The question is in relation to producing an abundance in the means of living e.g. shelter, food and clothing. Before capitalism became a global system humankind were always confronted with the constant problem of producing sufficient products so there was a surplus and then distributing these surplus products in order to survive. Natural scarcity was to all intents and circumstances the order of the day. Whole communities and civilisations could be wiped out through climate change, flooding, famine or depletion in natural resources, etc; due to this lack of surplus products.
Humankind, was constantly under pressure to adapt to the changing conditions and circumstances. However, with food always in high demand we found through trial and error a stable community based on agriculture was a partial solution to the problem of obtaining a surplus in food. The introduction of agriculture meant a further division of labour with specialists and a communal store becoming an established feature of such societies.
The first settled agricultural communities would have been established by societies which had previously practised hunting and gathering and so had a communistic economic structure. This was characterised by the absence of private ownership of the means of production and by the sharing of products according to need. After the adoption of agriculture, these communistic economic arrangements survived for a while, but tended to break down in the long run as they no longer corresponded to the material conditions of production.
This was not yet the establishment of private ownership, but it meant the end of free access to the means of production that had obtained in hunter-gatherer societies. It ruled out any member of society simply helping themselves to the products of any plot of land. Normally they would only have free access to the products of the plot cultivated by the family unit to which they belonged.
The existence of a common store becomes another aspect of the society's material conditions of production and requires a social arrangement for managing this store -collecting and distributing the surpluses. The usual arrangement seems to have been to confer this responsibility on a particular family. This role of collecting and redistributing surpluses had to be filled if all the members of the community were able to meet their basic needs as of right.
The emergence of control over means of production by a section of society, or social class, was a radical departure in human social arrangements. Production was no longer controlled by society as a whole. Such societies ceased to be communities with a common interest and became divided, with one class, on the basis of its control over access to and use of the material forces of production, exploiting the productive work of the other class and allocating itself a privileged consumption.
After the rise of settled townships on an agricultural base in Mesopotamia, trade between localities developed. For the first time the products of hands and brains took on an alien life as commodities to be bartered, and then bought and sold with the abstract commodity of money. Property, released at the boundary between tribes, began to impinge within them. The first property society came to be developed when people were bought and sold as slaves.
For the sake of brevity we’ll skip the introduction of feudalism and go straight to capitalism. Capitalist social relations emerged with the expropriation of common land by the aristocracy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The lands were enclosed to be used for sheep farming rather than arable cultivation. One reason for this was that the new Flemish woollen industry made sheep more profitable tenants than peasants. Enclosure destroyed the lives of thousands of peasant families, turning them into propertyless vagabonds.
Deprived of their land, their homes, their traditional surroundings and the protection of the law, the expropriated peasants were left to sell the one thing they possessed -their ability to work. The introduction of wage labour was the starting point of capitalism. Wage labour=profits=artificial scarcity.
With the introduction of artificial scarcity the problem of surplus production was solved by capitalism. Nonetheless, the problem of distribution still remains due to the restrictions of the profit system. In a nutshell despite the huge amounts of wealth produced by capitalism global resources can only be freed up with the introduction of common ownership.
Humankind, was constantly under pressure to adapt to the changing conditions and circumstances. However, with food always in high demand we found through trial and error a stable community based on agriculture was a partial solution to the problem of obtaining a surplus in food. The introduction of agriculture meant a further division of labour with specialists and a communal store becoming an established feature of such societies.
The first settled agricultural communities would have been established by societies which had previously practised hunting and gathering and so had a communistic economic structure. This was characterised by the absence of private ownership of the means of production and by the sharing of products according to need. After the adoption of agriculture, these communistic economic arrangements survived for a while, but tended to break down in the long run as they no longer corresponded to the material conditions of production.
This was not yet the establishment of private ownership, but it meant the end of free access to the means of production that had obtained in hunter-gatherer societies. It ruled out any member of society simply helping themselves to the products of any plot of land. Normally they would only have free access to the products of the plot cultivated by the family unit to which they belonged.
The existence of a common store becomes another aspect of the society's material conditions of production and requires a social arrangement for managing this store -collecting and distributing the surpluses. The usual arrangement seems to have been to confer this responsibility on a particular family. This role of collecting and redistributing surpluses had to be filled if all the members of the community were able to meet their basic needs as of right.
The emergence of control over means of production by a section of society, or social class, was a radical departure in human social arrangements. Production was no longer controlled by society as a whole. Such societies ceased to be communities with a common interest and became divided, with one class, on the basis of its control over access to and use of the material forces of production, exploiting the productive work of the other class and allocating itself a privileged consumption.
After the rise of settled townships on an agricultural base in Mesopotamia, trade between localities developed. For the first time the products of hands and brains took on an alien life as commodities to be bartered, and then bought and sold with the abstract commodity of money. Property, released at the boundary between tribes, began to impinge within them. The first property society came to be developed when people were bought and sold as slaves.
For the sake of brevity we’ll skip the introduction of feudalism and go straight to capitalism. Capitalist social relations emerged with the expropriation of common land by the aristocracy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The lands were enclosed to be used for sheep farming rather than arable cultivation. One reason for this was that the new Flemish woollen industry made sheep more profitable tenants than peasants. Enclosure destroyed the lives of thousands of peasant families, turning them into propertyless vagabonds.
Deprived of their land, their homes, their traditional surroundings and the protection of the law, the expropriated peasants were left to sell the one thing they possessed -their ability to work. The introduction of wage labour was the starting point of capitalism. Wage labour=profits=artificial scarcity.
With the introduction of artificial scarcity the problem of surplus production was solved by capitalism. Nonetheless, the problem of distribution still remains due to the restrictions of the profit system. In a nutshell despite the huge amounts of wealth produced by capitalism global resources can only be freed up with the introduction of common ownership.
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