I've been looking for more writings by Hakim Bey, so I stumbled across the following website:
t0.or.at
I guess I'll have to take a look at Bey's magnum opus: the T.A.Z. stuff....
Anyway, below is a thought-provoking scrap by another radical thinker --Bob Black:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work by Bob Black
THE END OF WORK: THE DECLINE OF THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE AND THE DAWN OF THE POST-MARKET ERA. By Jeremy Rifkin. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.
...Rifkin misunderstands, or recoils from, the implications of his very powerful demonstration that work is increasingly irrelevant to production. Why is work getting ratcheted up for those who still do it even as it's denied to those who need to work to survive?
Are the bosses crazy? Not necessarily. They may understand, if only intuitively, their interests better than a freelance demi-intellectual like Rifkin does. That supposition is at least consistent with the observed facts that the bosses are still running the world whereas Jeremy Rifkin is only writing books about it. Rifkin assumes that work is only about economics, but it was always more than that: it was politics too. As its economic importance wanes, work's control function comes to the fore. Work, like the state, is an institution for the control of the many by the few. It preempts most of our waking hours. It's often physically or mentally enervating.
For most people it involves protracted daily direct submission to authority on a scale otherwise unknown to adults who are not incarcerated. Work wrings the energy out of workers, leaving just enough for commuting and consuming. This implies that democracy -- if by this is meant some sort of informed participation by a substantial part of the population in its own governance -- is illusory.
Politics is just one more, and more than usually unsavory manifestation of the division of labor (as the work-system is referred to after its tarting-up by academic cosmetologists). Politics is work for politicos, therapy for activists and a spectator sport for everybody else.
If we hypothesize that work is essentially about social control and only incidentally about production, the boss behavior which Rifkin finds so perversely stubborn makes perfect sense on its own twisted terms. Part of the population is overworked. Another part is ejected from the workforce. What do they have in common? Two things -- mutual hostility and abject dependence. The first perpetuates the second, and each is disempowering.
Rifkin wonders how the system can deal with vast numbers of newly superfluous people. As he's himself disclosed, it's had plenty of practice. The creation and management of an underclass is already a done deal. The brave new world of techno-driven abundance -- if by abundance you mean only more commodities -- looks to look like this:
1. THE ALPHAS: A relatively small number of tenders of hightech, allied with essential tenders of people (entertainers, politicians, clergy, military officers, journalists, police chiefs, etc.). They will continue to work -- harder, in many cases, than anybody -- to keep the system, and each other, working.
2. THE BETAS: In lieu of the old-time middle class and middle management which, as Rifkin explains, are obsolete, there will be a social control class of police, security guards, social "workers", schoolteachers, daycare workers, clinical psychologists, with-it parents, etc. It merits special attention that the more robust and aggressive members of what used to be the working class will be coopted to police those they left behind (as one Gilded Age robber baron put it, "I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half"). Thus the underclass loses its leaders even as it's distracted by the phantasm of upward mobility.
3. THE GAMMAS: The vast majority of the population, what Nicola Tesla called "meat-machines", what Lee Kuan Yew calls "digits," what Jeremy Rifkin is too embarrassed to call anything. They cannot be controlled, as the other classes can, by work, because they don't work. They will be managed by bread and circuses. The bread consists of modest transfer payments maintaining the useless poor at subsistence level as helpless wards of the state. The circuses will be provided by the awesome techno-spectacles of what, in the wake of the Gulf War, can only be called the military-entertainment complex. Hollywood and tne Pentagon will always be there for each other. Gammas form a mass, not a class, a simple aggregation of homologous multitudes, as Marx characterized the peasantry, "just as potatoes in a bag form a bag of potatoes." They enjoy certain inalienable rights -- to change channels, to check their E-Mail, to vote -- and a few others of no practical consequence. Wars, professional sports, elections and advertising campaigns afford them the opportunity to identify with like-minded spectators. It doesn't matter how they divide themselves up as long as they do. As they really are all the same any differentiation they seize upon is arbitrary, but any differentiation will do. They choose up teams by race, gender, hobby, generation, diet, religion, every which way but loose. In conditions of collective subservience, these distinctions have exactly, and only, the significance of a boys' tree-house with a "No Girls" sign posted outside. Gammas are essentially fans, and the self-activity of fans is exhausted in their formation of fan-clubs. They are potatoes who bag themselves.
4. THE DELTAS: This set-up will engender its own contradictions class societies always do. Bill Gates to the contrary notwithstanding, frictionless capitalism is an oxymoron. There'll be plenty of potholes on the information superhighway. Every class will contribute a portion of drop-outs, deviants and dissidents. Some will rebel from principle, some from pathology, some from both. And their rebellion will be functional as long as it doesn't get out of hand. The Deltas, the recalcitrants and unassimilables, will furnish work for the Betas and tabloid-type entertainment for the Gammas. In an ever more boring, predictable world, crazies and criminals will provide the zest, the risk, the mystery which the consciousness industry is increasingly inadequate to simulate. VR, morphing, computer graphics -- all very impressive, for awhile, but there's nothing like a whiff of fear, the scent of real blood, like the spectacles nobody did better than the Romans and the Aztecs. The show they call "America's Most Wanted" -- that's a double entrendre. Societies don't necessarily get, as some say, the criminals they deserve, but nowadays they get the criminals they want.
"Whether a utopian or dystopian future awaits us depends", concludes Rifkin, "to a great measure on how the productivity gains of the Information Age are distributed." None of his evidence substantiates this ipse dixit, announced so early on that by the time the reader has made it to the policy proposals, he probably assumes that the proof must have been lurking amidst all those facts lobbed at him along the way. In fact, Rifkin's credibility in predicting the future is strained by his poor performance predicting the past.
Rifkin asserts, almost as an aside, that the American experience of the last 40 to 50 years -- higher productivity and longer hours of work -- is an aberration without historical precedent. (And thus, presumably, a wrinkle easily ironed out by our statesmen once it's drawn to their attention by Jeremy Rifkin, tribune of the people.) Both the Neolithic (agricultural) and the Industrial Revolutions spurred productivity and also lengthened the hours of work work (as well as degrading work qualitatively, as an experience). Productivity gains never ushered in utopia before, why should they now? More equitable distribution of the wealth never ushered in utopia before, why should it now? It's not that Jeremy Rifkin knows something he isn't telling us. Rather, he doesn't know something he is telling us. [...]
Excerpt from:
t0.or.at |
