[p2p-research] Structural Unemployment... round #3527

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Edward Miller wrote:
> Marx actually would not buy into any of the End of Work arguments.
> 
> Here is a pretty good refutation of Negri, Rifkin, and others from an
> anarchist and quasi-marxist perspective:
> 
> http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1927
> 
> It is quite possible that Jeremy Rifkin doesn't believe in structural
> unemployment.... he just wants the capitalists to believe in it... as an
> alternative to needing to actually go through it.
> 
> yet on the other hand it seems like maybe Alan Greenspan now believes in it.
>  I think there are a lot of feedback loops and such that make it hard to
> determine if it will happen or not, but to be honest, it doesn't matter that
> much. I don't think any P2P activism needs to be based on the belief in
> imminent doom.... from peak oil to structural unemployment. If it helps,
> then that's good I guess, but fear is a risky motivational technique. It
> tends to spin out of control.
> 

Bob Black on Jeremy Rifkin's book
   "WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? A critique of a neo-futurist's vision 
of the decline of work" by Bob Black"
  http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
"""
Rifkin only discerns, and only vaguely, that the voluntarist spirit has a 
part to play in the end of work. He doesn't notice that self-interested 
activity does too -- that play has a part to play. Mary Poppins perhaps 
exaggerated in saying that "in everything that must be done, there is an 
element of fun", but in many things that must be done, there could be 
elements of fun. Production and play aren't necessarily the same, but 
they're not necessarily different either. Income and altruism aren't the 
only springs of action. Crafts, sports, feasts, sex, games, song and 
conversation gratify by the sheer doing of them. Rifkin's no radical, but 
he's certainly a leftist, with the Judeo-Calvinist presumption that if you 
enjoy doing something, especially with others, it must be immoral or frivolous.
   We finally know what's wrong with this picture: we've seen it before, and 
we know how it ends. The future according to the visionary Rifkin is the 
present with better special effects. Putting people out of work does nothing 
to put an end to work. Unemployment makes work more, not less important. 
More makework does not mean less work, just less work it is possible to 
perform with even a vestige of self-respect. Nothing Rifkin forecasts, not 
even rising crime, offers any promise of ever ending work. Nothing Rifkin 
proposes does either. So strongly does he believe in the work-ethic that he 
schemes to perpetuate it even after the demise of the toil it hallows. He 
believes in ghosts, notably the ghost in the machine. But a spectre is 
haunting Rifkin: the spectre of the abolition of work by the collective 
creativity of workers themselves.
"""

No that first article (which I've seen before) I was struck on rereading it 
by two things I did not think about before. One is the importance of the 
factor's (capitalist factory owner's) involvement to coordinate widespread 
social efforts to do things. What has changed now is that the internet makes 
this more feasible for large scale volunteer efforts like Wikipedia or Debian.

The other is seeing how true John Taylor Gatto's points are about compulsory 
school "dumbing us down". And it is is more than dumbing. There are the 
years spent in authoritarian circumstance where any initiative or creativity 
is punished (unless it is what the teacher wants as assignable curiosity in 
Jeff Schmidt's terms). These years destroy initiative. This gave factors and 
their differently schooled children an enormous advantage -- because they 
were not so suppressed. So, while the average person had been beaten down, 
they could come in to save the day by coordinating these beaten down people 
into enterprises.

But I think I also understand better the point that it is rarely those at 
the center of the current system who try to change it even if you would 
expect they have most power too.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/