural values. That is to say, it is culturally conditioned.

Consumerism

In a capitalist society, your status correlates positively with how much you conspicuously consume in the form of material wealth. This is what makes consumerism such an integral aspect of our way of life under capitalism.

The point about consumerism is that there is technically no upper limit to the quantities, or money values, of goods and services you could strive to consume. Hence the emphasis on it ‘always’ being a desirable goal that one should consume more – a suggestion that conveniently chimes with the commercial interests of businesses wanting to increase their sales. More is always better. That there is no limit on how much you should consume stems from the fact that status competition itself is essentially a zero-sum game. I can only boost my social status within a status hierarchy at your expense (and vice versa).

According to the argument, it is not just that your sense of well-being and happiness is said to grow in line with your rising level of material consumption; crucially, it is also because this rising level of material consumption works to enhance your status in the eyes of others. The corollary of this is that those lower down this status hierarchy must therefore feel, to that extent, a little less satisfied and less happy with life — at least according to consumerist ideology. The only way in which they might mitigate this relative sense of dissatisfaction or deprivation is by striving to consume more – not just more but relatively more than others around them are consuming.

Our capacity to consume more is, however, dependent on us improving our economic circumstances and increasing our purchasing power, in comparison with others. But, of course, this cannot logically happen for most people in a capitalist society since the very mechanism of capitalist incentivisation itself depends on the systemic entrenchment, and even deepening, of economic inequality. Capitalism needs us to feel dissatisfied with our lot in life, by comparison with others, so we can all the more enthusiastically buy into, and embrace, what it is (literally) attempting to sell us. And, of course, work harder to achieve it.

This is an example of contrived or artificial scarcity. It is contrived because what the system is attempting to implant in us are what Marcuse called ‘false needs’.

Produce more stuff?

What can we do about it? It cannot be emphasised too much that ‘scarcity’ in this sense will not diminish and disappear simply by augmenting or adding to our capacity to produce yet more stuff – that is, by further expanding the already formidable forces of production at our disposal.

The problem is not that we lack the technological wherewithal to make a post-scarcity and post-capitalist society feasible. The problem is, rather, that we allow a system of profit-oriented and market-based production to continue to exist and to fundamentally get in the way of fully realising the productive potential we already possess.

A post-capitalist society, while it is not a recipe for a kind of stoical belt tightening is, on the other hand, not an excuse for some sort of turbocharged consumerism. The grounds for rejecting the latter are as compelling as the grounds for rejecting the former

Instead, there is a middle way, if you like. According to this approach the technological potential to meet humanity´s basic requirements for food, shelter and so on, to a reasonable level, should be looked upon as providing us with the means and the opportunity to better accommodate, or attend to, those other (and often neglected) needs we all have as human beings quite apart from our physical or material needs.

Lifestyle changes?

One thing is for certain: just privately reflecting upon the subject of consumerism and consciously seeking to adjust your own consumer behaviour, however much this might be welcomed, is not going to be enough. Not nearly enough. ‘Consumerism’ as it has been defined here is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

This is the problem with much of the currently burgeoning literature on the theme of a post-growth – and even, post-capitalist – society, awash, as it often is, with informative and penetrating insights into the negative social and environmental consequences of ‘consumerism’. The focus is too much on the particular lifestyles of particular individuals.

With some notable exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of a well-grounded analysis linking this phenomenon we call consumerism with the underlying socioeconomic relations that define our existing capitalist social order. The general tenor of the approach is essentially moralistic in tone and, ultimately, the solutions offered seem to hinge more on reforming or tinkering around with the system than getting rid of it.

Of course, changing values is undeniably important if we are to fundamentally change the nature of the society we live in. The point is simply that we cannot just rail against the ‘consumerist values’ of this society, as we see it, without understanding where they originate from, the material circumstances out of which they have arisen. Criticism has also to be coupled with a clear commitment to changing these circumstances.

Not just subjective

We need also to look at the supply side of the equation as well – not just the demand side. We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society where we can just go out and kill an antelope or gather roots whenever the hunger pangs prompt us to do so. We depend instead on a highly developed system of food production linking the farmer and the consumer through a complex chain of intermediate stages.

In other words, ‘artificial scarcity’ has an ‘objective’ dimension, aside from being rooted in an ideology. It would be absurd, for instance, to accuse a starving person or a homeless person of ‘consumerism’ because they wanted food or shelter. The scarcity they experience is real enough, but the point is that the reason for it occurring is both contrived – artificial – and inexcusable. Quite simply, people should not have to go without in this day and age. Yet they do.

One very obvious reason why this happens is the enormous diversion of human and material resources away from socially useful production into socially useless forms of economic activities. The purpose of such activities is not to meet human needs but to keep the capitalist system ticking over on its own terms.

Keeping the capitalist money system ticking over involves quite literally reducing the human and material resources available for meeting human needs. These are the very real opportunity costs of propping up a system of capitalist production, which cannot be denied or just brushed under the carpet. There are other, more direct and visible, ways in which human needs are blatantly disregarded and ignored as well. Thus, while we talk of starving and homeless people, we surely cannot be unaware of the grotesque spectacle of millions of empty homes languishing in the face of a growing problem of homelessness or food being destroyed in the face of hunger for no better reason than to push up prices or keep them high.

Such scarcity is ‘artificial’ in the sense that there is no logical reason whatsoever why it should exist other than the fact that it arises from the nature of the society we happen to live in. It will not cease to exist until this society ceases to exist and replaced by one in which meeting human needs is the sole concern.

Robin Cox