I finally got around to reading a little bit of Murray Bookchin

[Raphael]

I've now convinced myself to read a part of Murray Bookchin's book Post-Scarcity Anarchism which zompist had reviewed back in February: https://zompist.wordpress.com/2026/02/1 ... anarchism/

That is, I read the Listen, Marxist! chapter. Well, zompist recommends it as the best part. And it is very good! But I still have quibbles.

zompist has already commented a lot on the text, and I don't want to just repeat what he wrote. But here are some of my thoughts:

First of all, I think the basic assumption right in the title of the book is simply false. Yes, humankind's relationship with scarcity - the fact that there's only a limited amount of stuff in the world - has changed a lot over the last 400 years. But no, scarcity has not gone away. It just works differently now then it used to.

It used to be true that it was near-impossible to grow the total amount of things people could use. Since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, it has been possible to have a lot of growth in that regard if you could somehow find the right approach. But that growth has never gone, and, barring supernatural intervention, will never go, to the point of having an infinite amount of things. At any given moment in time, there's still just a limited amount of stuff, which means that there's still scarcity.

Another important thing in this context is that the things around us still require a lot of work by a lot of people to be made. I'll get back to that later.

One thing I find pretty grating about Bookchin's writing, though of course he's far from unique in that regard, is how often he calls things he doesn't like "bourgeois", or argues that what makes things he doesn't like so bad is that they're so supposedly bourgeois. It's just an annoying tic.

Oddly enough, Bookchin's Wikipedia article contains very little information on what either he or his parents before him did professionally, so I don't know to which extent his throwing around of the b-word was a matter of calling the kettle black. But, dude, you were clearly some kind of public intellectual. That made you at least bourgeois-adjacent in my book. Yes, that goes despite the fact that so many public intellectuals have apparently loved railing against everything they saw as bourgeois.

In any case, sitting around with some friends or people with whom you get along more or less well having long conversations about things you see as intellectually stimulating, with or without the help of alcohol, is a stereotypically "bourgeois" way to spend an evening. Getting as drunk as your budget allows with a combination of friends, enemies, and strangers, and then beating the crap out of each other is a stereotypically "proletarian" way to spend an evening. (Yes, there might have been evenings when the former turned into the latter.) Now, I respect that it takes all types, but personally, I clearly like the former a lot more. So why should I be all that impressed by people who keep telling me that everything bourgeois is bad?

Yes, I could do without the sexual repression of the old-school bourgeois types. Yes, I can't stand the kind of economic policy views common among both the old-school and the new-school bourgeois types. And no, I don't really think anyone should have the material standard of living of the seriously money-dripping people. But there are some bourgeois things that I quite like.

Somewhat related to that, Bookchin insists on calling what the Soviet Union did "state capitalism", like Travis here on the ZBB in our time. It's kind of trying to save the idea that "capitalism" has to be the root of all evil by declaring that, if something many people would not see as capitalist is bad, there has to be some way in which it's capitalist after all.

Frankly, I'm reminded of how zompist, long ago, commented on comic artist Dave Sim's hateful views about women:

https://zompist.com/bob17.html#2

Apparently Sim feels that no one has managed to refute this; but this is simply because Sim has made his theory unfalsifiable. Basically, if he hates something, it's Female; and the fact that he hates it show how bad Femaleness is. Thus, corporations suck the life out of you, just like women-- so they really are women. Thus, male politicians appeal to emotion, just like women-- so they're also agents of female control. If you see a powerful women (Mrs. Thatcher), that proves women control the world; if you see women economically worse off than men, that just shows what leeches they are. If there are some brilliant female artists, it's because the Male Light can occasionally reside in women (it's rather like how the Japanese in apartheid South Africa were honorary whites).

If something is bad, it's clearly bourgeois and capitalist, even if just (dis)honorarily so.

Another thing that Bookchin always mentions as a bad thing is bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats who staff it. Yes, I get it: the job of bureaucrats is to exercise power, so someone committed to the idea that no one should have hierarchical power over other has to be against them. But I simply find it hard to go along with the seething hatred people in all kinds of different parts of the political spectrum have for that profession.

OK, it's probably just a lucky accident of time, place, and circumstances, but the vast majority of professional bureaucrats with whom I've had to do in my life have been perfectly friendly and helpful people. But I might be biased by the fact that I've sometimes wondered if bureaucrat might have been the job I would have been better suited for than any other, and if it might have been one of the biggest mistakes of my life that, after finishing regular school, I tried to study the things I tried to study, instead of trying to go into training as an administrative government official.

Minor note: I had read quite far before I really realized that Bookchin was American. I had somehow assumed that if someone with an Anglophone name wrote an English-language book on Far Left theory, certainly, that person was or is British.

zompist already criticized how much Bookchin was in love with "the youth" of the 1960s, which was a rather elitist attitude towards, well, basically everyone else. And in that contexts, he seems to really love the idea of slacking off - "the work ethic" is one of the things he routinely lists among things people should overcome.

Murray, the work ethic of other people was what put food on your table. And what provided the table in the first place. And the room the table was in. Compared to the need that at least someone should have work ethic, even the importance of zinc oxide in people's lives is relatively low.

While he hates sexual puritanism - I agree - another thing he hates is consumerism. Am I the only one who sees a little bit of a contradiction there? Sex and access to consumer goods that are your kind of thing are both, at least ideally, sources of pleasure in people's life. Murray, what do you want? Should people's lives contain pleasure or not? Or are you simply for forms of pleasure that society in your time disapproves of and against forms of pleasure that society in your time approves of?

zompist already explained the problems with Bookchin's opposition to cities. One thing I'd add is that I don't really see an anarchist way to abolish cities. I mean, a lot of people clearly like to live in, or, as in my case, near cities. So, what do you plan to do about that, Murray? Do you want to tell us, "Yes, you think you like cities, but I've decided that they're bad, so gather your stuff and move elsewhere"? That doesn't sound like a very anarchist thing to do to me.

Now, the problem might be that, like some other revolutionary types, Bookchin might have thought that the main or even only reason why people ever did things he didn't think they should do was that the existing power structures made them do those things. If so, that was a rather embarrassing level of wishful thinking for a political thinker. Like some other anarchists and anti-authoritarian types, he never seemed to be able to imagine that there are people who like to go with the flow, who like to follow leaders, who like to respect authorities, who like to be placed in hierarchies, and who generally like doing all kinds of things that activists wouldn't want to do themselves. So much more comforting to assume they've all been fooled or coerced or both!

As a revolutionary anarchist, Bookchin would probably have been offended to be compared with a more reformist left-ish liberal-ish type like H. G. Wells. But this inability to really get many people reminds me of something George Orwell once wrote about Wells in one of his essays:

But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity.

Various reactionary impulses are far more powerful forces in at least some people's minds than what Bookchin would have described as sanity, too.

I'll finish with something that's only somewhat related to this, but which, I think, nicely illustrates how different people might arrive at their different views of human behavior, hierarchy, authority, and how these things interact. This requires a bit of explanation first.

I hadn't planned to tell people about this, but for a while, I've been an occasional commenter in the comments section of Dan Savage's advice column. Yes, I know that many people on the Left think that Dan Savage should have been cancelled long ago, but I disagree with them. My original plan had been to keep my identity there separate from my other online identities, because I've talked about some pretty personal things there, including some kinds of Too Much Information. But, well, sometimes there are reasons to change your plans.

Long story short, a while ago, the discussion in a thread there moved towards talking about bullies and outcasts in schools, and I posted the following:

There are many different types of school in the world, but there are two types I'm mainly thinking of in this context.

First, there are schools where bullies and bullying are basically a fully integrated part of the official or semi-official school power structures. The bullies might well have the one or other kind of official school functions. The teachers and other adults in charge often encourage the kinds of traits bullies usually have and discourage the kinds of traits bullied kids often have. Teachers might even take part in the bullying themselves.

I've never been to a school like that myself, but of course I know about them from American and British books and movies and TV shows and from reading people's reports of their experiences on the internet.

People who went to that kind of school often assume that bullying exists because adults want it to exist, and that those adults who are running schools could, if only they wanted to, easily stop bullying by simply not encouraging it. And for people who made the experiences they've made, that's a perfectly reasonable assumption to make.

But then there are the kind of schools I went to. There, the kids generally have a fairly low opinion of the teachers and other adults in charge as a group. They don't care much about what the adults encourage or discourage, except that they might want to do the opposite. Bullying often happens in opposition to the teachers, and might be seen by the bullies themselves as an act of rebellion against them. About the most effective way to become a target of bullying is to be seen, rightly or wrongly, as too close to the teachers or favored by them.

At schools like that, to the extent to which the adults might be said to be complicit in bullying, it's simply because of the fact that they're so hapless. All a bit like Lord of the Flies [], except that the adults are not absent but just to some extent irrelevant.

And, I'm sorry to say, if you went to schools like that, the idea that adults running schools could easily end bullying by simply being against it instead of for it does sound a bit clueless and uninformed.

The reason I mention all this here is that I think it can have political implications. People who are used to the first kind of school might believe that when people do bad things, it's inevitably because authorities and power structures make them do those things. People who are used to the second kind of school might be more sceptical of that idea.

[zompist]

I'm glad you read Bookchin! I find anarchism the most interesting and humane of radical approaches— with the major caveats I discussed in my review. And as HM says, where he's wrong, he's wrong in interesting ways that suggest solutions, not in the hopeless ways of the Leninists.

First of all, I think the basic assumption right in the title of the book is simply false. Yes, humankind's relationship with scarcity - the fact that there's only a limited amount of stuff in the world - has changed a lot over the last 400 years. But no, scarcity has not gone away. It just works differently now then it used to.

It used to be true that it was near-impossible to grow the total amount of things people could use. Since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, it has been possible to have a lot of growth in that regard if you could somehow find the right approach. But that growth has never gone, and, barring supernatural intervention, will never go, to the point of having an infinite amount of things. At any given moment in time, there's still just a limited amount of stuff, which means that there's still scarcity.

I don't get this. Of course Bookchin is not claiming that goods are infinite; but then why would he or you want them to be?

I discussed this in my review: if you divided up the world's wealth right now, you'd get a lifestyle similar to modern Brazil, and that is quite liveable. This was emphatically not the case in Marx's time or Orwell's, and that is what Bookchin is talking about.

There are goods that aren't easily distributed. We can't all have a beachfront villa and a sports car. I've already complained about his naive views about cash registers. Arguably once basic goods were fairly distributed and no one's starving, we can address how non-basic goods are distributed.

One thing I find pretty grating about Bookchin's writing, though of course he's far from unique in that regard, is how often he calls things he doesn't like "bourgeois", or argues that what makes things he doesn't like so bad is that they're so supposedly bourgeois. It's just an annoying tic.

Probably a holdover from Marxism. Bookchin's class analysis is much more advanced than Marx's, but didn't have the simpliciity of the Occupy movement's terms— the 1% and the 10%. I suspect Bookchin's points would make a lot more sense if you substituted "the 10%" for "the bourgeois".

Somewhat related to that, Bookchin insists on calling what the Soviet Union did "state capitalism", like Travis here on the ZBB in our time. It's kind of trying to save the idea that "capitalism" has to be the root of all evil by declaring that, if something many people would not see as capitalist is bad, there has to be some way in which it's capitalist after all.

Though I share your annoyance at making "capitalist" the all-purpose bogeyman, I think you're putting Bookchin in an unfair bind. If he failed to condemn Soviet communism, you'd rightly castigate him for accepting totalitarianism in the name of (or in the place of) socialism. But he doesn't, so you castigate him for disapproving of it in the wrong way. But is it wrong? Quite literally the USSR owned the means of production, that is, capital. It's easy to show that the workers didn't possess it, the Party did, or only the Politburo. Bookchin's whole point is that Marxists wanted to take over, not destroy, authoritarian hierarchies.

I think it's the "socialist" who still counts the USSR as an example of what they want to do, rather than Bookchin, who has a whole lot of explaining to do.

OK, it's probably just a lucky accident of time, place, and circumstances, but the vast majority of professional bureaucrats with whom I've had to do in my life have been perfectly friendly and helpful people.

Yes, that's an unusual view. I'd just note that an awful lot of people have not have the friendly experience you've had.

Like some other anarchists and anti-authoritarian types, he never seemed to be able to imagine that there are people who like to go with the flow, who like to follow leaders, who like to respect authorities, who like to be placed in hierarchies, and who generally like doing all kinds of things that activists wouldn't want to do themselves. So much more comforting to assume they've all been fooled or coerced or both!

Sure. Historically, we've now had several examples of recovery from totalitarian regimes: denazification in Germany, and decommunization in Eastern Europe. And yes, I think a major lesson is that a lot of people liked those regimes. It wasn't just the dictator ruling everyone with raw terror; the dictator had his own 10%, or more like 30% or 40%. But I'd also note that only one of those examples was available to Bookchin.

I'd also note that anarchists— unlike leftists today, who are often doomerists— have to navigate a sort of doublethink. They appeal to maybe 1% of the people, but they have a cheerful optimism that the rest would agree under the right circumstances.

I think the idea that anarchists simply don't know the power of reactionary forces is itself a bit naive. They know they're not in power, that the left is (still too much) dominated by Marxism, that they're not likely to win the next election. It's a philosophy for long-termers.

At the same time, the events in France in 1968 really seemed to suggest that the revolution could occur right now. Bookchin didn't know what things would look like in the next half century. (In fact, based on his Wikipedia article, he seemed to grow increasingly cranky as he got older, and mostly fought with other anarchists.)

[zompist]

And in that contexts, he seems to really love the idea of slacking off - "the work ethic" is one of the things he routinely lists among things people should overcome.

Murray, the work ethic of other people was what put food on your table. And what provided the table in the first place. And the room the table was in.

OK, I really don't mean to be in the position of defending Bookchin— I have strong criticisms, but they're already in my review and you've read those. But thinking about it, your objection here strikes me as odd.

A lot of the book is about small groups (his "affinity groups") living and working together and doing stuff. He has an entire chapter which covers productivity and logistics, a topic few anarchists or socialists even try to understand; the purpose is to figure out how small groups can get things done, how things can be more decentralized. I think he'd point out that you yourself do not grow food or make tables, so why are you trying to speak for the people who do?

The basic claim of both socialism and anarchism is not only that wealth is unequally distributed, but so are work and leisure. Some people have to work extremely hard to maintain a small class of comfortable people. The assumption is that if you could solve the first problem you'd also solve the second: the farmers and tablemakers wouldn't have to work as hard, because the work is shared better and they don't have to support useless professions.

Kropotkin lived in a time and place where it was a lot more obvious that there was a lot of manual labor to do. So his vision was small groups where manual labor was mandatory— if you wanted to be a teacher or scientist you did that on your own time, when ordinary people are relaxing and drinking. Not so appealing today, but it was more realistic in 1880s Russia.

But Bookchin is writing in the modern world where people are not fated to do manual labor to that extent. E.g. farmers are 1.2% of the US workforce— same number on Germany. And those farmers are not peasants and mostly not oppressed at all.

(Well, with the caveat that a lot of farm work here is done by seasonal undocumented workers. But that's a problem of US policy, not Bookchin's.)

[Raphael]

I apologize if I came across as trying to speak for the people who work in making things. I didn't mean to. My point is just that a lot of things need to be made in order for us to live and live reasonably well, that making all those things requires a lot of work and effort from a lot of people, and that therefore, treating "the work ethic" as a bad thing that people should overcome is a bad idea.

Perhaps Bookchin used the term "scarcity" in a different way than how I would understand it. I interpret it to mean the idea that there are limits on the amount of things in the world. Perhaps he interpreted it to mean the idea that the limits on the amount of things in the world would be the exact same as it had been for most of human history.

How would I have wanted him to talk about the Soviet system? Ideally by saying that it was bad while also acknowledging that it was something different from what most people would usually call "capitalism". But yes, what matters is that he opposed it.

How well did Bookchin understand other people, and how well do other anarchists? Yes, I guess they understand how few people agree with them for now, but they still sometimes seem to believe that what keeps people from agreeing with their own preferred version of anarchism is entirely the boot and/or the propagandistic tricks of the oppressor. To use an example from another well-known anarchist, if I understand a few lines in one of your reviews of him correctly, David Graeber seems to have really believed that the main reason for the large amount of jingoism in the USA is that people are supposedly afraid that the security forces will come after them if they don't engage in enough performative jingoistic gestures. Err, that's a level of not getting people where - ok, let's just say that if a biologist would get alligators wrong to the same extent, they'd think that they're herbivores.

Not to mention the classic anarchist "Propaganda by the Deed" campaign. "If we kill a bunch of people, the masses will be inspired by our example to join our project! They certainly won't come to see us as a bunch of deranged killers!"

[Travis B.]

I apologize if I came across as trying to speak for the people who work in making things. I didn't mean to. My point is just that a lot of things need to be made in order for us to live and live reasonably well, that making all those things requires a lot of work and effort from a lot of people, and that therefore, treating "the work ethic" as a bad thing that people should overcome is a bad idea.

In a socialist society automating production on a massive scale to reduce the amount of work we all need to do would not be problematic in the way that it is in capitalist societies. We could actually get away with working less.

How would I have wanted him to talk about the Soviet system? Ideally by saying that it was bad while also acknowledging that it was something different from what most people would usually call "capitalism". But yes, what matters is that he opposed it.

The significance of the term state capitalism is to make it clear that the Soviet system wasn't actual socialism despite what its partisans would have you believe. It is not to claim that it was somehow identical to private capitalism.

How well did Bookchin understand other people, and how well do other anarchists? Yes, I guess they understand how few people agree with them for now, but they still sometimes seem to believe that what keeps people from agreeing with their own preferred version of anarchism is entirely the boot and/or the propagandistic tricks of the oppressor. To use an example from another well-known anarchist, if I understand a few lines in one of your reviews of him correctly, David Graeber seems to have really believed that the main reason for the large amount of jingoism in the USA is that people are supposedly afraid that the security forces will come after them if they don't engage in enough performative jingoistic gestures. Err, that's a level of not getting people where - ok, let's just say that if a biologist would get alligators wrong to the same extent, they'd think that they're herbivores.

A key idea is that there must be something wrong if people openly sympathize with the people are most obviously their oppressors. Of course, to take this further, the fact that people have a lack of class consciousness, which they used to have more of than they have now, and what class consciousness people do have is commonly misdirected, must come from somewhere. The answer is propaganda. Propaganda is pervasive and takes many forms, of course, and it ranges from things like constantly invoking 'freedom' to things like invoking 'liberal elites' (to misdirect class consciousness) to things like the focus on individualism to things like the idea that rich people naturally deserve to be rich.

Not to mention the classic anarchist "Propaganda by the Deed" campaign. "If we kill a bunch of people, the masses will be inspired by our example to join our project! They certainly won't come to see us as a bunch of deranged killers!"

That was over a century ago ─ and anarchists have long known that was a mistake. Note, though, the context in which 'Propaganda of the Deed' came into being ─ social revolution seemed much closer then than it does now, so it seemed that people would revolt if simply given examples of doing so. Of course, that was not true, and in reality 'Propaganda of the Deed' ended up feeding reaction more than anything.

[Travis B.]

About the 'bourgeois', yes, in many cases this is used by far-leftists to refer to what Occupy called the '10%', on one hand, or to refer to things that do not appeal to narrow views of class consciousness (e.g. the idea that if something is not stereotypically working class it is somehow bad). To some far-leftists I would probably count as 'bourgeois' because I am paid decently and spend my leisure time doing things like working on a Forth compiler/operating system.

However, not all far-leftists think like this. There is an opposite view which holds that all people who need to sell their labor to survive and who do not exploit the labor of others are working class, no matter how well-paid they are. The bourgeoisie rather are those who do not need to do work to survive due to living solely off the exploitation of others (and the petit-bourgeoisie are those who exploit others but who still need to work to survive). The vast majority of people who in American society would describe themselves as 'middle class' are really working class in this view. Even people like star athletes are in this view of things working class as long as they don't exploit the labor of others.

[jcb]

About the 'bourgeois', yes, in many cases this is used by far-leftists to refer to what Occupy called the '10%', on one hand, or to refer to things that do not appeal to narrow views of class consciousness (e.g. the idea that if something is not stereotypically working class it is somehow bad). To some far-leftists I would probably count as 'bourgeois' because I am paid decently and spend my leisure time doing things like working on a Forth compiler/operating system.

However, not all far-leftists think like this. There is an opposite view which holds that all people who need to sell their labor to survive and who do not exploit the labor of others are working class, no matter how well-paid they are. The bourgeoisie rather are those who do not need to do work to survive due to living solely off the exploitation of others (and the petit-bourgeoisie are those who exploit others but who still need to work to survive). The vast majority of people who in American society would describe themselves as 'middle class' are really working class in this view. Even people like star athletes are in this view of things working class as long as they don't exploit the labor of others.

There seems to be two axes at work here:
(1) Do you own the company where you work?
(2) Do you earn a lot or a little money?

Owns, Earns a lot: billionaires (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc)
Owns, Earns a little: a local bookstore owner
Doesn't own, Earns a lot: a professional sports player in one of the highest level leagues (Lebron James, Patrick Mahomes, etc)
Doesn't own, Earns a little: everybody else

[zompist]

In a socialist society automating production on a massive scale to reduce the amount of work we all need to do would not be problematic in the way that it is in capitalist societies. We could actually get away with working less.

We could now, but only by adopting methods that may be ecologically or sociologically problematic.

There are clear cases where socialized solutions are better— health care or disaster relief, for instance. Other cases seem equivalent, so long as you regulate the hell out of the enterprise— e.g. water and electric utilities.

That 1.2% of agriculturalists depends on a massive level of industrialization— factory farms, irrigation and fertilizing at dangerous levels. Attempted socialist systems have not covered themselves in glory, in terms of protecting the environment. (Bookchin is hip to this, he was way into ecology.)

The problem with automation is that it puts a lot of people out of work. In advanced countries new jobs are created, but in developing countries there's no such guarantee. This problem doesn't disappear because the label on the can is now "socialist". E.g. India in the 1960s had access to simple technologies that would have reduced labor greatly. That meant putting literally hundreds of millions of people out of work, so it wasn't done.

I'm not saying the problems can't be solved; but they can't be solved by 1800s socialist doctrine. I don't think Bookchin solved the problem, but at least he faced it.

[Raphael]

The problem with automation is that it puts a lot of people out of work. In advanced countries new jobs are created, but in developing countries there's no such guarantee. This problem doesn't disappear because the label on the can is now "socialist". E.g. India in the 1960s had access to simple technologies that would have reduced labor greatly. That meant putting literally hundreds of millions of people out of work, so it wasn't done.

I'm not Travis and I can't speak for Travis, but judging from what I've seen of the writings of people with similar views, and also judging from some hints in his posts in this thread, I suspect that his preferred form of socialism would handle a technological development where 90 percent of the work that used to be necessary would no longer be necessary by spreading out the remaining 10 percent of work evenly among everyone, leading to a general one-tenth-of-the-number-it-used-to-be-hour work week.

[Travis B.]

The problem with automation is that it puts a lot of people out of work. In advanced countries new jobs are created, but in developing countries there's no such guarantee. This problem doesn't disappear because the label on the can is now "socialist". E.g. India in the 1960s had access to simple technologies that would have reduced labor greatly. That meant putting literally hundreds of millions of people out of work, so it wasn't done.

I'm not Travis and I can't speak for Travis, but judging from what I've seen of the writings of people with similar views, and also judging from some hints in his posts in this thread, I suspect that his preferred form of socialism would handle a technological development where 90 percent of the work that used to be necessary would no longer be necessary by spreading out the remaining 10 percent of work evenly among everyone, leading to a general one-tenth-of-the-number-it-used-to-be-hour work week.

I am not so optimistic that such an amount of work can be automated away myself, but with a view to an economy where money is replaced with labor vouchers*, if automation can reduce the amount of work needed to produce the consumer products one needs to survive by N%, the amount of work that people need to do to earn the amount of labor vouchers needed to buy the same amount of consumer products as before can also decrease by N%. This is because labor vouchers would operate on terms that the amount of value of a consumer product is equivalent to the total sum of time needed to produce that consumer product. Unlike under capitalism there would be no push to keep the unit cost of a consumer product at at least the same level in order to make a profit. Consequently, the average person can actually benefit in terms of being able to have more leisure time while still having equal purchasing power from increased efficiency in producing consumer products and providing services.

* For those here uninitiated, labor vouchers are paid to workers based on the amount of labor they do based on the amount of time they spend working, with all workers either being paid at an equal rate or being paid at varying rates based on the difficulty and danger of their work (with more difficult or dangerous work being paid at higher rates), buy an amount of consumer goods or services involving an equal total amount of time spent producing or providing them, are non-transferable, and are destroyed when spent. Also, labor vouchers cannot be used for purchases of capital.

[Travis B.]

Conversely, as you must know, the problem with increased efficiency of producing products under capitalism is that it allows products to be made with less being paid to the workers while capitalists can sell them for the same as or more than before. If this were extended over the entire economy the living standards of workers would decrease because their overall pay would decrease while the products and services they want to buy would cost the same or more.

In other areas, particularly outside direct production of products, increased efficiency on paper commonly runs into the Jevons paradox, however. For those not aware, the Jevons paradox is where increased efficiency results in increased demand and thus the amount of work done or the amount of resources consumed or like does not actually decrease or may even increase.

[Nortaneous]

And no, I don't really think anyone should have the material standard of living of the seriously money-dripping people.

Why not?

There are goods that aren't easily distributed. We can't all have a beachfront villa and a sports car.

There's no law of the universe that says the price of sports cars can't come down. We can all have nutmeg and cloves; we can all have sports cars. Meeting the latent demand for beachfront villas is more difficult, but not in principle impossible. Beaches can be made.

[Travis B.]

And no, I don't really think anyone should have the material standard of living of the seriously money-dripping people.

Why not?

There are goods that aren't easily distributed. We can't all have a beachfront villa and a sports car.

There's no law of the universe that says the price of sports cars can't come down. We can all have nutmeg and cloves; we can all have sports cars. Meeting the latent demand for beachfront villas is more difficult, but not in principle impossible. Beaches can be made.

There is a key difference between sports cars and beachfront villas ─ the price of sports cars is kept high in order to make a profit, but there is nothing that inherently says that every car couldn't be a sports car (aside from people's practical needs mandating vehicles other than sports cars in reality), so if profit was no concern there is no reason their price could not fall dramatically ─ but beachfront villas are inherently limited by the amount of beachfront that could possibly exist, and creating more beachfront to meet demand would likely be very environmentally harmful due to destroying existing habits to replace them with expanses of sand. As a result, everyone could just potentially have a sports car if they so desired one, but not everyone can own a beachfront villa, so in the new society beachfront villas would have to be assigned by lottery or timeshared or like.

[zompist]

We're all SF fans, so sure, a lot of things can be done in an imagined future world with cheap energy and, I dunno, vaporizing the asteroids to make metal.

The point though is that there are practical problems in giving the same basket of goods to everyone. Forget sports cars, what would be required to give a car to everyone on Earth?

We're not unimaginably far off: there are 1.7 billion cars and trucks in the world. However, only 0.1 billion are made every year. So to make cars for the remaining 6.3 billion we'd need 63 years.

That would, by the way, use up 2/3 of the world's unmined iron ore, while being unable to use iron and steel for anything but cars. That might be a problem for, say, providing the electricity for all those cars.

[jcb]

In a socialist society automating production on a massive scale to reduce the amount of work we all need to do would not be problematic in the way that it is in capitalist societies. We could actually get away with working less.

The problem with automation is that it puts a lot of people out of work. In advanced countries new jobs are created, but in developing countries there's no such guarantee. This problem doesn't disappear because the label on the can is now "socialist". E.g. India in the 1960s had access to simple technologies that would have reduced labor greatly. That meant putting literally hundreds of millions of people out of work, so it wasn't done.

So what changed in India that it can handle embracing automation now?

[Travis B.]

We're all SF fans, so sure, a lot of things can be done in an imagined future world with cheap energy and, I dunno, vaporizing the asteroids to make metal.

The point though is that there are practical problems in giving the same basket of goods to everyone. Forget sports cars, what would be required to give a car to everyone on Earth?

We're not unimaginably far off: there are 1.7 billion cars and trucks in the world. However, only 0.1 billion are made every year. So to make cars for the remaining 6.3 billion we'd need 63 years.

That would, by the way, use up 2/3 of the world's unmined iron ore, while being unable to use iron and steel for anything but cars. That might be a problem for, say, providing the electricity for all those cars.

Point taken. If we rule out everyone getting a car, though, what about everyone getting an electrically-assisted bicycle?

[zompist]

In a socialist society automating production on a massive scale to reduce the amount of work we all need to do would not be problematic in the way that it is in capitalist societies. We could actually get away with working less.

The problem with automation is that it puts a lot of people out of work. In advanced countries new jobs are created, but in developing countries there's no such guarantee. This problem doesn't disappear because the label on the can is now "socialist". E.g. India in the 1960s had access to simple technologies that would have reduced labor greatly. That meant putting literally hundreds of millions of people out of work, so it wasn't done.

So what changed in India that it can handle embracing automation now?

Sixty years of growth, basically. Half the population still works in agriculture. But 30% of the country is middle class, which means 400 million people. That's a lot of non-agricultural jobs.

[zompist]

Point taken. If we rule out everyone getting a car, though, what about everyone getting an electrically-assisted bicycle?

Yes, of course. As I've pointed out, the median world income happens to match the median income in Brazil, and that is pretty comfortable even by American standards: home appliances, Wifi, laptops, microwaves, universal health care, subways, a local payment system (Pix) that reaches 80% of the population, is used far more than credit cards, and infuriates Donald Trump. You can even have cars, if they're shared: my nieces get around by the equivalent of Uber. Oh, and 1/7 the carbon emissions per person as the US.

[Ares Land]

I really to get around to reading that book too

On sports cars and beachfront property and scarcity in general -- it's an interesting point on several levels.

Cars have the property that having more cars decreases the marginal utility of each car. I don't think this really reveals anything about the nature of scarcity; the real problem is cars aren't that great a technology, at least not the way we use them.
That's a little difficult to recognize, because cars are a huge symbol of prosperity in our culture, so phasing them out, even to a limited extent, can be painful. But the process is well underway: young people (at least here in France) tend not to care much about cars and driving, to the consternation of their elders.
It looks like future involves a lot more trains and bicycles than expected, which maybe feels disappointing (a feeling carefully nurtured by the oil industry, I should add) but people will be just as happy, or happier, and we should always the future to feel unexpected.

More generally, the scarcity of certain goods can be fixed if we take a step back, and consider the needs they answer, rather than the specific solution.
If the need is to travel quickly and comfortably, that could certainly be arranged for everyone. If we forget about that specific beachfront, and focus on comfortable housing for everyone in a nice place, or long vacations in a nice place; that can be done too!

Part of the appeal of the sports car is the status symbol aspect of it. Which gets into the problem of luxury goods: scarcity is the whole point. Rolex could definitely produce more watches; Vuitton could produce more handbags. But what is the point of a Rolex watch or a Vuitton handbag if everyone has one?
And you know, it's fine. There is endless variation in human beings and the subgroups they like to belong to. Most people don't want a Rolex watch anyway, it sends the wrong message entirely. Most people wouldn't be caught dead with a Vuitton handbag. Most people are in fact, perfectly happy with a regular car, or a bike, or taking the bus, and wouldn't want the hassle of maintaining a sports car.

zompist already explained the problems with Bookchin's opposition to cities. One thing I'd add is that I don't really see an anarchist way to abolish cities. I mean, a lot of people clearly like to live in, or, as in my case, near cities. So, what do you plan to do about that, Murray? Do you want to tell us, "Yes, you think you like cities, but I've decided that they're bad, so gather your stuff and move elsewhere"? That doesn't sound like a very anarchist thing to do to me.

I've come to realize that most people fall squarely into two categories: city mice and country mice. City mice find the country boring, backwards and unsanitary, country mice view cities as wretched hives of scum and villainy. It never seems to occur to anyone in either category that their preferences aren't universal and that in fact, both forms of human habitation (and in fact, there are a lot more intermediate options) are legitimate.

My own view is that I have a hunch that concentrating 80% of the population in the cities as we do now is perhaps not ideal and probably doesn't fit people's actual preferences. Though my 'plan', such as it is, would be for people to have more options to follow their preferences and let the chips fall where they may.

[jcb]

Point taken. If we rule out everyone getting a car, though, what about everyone getting an electrically-assisted bicycle?

Yes, of course. As I've pointed out, the median world income happens to match the median income in Brazil, and that is pretty comfortable even by American standards: home appliances, Wifi, laptops, microwaves, universal health care, subways, a local payment system (Pix) that reaches 80% of the population, is used far more than credit cards, and infuriates Donald Trump. You can even have cars, if they're shared: my nieces get around by the equivalent of Uber. Oh, and 1/7 the carbon emissions per person as the US.

Why does Trump hate Pix? Because he thinks that Brazil should be using a payment system from an American company instead?

Anyways, maybe Japan can learn a thing or two from Brazil and make their own payment system, so they can finally start moving away from using cash for everything.