Christian Siefkes of Keimform/Oekonux, one of the leading commons-oriented thinkers, is starting a promising series on post-scarcity, of which we publish the introductory passage below.

It in part reacts to a joint statement with Franz Nahrada a while ago, but Christian seems to imply that we are opposed to post-scarcity. This is absolutely not the case.

Central to the P2P Foundation’s approach is in fact an attempt to reach post-scarcity, i.e. to have a form of civilization and economy where every human being can have his material needs met, and thrive in his cultural and spiritual life.

What we oppose is foremost the sloppy faith-based thinking of a particular techno-determinist and utopian school of post-scarcity, which has a blind faith in technology, ignores social problems and struggles, and especially wants to ignore any problems with the material resource basis that is our planet. In the writings of Paul Fernhout, anybody disputing certain exponential growth is simply accused of conspiring against abundance, and so no serious dialogue or investigation of resource issues is needed.

Post-scarcity can be a goal, but it cannot be a certainty, and it can therefore not be an unequivocal promise. So when we say that “P2P […] is not about post-scarcity” we mean it cannot be based on such a promise, but rather, whatever mix of abundance and scarcity the future reserves for us, that is the reality in which equipotential peer to peer dynamics will operate. Post-scarcity or not, what we want to achieve is a more just and equal peer to peer society.

What needs to be done is to recognize a broad polarity between abundance and scarcity, between non-rivalry and rival goods. The P2P is about engineering abundance wherever possible, and to manage scarcity sensibly and equitably, instead of the systematic manufacturing and engineering of artificial scarcity that is done in the current system, not just in the immaterial sphere, but in the material sphere as well (think of terminator seeds, the throwing away of nearly 50% of the produced food in western countries, planned obsolence and all the other aspects of willfully maintaining artificial scarcity which are a core part of the current political economy).

So it is important to be in dialogue with those that study the real scarcities of the material world, and not to ignore these real physical issues through a blind belief in the exponential growth of miraculous solutions. It is this approach, exemplified in my view by Paul Fernhout for example, (and Nathan Craves, which claimed that the whole world would be roboticized in a mere 6 years) which I and Franz find insufferable, and why we felt we needed to clearly distinguish the P2P Foundation’s approach, so as not to loose credibility with the more serious approaches that take into account both scarcity and abundance factors.

The aim for post-scarcity needs to be balanced with other approaches such as sufficiency, sustainability. Post-scarcity is a promise and a possible scenario, nothing less, nothing more, but certainly not a magical wand that can make serious resource and depletion issues disappear. Nevertheless, we have to aim for a system which makes post-scarcity an approachable goal, and does not engineer permanent scarcity for the majority of the world population, while at the same time creating a false material abundance which destroys the natural world upon we all rest.

So when Christian Siefkes state that “I would be hesitant to try to discard post-scarcity thinking altogether”, I am in full agreement, on the condition that this thinking takes into account the full complexity of material reality, and that there is no automatic, “oh but this exponentially growing new technology will solve it” reaction to these real and complex problems.

Here is Christian Siefkes promised excerpt:

“The vision of post-scarcity is a popular but controversial meme in the debates of peer production. Post-scarcity envisions a world where everything is free as in free beer, where no payment or accounting is requirement for anything you use. Post-scarcity ideas usually rely very strongly on advanced technology, postulating that almost everything can be automated—or at least, everything that’s not fun and pleasant to do. Post-scarcity theorists also believe that advanced technology can provide enough natural resources and enough energy in order to satisfy everyone’s needs and wishes, possibly through extracting resources from space or through speculative future technologies such as nuclear fusion power.

A weak form of post-scarcity thinking is present in one of the founding documents of the free software movement, Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto (“weak” because there are still necessary tasks that are neither fun nor automated away):

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting.

More radical visions of “true” post-scarcity are expressed in the writings of Paul Fernhout and in the Oekonux project’s idea of a “GPL Society” where “[t]he produced goods would be accessible for free by everybody who needed them”, while “[p]eople would work autonomously and voluntarily”. A post-scarcity society (though apparently still mixed with a scarcity-based attention economy for privileges and luxury goods) is the background of Cory Doctorow’s first free novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

Environmentally concerned people will usually be deeply suspicious of post-scarcity, because they are aware that nature is already recklessly exploited as of today and that we use up Earth’s resources faster than Earth can renew them. Regarding resource use, we’re living at the cost of future generations, and the idea can future generations can not only continue this practice, but actually vastly expand it in order to make “freely available” to everybody what today is luxury for a few, is evidently absurd for ecologically aware people.

These different viewpoints on post-scarcity are certainly a reason for the big differences in the worldview of eco activists and peer production activists, making communication difficult—in spite of the fact that both rely on the common concept of the commons. In order to bridge this gap, Michel Bauwens and Franz Nahrada published a joint statement where they claimed outright that “P2P […] is not about post-scarcity” and argued for a strategic convergence of the “Open Everything” (peer production) movement with the environmental and social justice movements.

While I share this wish for a strategic convergence of the three movements, I would be hesitant to try to discard post-scarcity thinking altogether. Instead, I’ll take a look at the limitations that any peer production—based society will face and then consider whether and in what form something related to the post-scarcity ideas could emerge nevertheless.”