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The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays

Michigan State University Press

The Ambivalence of Scarcity

Scarcity and Violence

Economists and thinkers in the liberal tradition, such as Hume, Locke, and Malthus, generally explain violence, vice, and misery by a single cause: scarcity. This idea is very frequent in modern economic and social thought. It can also be found in Marx; the way it is expressed is different, but the idea is the same. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels say that the development of productive forces is a condition sine qua non for the end of the class struggle and advent of worldwide communism, for "without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced." Other more recent authors have formulated it in new ways. Advocates of the global village and postindustrial society, such as Marshall McLuhan, express the harmful influence of scarcity in more or less this way: we will never really be able to really communicate with one another until material objects have lost their hold over us.

No matter how it is formulated, it is easy to recognize the unity and simplicity of the underlying idea. Necessity suspends morals. People do not choose evil over good; they do not choose. Want holds us in its snare. Nature's parsimony condemns us to war. Scarcity forces people's desires to converge on the same objects and sets us against one another in necessary rivalry.

It is well known that all enlightened minds who have had faith in humanity's progress, especially in the concurrence of material and moral progress, have based their belief on this. They have believed in it so strongly that today there is no need to be enlightened to consider that the state of things, not people, is most to blame for violence and today's woes.

This idea was tailor-made to seduce economists. Those who had just discovered the causes of the wealth of nations and how to conquer misery could only rejoice in the inherently complementary nature of abundance and peace. This is why, since Montesquieu, they have always taught that "peace is the natural effect of trade."

Yet there is another reason that has led economists and liberal thinkers to explain violence and evil in general by necessity and needs. In their theories, necessity and needs appear in the form of scarcity. The law of scarcity is the primary constraint of economic systems, the basic economic fact. Explaining violence by scarcity has quasi-mathematical obviousness, and demonstrating it is child's play.

In economic theory, scarcity is defined thus: goods and resources are available to people in limited quantities, which are insufficient to satisfy the needs and desires of all. Scarcity is thus a clear, simple and distinct idea: the quantity of goods and resources available, the limitation of resources, nature's parsimony. Linking this quantity with the dimension or scope of human needs reveals how scarcity constrains human activities. Since such needs are supposed to be very large, not to say infinite, they form an unreachable limit. Thus, the amount and the relation coincide: the quantity of goods and resources available is a direct expression of the constraint of scarcity.

It is now easy to see how scarcity can engender conflict. If goods and resources are insufficient to meet the legitimate needs of each individual, it is inevitable that violence will follow, either in the form of injustice or in the shape of open, physical violence intended to eliminate those who are in excess. Scarcity is a necessary cause of conflict. There is a veritable arithmetic of violence. Good intentions are powerless. Scarcity violates people and forces them to fight one another.

This is thus a rational explanation for violence. It avoids value judgments and has no need to postulate any form of violent instinct, which would be an obscure and uncertain crutch. Elementary deduction proves that scarcity is a cause of violence. Simultaneously, this explanation identifies economic activity as the best foundation for peace since it is a means of ensuring future abundance. Furthermore, it teaches us that economic activity, which is a "strategy for fighting against the scarcity that manifests itself through value phenomena," is also a strategy for fighting against violence.

Moreover, because economic activity attacks evil at its root, and focuses primarily on overcoming scarcity and establishing universal prosperity, it has the advantage of rationality over other means of eliminating violence. The struggle against scarcity does not employ violence against violence. It does not compromise with evil. On the contrary, it seeks to eradicate the cause. If violence has its roots in scarcity, then growth of economic activity, because it produces abundance, is the only guarantee of lasting peace, and the only way to provide a definitive solution to the problem of violence.

In his study on the genesis and triumph of economic ideology, Louis Dumont very astutely points out that establishing economic activity as an independent domain of inquiry required a double emancipation, with respect to both politics and morals. However, what it seems Dumont does not see is both that these instances of emancipation are complementary and the primordial role played by the classical explanation of violence by necessity. When we translate the explanation into economists' language, it becomes: scarcity causes violence.

Dumont says that economic activity had to acquire moral worth of its own, and that the moral value in question was the public good. It is difficult to understand how this moral value could have been accepted in traditional society if it contradicted private moral values. Yet we know that this was the case. The establishment of this moral value in Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees, which Dumont studied, amounts to nothing less than an apology for pride, envy, and desire, which are all vices strictly punished by traditional morals. It is difficult to grasp what the public good could be, or rather what moral value it could have, if its price was all those vices.

However, if we begin with politics, everything becomes clear. Dumont notes that in Marx we find politics absorbed into economic activity. This requires, as a preliminary step, the establishment of a political value specific to economic activity. Dumont does not say much about this political value. Yet it is the crux of the matter.

It suffices to remember that the fundamental point of any form of politics is domestic peace and external defense. If we also keep in mind that the domestic peace, order, and unity of a given political whole largely determine its ability to resist outside aggression, it is clear how economic activity has been able to acquire prodigious political power.

Indeed, traditional political thought has always held that order produces order and disorder engenders disorder. The political problem of order, societal cohesion, and domestic peace requires that all instances of disorder, disagreement, dissent, conflict, and rivalry be avoided, and that activities that can lead to such things be carefully regulated. In traditional terms, the essential political problem is to maintain order in every part of society so that the whole remains well-ordered, and to prevent any part of the social body from exploiting or destroying any other part. It is to ensure reciprocity of obligations.

With respect to domestic peace, the great advantage of economics over any form of political thought is its claim to be able to provide a solution without having to deal with the concrete conditions that delimit the problem. By linking disorder to scarcity, and violence to limited resources, economic thought makes economic growth, spread of trade, and entrepreneurial freedom the best foundations for peace. By making envy, desire, and pride the driving forces behind economic growth, economic activity transforms real rivalries and larval violence into means of achieving domestic peace. The causes of disorder become sources of order. If they promote growth, then we should leave free reign to pride, envy, and avarice, to the most brazen exploitation, and to oppression of the weak by the strong. Not only does the explanation of violence by scarcity break the links between private disorder and public disorder, but it transforms rivalries into means of attaining domestic peace. Dissent among individuals guarantees the harmony of the social body. Economic thought dissociates the individual consequences of actions from their social consequences, and indeed opposes them.

This dissociation also means that politicians no longer have to enforce the ancient, venerable laws, customs, and values that used to guarantee the morality of every citizen in order to ensure public order. It recognizes the social impotence of morality. Trade's efficiency in producing peace allows politics to do without morals. The political efficiency of economic activity demolishes traditional morals.

By consecrating the social impotence of traditional morals, the links between scarcity, vice, misery, and violence give economic activity its own moral value. Indeed, it is only to the extent that scarcity and limited resources were seen as the causes of the wrongs and violence that afflict humanity that wealth—in other words, the good offered by economic activity—could be construed as having moral value. Moreover, the reason there have been no obstacles to the growth of envy, desire, and avarice is because scarcity is the cause of violence, and limited resources are the origin of evil. Envy and desire become highly commendable because they are the forces driving economic activity, and economic activity will save us from poverty and conquer the scarcity and necessity that cause and create much greater evils, namely, violence and destruction, vice and misery. Economic activity becomes more moral than morals. It goes beyond old-fashioned do-good moral intentions. As Keynes pointed out in a frightening sentence: "For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not."

However, economic activity may fight scarcity, but it does not eliminate it. Thus, the reason envy, desire, and avarice drive economic growth is because limited resources force everyone to serve self-interest. Trade often involves power relations simply because of scarcity, which engenders competing desires. The dubious feelings that are at the origin of economic activities do not prove that humans are evil because they are produced by the state of the world. Only economic growth can put an end to this.

In this, there is a double dialectic that closes economic activity to all objections from traditional morals and at the same time expels such morality from the category of socially effective strategies. The political role of economic activity, which is to guarantee order by eliminating the cause of violence, namely, scarcity, establishes economic activity's moral value and destroys the social effectiveness of traditional morality.

Thus, using scarcity to explain violence, vice, and misery has been indispensable for economic activity to gain its own political and moral value. Without it, the private vices of nascent individualism would have been perceived as pure causes of disorder. It is because wealth produces order that economic activity has been able to become a social ideal, absorb politics, and relegate morals to the no-man's-land of interior life. The explanation of violence by scarcity was necessary in order to understand the brutality of trade, and so as to avoid seeing economic competition as a cause of disorder.

Now, everyone knows that the division of scarce resources among rational self-interested individuals is what is supposed to establish economic activity, to establish the paradigm of hominess oeconomici, who make decisions according to their preferences and according to the problems of choice and decision that scarcity of resources creates in our world. The liberal tradition's explanation of violence teaches us that this situation can have two outcomes. Economic order emerges out of the division of scarce resources among rational individuals interested in satisfying their needs and desires. Scarcity pushes people to work, incites them to trade. It is the original motivation for commerce, which brings peace. Yet from this same division of scarce resources among these same rational individuals come conflicts, war, destruction of already scarce resources, the vicious circle of violence and misery.

These two results of the original situation are both equally rational and necessary. If we imagine homines oeconomici not as egotistical monsters but as rational individuals seeking to promote their own self-interest, then it is impossible to determine which solution they will adopt. Economic violence and order are indistinguishable. They are both based on the same situation. The outcome of the original situation that is supposed to institute economic activities is undecidable: it can be violence just as easily as economic activity. The paradox of economic activity is that is it cannot be differentiated from violence.

The undecidability of the original situation of the division of scarce resources must be called the ambivalence of scarcity. Scarcity has two values: it is both a cause of violence and the foundation of economic activity. The ambivalence of scarcity is not marginal or secondary. It is not exterior to the logic of economic activity. On the contrary, it is one of the founding elements and resides at the heart of economic undertakings and theory.

It is a founding element because the ambivalence is that of the original situation that established economic activity. It is also a founding element because the indispensable institution of the moral and political value of economic activity is based on the ambivalence of scarcity.

Indeed, the reasoning that makes economic activity the best means of conquering violence is based on scarcity's two contradictory values. Constitution of the moral and political value of economic activity employs both the beneficial and the harmful aspects of scarcity simultaneously. The negative aspect is present because, if scarcity were not a cause of vice and violence, economic growth and trade would not guarantee peace: if there were no negative aspect, the public good could not be a moral value established at the cost of envy and pride. The positive aspect is present because scarcity is the foundation of order in the form of commerce and trade since the fundamental economic fact, namely, nature's parsimony, pushes people to invent arts and industries that bring prosperity.

Establishment of economic activity as a social ideal requires both the beneficial and the harmful aspects of scarcity. The reasoning that establishes the political and moral value of economic activity does not hold together unless scarcity appears as both a source of disorder and a foundation of order—in other words, unless scarcity is ambivalent.

Yet this foundation has to be hidden, and scarcity's active ambivalence in economic texts has to be invisible. The reason for this is simple. If both of scarcity's contradictory aspects are indispensable for establishing economic activity, the invisibility of the ambivalence is equally necessary or else the edifice will be undermined by uncertainty. Indeed, once the ambivalence of scarcity has been identified, economic activity's claim to ensure order seems vain. Its institution, based on the paradigm of homines oeconomici who all seek to promote their self-interest in a world where resources are limited, seems incomprehensible. The ambivalence of scarcity cannot be admitted without seeing that violence and economic activity are the same thing.

There seems to be only one way to meet the double imperative of the presence/absence of the ambivalence of scarcity. In order for both aspects of scarcity to operate without acknowledgment of the ambivalence of the concept, we only need to distinguish scarcity from itself. It suffices to separate scarcity from scarcity, and to assign violence to one and economic activity to the other. A principle other than violence and order has to be employed to differentiate the two sides of ambivalent scarcity if we want the arbitrary nature of the dissociation process to remain hidden. This principle can be nothing but the principle that underlies the concept itself: quantity.

Economists have always distinguished between scarcity and scarcity. This distinction explains why the ambivalence of scarcity has not been noticed more often. The real quantity of available goods and resources is the principle for this distinction. Scarcity separates scarcity from scarcity.

The liberal tradition claims that there is no paradoxical identity of the situation that establishes economic activity and the conditions that engender violence. The two situations are similar, but not identical. A difference that is both tiny and huge separates them. It is an extremely significant difference. A situation in which there is moderate or relative scarcity establishes economic activity. Extreme scarcity—in other words, necessity—engenders violence. Both situations truly are similar: the only difference is the quantity of goods and resources available. If the quantity is so small that all people's needs cannot be met, then violence will necessarily erupt. If there is more available, but still not enough to fulfill everyone's desires, then envy will be a useful spur to economic activity.

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Excerpted from The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays by Paul Dumouchel. Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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