‘Post-Scarcity Anarchism’
Murray Bookchin,
first published 1971
‘A Book in Five Minutes’, Podcast no.5:
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Topped by a statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, what remains of Banbury’s Corn Exchange stands as a reminder of the power of Britain’s landed elite; who made money by rationing the supply of grain under the Corn Laws.
‘Post-Scarcity Anarchism’, AK Press, 2004 Edition. ISBN 9781904859062.
‘Post-Scarcity Anarchism’, The Anarchist Library, 1986 Edition.
Today, the site of the Corn Exchange is a shopping centre. Inside the shops also seek to extract cash by rationing; except today that isn’t the physical rationing of essential goods. It is based on the marketing of goods psychologically-rendered in short supply by fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and brand identification.
Someone who foresaw this change, and its implication for radical movements, was Murray Bookchin. Bookchin foresaw how consumerism was changing the dialogue in society towards a politics of ‘post-scarcity’.
‘Post-Scarcity Anarchism’ is an anthology of Bookchin’s essays. This print version was produced in 2004 by AK Press; but like all the best anarchist publishers, it’s available for free on-line.
Why then have a paper copy? What if The Internet stopped working; or deliberately blocked Bookchin’s works as ‘subversive’? That contradiction – a monetarily ‘free’ Internet, that is not ‘free’ politically or socially due to its technological nature – represents the heights of what Bookchin talked about:
“A century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced – hence the importance of the state in the present era… the social dialectic and the contradictions of capitalism have expanded from the economic to the hierarchical realms of society… from the arena of survival to the arena of life…
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