Friday, September 30 2011 - 07:47 PM
Socialist critique of the 'Third Industrial Revolution'
(Rather than to respond to Ray Cunneff’s The Third Industrial Revolution within that thread, I have elected to respond via the creation of this new thread for archival and retrieval purposes.)


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Quoted from Jeremy Rifkin’s latest and aforementioned book entitled The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, published by Palgrave Macmillian, 2011.

Jeremy Rifkin: “Our industrial civilization is at a crossroads. Oil and the other fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting, and the technologies made from and propelled by these energies are antiquated. The entire industrial infrastructure built off of fossil fuels is aging and in disrepair. The result is that unemployment is rising to dangerous levels all over the world. Governments, businesses and consumers are awash in debt and living standards are plummeting everywhere. A record one billion human beings – nearly one-seventh of the human race – face hunger and starvation.”

While the days of the world’s carbon-based economy are unquestionably numbered, and while I agree that certain technologies and all forms of fossil fule-fed propulsion are antiquated, precisely none of this can be rightfully attributed to any level of global unemployment.
Jeremy Rifkin is an economist and writer whom I respect and one whose work I often find to be informative. But his statement that peak oil, antiquated fossil fuel-based technologies and an aging industrial infrastructure have resulted in “unemployment…rising to dangerous levels all over the world” is a part of that which makes Jeremy Rifkin anything but the Marxist economist that he is sometimes referred to as.
Unemployment is the result of three basic factors: 1) the fact that, under capitalism, industrial production is geared toward satisfying the economic needs of capitalists rather than toward the satisfying of humankind’s material needs; 2) because of the fact that we workers cannot buy all of the commodities that we produce and; 3) because ongoing improvements to the means of production (e.g., computerization and robotization) enable capitalists to increase production and thus profits while employing fewer and fewer workers.
These three main tenets of capitalism result in unemployment – in that, once production quotas are met, once the sales volume of finished commodities drops to a certain point, and once jobs become automated, workers are then laid off, permanently in many cases. (So too are these and other such contradictions of the capitalist system those which constantly tend toward economic recessions and depressions.)

To verify what I have written here thus far, we should only have to perform a cursory examination of the primary industry of which Jeremy Rifkin wrote of; the oil industry.
As of 2010 and according to EconMatters, “US Crude Oil Refining Capacity [was] Near [a] 30-year High.” This despite of the dismal state of the US economy and despite of the fact that America’s newest oil refinery opened during the year 1977.
So if any number of oil refinery workers have been laid off of late, those lay offs would have been due to the ever-dwindling supply of oil as well as to the oil industry’s desire to keep gasoline prices artificially high by way of not constructing additional refineries. These hypothetical layoffs would have had no connection to the oil industry’s physical infrastructure – its means of oil/economic production – which appear to be operating rather well, wouldn’t you say?
Too, does Jeremy Rifkin’s “unemployment is rising to dangerous levels…” suggest that he deems a certain level of unemployment to be acceptable?
Of course he does. After all, he is, in the end, a capitalist economist. As such, he may even be of the belief that an unemployment rate of, say, five-percent is “healthy” for the economy." That is to say – healthy for capitalists because
a reserve pool of labor (Marx) helps to keep wages as low as possible; it assures capitalists with a ready supply of additional workers when needed; it supplies them with replacement workers during strikes; and it keeps them chalk-full of cannon fodder for their – the capitalist class’ – wars.

Nor does peak oil, sunsetting technologies and the like have anything whatsoever to do with the reality that “Governments…and consumers are awash in debt and [that] living standards are plummeting everywhere.”
(I intentionally omitted the word “businesses” from Rifkin’s “Governments, businesses and consumers…” since, save for many small businesses, most businesses are clearly not “awash in debt.” In fact, as Barrack Obama demonstrated earlier this year when he all but literally begged them to begin spending a bit of it, most “Fortune 500” businesses are awash in cash not debt.)
Governments and consumers/[workers] are in fact awash in debt and experiencing plummeting living standards. This, however, has everything to do with the fact that more and more working-class-produced wealth is being funneled into fewer and fewer capitalist coffers while it has nothing to do with Jeremy Rifkin’s aforementioned reasoning.
The average American worker has not enjoyed an increase in real wages (those adjusted for inflation) since 1973 all the while capitalists have become infinitely more wealthy, and governments are faced with tax bases that are declining accordingly as well as with its own ever-increasing plutocratic nature. Simply put, the capitalist class is now buying government influence like never before because, among other reasons, most capitalists now wish to pay less money, or preferably no amount of money, in the form of taxes.

Jeremy Rifkin: “It is becoming increasingly clear that we need a new economic narrative that can take us into a more equitable and sustainable future…In my explorations, I came to realize that the great economic revolutions in history occurred when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems. New energy regimes make possible the creation of more interdependent economic activity and expanded commercial exchange as well as facilitate more dense and inclusive social relationships…
In the coming era, hundreds of millions of people will produce their own green energy in their homes, offices and factories and share it with each other in an ‘energy Internet,’ just like the way we now create and share information online. The democratization of energy will bring with it a fundamental reordering of human relationships, impacting the very way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children and engage in civil life.” [Emphasis not in original.]

Clearly, Jeremy Rifkin and all Marxists can agree that “[i]t is becoming increasingly clear that we need a new economic narrative that can take us into a more equitable and sustainable future.”
But, after reading all of the excerpts posted to the Huffington Report, and while I freely acknowledge that Jeremy Rifkin is of a much deeper intellect than what I am, not to mention a far superior writer, I have been unable to imagine how this “energy Internet” will bring about “a fundamental reordering of relationships.” Rifkin tells us that this fundamental reordering of relationships will stem from the “democratization of energy” without his ever telling us of who would own this futuristic “energy Internet.” Would it be owned and administered collectively by those who would use it and contribute to it, or would it be owned and controlled by energy capitalists? Given his repeated mentioning of the CEOs, business leaders and representatives of various political states he is working with in the “development” of “the energy Internet,” one can only assume that Jeremy Rifkin is pushing his energy Internet with an eye toward its being owned by the same, old, related powers that be – energy capitalists.
Therefore, I am also unable to imagine how in the world this energy Internet could possibly constitute the democratization of energy production or, moreover, how it could usher in a “fundamental reordering of relationships” while wanting of the social ownership and democratic administration of this new Internet – while wanting of a fundamental reordering of relationships.

Jeremy Rifkin speaks of a grid which users/producers could pull from and contribute to. So it would of course be a physical structure similar to if not identical to the current system of electricity distribution. This is a system which is now mainly owned by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric, Con Edison and other privately held utility firms. Yet Rifkin makes no mention of the certainty that these utilities would not relinquish ownership, control and thus the profitability of that system of electricity distribution.

The concept of lateral power – of “using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet” (Rifkin) is, to me, a sound and viable concept. But I do not see it coming to fruition within the overall framework of the prevailing economic order. I hope to be mistaken, but I do not believe that I am mistaken.
To gain an insight as to who it is that may be mistaken and who it is that may be correct, let us examine a portion of Jeremy Rifkin’s past writings.

Within his The End of Work…, Putman Publishing, 1995, Jeremy Rifkin wrote: “During the 1950s, automation began to take a toll on America’s manufacturing sector…Hardest hit were unskilled jobs in industries where black workers were concerned. Between 1953 and 1962, 1.6 million blue-collor jobs were lost in the manufacturing sector. While the unemployment rate for black Americans had never exceeded 8.5 percent between 1947 and 1953 and the white rate of unemployment was only 5.9 percent.”
Were Jeremy Rifkin a Marxist he may have also stated that capitalism’s cheerleaders of that era asserted that layoffs created by automation and other improvements to the means of production were temporary and that new jobs would be created to reemploy those workers. But, as evidenced by the fact that both “black unemployment rates” and “white unemployment rates” have steadily increased since the 1960s, that never happened.

Rifkin added that “Today ¹⁹⁹⁵, the very same economic and technological factors are starting to affect large numbers of white males with potentially dire consequences for society at large. New jobs will be far too few to absorb the many millions of workers displaced by new technologies.
If the productivity gains of the Information Age are not shared but used mainly to enhance corporate profits, chances are that the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots will eventually cause widespread social disintegration and increased levels of crime and imprisonment on a scale previously unknown in the United States.”

To be sure, all of this has come to pass. But I would ask Jeremy Rifkin what he thought the reason was that capitalists installed and continue to install labor-saving technologies if not to “enhance corporate profits.”
So yes of course “the productivity gains of the Information Age” are not being shared, Mr. Rifkin. After all, a corporation’s one and only responsibility is to create an ever-increasing rate of profit rather than to share productivity gains by, say, paying their workers more while allowing them to work fewer hours.
Too, what does the drastic increase in black unemployment during the 1950s and 1960s show us? What indeed are the “economic factors” that “are starting to affect large numbers of white males” (Rifkin) if not the economic contradictions that govern the capitalist system of production?

So although Jermey Rifkin’s End of Work… is long on accurate descriptions of the symptoms of capitalist rule, it is devoid of a solution which is, I believe, the establishment of the social ownership and democratic administration of the means of production – the establishment of Marxian socialist society.
In turn, I also believe that, while it would be a wonderful technology that would fit quite perfectly within the framework of a futuristic socialist society, the “energy Internet” will never be permitted to come about within capitalist society, at least not within uber-capitalist America.

Yours in revolution..
Guy R. Marsh
Lancaster
93536
Member-at-large (since 1990):
Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)

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