Re: Beef = Cancer. More sources on this?

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

Panix's mail reception was down for the last 24 hours or so, so I missed
out on the Rifkin thread. Belatedly, let me add this, since I've just sent
an LBO to press with an article on the future of work. Rifkin's latest book
is, of course, The End of Work, which is largely terrible.

If I may be permitted the indulgence of quoting myself:

>JOBLESS FUTURE?
>   Downsizing anxiety isn't fundamentally about bounced bankers pumping
>gas; it's about the broad downscaling of the U.S. middle class, a process
>moving in step with the total immiseration of the poor. Unfortunately,
>some people take the downsizing message too literally - people like Jeremy
>Rifkin, in his The End of Work, a vision of a massively jobless future.
>   Rifkin has a long history of being party to extravagant predictions. In
>The North Will Rise Again, his 1978 book written with Randy Barber, we
>learned that "Capitalism is not likely to exist anywhere in the world a
>hundred years from now." In 1979's The Emerging Order, written with Ted
>Howard, we read that the end of economic growth  and the "topping out of
>technology" will inspire a merger of American Protestantism and
>environmentalism in a "new theological prescription for a nongrowth,
>steady-state ecological future"; Protestantism will be essential because
>"only by starting with the belief that human beings are basically
>evil...is it possible to put the brakes on the runaway consumer
>mentality." Entropy, a 1980 joint venture with Howard, predicted the end
>of large-scale farming, a return to the land, and a collapse in service
>employment that will be offset by a rise in manufacturing jobs, as plants
>"convert back from energy- and capital-intensive production modes to
>labor-intensive ones."
>   But now, Rifkin argues, jobs are about to disappear in droves, an
>argument he makes mainly through a cascade of anecdotes. Machines are and
>have been replacing people at every turn. Rifkin's account of the 1944
>introduction of the mechanical cotton picker in the south, which replaced
>black field workers, reads almost like a lament for sharecropping.
>   People have been worrying about machines replacing human labor since
>the beginning of capitalism. Yes, machines do replace workers - but
>employment nonetheless continues to expand, quadrupling in the U.S. over
>the last 60 years. In most parts of the world, aside from Europe and
>Africa, employment is growing. Throughout history, capitalism has
>constantly drawn new people into paid labor, though the demand for jobs
>always outstrips the system's capacity to provide them.
>
>MASSES & MACHINES
>   This time it's different, Rifkin argues, since the service sector,
>which has absorbed the cast off manufacturing workers as well as millions
>of new (largely female) entrants, is now automating, promising job
>shrinkage. That productivity boom is invisible by standard measures. Sure,
>U.S. manufacturing has seen strong productivity growth, but not the
>service sector; over the last three years, output per hour worked in
>manufacturing is up 11%, but in all private business, only 1% - the
>average pulled down by a dismal services performance. Amazingly, output
>per unit of capital - a messy concept, theoretically and practically, but
>good enough for journalism - has been declining for most of the last four
>decades, and with no upturn in recent years, those of the
>cyberflourishing.
>   Yes; mechanization does allow fewer workers to produce more stuff. To
>lubricate his move from this noncontroversial point to the apocalyptic
>mode, Rifkin quotes Marx's prediction (from the Grundrisse) of the
>"last...metamorphosis of labor ...when an automatic system of machinery"
>replaces the living worker. Rifkin seems not to have learned much from the
>passage that surrounds that quotation. To Marx, machinery renders workers
>dependent, makes them into watchmen and regulators rather than direct
>producers; the social knowledge and coordination behind technological
>production could make possible a more leisurely and humane way of life,
>but instead is used for the accumulation of money. But machines don't
>render human workers obsolete; on the contrary, Marx said, they
>"presuppose masses of workers."
>   It's odd to cite Marx to refute Rifkin's millenarianism, but here's
>another soundbite from the Old Man, this from Theories of Surplus Value.
>Marx foresaw a day when basic industry would be highly mechanized, and
>only a third of all workers were directly engaged in production.
>
>   The two-thirds of the [unproductive] population consist partly of
>   the owners of profit and rent, partly of unproductive labourers
>   (who also, owing to competition, are badly paid). The latter help
>   the former to consume the revenue and give them in return an equivalent
>   of services - or impose their services on them, like the political
>   unproductive labourers. It can be supposed that - with the exception
>   of the horde of flunkeys, the soldiers, sailors, police, lower
>   officials and so on, mistresses, grooms, clowns and jugglers - these
>   unproductive labourers will on the whole have a higher level of
>   culture than the unproductive workers had previously, and in particular
>   that ill-paid artists, musicians, lawyers, physicians, scholars,
>   schoolmasters, inventors, etc., will also have increased in number.
>
>   Ill-paid lawyers and physicians hardly exist, and some of the
>occupational categories sound a bit off; who, in the middle of the 19th
>century, could imagine a world filled with information clerks and home
>health aides? But the general outline sounds pretty familiar: basic
>production employing ever fewer, with ever more in ill-paid service jobs.
>It's a much less dramatic vision than either decentralized Cybertopias or
>jobless futures, but that's life as the century turns.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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