Chapter 5: Scarcity and Post-Scarcity Introduction For all but the privileged few, history has been in great part a chronicle of material scarcity — that is, an insufficiency of the goods and services that people need and value — all too often as a result of an unequal distribution of wealth. At best, people living under conditions of material scarcity must spend an inordinate amount of time working to produce the goods they need for material survival, or else earn a livelihood. This necessity, Bookchin maintains, reduces people to a quasi-animalistic existence; it prevents them from fulfilling their potential for rationality and freedom and thus from becoming fully human. At the same time, material scarcity has also been an ideology as well as a reality — in particular, ruling elites have used it as a rationale for authoritarianism — both when scarcity is real, and when it has been artificially induced for the benefi...