According to Marx, scarcity has two aspects, social and natural. Natural scarcity cannot be entirely overcome, no matter how much technology may advance. By contrast, social scarcity increases in capitalism in the face of unlimited capital expansion. Everything is by definition scarce in capitalism: ‘capital always is – and, this cannot be stressed strongly enough, it always must remain, as a matter of inner systemic determination – insuperably scarce, even when under certain conditions it is contradictorily overproduced’. The more capital develops for the sake of overcoming self-imposed scarcity, the more destructive the entire system becomes, but the abundance it generates can never eliminate the artificial scarcity created by capital itself. This is the fundamental paradox of wealth in capitalism.
Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
