It may not be a good idea merely to contradict each separate piece of conventional wisdom as a way of arriving at the truth, but we think we may be on to something here.

Scarcity (relative and absolute), or rather the idea of scarcity’s predominance over abundance, is at the core not just of Economics, but of political economy, and reaches, therefore, into all areas of life. The predominance of Scarcity has become a fundamental assumption affecting the whole of contemporary culture. In these pages, we hope to show that this is so.

And yet we are surrounded by great wealth. Some might argue that this is illusory, pointing to the catastrophe of worldwide poverty and famine.

Yes, we reply to such statements –there is an acute contradiction between the poverty of the billions and the massive accumulation of wealth.

This reality becomes evident when we consider the following:

1) The fact the overproduction crises have never gone away, despite economic policies aimed precisely at dealing with this problem;
2) The deliberate limitation of output in industries where such controls have become possible (monopolies etc.) in order to push up the profits of the few;
3) The existence of massive waste, from the extraction and collection process right through production to marketing, sales and consumption, again, basically to enhance profits;
4) The deliberate allocation (one can hardly argue via market forces, although these certainly go hand-in-hand with an extremely polarized income distribution) away from socially useful output (e.g. food, education) and towards socially destructive operations (drugs, arms, etc)

The epitome of abundance in a world in denial is the arms industry –not only do arms destroy but they also allocate resources (including human beings) away from socially useful activities, doing both things with a single basic justification: profitability.

It should also be emphasized that the old idea of the “armaments ring” (of the 1920s/30s) has been replaced by something much larger and more penetrating: the military-industrial complex. This many-tentacled beast is the concrete manifestation of a world in denial and has integrated itself wherever humanity resides.

The integration of the world economy into this destructive channel is paralleled by the globalization of political economy’s scarcity assumption at all levels of contemporary culture. Its influence is far greater than many of us are prepared to admit, and thus we end our lives becoming proponents of our own destruction.

We are not content merely to criticize what is. And we do not believe that the “over-arching conspiracy” has no limits –something is causing that to be revealed and has been for some time now. We seek those limits through these pages