Jeremy Rifkin and the Death of Capitalism

[robbo203]

I don't know if  Jeremy Rifkin's ideas have been discussed on this forum.  He is a bestselling futurist writer somewhat  in the style of Alvin Toffler and has written numerous books the most recent one being  The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

 

I actually find Rifkin's writing quite thought provoking – I read a previous book of his called the "Age of Access" – though I think the central thesis of his latest book is highly questionable.  He is looking at the advances in technology through the eyes of a technological determinist and holds that the marginal costs of production are being driven downwards to the point that makes capitalism unsustainable.  Even accepting his claims about increased productivity for the sake of argument, he is not looking at "costs" in a wider economic sense. Included in such notion of costs are the "transaction" or "on-costs" of capitalism  which, if anything, are steadily increasing.  I am referring to the growing burden of structural waste within capitalism exemplified by such sectors as the financial sector.  The growth in socially useless occupations (though functionally necessary to capitalism) has probably more than offset any gains in cost reduction brought about by  technological innovation

 

Nevertheless, there is a lot of interesting stuff in what Rifkin writes which is worth noting.  To get a flavour of what he is saying here is an article of his that appeared in the Guardian last year

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism-age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift

 

And here is quite a useful chapter-by-chapter summary of his book "The Zero Marginal  Cost Society"

http://www.integralworld.net/berge7.html

 

Comments?

 

[ALB]

robbo203 wrote:

I don't know if  Jeremy Rifkin's ideas have been discussed on this forum.  He is a bestselling futurist writer somewhat  in the style of Alvin Toffler and has written numerous books the most recent one being  The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Actually, there was a bit of a discussion on this here about a year ago:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/zero-marginal-cost-society

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

I don't know if  Jeremy Rifkin's ideas have been discussed on this forum.  He is a bestselling futurist writer somewhat  in the style of Alvin Toffler and has written numerous books the most recent one being  The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Actually, there was a bit of a discussion on this here about a year ago:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/zero-marginal-cost-society

  Thanks Adam. Interesting discussion.  I wonder if anyone has come across any critiques  looking at the economics of what  Rifkin is proposing. Like the argument that employment is going to dry up because of robots etc replacing human labour, I find Rifkins claim about the  spectacular increases in productivity brought about by technological innovation and causing costs to dramatically plummet, a little hard to swallow.  Capitalism generates all sorts of costs that dont have much to do with technology as such.  The growth of structural waste within capitalism  which is a cost born by industry still has to be paid for and will tend to offset any productivity gains made through technological innovation and the like…

[Anonymous]

robbo203 wrote:

I wonder if anyone has come across any critiques  looking at the economics of what  Rifkin is proposing. Like the argument that employment is going to dry up because of robots etc replacing human labour, I find Rifkins claim about the  spectacular increases in productivity brought about by technological innovation and causing costs to dramatically plummet, a little hard to swallow.  Capitalism generates all sorts of costs that dont have much to do with technology as such.  The growth of structural waste within capitalism  which is a cost born by industry still has to be paid for and will tend to offset any productivity gains made through technological innovation and the like…

Yeah, a few.  Here's an extract from one such critique although I don't feel competent to comment on its merit or otherwise:

Robert D.Atkinson wrote:

The latest entry to the techno-utopian club is Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society. Rifkin is a longtime social critic who doesn’t like oil, beef, biotechnology, or much else. However, now, not just content to mirror the flawed arguments in Abundance and Second Machine Age, Rifkin raises them, and not just a little, but well beyond them. For Rifkin argues that within less than 50 years, technology will have developed to the point where there will be virtually no more jobs, where the marginal cost of everything will be zero and where capitalism will cease to exist. Besides that, not much will change. But this is a Rifkin staple: every year or two he publishes a book, each one more grandiose and provocative than the one prior.He goes on to claim that “The Internet of Things is already boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them practically free. The result is that corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and an economy based on scarcity is slowly giving way to an economy of abundance.”There are so many problems with this analysis that it is hard to know where to start. Productivity growth rates are actually pretty low over the last five years; corporate profits are up, not down; wages are stagnant, not abundant; the marginal cost of producing virtually all goods is not anywhere near zero. Besides these nits, Rifkin nails it.In the book he argues, “the marginal cost of human labor … will plummet to zero … as technology substitutes for labor in every industry and professional and technical field.” Rifkin goes even farther than Brynjolfsson and McAfee*, arguing that human labor will disappear in the next two generations. But assuming that this is true, it would require an annual productivity growth rate of at least 10 percent a year for 50 years (and not much increase in per-capita living standards). To put this in perspective, U.S. productivity growth has averaged around 1.5 to 2 percent a year for the last 100 years.Not only will we not have any jobs, but we won’t have any businesses either, because when goods and services become free (because the marginal cost is zero) “profits dry up, the exchange of property in markets shuts down, and the capitalist system dies.” Sounds like its right out of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto.

http://republic3-0.com/book-review-jeremy-rifkin-flawed-vision-of-techno-utopia/* 'The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies'

[robbo203]

Thanks Gnome – that is a very useful quote, indeed.Atkinson's various points are quite damaging to the argument that Rifkin makes about the prospect of a so called "zero marginal cost society"  but his passing reference at the end to the Communist Manifesto reminds me again that there is a school of thought out there that predicates the possibility of communism/socialism on precisely the kind of stuff that Rifkin is talking about – where there is a technologically based superabundance of everything and where the costs of producing anything  is so low as to be hardly worth putting a price tag on them. I think we need to be very wary of these technological cornucopians and their techno utopian ideals.  They are sending out quite the wrong message – that it is technology rather than human beings that is the master/mistress of our fate.  I suppose I am like most people here in believing that a socialist or communist society was technically feasible decades ago – certainly long before IPads were a twinkle in somebody's eye  – and that what was, and is, lacking is simply the subjective preconditions for such a society – mass revolutionary consciousness We don't need for capitalism to be so crippled by it's own contradictions to the point where it can barely function at all as a viable system in Rifkin's sense in order for socialism /communism to become possible.  Because if we are going to have to wait for a "zero marginal cost society" to materialise under capitalism we are going to have to wait forever.  At least in my book.

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