A warm Sunday afternoon in an airport in Rome, the immense terminals filled with swarms of people, apparently a few days before the official start of the holiday rush. I suppose some would say that this is the material correlative of Kant's kingdom of ends. No grand social purpose, just the assumption that everyone here is able to further their own existence in their own manner. All seem quite placid. There are enormous stores lining the walls of the terminals, filled with expensive goods. A piano player somewhere is doing his or her level best to replicate the effect of Muzak on the mind.
So what right does a dissentient fellow have, against the obvious prosperity, and the fact that the people have obviously become more civilized (if not more cultured) over the last few generations?
Perhaps it's that having the necessary or desirable things at hand is distinct from creating a situation in which it is made plain that abundance is at hand. It is the difference between grocery stores or websites being filled with a wide range of products and inventory, and people actually possessing the things that they desire. Before we even question these desires as desires, there's something else going on above that question.
The monstrance holding the medium-sized dry good is the modern mall, a desire machine. Shopgirls (yes) , video monitors flashing successions of images of fit and attractive folks cavorting in the sunlight, that sort of thing. Making plain that abundance is at hand isn't an abstract intellectual point. That's not how shared ideas work. The material reality of the proof of abundance is the material existence of desire in the people. If we didn't want these things, there would be no point in having them, and more directly, one couldn't prove that the industrial mechanisms were creating abundance.
Which is not to say that we should shift questions of production to centralized bureaucrats or committees. Desire is the reaching-forth of the people not just to the object, but to the object as they understand it, in the manner in which they have come to think about it. And the forces of production tune their production to the objects that the people more intensely desire, desire, again, being the creation of the possibility of the sense of abundance.
Desire then begins to govern the form of the object (the socialists of the east didn't make dungarees, because they thought that they had to condition this desire). The form of bread emerges, not by a scientifically determined process examining how best to use wheat, but because the people desire bread. If the categorial term didn't exist, bread would be simply the action of doing to wheat the thing that resulted in people wanting to have it. And the people, at least in the abstract, are right in this.
Things can imbalance, though. The process of acquiring the goods becomes about accomplishing the satisfaction of desire, rather than acquiring the necessary objects. The sense of abundance comes from the presence of objects of desire -- something that requires both objects and desire. The people then feed on their own sense of abundance in possessing the object that they had desired. That sense gives the object an extra cachet, and the people take satisfaction in having it because it is a sign of that abundance, which they knew as desire. If you paraphrase this sequence more explicitly, the people gain satisfaction in possessing the object that had caused them to desire things, thinking that a need has been resolved. This enters into their comportment. But this pride of possession is of the owner, not of the author. Although the fact of desire was the thing that shaped the object, the possessor imagines that he has taken something of undoubted worth from the outside world and introduced it into his world. But he only possesses it to the degree that and in the manner that he has thought it worthwhile, The idea both determines and negates the experience. And so, his own notion that this specific object would be worthwhile is what gives him satisfaction, as he possess it in the manner of his imagination; having himself imagined the form, he nonetheless values it (independent of his use of it) more for its substance. And so he begins to value the authoring and determining aspects of desire less, and then looks to the mind of industry to give him the best bread.
We need objects in order to live. But we shouldn't feed on the satisfaction of desire, as it necessitates the existence of (at least temporarily un-fulfilled) desire, and when the satisfaction happens, we imagine it a gift from the gods that we had wrenched from them with Promethean force of spending, when in fact we were the authors of the manner and means of the satisfaction of desire, and its object. We sit in the airports, surrounded by expensive goods, and by virtue of the fact that we don't yet possess them, we think ourselves amid abundance. But there is a true form of abundance, and a true form of desire, and a true form of satisfaction; in the last, we recognize our own limitations, and have merely acquired the useful object in order to repair a few of those.