Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Economics and Visions of the International

In the Anthropocene, visions of international order after capitalism revolve around the notion of ‘post-scarcity’. The idea has become a central tenet in degrowth economics (Kallis et al. 2018), the discourse on automation (Bastani 2019, Benanav 2020), and even Marxism (Saito 2023). Indeed, post-scarcity economics are increasingly seen less as an unrealistic dream, but rather as a legitimate design criterion for surviving the climate crisis (Schmelzer et al. 2023). While the dream of post-scarcity is said to have many origins, its context of popularization and radicalization in the postwar era remains vague, and ideas about the structure of international space with post-scarcity institutions even vaguer. In this paper, I offer a critical genealogy of post-scarcity, tracing a particular vision of society back to the postwar era, specifically to the work of the American political and social theorist Murray Bookchin (1921-2006). Excavating the intellectual origins of Bookchin’s synthesis of Marxist economics, socialist planning, and the history of technology, I show how he appropriated the concept of post-scarcity and integrated it into a novel theory of radical democracy. This vision of a post-scarcity society, called democratic confederalism, was developed in response to various struggles on the Left in the 1970-1990s, however, it contained in it a vision of international order that has hitherto been neglected. While Bookchin’s temporalization of scarcity (into post-scarcity) has influenced recent discourses on automation and technology, understanding Bookchin’s influences in their original contexts changes the way we should imagine post-scarcity in the Anthropocene. To show this, I advance two claims: First, I argue that Bookchin’s conceptual innovation must also be read within the context of Lewis Mumford’s attempt to defend Marx’s technological progress to liberate workers from meaningless toil. Bookchin redescribes this aspiration within the burgeoning discourse in Marxist economics and socialist planning to produce a more radical, ecological, and utopian vision of communistic politics. Second, I argue that this contextualist reading of Bookchin’s concept of post-scarcity changes the way his theory of democratic confederalism can be interpreted, especially as regards his international theory. Finally, I offer a rational reconstruction of his vision of international order and consider ways it could be improved upon today to reinforce the burgeoning degrowth literature as well as international political theory, especially in an age of climate change and Anthropocened politics.