Re: [ox-en] Commons in a taxonomy of goods
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan meretz.de>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:29:04 +0200
On 2010-06-19 00:32, Diego Saravia wrote:
Goods are not scarce by its nature (like having a temperature).
They are scarce by its economic nature
They are scarce by commodity production treated as "nature".
ok, we can define such a property "limitedness"
but it is not obvious than you can produce more apples, you need
trees, land, work, etc
If you take a simple model without thinking about capital, you need
to work to get apples, and if you
put work in apples you will not get all the oranges you need, so, the
scarcity cames from other place in that case: work
Same applies here: Work (labor power) is only scarce if being a
commodity. Otherwise it may be limited.
The other points you gave are repeatings of classical liberal framework,
which I well know. If you don't feel to criticize the liberal framework,
then ok. I do.
On 2010-06-19 16:43, Diego Saravia wrote:
However, satisfying needs is only a secondary effect of producing
goods as commodities, the first and alien goal is to make money.
In order to make money goods must be scarce. Thus scarcity is a
defect by design, because due to being a precondition of selling
commodities scarcity can never be overcome.
Production system reflects the fact that economics goods are scarce
This is a myth used by liberal economic theory in order to legitimate
capitalism (there are two: the other myth is the homo economicus).
Off course we have a very unequal distribution system, that was
correctly described and explained by Marx.
Marx wrote a critique of entire political economy, not only of a single
aspect like distribution.
And we can reduce a lot of poverty if we can change that
distribution system, but we cannot have a production system without
limits.
A change solely of the distribution system would only be a minor one (as
history showed), because capitalism remains what it is. What we need is
a new way of production, e.g. common-based peer production in entire
society. This process can not be thought in old categories of
traditional liberal economy.
what you call limits is usually called scarcity
It may seem to be only a problem of words, but it isn't. Limitation is a
natural phenomenon (the earth is limited), scarcity is social
phenomenon, is a consequence of a historically special way of
production. Saying that scarcity is a natural thing (of economy)
implies to ignore this difference, is to reverse a social into a natural
phenomenon. This exactly is my critique of liberal economic theory.
what you call scarcity is usually called unequal distribution
Then it is usually a over-simplification.
Ciao,
Stefan
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