We're rich. We're so damn rich, so why are we so poor? How did we manage to live on a planet so rich, and still build a human world on it that leaves so many of us wanting and needing more in order to live a decent and happy life?
source: YouTube
You already know the answer to those questions; we've organized our societies in a way that allows most of the earth's riches to be controlled by an absolute minority of owners. I've recently written about wealth, and tried to explain what it is, and how most of it ends up in the hands of the small group of people who are already extremely wealthy. It's easy to understand if you just forget about money, interest rates, credit and debit, and just boil it down to the real material world we all have to interact with in order to survive. Wealth is whatever the planet gives us. It's the land, the plants, the animals, the water, the minerals, the metals, the wood, the rocks. It's everything because we need everything to make the products we need for our human lifes. We grow food, we slaughter animals, we drink the water, we use the wood and the rocks to build our shelters, we bake clay to make bricks. We use the silver, copper, gold, platinum and other rare metals in our electronic devices and cars... You get the picture. And there's a lot of it all, more than the 8 billion of us need to lead a rather comfortable and luxurious life.
Forget about overpopulation: it's a myth. If we build one giant city on the island of Australia, we'd all fit in there with the rest of the planet providing the resources for that one giant city. Here's a few quotes from an article from 2013:
If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manila, the human race could fit in Tunisia
If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manhattan, the human race could fit in New Zealand
If everyone lived as densely as they do in Bangladesh, the human race could fit in Australia
If everyone lived as densely as they do in South Korea or New Jersey, the human race could fit in Russia.
source: FastCompany
It works both ways: if everyone lived as densely as they do in Alaska, we'd need 108 earths to fit us all... It's a good thing then that we're social creatures who generally like to be around other people :-) But it's just an illustration to put things in perspective. Space is not a problem. It's true that we currently use way too much of the earth's resources, almost more than the planet is able to regenerate on a yearly basis, but that's mainly because we produce a lot more than we need; we destroy a lot of the food we produce, we build more houses than there are people to house, we make more cars than we're collectively able to buy, and we throw away or put in a drawer our mobile phones when they're only two years young. The resource problem is caused mainly because we waste so much; the planet can provide us with everything we want and need if only we learn to use its resources responsibly.
But the same societal organizations that allow for all the wealth to be concentrated in the hands of a few, is responsible for all the waste and all the pollution. If we don't waste so much, this planet could comfortably provide for more than ten billion people, and it's predicted that the world population will reach (and peak at) 9.6 billion in 2050. Or will it... You see, poor countries are responsible for most of the population's growth; rich countries are getting older because when humans reach a certain level of prosperity, they just reproduce less. Poor people need a lot of children to take care of them when they're old. In rich and emancipated countries women become less dependent on men and family life, and they carve out a life and a career of their own before even thinking about having children. Neither is good or bad; it's just the way things go. So, for the world's population to stop growing at this pace, the best thing to do is make sure every country is delivered from poverty. But, you've guessed it, our current socioeconomic structures don't allow for a more equal distribution of the earth's riches, not among individuals and not among nations.
Wealth, my friends, has only two prerequisites; natural resources and human labor. We use our labor to transform the natural resources into the wealth we enjoy every day. Or don't enjoy every day. Marx said it:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
In other words: it's how we organize the relationship between labor and the material world that forms the real foundation on which we build the superstructure of our legal, political and cultural lifes. That relationship between labor and the material world is the economy on which the society of living human beings is built. The rules of that relationship become the rules of our society, they become the laws, the politics and the culture that constitutes our social existence. Right now we've organized the economy in a way that gives all the power and all the wealth to the few that own the material world, a system of private ownership and private wealth. And because all of us need to interact with the wealth that's now privately owned, all our labor is in service of that private wealth. Marx said that's wrong. The planet just is. The crucial factor in the relationship that grounds the rest of society is labor. Without labor there is no wealth, however rich the planet may be. Therefore labor shouldn't be controlled by ownership, but ownership should be controlled by labor. This is a simple and beautiful and realistic way to ground the economy. It boils it down to what it really is, and explains how much depends on its organization.
Anyway, the quote from Marx is lifted from the below linked video, which I recommend you all to watch, especially if you want to learn about what Marx really advocated, instead of the usual nonsense about how Marx was a statist, or how socialism and communism inevitably wind up in dictatorships. It's a beautiful debunking of Jordan Peterson's faulty reading of "The Communist Manifesto" that not only shows how little Peterson understands Marx, but also corrects many of the popular anti-socialism and anti-communism arguments.
Learning about Marx with Jordan Peterson (feat. Anarchopac and Red Plateaus)
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