by Daniel Bell
The postulate of scarcity has underlain the dismal view of society held by many philosophers. For Hobbes, “in the nature of men we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh man invade for gain; the second for safety; and the third for reputation.” 112 Thus men are constantly at war with one another for a greater share of the scarce values. For Malthus, scarcity is willed by Providence. Resources are limited, men’s appetites are limitless; men must therefore learn to live prudently rather than prodigally lest their unchecked lust lead to overpopulation, famine, disease, and war. For Rousseau, scarcity is an artificial restriction which allows some men to flaunt their possessions before those who are kept from having them: “... if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of grandeur and fortune, while the crowd grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only insofar as the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their status, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.”113
In his reworking of Marxism, in the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, Jean-Paul Sartre makes scarcity the central postulate of the “negation” which rules men’s nature, and the practico-inerte, the “inert practicality,” which is the failure of society to comprehend itself as society. Because men begin in an environment of scarcity, each man takes his needs as the starting point for the social image of society; scarcity pits men against each other in the competitive struggle for survival. Each man sees in his fellow man the other who is a constant threat to him. Scarcity is “the negation within man of man by matter,” the “negative unity” imposed by matter on society through labor and social conflict. War is the “inhumanity of human conduct as interiorized scarcity ... which causes everyone to see everyone else as other and as the principle of Evil.” It is only because everyone sees in his neighbor primarily the other—a generalization by Sartre of the lord-bondsman theme of Hegel’s phenomenology—that history developed as it did. History is the conjunction of alterite (otherness) and alienation. History is the effort to overcome scarcity, and with it the blind operation of social forces—the practico inerte—that has bent men to others.114
Marx, as we know, rarely speculated on what the future society would be like. Yet it is clear from every aspect of his work that the condition for socialism, for genuine equality, was economic abundance. In the so-called Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, written in 1844, Marx writes that the simple abolition of private property, and the equal sharing of goods, would only be “crude” or “raw” communism, only a form of levelling.115 More than thirty years later, in a letter criticizing the program of the newly formed German Social Democratic Party, Marx returned to the theme and spelled out the difference between “equal right,” with its inescapable degree of inequality, as a transitional phase of socialist society, and the kind of equality that would be possible under communism. Marx’s most famous phrase about the character of communism occurs in this letter:
... equal right here is still in principle—bourgeois right—although principle and practice are no longer at logger-heads. ...
This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view. ... Further, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on.
To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal. ...
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!116
The possibility of abundance, of course, lay in the extraordinary accomplishments of the bourgeoisie. In 1848, in a startling panegyric in the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote:
[The bourgeoisie] has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals. ...
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all the proceeding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour.117
The achievement of the socialist society is the taking over of these productive forces and organizing them with conscious coordination for social ends. In the famous formulation of Engels:
Man’s own social organization, which in the past confronted him as something imposed by nature and history, now becomes his own free act. The outside, objective forces which until now governed history, pass under the control of man himself. Only from then on, will man make his own history with complete consciousness. ... It is the leap of mankind from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.118
Writing in 1930, during a worldwide depression, John Maynard Keynes quixotically asked, “What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?” The depression, he pointed out, was not the “rheumatics of old age” but the “growing-pains of over-rapid changes ... between one economic period and another.” The “disastrous mistakes” we have made “blind us to what is going on under the surface—to the true interpretation of the trend of things.” The underlying trend of things could be seen in two innovations: the discovery of technical efficiency or productivity, and the sustained means for the accumulation of capital.
From the earliest times, back to two thousand years before Christ, down to the eighteenth century “there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centres of earth.” But with the combination of technical efficiency and capital accumulation, mankind had discovered the “magic” of “compound interest,” of growth building on growth. “If capital increases, say, 2 per cent per annum, the capital equipment of the world will have increased by a half in twenty years, and seven and a half times in a hundred years. Think of this in terms of material things—houses, transport and the like.” And to Keynes this meant “in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of a far greater progress still.”119
On the basis of compound interest, an economy that grows at the rate of 3 percent a year doubles its gross national product in twenty-four years; one that grows at a 4 percent rate doubles it in eighteen years. During the 1960s most of the industrialized countries were growing at abou
t a 3 percent rate, West Germany and Italy were doing better at 4 percent, and Japan was growing at a startling rate of 7 percent a year. On the basis of these rates, Herman Kahn and his associates, during the mid-sixties, made projections of the world’s economies to the year 2000. Taking income levels as the criterion of division between types of societies, Kahn divided the world into five spheres:
1. Pre-Industrial $50 to $200 per capita
2. Partially Industrialized $200 to $600 per capita
3. Industrial $600 to $1,500 per capita
4. Mass Consumption or
Advanced Industrial $1,500 to $4,000 per capita
5. Post-Industrial $4,000 to perhaps $20,000 per capita
In 1965, only the United States and Western Europe (and possibly Japan) could be called mass-consumption or advanced industrial societies. By the year 2000, Kahn estimated, twelve countries would be “visibly post-industrial,” and nine countries “early post-industrial.” Seventeen more countries would have achieved the mass-consumption stage.120 Of a world population of six billion persons, about a billion would be above the $4,000 income level, almost a half-billion above $1,500, and slightly more than a half-billion above $600, the industrial level. About three billion persons would be in a transitional stage, and the remaining billion in the pre-industrial stage. As Kahn points out, until the last two or three centuries no large human society has ever produced more than the equivalent of $200 per capita annually. By the year 2000, more than five-sixths of the world will have broken out of the historical range.
For the United States, Kahn drew an even more effulgent picture. By the year 2000, income would be tripled, reaching to more than $10,000 a person (in 1965 dollars) as against $3,550 per capita in 1965; and in a lesiure-oriented world each person would work no more than 1,100 working hours a year, broken down schematically as follows:
7.5 hour working day
4 working days
39 working weeks a year
10 legal holidays
13 weeks a year vacation.
Presumably, since many enterprises—automated production firms, utilities, hospitals, service institutions, retail stores, and the like—would operate more than 2,000 hours a year, or even round the clock, there would probably be two-shift arrangements, and “double heads” of operations who would take turns in managing the enterprises. In short, there would be a much more complex and differentiated pattern of work and responsibility in the post-industrial world.
This technological euphoria reached its vertex in 1964 with the statement of a group calling itself “The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution.” “A new era of production has begun,” the Committee declared; indeed, a new “cybernation revolution” was underway whose “principles of organization are as different from the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural.” Cybernation—a term invented by Donald Michael—is “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine.” The increased efficiency of machine systems “is shown in the more rapid increase in productivity per man-hour since 1960, a year that marks the first visible upsurge of the cybernation revolution.” Cybernation results “in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less labor.” An “industrial economic system postulated on scarcity [is] unable to distribute the abundant goods and services produced by a cybernated system.” The major change must occur in the relation between work and reward. “It is essential to recognize that the traditional link between jobs and incomes is broken. The economy of abundance can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work.” Thus, the rise of a post-scarcity society marks a turning point in the most fundamental historical experience of man, the rootedness of his social character in work. Man will have been replaced by machines, and he will have to find a new purpose in the world.121
This was Keynes’s theme, too, when he said that in the future the “economic problem” may be solved. “Why, you may ask, is this so startling? It is startling because—if, instead of looking into the future, we look into the past—we find that the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race. ...” If the economic problem is solved, “mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. ... I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. ...” Thus, “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely, agreeably and well.”122
Has the economic problem been solved? Will scarcity disappear? Put in the terms which socialist and Utopian thinkers have used—nineteenth-century terms—the answer is no, or not for a long time. For one thing, the cybernetic revolution quickly proved to be illusory. There were no spectacular jumps in productivity. The detailed study by the President’s Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress showed that for the past two decades there had been no sharp changes in the rate of productivity and, if one looked ahead ten years—the period for which one could identify oncoming technological developments—there were no increases in the offing. In fact, the prospects for the economy were quite the reverse. The expansion of the service sector—a significant feature of the post-industrial society—had become a drag on productivity, so much so that, as Fortune estimated, by 1980 the American growth rate would decline from 3 percent to 2.8 percent, a difference, in 1970 prices, of $40 billion worth of output a year.123 Cybernation had proved to be one more instance of the penchant for overdramatizing a momentary innovation and blowing it up far out of proportion to its actuality. (One forgets that in a trillion-dollar economy, even a new one-billion-dollar industry is only one-thousandth of GNP). The image of a completely automated production economy—with an endless capacity to turn out goods—was simply a social-science fiction of the early 1960s.
Paradoxically, the vision of Utopia was suddenly replaced by the spectre of Doomsday. In place of the early-sixties theme of endless plenty, the picture by the end of the decade was one of a fragile planet of limited resources whose finite stocks were being rapidly depleted, and whose wastes from soaring industrial production were polluting the air and waters. Now the only way of saving the world was zero growth.
What is striking in this change is the shift in attention from machinery to resources, from man’s mastery of nature to his dependence upon its bounty, from Harrod-Domar-Solow growth economics to Malthusian-Ricardian scarcity economics. And the principle of diminishing returns, rather than increasing yields to scale, becomes the analytical motif. A group of computer scientists at MIT, students of Jay Forrester, published a simulation of the world’s growth, at current rates of use, in which the model traced the interconnections of four basic variables: resources, population, industrial production, and pollution. Their first projections showed a collapse of economic growth in a one hundred years because of a shortage in natural resources; food supplies would fail since fertilizer requirements could not be met. Second, they doubled the amount of resources, but in the next simulation the economy collapsed because of the rise in wastes. Third, assuming a three-quarter reduction in pollution by 1975, the model showed a continuation of economic growth, but the consequent expansion of cities and industries used up agricultural land so that food supply often ran short. Finally, when they assumed a doubling of agricultural yields, there was a huge industrial expansion, followed by a new collapse because of unmanageable pollution.
The admonition was clear. Societies had to limit their growth.124 A hundred years ago, contemplating the vision of a cramped and depleted earth, on a smaller scale, John Stuart Mill had urged human society to limit its population and wealth and seek “the stationary state.’ Now Mill’s
injunction had been resuscitated. For the new ecological radicals, Mill replaced Marx as the prophet for the times.
The difficulty with the Forrester model is its simplified quantitative metric. The exponential growth of any factor in a closed system inevitably reaches a ceiling and collapses. (See the discussion in Chapter 3 on logistic curves.) It assumes that no qualitative change in the behavior of the system takes place, or is even possible. But this is clearly not so. Materials can be recycled. New sources of energy (e.g. solar energy) can be tapped. We do not yet have a full inventory of the mineral and metal resources of the earth (in the oceans, in Siberia, the Amazon basin, etc.). And technology makes possible the transmutation of resources. Taconite, once thought to be worthless, is now a vast source of iron ore; aluminum oxide, once a curiosity, has now become a source of hundreds of millions of tons of metal reserve because industrial chemistry reduced the cost of extraction. The ecological models take the physical finiteness of the earth as the ultimate bound, but this is fundamentally misleading. Resources are properly measured in economic, not physical, terms, and on the basis of relative costs new investments are made which can irrigate arid land, drain swampy land, clear forests, explore for new resources, or stimulate the process of extraction and transmutation. These methods of adding to the supplies of “fixed resources,” as Carl Kaysen has pointed out, have been going on steadily throughout human history.125
If in the foreseeable future—say for the next hundred years—there will be neither Utopia nor Doomsday but the same state that has existed for the last hundred years—namely, the fairly steady advance of “compound interest”—the banality of this fact (how jaded we soon become of the routinization of the spectacular!) should not obscure the extraordinary achievement Keynes called attention to. For the first time in human history, he reminded us, the problem of survival in the bare sense of the word—freedom from hunger and disease—need no longer exist. The question before the human race is not subsistence but standard of living, not biology but sociology. Basic needs are satiable, and the possibility of abundance is real. To that extent, the Marx-Keynes vision of the economic meaning of industrial society is certainly true.126
