|
chapter
from TECHNONATURES:
Environments, Technologies, Spaces and Places in the 21st Century, eds:
Damian White, Chris Wilbert; Wilfred Laurier Press: forthcoming (April 2009) A Postindustrial Green Economy: New Productive Forces and the Future
of the Academic Left Brian Milani Business &
Environment Program Faculty of
Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto Canada While Technonatures takes off from an apparent malaise of the environmental movement, this chapter argues that a bigger problem might be a malaise of the political and intellectual left, particularly the academic left, which has been very slow, at best, to appreciate the relationship between human development potentials and social change strategies. Because we are in the midst of a major historical transition, it’s important that we go a step beyond the mainstream left’s understanding of the relationship between humanity’s “productive forces” and “relations of production.” This chapter takes the classical Marxist insight—about the role of outdated social power relationships holding back emerging productive forces—and applies it to a postindustrial context. It looks at the essence of postindustrialism, its identity with human and green development, and the implications for both social change strategy and the role of left academics and the university. Special attention will be paid to the role of economic decentralization in future regulation, and the distinction between mentalities and strategies of environmental protection and ecological alternatives in understanding basic choices we face. The
Left and Productive Forces
Contemporary postmodernism has pretty much sealed the deal—with its aversion to historicism, essentialism, and notions of progress. But in the belly of the dragon of economic and technological development (the West), the intellectual left has not had a lot to say on the nature of this development for many decades, well before the rise of post-structuralism. The left’s relative silence on “productive forces” probably had its origins in reaction to Stalinism’s mechanistic economism and historical determinism in the 1930s, 40s’ and 50s’. In contrast to the reductionist analysis of the Eastern bloc—intended to rationalize Stalin’s obsession with heavy industry—Western Marxists chose to focus less on productive forces and more on “relations of production.”(Levine and Wright, 1980). Such analysis seemed to provide more subtlety and flexibility in understanding social, cultural and political complexities. But by simply ignoring productive forces, the Western left implicitly accepted the Stalinist definition, rooted in an earlier stage of industrialism.
The real breakthroughs in radical postindustrial thought came from Radovan Richta et al (1969), Martin Sklar (1969), Fred Block and Larry Hirshhorn (1979). From neo-Marxist standpoints, they highlighted the new role of culture in production, and its implications for the relationship between human, technological and economic development—particularly in how it challenged certain aspects of classical industrialism. They emphasized how industrial capitalism, which had always been based on cog-labour and vast material throughput, would have to somehow manage new productive forces (NPFs) whose essence involved upgrading human creative capacities and saving resources. These writers were, however, virtually ignored by an academic left that also seemed disconcertingly oblivious to emerging grassroots social and ecological alternatives. In recent years, the rise of new information technologies has spawned visionary new perspectives on wealth and change—like Benkler’s (2006) The Wealth of Networks , written from a liberal-democratic standpoint. But a more radical left analysis of these emergent forces has been largely nonexistent, leaving something of a vacuum concerning the deepest political implications of these changes. The left’s dearth of concern with productive forces and technological development is at least partly attributable to its lack of interest in economic alternatives generally. Many of these alternatives require an altered role for both the state and the left, and new levels of participation in production and governance. In the industrial era, the left had a special intellectual and organizational role in social change. The organized left was the “head on the working class body” for a labour movement that was both culturally and politically dependent. Issues concerning the nature of production were far less important than questions of distribution and fairness. Few substantial economic alternatives could be implemented without direct state involvement, and this lent an oppositional cast to most social activism. In this context, the left constituted a “shadow state” for labour and civil society. In the context of existing industrial structures, the left played an important role, but it was also somewhat privileged by this role, as both an organizational and an intellectual vanguard. The industrialization of
culture, would, however, change this.
With mass education and mass communications, workers and communities
would no longer need either intellectual or political representation by the
left; they could increasingly represent themselves. Similarly, they could begin to implement
alternatives directly in many sectors of Left academics and the university generally have, in recent decades, had to withstand a number of challenges. They include the apparent threat of intellectual labour and the information economy to the Ivory Tower, along with challenges to conventional (rational) paradigms of knowledge by feminists, aboriginals, and others asserting the validity of non-rational modes of knowing. While spiritual tendencies and evolutionary perspectives have grown strongly in almost all the new social movements, they have not penetrated very far into academia. Perhaps feeling burned by their own past involvement with deterministic forms of Marxism, many academics have recoiled from both evolutionary social movement perspectives, castigating any large historical vision as “essentialist.” This essay, however, will argue that such holistic vision
is crucial to navigate a historically unprecedented transition from quantitative to qualitative
development. While the left’s
traditional concerns with the wealth distribution The New Productive Forces The academic left, like the mainstream environmental movement, has been slow to recognize that our current social and environmental crises are not simply a matter of the economic system’s exploitative or destructive impacts, but also of the suppression of vast and growing human potentials. Many of these repressed capacities are far from new—and their suppression dates back to the earliest civilizations that emerged, often violently, from more integrated hunting-gathering or Neolithic societies. But economic development, culminating in the industrial upheaval of the past 200 years, has begun to move beyond material accumulation and call into play—however ambivalently—the cultural capacities long suppressed by civilizational development. This is not a simple return-of-the-repressed because civilization—characterized over the last 5000 years by a permanent surplus, classes, cities, independent crafts, etc.—has built a platform for a possible new synthesis of primitive and civilized focused on all-round human development. The new productive forces (NPFs) are basically forces of people-production—in contrast to the thing-production of the past phase—but they also make possible a new level of regenerative reintegration with non-human nature. A Marxist or feminist might consider them aspects of the “reproduction of labour-power”—which they are—but we must appreciate that they go far beyond ‘simple labour-power’ or industrial cog-labour. They encompass a complex of creative, nurturing, giving, intuitive, artistic, healing and cooperative capacities that have been systematically suppressed or channelled for millennia by the civilized order. The platform that civilization has ultimately developed—at the expense of these qualities—includes abstract-rational thought, material and technological development, more individuated and historical consciousness, and an increasingly interconnected planet. Further development of the latter, however, requires the unleashing of the former—the suppressed elements of holistic human development. The problem is that capitalism—as intrinsically a mode of quantitative development—may be incapable of transcending a material focus. Over several millennia, different civilizations have allowed various degrees of official expression for life-regenerating energies—in, for example, healing, building and high art. But, by and large, civilization as a historical epoch has been all about external control and material accumulation. Even in pre-industrial societies without institutional drivers toward economic growth, material wealth has been utilized as an instrument of social control. Industrial capitalism’s open-ended economic growth extended this materialism to its most extreme reaches, but the basic relationship between matter and domination has existed from the outset of class society. By contrast, the essence of authentic postindustrialism is dematerialization and a more direct focus on human development in both production and consumption. Capitalism is defined by property and power relationships
that are generally antithetical to far-reaching human development, but
competitive pressures have compelled the system to at least selectively
employ and cultivate the NPFs. By the
1920s, industrialization had begun to move into the realm of culture,
effecting significant changes in Technology—understood as extensions of human senses and
functions—also began to undergo a basic change. As emphasized by McLuhan (1962, 1964), technology which
previously had served mainly as extensions of our muscles The NPFs therefore present some fundamental problems for capitalism. As Benkler has argued, old-line markets just don’t work well to facilitate new forms of cultural production based in nonmaterial inputs and outputs. (Even earlier in industrialism’s history, the role of universities testified to the inability of strictly market relationships to generate necessary knowledge-production). The expansion of knowledge and value production in the postindustrial context is creating a fundamental crisis of both the market economy and class society—requiring a new relationship between resources and people, between material and non-material production, and between production and consumption. Scarcity, Domination and Quantitative Development This fact is more or less acknowledged by the left—and influences the left’s emphasis on fair distribution of wealth. But the left tends to underestimate the importance of production—in content and structure—in maintaining this inequality. Especially now that cutting-edge production depends upon the cultivation—not the suppression—of human creativity, the redistribution of both material wealth and political power are impossible without the transformation of what and how we are producing. By contrast, many environmentalists fetishize production—particularly through their emphasis on economic growth and overconsumption. By positing “affluence” of whole nations as a fundamental cause of environmental destruction, they overlook the actual role of inequality in this destruction, the role of scarcity in perpetuating this inequality, and the potential for qualitative or regenerative development. A politics based on limits rather than transformation (including democratic participation) risks reinforcing inequality, especially since the costs of crisis invariably fall heaviest on the powerless. While alienated personal consumption is definitely a problem, and individual responsibility can be an important starting point for activism, such a perspective amounts to “blaming the victim” if it does not understand that a manipulative use of scarcity underpins the entire mass consumption economy. Marx saw the relationship
between class society and relative
scarcity. Civilization was made
possible by a permanent economic surplus large enough to support classes but
too small to provide abundance for all.
A combination of elite control of scarce resources and elite monopoly
of high culture defined power in civilization. For this reason, Marx saw capitalism as a
contradictory system: a class society whose open-ended economic growth could
eventually undermine class power by ending scarcity. Even at their most efficient, capitalist
markets are driven by scarcity—which is not necessarily a bad thing at an
earlier stage of development when most legitimate needs revolve around food,
shelter, clothing and basic infrastructure.
But potential abundance changes everything, in While Marx recognized that material abundance could
potentially sabotage class society, he probably didn’t anticipate the
possibility that growth could be redirected into waste in order to reinforce
scarcity and class. This is
essentially the story of postwar (or “Fordist”) North American capitalism
which, contrary to the popular notion of creating “the Affluent Society” (Galbraith, 1958) actually served to
artificially recreate scarcity through the production of waste—the Effluent Society. A progressive solution to the new crisis of
effective demand would have entailed, among other things, greater
redistribution of income, thus increasing worker purchasing power—one of the
key proposals of left New Dealers.
Real abundance, however, would also have entailed a more qualitative
redefinition of wealth—echoed at that time by labour and social movement
advocacy of work time reduction, universal free education and health care,
and intelligently planned communities.
The latter would have been an authentic step toward real abundance,
but alas such options were soundly defeated by around 1948—as the Many activists today wax nostalgic for postwar
Fordism—understandably since the system seemed to allow worker and citizen
gains, the cumulative outcome of union and social movement struggle over
several decades. These Issues of poverty, material scarcity and inequality are perhaps more widespread today than any time in our history. On the surface, it may seem unrealistic to suggest that humanity can or should move beyond quantitative development. But the material scarcity of today is quite different than that of even 100 years ago. Today it is artificially created and maintained. Going beyond scarcity now involves going beyond accumulation and establishing new forms of qualitative development everywhere. Especially in the most poverty-stricken areas of the globe, “income” growth can be a poor measure of economic well-being; it often disguises the erosion of traditional livelihoods and appropriation of regional resources by global corporations. Indicators of how well needs are met are far more reflective of real wealth and efficiency. Today’s “disaster capitalism” (Klein, 2008) is grounded in a psychology and politics of scarcity and fear—even in the best of times. A potential green economy must be grounded in a culture of abundance and plenitude. This is no contradiction of the equally-important conserver mentality. Real abundance and fulfillment are qualitative not quantitative. People are far more willing to accept material limits when they have access to many opportunities for personal fulfillment, community and real security. Decentralization
and Postindustrialism
While the left has been slow to recognize the role of waste in holding back real development, so also it has underestimated the decentralist character of postindustrialism. The industrializing economy
during its 19th century heyday was chaos, a runaway freight train.
Despite its apparently decentralized character, it was capital-intensive, and
its developmental tendency was towards centralization. One part of this was
the technological centralization encouraged by industrialism’s concentrated
energy sources, especially fossil fuels. Measures to mitigate the chaos, or
encourage a more humane and egalitarian industrialization, would have to be
even more strongly centralist, as were most socialist movements. Efforts to
control the economy Today the most conscious elements of all the social
movements are disputing capitalism’s very definition of wealth. They contest the nature of
production, not only its distribution.
Equally importantly, they are in a position to initiate economic
alternatives themselves, without prior control over, or influence in, the
state. Three key interrelated
dimensions of authentic postindustrialism make this decentralization
possible. First, pressures toward
democratization, human scale and grassroots participation. Notwithstanding the power of corporate
globalization and religious fundamentalism, democracy is an inextricable
element of the NPFs, and throughout the world, community is increasingly
recognized as the nexus of real development.
This means not simply a growing role for civil society, but a
fundamental re-embedding of the economy in civil society and community. In Second are pressures toward efficiency and harmony with nature. Industrialism’s fossil-fuel based centralization supported a linear extraction-to-disposal resource cycle. By contrast, emergent sustainable agriculture and food systems; soft energy infrastructures; ecological waste-resource systems; holistic health systems; sustainable urban design and more, tend to involve both greater decentralization and circular resource flows. Even eco-manufacturing—based in reuse, service and regional benign materials—demands proximity and increasingly localized closed-loops (Stahel, 1994). This involves not simply more efficient use of energy and resources, but a restructuring of economic processes to move within, or to imitate, natural systems—what’s been called “economic biomimicry”. It also entails a more direct focus on end-use or human need—and a process of “backcasting” to find the most elegant and efficient ways of meeting that need. As soft-energy guru Amory Lovins (1977) put it, we want “hot showers and cold beer”, not necessarily fossil fuels and power plants. The latter are just means to the end. Industrial ecologists have called this the “eco-service economy” geared to meeting needs for nutrition, access, illumination, entertainment, etc. and highlighted its potential for a radical conservation of resources. For this reason, advocates argue that harmony with nonhuman nature is not only not counter to (or a trade-off with) human interests, but in fact it depends on a more direct targeting of real human needs. The third main dimension of postindustrial
decentralization is rooted in the character of knowledge-based
production. Ecological economist
Herman Daly (2000) points out that real
economic efficiency today necessitates greater restrictions on the flow of
material goods and physical capital (to minimize transport costs and optimize
the use of local resources, etc.), and fewer restrictions on the flow of
knowledge. As he says, “trade recipes,
not cookies.” Daly said that such
common sense runs directly counter to ongoing capitalist globalization,
which, through f In recent times, economic crisis has highlighted the irrationality
of capital’s relationship to resources and information. The Post-Fordist era, beginning with Reagan
and Thatcher, introduced new, even more empty, forms of waste production. It channelled new information technology into
financialization and a global Casino Economy based in fictitious capital,
illusory debt-money and speculation.
Like the planned inflation and Paper Economy of the Fordist period, it
has essentially been a means of re-redistributing wealth back to those with
money-making powers, and critics have long seen it as a kind of ponzi scheme,
a house of cards that would eventually topple. By the same token, globalization’s
irrationally overextended loops of production and consumption—as manifest in
Wal-Mart and the Distributed Regulation and Mindful Markets Localization and the re-embedding of the economy in civil society imply basic changes in the nature of regulation and the state. A different style of regulation is also suggested by the fact that so much green production could be regenerative—and not simply a toxic destructive juggernaut that nature and community had to be protected from. The very complexity of the contemporary economy (especially one based in quality) also defies a concentration of regulatory power in the state. Complex systems tend to require greater measures of internal self-regulation based in sophisticated feedback loops. No less than soft energy systems or sustainable food production, green regulation must be distributed—and “environmental” in the sense that it is structured into a range of incentives and disincentives embedded in everyday economic choices and relationships. This is definitely not an
argument for the voluntarism usually advocated by corporate critics of
“command and control” regulation—a transparent rationalization for less
corporate accountability. If anything,
postindustrial planning and regulation has to be more thoroughgoing and
conscious, but this takes place on a multitude of levels, some of them not
usually associated with the state.
What the state should be trying to both accomplish and express is a
new regenerative economic balance of competition and cooperation. One powerful force that must explicitly act as a regulatory mode is finance—preferential lending for activities and enterprise that correspond to well-defined green community plans. There is something to said for ‘green jobs’ advocate Van Jones’ (2008) view that we have entered the “investment” phase of environmentalism, which he contrasts to two previous eras of “regulation” (1970s) and “conservation” (19th century). By this he means not that we have moved beyond regulation or conservation, but that our primary need is for fundamental economic restructuring. This is one reason why the concerns of some left critics—that the environmental movement has not matched its regulatory achievements of the seventies—are not really that relevant. At a different level, the environmental movement has made substantial gains in developing ecological alternatives in basic sectors. But today more comprehensive means are required to channel resources to ‘mainstream’ these alternatives. Finance itself would be only one part of the new incentive structure of a green economy. For government, taxes, procurement, and infrastructure can all be major means of encouraging good things. Also, as discussed earlier, the very scale of the economy can encourage greater accountability—especially when local and regional governments refrain from giveaways to non-local corporations and chains. But other kinds of rules and relationships are also necessary—especially those that institutionalize stakeholder power. Mainstream “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) pays much lip-service to stakeholder consultation; but processes are needed that concretely guarantee that all stakeholders have some degree of decision-making over activities that impact their lives. As former Business Ethics journal editor Majorie Kelly (2002) wrote, “economic democracy is the next stage of corporate social responsibility.” In a green economy, participation can rarely be separated from other dimensions. Within academia concerned with CSR and green business,
there is a growing literature on new forms of “non-state governance” and
regulatory pluralism—expressed in developments like food, building and wood
certification. Many of these writers,
however, underestimate the value-revolution that the expanded toolbox of regulatory
instruments must ultimately accomplish.
The goal must—over the long haul—be to displace profit and
accumulation as primary market drivers.
Cashore (2004), e.g., considers green
3rd-party certification systems as “non-state market-driven
governance,” without fully appreciating that the best of these systems
manifest a new form of market as
much as a new form of governance. When these certification systems are truly
doing their job, the market drivers they create One of the most fundamental challenges of the new green
regulation is to connect responsibility with regeneration, which means redefining
ownership to support stewardship. Abstract questions of public vs.
private can be distracting holdovers from the industrial era. From a green economic design perspective,
the question is how ownership can be shaped to support stewardship. For example, extended producer
responsibility ( Strategic Priorities for Action: For the Economy and
Universities Despite the depth and the scope of the crises we face, making fundamental social change today demands an increasingly positive mindset for two interrelated reasons. First, there is the appreciation that the new productive forces (NPFs) are grounded in all-around human development, and that they permit and require growing levels of decentralization. Second, there is the recognition of the two key dimensions of a green or postindustrial economy: (1) it must be primarily a service economy, organized for the direct targeting and satisfaction of human need, and (2) it has to be a more circular closed-loop system deeply integrated with nature, a sailboat in the winds of natural process. These new realities radically alter social change strategies compared to those of the industrial era which had to be more oppositionally-focused. Marx basically saw the working class revolution as happening before the appearance of the NPFs; in fact, it was the successful revolution’s job to make sure the NPFs were developed and implemented. But the NPFs have begun to emerge before the revolution, fundamentally changing revolutionary strategy. While in Marx’s time, the working class had to accomplish the revolution as the first step in creating the Good Society and the New Human, today the order is reversed: the working class must create the Good Society and the New Human in order to make the revolution. Social and ecological alternatives become the centrepiece of movement strategy, with necessary oppositional activity geared to support this focus. “Seizing the means of production” is still necessary, but today the means of production are ourselves and our full creative capacities. Despite the intellectual left’s slowness to acknowledge emerging potentials, it is well-placed to make substantial contributions to the tasks at hand, particularly in universities. Because of the knowledge-intensity of postindustrial production, universities have key roles in the production, evaluation, training, and regulation of green economies. Because of their size, coupled with the necessity of increasing localization, universities also have a major role to play in consumption, or market creation, within local economies. The development of new measures of qualitative value—and their economic application—are crucial to postindustrial development. These include mass-balance accounts, eco-footprints, product LCA, firm eco-accounting, to Genuine Progress Indicators, local economic multipliers, sustainable community indicators and more. Universities should be an important base not just for the study of emergent third-party certification systems (as suggested by Cashore), but for their creation. Another essential service that universities could contribute to would be comprehensive directories and databases of regenerative products and services. These virtual marketplaces can be powerful tools in what will likely emerge over the next decade as one of the most significant strategic initiatives of green economic development: Local First (buy local) campaigns, organized by new community business networks and their diverse allies (Shuman, 2006). The role of left intellectuals—embodying a heritage of critical political-economic thinking—can also provide “big picture” thinking that can be vital at a time when Wal-Mart efficiency measures are hailed as a sustainability revolution. The ‘service and needs’ focus of a green economy is essentially postindustrial socialism. This is not socialism as the industrial state formation, but as a philosophy of the priority of human need over blind market forces. Such a tradition can be invaluable to understanding and supporting qualitative development today. Critical thinking about markets today can be invaluable at a time when non-market and ‘mindful market’ production and exchange is exploding. On one hand, many key forms of ecological production—energy retrofit, rooftop and community gardens, preventive health care, etc.—take place in or around the home, in the informal economy. In today’s economy, these things are considered simply forms of consumption, and economically penalized; but we have to find ways of properly remunerating or supporting these essential activities. On the other hand, we have to find ways of supporting the new peer production and mass collaboration of the emergent electronic commons without burdening it with restrictive market relationships. One of the great priorities for postindustrial development is the achievement of new forms of economic security. The earlier discussion of the role of scarcity in suppressing progress only hints at the actual role of fear and insecurity in maintaining waste, exploitation and domination. In tough times, people will do nasty things for money. Even when times are good, many people who have no interest in big money or power are nevertheless driven to compete and accumulate simply because they cannot trust society to take care of them when old or ill. They cannot trust that their children can get a decent education. Possible solutions might include Basic or Citizen Income schemes (guaranteed annual incomes). If these programs can fully meet people’s basic needs, they can potentially unleash a tide of creative activity hitherto crippled by fear and uncertainty. Carbon and other kinds of green taxation are appropriate sources of funding for Basic Incomes since a mutual goal is a fundamental shift in investment from resources to people. Like many forms of green production, the approach is to employ savings as a source of finance. Community currencies are also a fertile ground for experimentation with support for healthy forms of non-market production. In our electronic environment, we can expect to see imaginative and sophisticated new forms of economic exchange, all geared to reclaiming the information revolution from the contemporary capitalism’s Casino Economy. In a complex society, many forms of public goods, new and old, are not most appropriately financed by user-pay, market prices or wages. Benefits are spread so widely, it makes sense for governments or communities to provide for them, financed by taxes or whatever. As the music industry has already found out, the electronic commons is displacing many unnecessary market relationships, and we should be making more conscious choices about how we might facilitate this in constructive ways. In particular, we need to find out what kinds of economic security might unleash giving—and not simply reciprocity—as a major force in economic life. The biggest current impediment
to universities tapping their potential as incubators of qualitative wealth
is probably their attitudes toward localization and globalization. Qualitative wealth is decidedly
place-based, but the function of the industrial university has been increasingly
to service big corporate enterprise, along with state infrastructure
organized to support it. There has
been in the last several years heated debate about the future of higher
education, pitting “job-training” vs. “liberal education.” Many people on the left are justifiably
concerned about the In the corporate-global university, social change-oriented academics have been increasingly relegated to the realm of analysis and critique, not actual production. How many North American university faculty members are involved in creating sustainable food systems, designing soft energy systems, supporting green building, or initiating eco-industrial development? How many students, undergrad and grad, are concretely contributing to community development in their studies and research? The university itself also remains unconscious of its major role within the local economy. Simply basing its purchasing decisions on social and environmental values could radically affect the abilities of local economies to create regenerative work, generate dynamic local enterprises, and plug debilitating leaks in the regional economy. Fortunately, there is a rapidly-growing “university sustainability” movement, but even here many of these initiatives still fail to acknowledge their impacts, existing and potential, on the economies of the communities in which they are situated. In conclusion, the intellectual left has much to offer green and postindustrial transformation. But first it has to acknowledge its character, its direction, and the role of knowledge in this change. We are talking about far more than environmental protection here. A retreat from vision—typical of much postmodernism—is a dead-end, but a positive embracing of qualitative change can be a service to all progressive social movements and to higher education. y Achbar, M., Abbott, J. and Baken, J. (2003) Big Picture Media Corporation, Canada, pp. 145 minutes. Bazelon, D. (1963) The Paper Economy, Vintage, New York. Bell, D. (1976) The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A venture in social forecasting, Basic Books, New York. Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven. Block, F. and Hirshhorn, L. (1979) Theory and Society, 7, 363-390. Bookchin, M. (1971) Post-scarcity Anarchism, Ramparts Press,, Berkeley CA. Cashore, B. W. (2004) Governing Through Markets: Forest certification and the emergence of non-state authority, Yale University Press, New Haven. Daly, H. (2000), pp. Paper based on a discussion at The Aspen Institute's 50th Anniversary Conference, "Globalization and the Human Condition", August 20, 2000, Aspen, CO. DeKerckhove, D. (1995) The Skin of Culture: Investigating the new electronic reality, Somerville House Publishing, Toronto. Galbraith, J. K. (1958) The Affluent Society, Houghton Mifflin, New York. Gorz, A. (1971) Strategy for Labor: A radical proposal, Beacon Press, Boston. Jones, V. (2008) The Green-Collar Economy: How one solution can fix our two biggest problems, Harper One, New York. Kelly, M. (2002) Business Ethics. Klein, N. (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism, Metropolitan Books, New York. Korten, D. (1999) The Post-Corporate World: Life after capitalism, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco. Kunstler, J. H. (1994) Geography Of Nowhere: The rise and decline of America's man-made landscape, Touchstone Books. Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: The nature and future of creativity, Penguin, New York. Levine, A. and Wright, E. O. (1980) New Left Review, 123. Lovins, A. (1977) Soft Energy Paths, Harper Colophon, New York. McLuhan, M. (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The extensions of Man, Mentor, New York. Perrucci, R. and Pilisuk, M. (1968) The Triple Revolution: Social problems in depth, Little Brown & Co., Boston. Richta, R. and et al (1969) Civilization At the Crossroads: Social and human implications of the scientific and technological revolution, International Arts and Sciences Press, Prague. Shuman, M. H. (2006) The Small-Mart Revolution: How local businesses are beating the global competition, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco. Sklar, M. J. (1969) Radical America. Stahel, W. R. (1994) In The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems(Eds, Allenby, B. R. and Richards, D. J.) National Academy Press, Washington DC, pp. 178-190. Toffler, A. (1972) Future Shock, Bantam, New York. Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave, Bantam / William Morrow, New York. Touraine, A. (1971) The Post-industrial society; Tomorrow's Social History: Classes, conflicts and culture in the programmed society, Random House, New York. Vaughan, G. (1997) For-Giving: A feminist critique of exchange, Plain View Press, Austin. |
The first wave of popular
“postindustrial” writing in the sixties and seventies—Daniel Bell (1976), Alvin Toffler (1972, 1980), etc.—provided many
insights into emerging potentials, but also tended to rationalize many
exploitative—and distinctly industrial—aspects of capitalism with
postindustrial doublespeak. Social radicals, like Touraine (1971), 
the economy, and did not
need to be so one-sidedly focused on oppositional activity. This process
would pick up steam throughout the century, the 
remain vitally
important, real social equality also demands a fundamental 
and bodily
functions (like heating) now began to focus more on extending our minds and
nervous systems through electronic media and information technology.
part by
undercutting traditional market drivers.
included the legitimization
of collective bargaining in key industries, the creation of social safety
nets, etc.
were
further complicated by structural chasms separating economics, politics and
culture in early capitalism.
ree
trade and intellectual property rights respectively, is working directly
against economic intelligence.
Unhealthy forms of
competition are blocking alternatives like eco-industrial networks that
require substantial sharing of information and decision-making. Such
competition is also behind the massive waste caused by the needless
incompatibility of all kinds of electronic equipment.
are
primarily social and ecological, not financial.
subordination
of education to corporate needs, and so argue against a jobs focus. But
a greater emphasis on practical job skills is not in itself a bad idea, so
long as this work is geared to provide for real community needs. Such
work goes hand-in-hand with the best kind of liberal education—since
all-round human development is actually the most direct route to
postindustrial productivity. One cannot make this case for corporate-global
development, in which the university is being asked to produce intellectual
labourers for work that is largely destructive of community and
environment.