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>Redistribution changes who can pay; structural reform changes what is available and at what cost.Could you otherwise say that one concerns private costs while the other concerns public costs? Privatising healthcare shifts public costs onto private costs, and vice versa.
>Advocates therefore argue that if private markets fail to generate sufficient employment at socially acceptable wages, the state should act as an employer of last resort.Well, there must always be a public sector, and making people fill up Keynes' Bottles is better than nothing, as he remarks. Certainly, busy-work can even be more productive (less destructive) than private enterprise. The question then either concerns under-investment, or over-employment. Keynes thought we are overemployed.
>Creating employment for its own sake in such contexts risks shifting labor into roles that exist primarily to absorb workforce capacity rather than to produce essential goods or services. This does not mean such roles are inherently without value, but it raises the question of whether the objective is employment per se, or the production and distribution of well-being.I mean, if you have a free labour market, is indefinite unemployment even possible? The fact that there is a constant demand for illegally cheap labour shows that high wages are barriers to employment. A free labour market absorbs women and children; there is always room for more - but at the same time, technological innovation is about saving labour (t. "Relative Surplus Value"), so limits on duration would still be imposed.
>The tension between them reflects a deeper question: whether the primary goal is to decouple life from labor, or to ensure that labor remains universally accessible and socially meaningful.In civilisation, its impossible to abolish labour, which is why natural liberty only persists in wilderness. The establishment of law by right of property is an original claim as to the fairness (reciprocity) of labour by social contract. All class war is simply a discourse upon the justice each person has in their property thenceforth.
>Cooperative ownership is presented as a way to align incentives more directly with the preferences of workers and communities, reducing the gap between what is produced and what is actually needed.A cooperative still has a profit motive; just a distributed income.
>ownershipA cooperative is still privately owned. Think of public companies, which have multiple shareholders.
>If a firm is collectively owned by its workers, then withholding production to artificially maintain scarcity may directly reduce the income or welfare of those same workersThe big difference is that the typical business can fire people at will, while in a cooperative, people have to be bought out if someone is a drag on long-term profits.
>Mutual aidLike in the previous discussion upon parasites and symbiotes, resource distribution is often indirect, or frictional, but also directly altruistic (i.e. Symbolic Exchange). It is only in a state of mandated commodity exchange where cooperation becomes inaccessible, since distribution is dependent upon money. Trade is twofold however, since in conditions of reserved right, trade can become exclusive (e.g. trade embargos, tariffs, civic discrimination, etc.) which falls under the freedom of association - if you don't want to trade with someone, owner reserves the right, unless the consumer is granted their own rights to purchase. For example, if a Christian bakery is legally mandated to bake a cake for a gay wedding, this is slavery, yet it is also limiting access to services. We see in the US, racial integration positively enforced, with the freedom of association entirely diminished (as a contemporary example, the Boy Scouts is no longer allowed to exclude girls). Here, the right of the potential associate is given precedence over the association. We see the market as a means to both include and exclude, thus. The rights of private property permit all manner of liberalism, but also of conservatism. The mantra of "start your own club" seems to be vanishing, but is this justice? To return to relevance; markets are both open and closed, and so cooperation is a condition of entry. Money forces hostile groups to work together (this was the free trade policy of pacifists such as Richard Cobden), and the rule of the cash nexus obliterates all traditional bonds. Thus, where there is Symbolic Exchange alone, there are inherent limits, filled in by money, and vice versa. It is insulting to give your friends money, but to give them gifts is relieving. So then, forcing cooperation via commodity exchange rather than permitting Symbolic Exchange causes a subversion in the role of gifting. Similarly, exclusion is necessary; there are some people who you will never cooperate with, so don't try to force them.
>Mutual Aid networks do not rely on exclusion as a default mechanismI would disagree; all distribution networks are exclusive.
>The challenge, across all of them, is whether acts of relief, reform, and redesign can accumulate into arrangements where access to basic goods is governed less by exclusion and more by sustained social capacity.Money is the ultimate determinant of inclusion, even if it is not universal.
>They are, in effect, organized attempts to rebalance the terms under which labor is exchanged in systems where access to necessities is mediated through employment.Well, unions go back to medieval guilds, which did not represent wage workers, but artisans. In the 17th century, we see the rise of merchant guilds, and later on do we see labour unions. Adam Smith speaks upon how capitalists conspire with another, but workers cannot do the same, so we can see labour unions as a 19th century invention, with the rise of industrial revolution. Lenin calls the first radical working class movement The Chartists (1832-60), which arose around the same time. The red flag was also first raised in 1831, in Wales.
>Gesell believed this asymmetry contributed to forms of artificial scarcity. If money itself can be hoarded without penalty, then access to goods and labor may become constrained not because productive capacity disappears, but because exchange slows or stalls.In his work, he sees that the Manchester School of free trade is correct on everything, except money, which they fail to regard as freely as everything else, thus concealing the class relation implicit in the discourse. Gesell's practical reforms were to introduce a depreciating medium of exchange to boost spending. Like the medieval and mercantilist writers, his wrath was given against the bankers, whose rate of interest was the cause of their profit.
>In such cases, accelerating currency turnover may increase economic activity without fundamentally altering who controls the conditions of access.Gesell didn't just promote free money in his Freiwirtschaft, but also "free land", which was land that was held in the state and only leased out. This was not new in Political Economy, Since Gossen (1852), the founder of marginal utility theory, had the same idea. Land has always been a great problem in Political Economy, even to free market thinkers, such as Smith (1776) who saw a tax on ground-rent as most justified; the same as Rousseau earlier (1755). Owen also saw property taxes as most justified. Von Thünen (1823) also saw that competition in land raises wages to their highest rate (what he termed the "natural wage"), and thus, the constriction of wages upon employment of capital is the cause of the monopoly of land. This is also Marx's verdict (1867) as regards "Primitive Accumulation", that the subjection of labour to capital is only possible where land is sufficiently privatised (or exclusive). Henry George (1878) is of course most famous for discourses upon a Land-Value Tax (LVT).
>under certain conditions, abundance becomes economically destabilizing.Yes, and in regards to waste; waste is effectively the measure of profit in an economy, such as it is attributed to Keynes: "If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has." I relate this to sacrifice in general, which has been a feature of all societies which produce a surplus. Abortion as a type of child sacrifice is also most common in wealthy countries. We see abortion performed in antiquity, too.
>Modern industrial technology has given humanity an unprecedented productive capacity.If we take the words of Xenophon, a useless product is not a product at all, but is waste - thus, production is most often destruction, such as Schumpeter writes; "creative destruction".
>More is produced, more energy is consumed, more waste is generatedThis is just the logic of capital in general (M-C-M); spending money to make money, like Keynes' criticism of gold mining.
>Refusal, whistleblowing, slowdowns, or coordinated collective action can therefore disrupt scarcity mechanisms at the point where they become materially real.Right, but everyone just uses the Nuremberg Defense. The banality of evil, etc.
>workers fear losing jobs, while the unemployed fear exclusion from economic life altogether.But we must not forget that systems of government benefits (e.g. Poor relief under Elizabeth Tudor, to today) has been in tandem with the presence of the unemployed. Some people even prefer unemployment.
>In principle, sanctions are often justified as alternatives to direct military conflict.I have written about it elsewhere, but "free trade" is an imperialist construct, which is why countries that refuse to obey imperial powers are excluded.
>Warfare represents not only a struggle over territory, security, or political power, but also a massive process of organized destruction directed at the material basis of human abundance itself […] In this sense, war can be understood as the ultimate form of scarcity creation: the deliberate reduction of productive and social capacity on a massive scale.Of course. Just look at Judges 9:45, where the City is not simply seiged, but the land itself is salted, so that nothing may grow there again.
>Growth becomes entangled with devastation.Yes; war is a racket.
>Artificial scarcity is closely connected to another defining feature of modern economies: artificial demand.As we discussed previously, a doctor has the interest of making people sick, like police officers have the interest of increasing crime. Demand can be stimulated by these opportunists, then, since otherwise - if we lived in Paradise, these people would be out of a job. Some see the Vaccine Contracts in 2020 as this type of con, where the demand for medicine spurns on a contrived manufacture, which then overproduces, and so we don't just see the one jab, but booster after booster.
>At the same time, monopolistic control can also be justified in certain contexts as a way to stabilize investment and enable large-scale coordination. Infrastructure-intensive systems may require centralized planning and long-term guarantees of return on investment.Absolutely; even as Engels writes, money preserves its value by monopoly, and so competition is not simply inefficient, but regressive, in some cases. We see for example, the death of artisinal labour by a focus on competition in the arts, like how 2-D hand-drawn animation was phased out by Disney, and now Ghibli. Artisanship raises prices, but also preserves craft. This is why protections are always in consideration. Capital intensity also leads to natural monopoly and the formal hierarchy of firms, which is why cooperatives struggle to expand beyond a certain threshold.
>At the same time, defenders of strong patent enforcement argue that without robust protection, innovation would decline.This certainly has its truth. And if the Manhattan Project was transparent and open source, maybe the Third Reich could have developed their own bomb as well.
>From this perspective, tariffs occupy an ambiguous position. They can function as tools of industrial development and strategic autonomy, but also as mechanisms that restrict access to global abundance and reinforce localized scarcity. Whether they mitigate or intensify artificial scarcity depends heavily on context, design, and duration.Well, even Smith and Ricardo, who theorise Comparative Advantage see that there is only a viable balance of trade if domestic capital is proportional to what is imported, otherwise you are in a deficit, and so become a servant to the country you depend upon. So, "access" always comes at a cost.
>Within Economics, this raises a fundamental question of allocative efficiency versus social welfare. Markets are generally effective at directing resources toward areas of strong monetary demand, but monetary demand does not always align with human need.
Precisely, which is why the best markets are consumer and luxury markets, which are also capable of innovation, unlike with necessities, which are fixed in their utility, as much as man is fixed in his nature.
>Scarcity is therefore largely “naturalized” by material conditions rather than socially engineered through complex institutional mechanisms.I would again disagree. All class societies are essentially identical, which is why ancient political analysis can still have modern relevance. Artificial scarcity in ancient societies is in ritual sacrifice and war.
>Within Economics, introductory models often emphasize equilibrium: prices adjust, supply meets demand, and resources flow to their most valued uses. Yet real-world economies frequently deviate from this idealized picture due to monopolistic behaviorYes, what Keynes describes as "imperfect competition".
>Within Political Communication, persuasion is often understood less as the transmission of abstract facts and more as the framing of lived experienceI would gladly say that sublimity is rightfully perceived aesthetically. Its art which makes people cry by communication with the divine.