Getting Beyond Scarcity: Strategy and Vision in the Information Age (page 2 of 2)
By Carl Davidson / cy.Rev Managing Editor

How do we deal with these theories? What I think is truly revolutionary about the information revolution is that it is undermining the material basis of the economics of scarcity for the first time in human history. The information revolution is setting the conditions for an economy based on abundance. To get right to the core issue, I think it's because of the unique nature of the commodity we call information. Not only is the information component of almost all commodities increased, information itself has become a crucial commodity. In many ways information behaves like a traditional commodity, but there is one important difference. Information is the only commodity I know of that you can sell and keep at the same time. You can sell a copy of WordPerfect and keep it at the same time. This makes for an explosion of value, an explosion in the value that we call knowledge.

One of my favorite thinkers on this topic is Buckminster Fuller the man who invented the geodesic dome and a host of other futuristic devices. He took a non-traditional look at wealth. He said that wealth has two aspects. On the one hand, it contains energy. By that he meant energy broadly, including both matter and radiation. On the other hand, it contains human know-how. Wealth is a combination of energy and know-how. By the law of the conservation of energy, the energy component of wealth doesn't go away. It can be transformed, but it doesn't disappear. As for the know-how component, it only increases. Knowledge is interesting in that the more you use it, the more it grows.

In Fuller's eyes, the world's energy wealth isn't just a matter of how many proven oil reserves there are out there, since wealth is a combination of energy plus know-how, in the broadest sense. In our time frame, the sun's radiant energy and the moon's tidal energy are inexhaustible sources. When combined with know-how, namely the know-how to put that energy to work to satisfy human needs, that wealth is constantly growing. The more it's used, the more knowledge grows. For particular resources such as petroleum, we will want to observe limits, but in the basic sense of wealth as energy from the solar system and human knowledge, there are no limits.

So there's not a scarcity of wealth, but a tremendous explosion of wealth in the world today. If we wanted to divide up the existing resources of wealth in this sense of both energy and know-how, every person in the world would be a millionaire several times over. I'm not just talking about Americans; I mean everybody.

Don't let them tell you that there are not enough resources to solve our problems. They can say we have a government deficit or the resources are scarce. But these conceptions, we must realize, are based on the outdated notions of an economics of scarcity. The problem is not a lack of resources. We don't lack day care centers because of a lack of resources, when at the same time we can build Trident nuclear submarines. The problem is a failure of imagination and a failure of moral values, especially on the part of those politicians and economists who could think that the problem in this country is that the poor are too comfortable or that the workers are too well off. Finally, and this applies to us as well, it's also a failure of political will. Primarily this is the result of the collapse of the traditional liberalism that has brought us to this point. But it's also due partly to the global crisis in socialism and the loss of vision in our own ranks.

So, the information revolution means that we need a new way of looking at value, a new way of looking at generating wealth, and also a new way of beginning to divide it up so as to enable us to generate new wealth. What would this mean in terms of actual policies and programs? Let me give as an example one of the most important things this country ever did in terms of getting itself out of a bind. Right after World War II, we had a large number of G.I.'s who had been demobilized, and even with the postwar boom there weren't enough jobs to go around. What the country did was to offer every one of these returning soldiers a university fellowship under the G.I. Bill and said to them, go off and learn something. The veterans didn't even have to enter a certain field, take a certain job, or pay it back directly.

Now, some people would say that's just government throwing money at the problem. Actually it was one of the smartest things this country ever did. It simply created the conditions for the soldiers to make themselves more valuable. By creating that whole new generation of educated workers, they created the basis for a whole new explosion in creativity and productivity in science and industry. It was a social investment in human capital that was later recouped many times over.

What does this suggest for us today? It means it's not enough just to increase welfare benefits within a system that's dehumanizing and degrading. It is even not enough to raise the minimum wage, because the problem with the minimum wage is that you have to have a job to get it. We need to think of creating means of income, means for us to educate ourselves, means of training people to create value. We need to think of these things as fundamental, things that the society provides simply as your right as a human being. It's in that direction that we can find some sustainable solutions to the current crisis.

Strategy also has to do with the questions of new alliances. There has been talk at this conference so far about the importance of the "new class" of the unemployed. I don't know if I agree with that definition, but we all know who we are talking about: the people who have been mainly victimized by the information revolution, who have been pushed out and excluded from production. I agree that they are the starting points for a building a base for progressive change. We have to begin to organize in those communities, but I don't think we can leave it there.

Thinking in terms of the whole means we also have to keep in mind those millions of workers and displaced peasants in other countries who are also victims of this global economy. We have a lot to learn from them and alliances to form with them. Since the battles over NAFTA and the GATT, we've also learned that there are both creative and backward ways to go about this.

I think there's another new sector that's been created by the information revolution that I also think has an important role to play. I'm talking about people like myself and many of the people in this room. You are the people who are university-trained, who have been educated and know the value of the new technology from within so to speak. This sector of the population is like every other class or strata in society. It has a left wing, a right wing and a center, various subdivisions and trends. I'm not suggesting that this whole sector is going to be an ally of the poor, but I think it does have a left wing that has a conscience, that understands the value and the problems of the new technology, and the importance of forming alliances to bring about progressive change. I can see it in the different organizations that I belong to like the New Party. I look at the class composition and where these different people are coming from and that's how it breaks down.

By stressing these two sectors the "underclass" and the "high tech" I don't mean to exclude any other sector, like the traditional trade unions, people from industries like steel and auto. But I do think these two sectors are where some of the most creative thinking and interesting kinds of activism are going on, and where there's some enthusiasm for challenging the existing system in new ways. There's lots more to be said, but these are the ideas I would put at the center our discussion on strategy. I don't expect us to find all the answers this weekend, but I hope we make a good beginning. Thanks for your attention.