One of the key claims of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is that the functioning of capitalism is premised on the expenditure of abundance rather than the allocation of resources under essential conditions of scarcity. This premise, of course, accompanies their more generalized critique of lack as a foundation of desire.
Anyone who pauses to reflect on the logic of non-academic discussions of political thought can discern just why this critique of scarcity is so important. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, if we falter on this point, “…all resignations are justified in advance” (AO, 74). Where the social comes to be understood as a response to scarcity, then politics becomes the means by which decisions are made as to how scarcity is distributed. While there might indeed be many different ways of distributing scarcity, what is ineradicable or impossible is inequity. In short, all inequity is justified in advance and a priori.
What we thus encounter here is the essence of ideology as understood by Meillassoux. As Meillassoux puts it in After Finitude,
If every variant of dogmatic metaphysics is characterized by the thesis that at least one entity is absolutely necessary (the thesis of real necessity), it becomes clear how metaphysics culminates in the thesis according to which every entity is absolutely necessary (the principle of sufficient reason)… …[The] refusal of dogmatism furnishes the minimal condition for every critique of ideology, insofar as an ideology cannot be identified with just any variety of deceptive representation, but is rather any form of pseudo-rationality whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily. The critique of ideologies, which ultimately always consists in demonstrating that a social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent, is essentially indissociable from the critique of metaphysics, the latter being understood as the illusory manufacturing of necessary entities. In this regard, we have no desire to call into question the contemporary desuetude of metaphysics. For the kind of dogmatism which claims that this God, this world, this history, and ultimately this actually existing political regime necessarily exists, and must be the way it is– this kind of absolutism does indeed seem to pertain to an era of thinking to which it is neither possible nor desirable to return. (AF, 33 – 34)
Meillassoux is able to demonstrate an internal link between metaphysics and ideology, demonstrating the manner in which metaphysics functions as an apologetics for the necessity of whatever social system happens to exist. In developing this position, he moves in the radical direction of demonstrating the contingency of existence itself (regardless of whether any humans exist), and attempts to show the impossibility of any necessary being. If philosophy is to be measured by the originality and novelty of its arguments coupled with its conceptual creations, then Meillassoux certainly ranks highly. (In an unrelated vein, it seems to me that this also raises a number of questions about the Lacanian use of the matheme and the tendency among Lacanians to treat certain structures like the graphs of sexuation, the discourses, etc., as real in the Lacanian sense of “that which always returns to its place”. Zizek, for example, seems to make a number of deductive claims about what is and is not possible, what is and is not fantasy, in his political thought. This is reflected in the enthusiastic way some have been taking up Schmitt, though with very different aims than Schmitt himself advocated).
At any rate, the manner in which the argument from scarcity works is clear within the framework of Meillassoux’s understanding of ideology. On the one hand, we are told that since resources are intrinsically scarce, social organization must necessarily take the form of inequity and hierarchy. As the old saying goes, “there are the haves and the have nots, and so it is, so it has been, and so it will always be.” As a result, questions of distribution and production, and the principles and decisions underlying distribution and production become invisible and naturalized. On the other hand, we are told that envisioning any other possibility either a) necessarily leads to the political terror of social systems such as those found under Mao or Stalin, or b) is just an immature fantasizing that fails to recognize the true nature of reality. In connection to point a, it is intriguing to note that we are told both that other alternatives are impossible and are implicitly forbidden from even contemplating alternative systems of production and distribution. There is something symptomatic in the way that something that is impossible is simultaneously prohibited. Here the elementary gesture of any critique of ideology would lie in 1) demonstrating the contingency of existing social relations, and 2) uncovering the site of possibility where another form of social relations is really possible and coming into existence. Negri and Hardt, for example, attempt to do this with their analysis of emerging multitudes, that evade the logic of sovereignity, representation, national boundaries, and traditional factory models of production. Whether they’re successful is another question altogether.
If, however, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, social production is always based on abundance and surplus, if the question is how to expend surplus, then we come to see that the current mode of distribution is, in fact, contingent and that scarcity is manufactured through relations of anti-production. As Deleuze and Guattari put it,
We know very well where lack– and its subjective correlative –come from. Lack (manque: lack/need in the psychological sense, want/privation/scarcity in the economic sense) is creat4ed, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; and production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propogates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. (AO, 28)
Here we encounter the ground necessitating the linkage between psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, and Marx. If Marxist thought requires supplementation by the theory of desire developed by Nietzsche and psychoanalysis, then this is because all too often Marx concedes too much to liberal economists and political theorists by developing his thought in terms of naturalized needs and scarcity. Although Marx occasionally speaks of the manufacture of needs (see, for example, the very first section of chapter 1 of Capital), he all too often privileges natural biological needs and the attendant scarcity of goods in the environment. In short, Marx fails to think through the logical implications of his own observations of the produced nature of desires. Likewise, although Freud glimpsed the productive nature of desire, he falls back into ideology by arguing for the necessity of the Oedipus, the family structure, and treating lack as a primordial ground that precedes desire rather than lack being a product of desire. Where, by contrast, desire becomes productive, it becomes possible to discern the possibility of alternative social relations to those premised on lack and scarcity.
My naive question is to what degree is it true that the world is characterized by abundance rather than lack. Clearly when we talk about intellectual resources it is idiotic to speak in terms of lack and scarcity. Computer programs, books, music, articles, etc., can all be reproduced without limit; especially now with modes of electronic transmission. Given that academics and scientists get little or no compensation for their intellectual work, yet continue to produce outstanding work, it also seems ridiculous to argue that somehow art or science would suffer were there not the lure of great financial rewards. Deleuze and Guattari are able to also show how the desire for types of clothing, transportation, entertainment, food, etc., is manufactured. But it is difficult to see how their analysis of desire and lack can be squared with the need for food as such, the need for clothing as such, the need for shelter as such, the need for good medical care, etc. Can these forms of scarcity be so easily exorcised from the foundation of the political? Is it that somehow semiotized desires that are produced or manufactured rebound back on basic biological needs, creating scarcity in these domains as well through the hoarding of resources by a select class of people? I don’t know.
Larval Subjects . 
June 22, 2008 at 7:44 pm
[…] I think more about Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire in Anti-Oedipus, I find myself wondering if it doesn’t risk becoming another apologetics for […]
June 22, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Dr Sinthome this is a brilliant analysis; I will make sure to tell Shaviro when I next write to him.
June 22, 2008 at 9:26 pm
[…] to toss up a couple of links to two pieces over at Larval Subjects, where Sinthome is blogging about scarcity, reflecting on Deleuze & Guattari’s suggestion that notions of lack or scarcity […]
June 23, 2008 at 1:35 am
[…] Scarcity and Desire→ […]
June 23, 2008 at 6:32 pm
In your latest posts, I seem to find a thematic similarity and a frustration: that D&G lead, perhaps, to a kind of deconstructive quietism, that their concepts promote something but perhaps address nothing, perhaps even have consequences like a stoic fatalism or abdication of any political effectivity. While their specific political statements certainly speak oppositely, your concern is with — if I follow — with the pragmatics of their thought. Though I am somewhat afraid to say anything here, I will venture something since trying to find an ethics is central to me. IN ATP, they say “the unconscious itself…[is] a crowd.” In part, what I take that to mean is that the social situation is always constitutive of the flows at hand. These cannot be trumped by grander Cartesian representations of the state of affairs since all representations of them according to some extant protocols are always less effectual, more removed as standardized misprisions of the event. As in AO, an archetype of knowing always tends to overcome the very multiplicity it puppets. Thus a kind of fidelity to the flows is always an intervention into their being doubled by the sincere desire for political advance, the changelings of “organized” response. This undoing of the image of doing more is already an address, an action about action that now allows a life to respond according to stimuli as they are rather than as they are valorized, virtuals and not simulacra. Further, this is social — the crowd is here and acts — like Smith’s invisible hand but without a sovereign — to its greatest ability without restraint or confusions of ideality.
June 23, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Hi Dan,
So nice to see you again! I hope all is well. Your remarks here hit the mark. What I am wondering about is not the avowed aims and commitments of these texts, but how these avowed aims and commitments are to be thought or grounded. That is, by what principle does on select flows over molar aggregates? Why ought we choose flows over molar aggregates. In Plato we get a principle of selection based on the concept of justice. It is this that allows him to select among the various political formations towards the end of The Republic and diagnose states of “health” and “sickness” with respect to each of these political systems. Likewise we get a principle of selection in Badiou and Ranciere.
The question, then, is whether there is a principle by which selection is made and how that principle might be grounded? Perhaps the issue can be brought into further relief by reference to biological thought. It’s no secret that Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari are deeply influenced by evolutionary theory and biological thought. Now within the context of biological theory, no preference is given to populations of a species that are in a state of stable equilibrium and populations of a species that are in a state of metastable equilibrium where speciation is actively taking place as a result of migration, drift, isolation, etc. It seems that a very similar schema is being applied at the level of social systems in Deleuze and Guattari. Molar aggregates are social formations in a state of fairly stable equilibrium, whereas molecular aggregates are in a state of metastable equilibrium. Yet why is one to be preferred over the other?
June 25, 2008 at 12:22 am
Thank you! I was afraid that you would stop writing here and your posts are important to me. With all the frustrations you must encounter, I cannot place any claim on your going on, but I can say your site allows me to think against statements that allow me to test my concepts. This is not quite dialectic or dialogic, but it gives me a pleasure even if I am most usually a free rider. In short I both admire you and profit from your labor. Let me use this inter-active pleasure as the start of a reply — not answer — to your more pointed question not because I feel up to it but I am drawn to it: that is the answer of engagement and choice in regard to reaction, the political of this, not as a theory but more as a sample. The nexus of terms in your question — aims , commitments, selection, and principle etc — all give me pause even as I feel — habitually — the claim of the interest. The problem with all these for me is that they tend to dispositions in advance of their application: rules of engagement that are valorized — closer to Kant. But I am suspicious of this, my own reading, since I know that cannot be your commitment, so I turn more to your second paragraph where you bring up biology and certainly biological images haunt all of D’s work. But I do not think they represent it or even misrepresent it but allude rather to “a life,” his final concept. This indefinite does not supply criteria in advance other than that which in the instance promotes life as, in D’s sense, repetition, eternal return. This is the opposite of the pointed resentment that informs typical political choice, and it allows the multiplicities of the encounter to meet their potential in the event of the next. I realize that activism or regular politics wants this force channeled and programmed (I remember how Badiou denounced D from a “Maoist” perspective) but this more is always less. We cannot — I think — get ahead of the history we are in or reach beyond the opportunity of the event: these are the dreams of Apollo. Thus D hated Hegel and had an odd relation with Marx. This does not mean — for me — that we are not encountering global inequalities effectively or in fashions that are not engaged and forceful. The ecstatic is the series of life in its own divergent realization in regard to those flows with which it laminates, and these are typically now global: to get ahead of this adjacency and conjuncture is to fall behind. So, both the criterion, a life, and the instance are not specifiable any more than a duration is fixed before its processes. This does not make them nugatory or uncommitted: on the contrary they are as consequential and affirmative as can be exactly to the degree that they are not subsumed by the representations of other, by a service to a master narrative that went before. Further these are not hubristic or isolationist — the solipsism of a new post-subjective process — since the folding of the encounter is exactly that degree of sociality that pertains to the conjuncture while more, again, could only be the dream of the state or obligation, an iteration — not repetition — of an ideological given.
June 25, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Dan, your comment clarifies a lot for me; especially the reference to Kant. I’m a bit airy at the moment, but it seems to me that what is being asked is how it is possible for some sort of normative framework to emerge from within immanence. Once the shift towards ontological immanence is taken, it is no longer possible to appeal to things such as Kant’s categorical imperative or Plato’s ideal form of justice. Rather the criteria must be seen as emerging from within situations and their own productive capacities themselves. The difficulty with taking the side of becoming– which is a side I’m sympathetic to –is that there is no guarantee that this side will not be a fascist, totalitarian, or reactionary becoming. Enough for the moment.
June 26, 2008 at 12:02 am
1. It seems like Marcuse was trying to move beyond scarcity in Eros and Civilization, though he seems more tripped up by Freud than aided by that whole framework. (I always thought D&G were basically elaborating Marcuse’s thesis.) But moving “beyond the reality principle” seems like the same thing as denying that scarcity is a fundamental and unalterable fact. Marcuse sees rationality in general as product of the acceptance of scarcity as a fact. The concept of the rational is then used to dismiss any attempts at a more euitable distribution of the social product.
2. Economist Paul Romer has done a lot of work on “new growth theory” and the idea of “increasing returns to scale,” detailed in David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. All about the duplicability of information goods, digitization, etc. How ideas are infinitely copyable. May be relevant to theorizing about the possibilities of a post-scarcity economy.
3. The idea of positional goods often comes up in thinking of contrived forms of scarcity. The thinking is that these become more important as fundamental needs are met, allowing for the preservation of class distinctions in the face of abundance.
June 26, 2008 at 12:35 am
I am sorry you are ill, and I wish you well. About your worry: “The difficulty with taking the side of becoming– which is a side I’m sympathetic to –is that there is no guarantee that this side will not be a fascist, totalitarian, or reactionary becoming. Enough for the moment.” I believe the defense against these is the very commitment to becoming itself since these others are, to me, always based on essentialized and frozen positions, intolerant of difference. To prepare a position to meet these then is to give over to them — to sacrifice in advance the very life one wishes to empower. Thus the liberation of flows, the attention to the immanent conjuncture, the rhizomatic openness is exactly the non-methodological response to destructive positionalities whatever their particular attributes to come. To be “practical” or “pragmatic” I think the Deleuzian flow finds — or at least I do — horror in the constant tendency of Bush’s administration to kill liberty and people ON PRINCIPLE. It’s always — I cannot believe they were blind to the irony — “Operation Just Cause.”
June 27, 2008 at 5:41 pm
We might mention that the dialogue of scarcity is something we really see beginning in the early modern social contract theorists (most importantly Hobbes and Locke). But scarcity wasn’t the dominant paradigm previously. Most medievals and ancient Greeks emphasize that nature provides humans with the necessary goods in a great deal of abundance – as long as humans, as part of good political regimes, take steps to ensure that the human population is supportable by nature and that the desires of the citizens do not become uncontrollable.
The argument that nature produces abundance rather than scarcity (or that nature is friendly as opposed to hostile) is a plausible one: humans are quite omnivorous, able to eat numerous types of food and find many different kinds of food delicious – from meat and fish to fruits to vegetables to nuts to grains to sea plants. Humans can reside in a wide array of environments. A properly small number of humans can easily find abundant resources for commodious and moderate living.
July 8, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Just discovered this, randomly searching for Deleuze stuff online…
I think abundance/scarcity in a Deleuzian sense (not that he really uses the terms) is not working on a biological (molar) level so much as a level of desire (molecular). Their view would be close to that of Marshall Sahlins, the idea of “primitive abundance”. Given that indigenous societies at an economic level often termed subsistence do not seem to experience the existential lack typical of Oedipal subjectivity, it is absurd to think that the latter has anything to do with material scarcity – people in western societies have far more materially than people had/have in such societies. It has to do with life-orientations and psychologies rather than distributive justice. A parallel is the ideas of “survival” versus “life” in Vaneigem. When people associate Deleuze and Guattari with abundance, it is largely because of the role of active (affirmative, schizoid) force/desire against reactive (negative, paranoiac, “lackist”) desire which for the likes of Lacan and Zizek is the ONLY form of desire, but which Deleuze and Guattari reject as an undesirable secondary form (the passage on affirmative vs negative in Difference and Repetition is quite often used for this purpose). Active desire/force has to do with “going to the limit” or “realising one’s (creative) power to the fullest” – as opposed to holding back, being repressed. In the sense this is a relative concept – each becomes different (singular), but “how much” is realised will vary – it doesn’t matter as long as it is realised actively (“to the limit”, “to the fullest”) – in this sense all are equal.
Abundance (associated with molecular vs molar, becoming vs being, smooth vs striated and absolute deterritorialisation / body without organs / eternal return) is also a way of relating to the world – associated for instance with the Amazonian idea of predation as distinct from the resource-consumption model of western capitalism. Abundance is a psychological orientation to “include everything” (as Levi-Strauss depicts indigenous knowledge); it aspires to form connections rather than exclusionary molar aggregates. One solves a problem by adding a connection, or by letting the fly out the bottle (hence lines of flight, a little bit of the outside, etc). So contingent scarcities are addressed by creating new connections of an active/affirmative type. Hence, abundance would apply to the diachronic not the synchronic dimension. In the synchronic dimension one might have an active force which has not realised itself due to context (hence ideas such as cramped space, line of flight, relative deterritorialisation).
Of course this doesn’t determine how much, or what, actually exists, but rather, entails an open attitude to whatever does exist (provided it is not reactive). In cases of actual lack (in a contingent empirical sense), the abundance/lack division runs between those who assert that the lack is a result of contingent conditions to be overcome, and those who insist on a non-contingent lack as such. The “abundantist” response to empirical scarcity – death for example – is creative activity which reconstructs the system of relations around the newly formed gap, “social weaving” as Colombian feminist peace activists Ruta Pacifica term it. Indigenous rituals often function as this type of social weaving (see Isbell’s discussion in “To Defend Ourselves” for example), as do at least some forms of protest (the Indian dharna or relay-fast for instance). Obviously one would also have to distinguish here the active act of confronting existing reactive forces to deterritorialise existing assemblages (the Zapatistas, MST or South African squatters occupying land for example, or anti-capitalists trying to shut down a summit) from the reactive construction of exclusions which are constitutive of identity (blaming shortages on immigrants and carrying out pogroms like in Johannesburg for instance).
I’m thinking about these issues partly from the standpoint of networks and hierarchies in social movements in the periphery, and it is true that the two tendencies coexist – the network/affinity approach which creates “abundance” by means of new creative combinations (MST land occupations, Lomnitz’s “networks of resistance”, Simone’s alternative cities) and the “paranoiac” tendency to molarise around scarcity, blame an Other and act out some kind of violence (in communalist and fundamentalist movements for example). The two tendencies coexist and constantly slip from one pole to the other, but it is not clear that material scarcity correlates with one or the other. If anything, molar tendencies seem strongest among relatively included and well-off groups who mobilise against outsiders (the strength of anti-immigrant, anti-“crime” and other reactive attachments in western societies). One looks at the emergence of Nazism in Germany and it is not the unemployed who become Nazi, it is the small-town “petty-bourgeoisie” who formerly supported conservatives and liberals, and the former soldiers (Nazism is quite endocolonial in Virilio’s sense). This makes a lot of sense in Deleuzian terms – the reactive/lackist response to scarcity is a majoritarian response, based on identifying with an epistemologically privileged in-group, and therefore is necessarily more attractive to relatively included groups (those who most easily imagine themselves as “superior race or class”), even though majoritarian and minoritarian inscriptions are available to all groups in one form or other (but not necessarily on a macrosocial level).
A system of abundance over time implies a sustainable system. Actually I think Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return is already ecological – to do something which one can will to repeat indefinitely is to will something sustainable, not something that exhausts itself or its basis. (Guattari’s late works feature ecology as a core theme, and Braidotti also links Deleuzian theory closely to ecology). Sustainability in turn is connected to arriving at a networked relation with nature in which natural beings/becomings are not reduced to “resources” but treated as parts of a (changing) system of molecular relations (as in actor-network theory, and deep ecology such as Naess and Starhawk). Hence the type of relationship to (molecular) “nature” is different in Deleuze compared to the kind of instrumentalism implied in the critique outlined here.
The mention of “consuming surplus” as a social goal is almost certainly a reference to the idea of potlatch as theorised by an anthropologist they refer to, Marcel Mauss if I remember rightly. Its function is not so much to eliminiate surplus as to ward off the formation of inegalitarian and unfree relations by preventing “capital accumulation”.
The issue is complicated by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari rarely use terms such as abundance-lack or excess-lack, and there are complications as to which of their binaries are exclusive (either-or) and which involve orderings (A subordinated to B, or B to A). I’d contest some of the readings of Deleuze which suggest it’s always the latter – rhizomes and arborescences are definitely exclusionary categories for example, even though an arborescence can have root structures which are similar to rhizomes, and the two forms can turn into one another. But molar-molecular and possibly also active-reactive are of the former type. Molar (or organic) entities cannot be eliminated as such, but should not be allowed to dominate molecular assemblages; rather, molecular assemblages should determine molar assemblages. Ditto with social production (which would include economic production) – it is not to be done away with entirely but rather, subordinated to desiring-production. Active-reactive is more complex because they sometimes talk about distinct “schizophrenic” and “paranoiac” assemblages or poles, and sometimes of making active or reactive primary. One possible reading is that it’s like the relationship between good and bad/evil in Nietzsche – the function of reactive force is not eliminated entirely in an active/schizoid personality but is reduced to a secondary position, a way of strategically calculating means (so “bad” still exists “beyond good and evil” but in a secondary position). In addition, there are three kinds of reactive desire – a first initial type, a second type which is a repressive force which forms to control active desire once reactive desire is on top, and a third type which is active desire itself when it cannot “go to the limit” because of psychological repression. The second and third types are conditional on the primacy of reactive desire over active desire and so are in principle eradicable. On the other hand, the organism (molar level) is not eradicable – it can simply be subordinated in ethical importance to the molecular level (which is also ineradicable). Hence issues of biological necessity connected to the molar/organic level do not go away but are denied ontological primacy; the organic is denied the “fascist” role of being able to determine desire, through the domination of sexuality by procreation for example (see the debate between Guattari and Leclaire in Chaosophy).
One point is that, whereas in an active configuration specific desires may or may not be satisfied, in reactive formations it is built into the structure of desire that it cannot be satisfied, and the system is designed to produce scarcity. The “lackist” response necessitates scarcity as more than contingent because, in positing the other as having stolen the enjoyment from the in-group, it therefore requires that the other be put and kept in a subordinate position (of exclusion, suffering or subordination) in order that the self may gain enjoyment from its own place (however well off the Germans are, the Jews or the Slavs must suffer). The “abundantist” response may succeed or fail but it should not institutionalise lack in this way.
The idea of systemic production of scarcity, and resource crises arising from the functioning of the system, are central to autonomist and autonomist-related authors who influenced Deleuze and Guattari (Negri, Berardi, Virilio, etc). In Virilio for instance, military control of space produces ecological crisis because ecological crisis is only crisis for civilians – for the military rulers, making environments uninhabitable is a form of victory (the environment becomes inaccessible to anyone other than the military, hence “under control”) – he has in mind things like Agent Orange, napalm bombing, depleted uranium. In early Negri the issue is the “crisis-state”, a state permanently constructed around the production and management of crisis in forms such as nuclear risk and reliance on oil. This could almost be viewed as a response to abundance reasserting itself – the “refusal of work” arising from the possibility of autonomy, of living outside work, largely because of a surplus of unconsumed excess (abandoned factories, “skipped” goods, etc). In a classical Marxist account, the capitalist response to economic problems (arguably problems of abundance – more goods than buyers, or inability to match commodities to those who want them) is to reintroduce scarcity by destroying goods in a crisis or a war (remembering that war not only destroys the items which are bombed, but also consumes resources in producing weapons etc); or on another account, by accumulation-by-dispossession (which burns up existing resources by creating new assemblages in violent ways, disconnecting things from their existing insertions). I suppose the crisis-state, which is a concept I’m not entirely sure I understand, would be a speeded-up wave of responses of this kind, hence becoming a kind of permanent on-off mini-war. Scarcity (or fear of scarcity) is built into capitalism on several levels – it is necessary as a motivation to work, it is a necessary effect of accumulation-by-dispossession and of militarism, it is induced on a psychological level by deliberate construction of shortages (such as built-in obsolescence and housing speculation) and by inducing “false” desires (for things nobody needed until “everyone” had them but which then become indispensable for daily life or for social status – and sometimes these too are “limited edition” with inflated prices) – one might add here Baudrillard’s observation in “Consumer Society” of the growing importance of sign-value as opposed to use-value as the subjective component of capitalism, and signs controlled by intellectual property can be endlessly manipulated to create demand and scarcity. This also affects virtual commodities, and entities such as learning – one of the big points of Illich and Reimer’s critique (deschooling) is that in schooling, learning has been arbitrarily connected to systems of assignation of social status (grading, graduation, qualifications) so that however much schooling expands, there will always be those who “fail” (typically the more marginal or “minor”, who are filtered out by economic, cultural and libidinal means).
Not sure how often I’ll be around here so if you want to discuss the issues I’ve raised you can email me at Ldxar1 at gmail.