Philosophically Speaking: Annals of the International Philosophy Grou Philosophical-Annals-II-2017 | Page 17

Of Mind and Money: Post-Scarcity Economics and Human Nature
How would a fully-realized post-scarcity environment be structured? First and foremost,
despite having elements in common with some systems, it will not take the form of any
existing sociopolitical economy, including the usual suspects: capitalism (private property and
ownership of means of production, capital accumulation, wage labor, market competition,
labor theory of value); socialism (social ownership of means of production and co-operative
management of the economy); communism (common ownership of means of production;
absence of social classes, money and the State); and anarchism (absolute individual freedom
and absence of government).
While the closest post-scarcity analogue is communism, the essential differences are that in
technology-enabled post-scarcity there is neither labor nor ownership of the means of
production. Moreover, analogous to the assumptions about the term economics discussed
earlier, it is often thought that there is only one form of anarchism 23 (as per the standard