I agree that this is orthogonal to the "warehouses of resources" mentioned - although I don't think we really do have that kind of warehouse of goods.
Maybe not exactly/literally in the manner described, but in the aggregate, the majority of our resources are deliberately wasted. Capitalism cannot function as it does in the current era without enforced artificial scarcity. At this level of inequality, the economic machinery only cares whether transactions are taking place between businesses. After many dozens of steps when those transactions have managed to result in a product being made, it doesn't care whether that product ever finds any actual use. At this point, the product is often a byproduct of the real point of business - merely an excuse for businesses to exchange numbers on spreadsheets back and forth between each other in order to ritualize the directing of the numbers on those spreadsheets into the accounts of the ultra-wealthy who own the whole process, which is itself a hollow ritualization of the ultra-wealthy maintaining control over the world's resources purely for the sake of denying them to others. In many cases, businesses deem that it is more cost-effective if the product is never sold. Whether they sit unused in a warehouse or are destroyed depends on the type of good.
Example that I stumbled across recently. It's pretty common practice to accept returned products, only to destroy them. Because it's cheaper to destroy the product than it is to pay someone to evaluate and re-package it at a lower price, and donating to charity or something damages the prestige of their brand and drives down price.
The majority of the food we produce is wasted, while millions are hungry. Many businesses will pour bleach on perfectly good food before throwing it away, because it's less hassle than calling the cops on dumpster divers.
And everyone's favorite that I will point out at every opportunity until capitalism is dead... banks were caught deliberately keeping foreclosed houses off the market in the aftermath of 2008 in order to inflate prices, especially egregious when you consider that thousands of those foreclosures were illegal.
At some point, someone does need to buy something to keep the esoteric ritual going, and the world under its spell. But artificially enforcing scarcity means the goods that are bought at inflated prices balances the whole arrangement, while keeping the lower classes at just the right level of desperation that they can't sacrifice the time and energy necessary to figure the whole thing out and organize against it.
I've been thinking lately that sometime in the moderately near future, the 1% are going to try and turn it all into a closed-loop process. Instead of marketing products to consumers, they'll start making bots that do automated online shopping and the shipping address will be a facility where stuff is just thrown in an incinerator. Real consumers are too expensive to cater to. Yeah, it's absurd and unsustainable and near everybody will suffer for it. But don't think like that. Think like a Jeff Bezos. Imagine re-directing all of your marketing and a huge chunk of your labor costs into immediate, guaranteed, predictable sales. The whole point is that money cycles, and every cycle allows them to take a chunk and store it away. When they've captured all of it, what will there be left to do? It's not like any of the physical stuff systemically matters. Only the numbers on spreadsheets. I 100% believe that most of them are such callous ideological slaves to that process, that when there's no longer any such thing as a consumer because everyone but them is too poor to survive, that their response would be to just create an automated synthetic replacement for the whole song and dance. They would fucking love it, too. Let it run and just consider the whole thing done and taken care of once and for all, as they party to the end of their days in the post-apocalypse inside their glass-domed self-contained eco-mansions just like the
protagonists locked inside
the mall in
Dawn of the Dead.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4210266 times)