Ask Lemmy

When we're talking raw resources that can potentially be turned into things needed to provide for the people, then yes there is easily enough. Today you have a lot of people living on a subsistence level, but also a ton of potential arable land, resources to be mined, production to be refocused that can provide for said people.

However, unless we get rid of capitalism (tired trope but hopefully I can provide substance below), then even in the best case scenario of how capitalism can develop from here on will this idea of "providing for everyone" remain impossible.

The main issue here isn't "the rich" or them not being taxed (which others blame in the thread), but how capitalist mode of production fundamentally organizes production - goods aren't produced to satisfy human needs (use value), but strictly for profit (exchange value) as commodities, to be bought and sold.

If you have millions of malnourished lower-class people and a million middle and upper strata demanding more luxuries, the latter's demand will always be prioritized while the former's will until things get desperate that production for them finally leads to desired margins and profit rates. Why produce cheap commodities whose main buyers have very limited purchasing power (therefore a low cap on growth) when a business can produce a commodity that turns more profit and whose buyers are more wealthy, leading to more potential growth?

That's not to mention overproduction, the need of a reserve army of labor which are unemployed people kept on a brink of poverty to compete in the labor market to keep wages down and therefore profit up, and many other funny things. To change this fundamentally, one would have to ditch production for profit and instead replace it with production to satisfy human needs via economic planning - anything short of that is not enough and results in "capitalism coated in X".