Why do people who understand that their situation is unjust so often fail to act on that understanding? Why does political quiescence persist in the presence of knowledge, grievance, and formal democratic rights?

This book offers a new answer. Scarcity silences politics not by suppressing speech or distorting belief but by consuming the attention, time, and cognitive capacity that political agency requires. When enough people are preoccupied with obtaining what they need, the questions that would otherwise organise political contestation do not get asked. This condition — governed inattention — is one of the most durable and least theorised mechanisms through which political order is maintained across historical periods and regime types.The argument moves from theory through genealogy to contemporary analysis, anchored throughout by the Soviet case — not because it is exceptional but because it is uniquely transparent.

The central claim is that the obstacle to political action under administered scarcity is not knowledge but capacity. People can understand perfectly well that their shortage is politically produced and still lack the bandwidth to act on it. The Soviet case teaches the book's most uncomfortable lesson: the elites who administered shortage were precisely those best positioned to exploit its dissolution, converting institutional knowledge and political connections into oligarchic capital. That is not a story about corruption. It is a story about what scarcity governance produces for whatever future follows it.

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