Phil He
American 'futurologist' Jeremy Rifkin argues that A computer technology is leading to a decline of
employment, which will eventually spell a massive crisis for capitalism. His arguments warrant close attention from socialists.
Professional pundits like Rifkin like to paint things in dramatic colours, so we should be wary about his arguments. As he says in his new article, 20 years ago people were already predicting the decline of work, and it turned out to be a premature claim. However he claims that now the signs are unmistakeably there, and over the next decades it will become obvious.
Rifkin produces data which show that manufacturing
According to Alliance Capital, 3Im manufacturing jobs were eliminated between 1995 and 2002 in the world's 20 largest economies ... during a period when global industrial production rose by more than 30%
Moreover, the commonly-accepted idea that industrial jobs lost in the advanced countries all move to the third world is untrue. In the same period China's rapidlyexpanding economy shed 15 million industrial jobs.
It is commonly assumed that jobs lost in the manufacturing sector become new jobs in the service and white*Now the white-collar and services industries are experiencing similar job losses, as intelligent technologies replace more and more workers. Banking, insurance, and the wholesale and retail sectors are introducing smart technologies into every aspect of their business operations, fast eliminating support personnel in the
And it's not true that service jobs lost in advanced countries are generally transferred to the third world.:
"The UK and US jobs being lost to call centres in India, while important, pale in significance compared with jobs lost every day to voice recognition technology. Consider the US phone company Sprint, which has been steadily replacing human operators with this technology. In the year 2002, Sprint's productivity jumped 15% and revenue increased by 4.3%, while the company reduced its
Overall Rifkin claims that today there are more than one billion people unemployed and underempolyed, and in the future this will be a massive crisis for capitalism for one simple reason - the lack of demand:
"If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer Get the demand come from to buy all the potential new products
n Marxist terms, Rifkin is pointing to the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces
and the existing social relations of production.
In the last two decades Marxists have been reluctant to accept such arguments because they appear to challenge two planks of basic theory - the idea that surplus value, the basis of profits, can only be produced by living labour, and the idea that the proletariat is disappearing or declining.
Without a declining proletariat, where is the revolutionary subject with the social weight to overthrow capitalism?
These objections do not really apply to Rifkin's ideas. In the first place he is not predicting the disappearance of
What is there in principle to prevent the era of the Internet giving rise to a long-term trend in which the proportion of living labour is qualitatively reduced? In fact there is only one thing - the inability of a society with huge levels of unemployment to actually buy increasing mass of products.
On a world scale we already see that capitalism is incapable of providing employment for huge masses of peo ple available for work. From the point of view of capitalism, these masses are a 'surplus population', to which capitalism is indifferent or actively hostile.
More than a billion unemployed or underemployed includes vast swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, literally abandoned by world capitalism. Like unprofitable factories, unprofitable people are simply closed down.
The trend towards massive structural unemployment in the advanced countries is deepened by neoliberalism. A neoliberal world is one dominated by finance capital, which is like a massive vacuum cleaner which, through privatisation, sucks up the disposable income of employed workers. Giant proportions of workers' incomes go into paying for utilities like gas, electricity,