Individual production and consumption. Progress?

Think I made this point before but in the 21st Century after several hundred years of explosive scientific and technological "progress" we still live in a world where people are concerned about where their food comes from.

The reason for this statement is the realisation that my mother and my sister are very concerned about where the money to support myself will come from. I don't have this fear because I know that the real problem is human population and it is true that a large percentage of the human population will have to die when oil runs out. But while oil is cheap then food is cheap and there is a plentiful supply. My worry then is not whether I have the money to buy food, but rather whether the human race can manufacture enough food in the future.

I guess this cuts deep into the issue of employment which I am not interested in. For my mother and my sister it is enough to get a job to get food. Yet I see my mother weeding the garden and throwing away plants that I have learned are excellent to eat - nettles, fat hen, jack-by-the-road to name my favouries. Food doesn't actually come from employment. The problem is that oil has lead to machines and plentiful food and so high population. This I now suspect is the real reason for human population growth - nothing to do with the medical advances. The sun is impossible to own so the energy and food from it is free. Oil however is every capitalists dream because it is easy to own and the population whose energy comes from oil has thus been bought by the capitalists who own oil. We thus have to "work" for the capitalists to get at that energy.

This it seems to me is the underpinning of the current world order. Once it was land rents on farm land. The sun (and energy) couldn't be owned but the land required to grow plants could so the capitalists/land-owners managed to get the others to work for them. Now it is much easier: the cost of land is higher and the value of human labour is lower since people have to compete with mass produced agriculture, we have therefore to work even harder to get at our energy.

This picture is far away from the naive 1950s image of progress leading to more free time and leisure. At the bottom line despite the enormous progress it seems oddly that things have not changed at all. People still worry about where their next meal will come from. This point has been analysed at length (in terms of social structure) but remaking to point from the other side that it is social structure only that maintains a system where we need to work for our food.

The more I look at things the more I see either one of two possibilities. The human race has been pregnant with a massive paradigm shift in the concept of life and living for many centuries but is either lacking imagination in making to move OR the ruling elites are afraid to offer up their comforts and embrace the change.

Basically as has been said for decades, and been obvious for millenia there is enough food to go around and feed the world multiply. That the energy to make this food is currently plentiful and cheap. That the number of jobs available is falling every year (from efficiency and mechanisation) yet we insist on a system where distribution of productivity is to those who work... i.e. those eligible for payouts from the system are fewer in number each year and the payouts are greater each year! Where private ownership is preferred to public owenership with the obvious benefits. As an example I use public toilets just as Rome had. Consider the efficiency in everyone using a local toilet rather than having to manage a single one each. That the human race is trapped within a paradigm of individual productivity and consumption.