Scarcity.
A common capitalist argument against socialism is that there exists a scarcity of resources to establish socialism. This is a false argument, based on the artificial scarcity of the constrictive profit system. The capitalist system demands that all human production and construction be profitable, so it prevents the expansion and creation of infrastructure, new supply chains and innovative technologies which are not profitable in the short term. All the resources exist to feed the hungry, to link up the world, to create pollution free energy, to create jobs for all, to supply quality healthcare, to give everyone a high standard of living, over and above that enjoyed by the Western middle class.
There is not a problem of overpopulation, but of underproduction. Even taking the basis of the resources made available by the declining capitalist system, there is $11.8 trillion holed up in the private bank accounts and stock holdings of the world’s 3,311 individual billionaires. The top 1% of the world population control half of the world’s wealth, including two thirds of the wealth created since 2020. There is $2.1 trillion a year that goes toward military procurement. $123 billion is spent on US policing alone and 80 billion for jailing In the US. Americans pay 4.3 trillion on healthcare a year, most of it pure hiked up exploitation of the consumer. In fact healthcare spending makes up an ungodly 18.3 percent of the American GDP.
All of these costs are continually rising. To end world hunger would cost 37 billion. 58 billion could pay for free college at current prices. It would cost 20 billion to end homelessness. And so on and so on.
Seizing the means of production from the billionaires and corporations would immediately free up vast possibilities in the economy, well beyond these cash numbers illustrating the insanity of the capitalist system. The economy would stop working as an ever widening funnel for billionaires to capture the wealth created by the bottom 90% and instead act as a tool to meet the needs of human beings everywhere.
Human nature
The core argument used against socialism is the bogus concept of “human nature.” To capitalist exponents, Human nature is a supposedly immutable, unchangeable thing that exists regardless of time and place. They ignore the changing development of culture and human interaction over thousands of years of human history and pretend that some overriding psychology of capitalist class society is present throughout all of it.
People are “bad,” selfish and cruel because of human nature. Without the disciplining force of capitalism which “makes selfishness work” (for the capitalists at least), brings the “best” to the top and keeps those “who don’t work hard enough” on the bottom, there would simply be chaos resulting in the rule of the “bad.”
Majority rule to these capitalist apologists always leads to dictatorship by undeserving but ambitious men, unlike rule by wealth under capitalism, because a non-capitalist society wouldn’t “run by itself” based on profit interests, but run by capricious management according to the supposedly impossible idea of planning an economy. Greed would turn the world under capitalism from a positive good to a tragic dystopia under socialism.
This kind of argumentation is completely laughable. Instead of greed and evil being an eternal factor of the human psyche (which by the way, capitalist ideology steals from the Old and New Testament religions), it is unfailingly a result of the capitalist system and the pressures capitalism brings to bear on individuals. The cannibalistic profit system which pits man against man and nation against nation in the search for material advantage, is a kind of corruption that is part of capitalism and not the eternal mystical underpinning of humanity. Without the pressures and perversions of profit seeking and artificial scarcity, which the majority suffers from and a minuscule minority benefits from, there is no corruption.
The “money motive,” hailed by capitalist ideologues as the basis for civilization, is actually a form of practical neurosis and limitation which hampers the natural cooperation of human beings in society. Direct democratic control and initiative of the majority of the population, the equalization of humanity at a high standard of living through egalitarian distribution of goods and services are the antidote to corruption by money or luxury seeking.
Without the practical ability or even desirability to acquire privileges, the rabid seeking of such privileges vanishes from the scene of human interaction. Without the control by profit and national interests that comes from minority ownership of the means of production and distribution, the whittling down of the living standards and exploitation of the majority ceases.
Ambition is instead given a healthy expression as a striving for self-improvement and service to society as a point of pride, not as a point of conflict with the rest of society. The earliest humans lived in what Marx called “primitive communism” where what little “wealth” that existed was shared in common and true equality and cooperation prevailed. This was the way of life for hundreds of thousands of years. If there was a “human nature,” immutable and unchangeable, why wouldn’t it be this one, instead of the minoritarian, all against all “morals” of capitalist society?
We know, however, that human nature is the product of the social environment, and each mode of production creates its own particular human nature. It is time to end the way of life that exists under capitalism and begin a new one under an egalitarian, cooperative system of ownership established by the initiative of the vast majority, for the human race as a whole.
What Way Forward? 