I’m not aware of any “Enlightenment Narrative” saying that our society is organized around Science and the fact that civilization is organized around capital, i.e. resources, is as obvious as the sun at high noon.
This isn’t going to change until and unless we truly reach “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism” levels of post-scarcity. Don’t hold your breath 'cuz it ain’t happening anytime soon.
In Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, there are two planets in the same solar system. The one with bountiful natural resources is hyper capitalist, where as the other planet, which is mostly arid and can sometimes experience famine, is an Anarchist society out of necessity.
I think it makes a compelling case that we could become socialist without the post scarcity luxury part.
It’s a good book. I’d recommend it as one of the most realistic take on an anarchist society I’ve seen depicted.
The problem is not that we lack resources, but how organize them. If you take the US for example. Inflation adjusted GDP per capita is 4.4 times large today, then it was in 1950. 1950s America was able to meet all basic needs and quite a few luxuries. Not an awful lifestyle materially speaking. The technology we have today would nearly allow everybody in the US to work a day a week and have that lifestyle. Rest would be leisure time.
I understand that this is not “Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism”, but it is post scarcity for all basic needs and actually realistic. The point is more that the issue is not resources, but how we use them. Btw going back to that material consumption with modern technology, would also solve most environmental issues.
And yes globally that is more difficult, but we still have the technology to allow everybody to nearly not work at all, while meeting everybody needs.
We are still just tribes.
At the micro-level, maybe - but we’re far more than that - we’re a unified society of capital that’s on the fast-track to neo-feudalism.
