No one really labels themselves a “post-scarcity anarchist” like one would label themselves a “poststructuralist” for a reason. For one thing, Post Scarcity Anarchism is just the title of a book, and for another, the economic system upon which it is based requires the subscriber to place faith in its inception on tools and gadgets that have yet to, and possibly never will exist; “boldly go where no man has ever gone before”, so to speak. Understand that “post-” serves as the significant keyfix, in that it implies what will follow the implementation of a specific branch of anarchy, but it remains a projection of science-fiction as far as reference goes. Needless to say, I doubt I’ll rustle the feathers of anyone who believes in post-scarcity, vulturous though they may be.
However, the vehicle that is believed to launch us into space is socialistic/syndicalist in nature, as is the destination, itself. The goal is to eliminate the need for human labor by getting machines to do all the work and produce raw material that was previously scarce, in which case, machines would supersede the position once held by government, or if anarchy is achieved, a community.
A statist route toward post-scarcity would be reallocating expenditure from, say, national defense, to scientific research and a cultural shift toward secularism, which is hoped to be commenced, for instance, through voting to have their masters issue and sign a bill to have any mention of the word “God” removed from official documents, establishments, etc. In addition to the aforementioned blind faith in ideas that have yet to be realized - ironically and fittingly enough, a level of insanity to which most Christians wouldn’t even stoop - the statist left’s hope to meet anarchist ends through statist means serves as a stumbling block. Normally, and much to the dismay of other anarchists, I would give ideological permission for the use of statist means to achieve libertarian ends, but this procedure is not transferable to the left. It can at least be said that the right wants small government and it’s clear that they would use democracy to chisel it down, whereas almost every leftist vote is a vote to either expand the state or reallocate its budgets. Relying on the state to fund research and development is unwise. The theories developed by Einstein, the inventions patented by Edison, and the discoveries of Galileo when juxtaposed with the subsidies put into 80 years of stem cell research, the fact that we have yet to discover cures for the most deadly of diseases, and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, prove to us that the individual can produce and achieve more in a single lifetime than a government can achieve in an entire century.
Complementarily, the anarchist left just supplants the state with either a democracy or a proletarian class, and if post-anarchy is achieved and the need for human labor is eliminated, the machines who continue the tasks will take on the role of the state. Each machine will be programmed to perform unwaveringly, which would mean less variety in the performance of these tasks. However, if this is taken into consideration and there is variety in how these tasks are performed, there would be a foothold for the resurrection of capitalism, where it is widely believed to be eliminated at this point in human history.
Competition may take place amongst the humans, robots, or both. Regardless, the idea that capitalism would no longer exist is false, anyway. If Futurama has shown us anything, it’s that we’ll still have to pay for the machines, whether there are self-replicating automata or not and my suspension of disbelief will only allow me to overlook the likelihood of mankind allowing the sentient machines that they built to perform things they will eventually condition themselves not to do to out-breed them, for so long.
When cybernated and automatic machinery can reduce toil to the near vanishing point, nothing is more meaningless to young people than a lifetime of toil. When modern industry can provide abundance for all, nothing is more vicious to poor people than a lifetime of poverty. When all the resources exist to promote social equality, nothing is more criminal to ethnic minorities, women and homosexuals than subjugation.
-Murray Bookchin, Post Scarcity Anarchism, 1971
The fallacy Mr. Bookchin commits is that of rechristening labor, “a lifetime of toil”, as if it were an iniquity. To give his locution a bit of context, Bookchin was not very fond of the condition of the proletariat in his day and he especially saw it as a stumbling block for revolution, as he believed unions, in his words, “strengthened the system and serve to perpetuate it”. I interpret this as him fearing that the workers are too content in their current place in the capitalist system to realize an historical climate in which labor would no longer be necessary; it is clear that his goal wasn’t to lighten the burden of the working class (syndicalism), but to eliminate it altogether (post-scarcity).
What does he seek to achieve? Bookchin failed to realize that he was merely a philosopher and not an inventor and that the working class are blue-collar tradesmen and not white-collar nuclear physicists. Those who invent do so through incentive, and as we have seen throughout history, the state and anything resembling it, puts minimal effort into what it excogitates and the machines built by government employees or members of collectives will wear before their warranty and the machines that are built to combat scarcity may perform tasks uniformally, but even they would be brainchild of the individual and used by capitalists to replace their workers.
We should not place our faith in the state. We should not place our faith in a single ideology. We should not place our faith in machines we’ve yet to build. We should place our faith in nothing but the finite materials we’ve been provided.