Re: [ox-en] Commons in a taxonomy of goods

On 2010-06-19 00:32, Diego Saravia wrote:
> > Goods are not scarce by its nature (like having a temperature).
> 
> They are scarce by its economic nature

They are scarce by commodity production treated as "nature".

> ok, we can define such a property "limitedness"
> 
> but it is not obvious than you can produce more apples, you need
> trees,  land, work, etc
> 
> If you take a simple model without thinking about capital, you need
> to work to get apples, and if you
> put work in apples you will not get all the oranges you need, so, the
> scarcity cames from other place in that case: work

Same applies here: Work (labor power) is only scarce if being a 
commodity. Otherwise it may be limited.

The other points you gave are repeatings of classical liberal framework, 
which I well know. If you don't feel to criticize the liberal framework, 
then ok. I do.

On 2010-06-19 16:43, Diego Saravia wrote:
> > However, satisfying needs is only a secondary effect of producing
> > goods as commodities, the first and alien goal is to make money.
> > In order to make money goods must be scarce. Thus scarcity is a
> > defect by design, because due to being a precondition of selling
> > commodities scarcity can never be overcome.
> 
> Production  system reflects the fact that economics goods are scarce

This is a myth used by liberal economic theory in order to legitimate 
capitalism (there are two: the other myth is the homo economicus).

> Off course we have a very unequal distribution system, that was
> correctly described and explained by Marx.

Marx wrote a critique of entire political economy, not only of a single 
aspect like distribution.

> And we can reduce a lot of poverty  if we can change that
> distribution system, but we cannot have a production system without
> limits.

A change solely of the distribution system would only be a minor one (as 
history showed), because capitalism remains what it is. What we need is 
a new way of production, e.g. common-based peer production in entire 
society. This process can not be thought in old categories of 
traditional liberal economy.

> what you call limits is usually called scarcity

It may seem to be only a problem of words, but it isn't. Limitation is a 
natural phenomenon (the earth is limited), scarcity is social 
phenomenon, is a consequence of a historically special way of 
production. Saying that scarcity is a natural thing (of economy) 
implies to ignore this difference, is to reverse a social into a natural 
phenomenon. This exactly is my critique of liberal economic theory.

> what you call scarcity is usually called unequal distribution

Then it is usually a over-simplification.

Ciao,
Stefan

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