FOREIGN AFFAIRS – CLASH OF IDEAS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 9, 2012
PREAMBLE:
A quarter century ago, I became a regular subscriber to “Foreign Affairs.” Not a political scientist, diplomat, academic, politician, think tank aficionado, nor a pundit or journalist, I am simply a reader. It is my hope that sharing these snippets with you will find you interested in becoming a reader, too.
The thoughtful ruminations reminds me of what philosopher Gustave Le Bon called in his day, some hundred years ago, the contemplation of society's "chimera of dilemmas," which invariably result in revolutions.
While revolutions claim to be founded on rational thought fueled by deliberate reason, in Le Bon's view, this is never the case. The cognitive biases of political scientist and economists cannot be faulted for trying to steer a measured course through the chaos and conflict of their times. Words are no substitute for action, but words trigger action, and on occasion prove prophetic.
The January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs features, "The Clash of Ideas." It provides snippets of earlier essays, and in some cases the ideological battles in those periods up to the present, ideas that have made the modern world, and are shaping the future.
In 1888, novelist Edward Bellamy published “Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887.” His little book was an attempt to find a solution to most of the ills of his time caused by the Long (business) Depression from 1873 until 1893, the longest economic contraction in history. Bellamy, a socialist and follower of Marx envisioned the United States in the year 2000 being a totally socialistic state.
In this world, there is no money, the state provides jobs and work cards that contain the same amount of credit for a year’s expenses, be you a domestic, doctor or bricklayer.
There is no opportunity for anyone to spend this stipend foolishly and starve as the government steps in and supervises the spending when necessary.
Everyone is educated to the age twenty-one with a broad cultural course so that inte4lectual snobbery is not only discouraged, but impossible.
Everyone engages in an apprentice program such as waiting on tables or similar tasks for three years, then competitive examinations are given to determine qualification for such professions as medicine, engineering, teaching, etc. To advance to these professional schools the individual must show the germane aptitude and attitude required, or be otherwise slotted in some other activity.
This utopian novel may seem farfetched but it was a resounding success in its day, and has been read up to the present as are other utopian novels such as Plato’s “Republic” Thomas More’s “Utopia,” and William Morris’s “News from Nowhere.”
At the end of this "Foreign Affairs" abridgment, the reader is introduced to Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution." It reads like a utopian novel, as twenty-first century society is on the brink of a world Bellamy envisioned, as competing ideologies are moving toward complementary partnerships. Utopia is moving increasingly from "Nowhere Land" to the social and economic order of tomorrow.
"Foreign Affairs" has been dealing with social and economic order and disorder for the past ninety years, making its own contribution to the course of human history, as these snippets indicate.
MAKING MODERNITY WORK
Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, 2012
He sees the true narrative of the times more a matter of policies than principles, as the ideological wars have given ground to stability. The clamor of the times is on the symptoms, not the problem, on the fact the US is trapped in political deadlock and dysfunction, Europe is broke and breaking, authoritarian China is on the rise, Occupy Wall Street protesters are on the streets, while movers and shakers search for “new models” to shape the future. The issue shares contributions of writers who have attempted to deal with modernity to reconcile capitalism and mass democracy, increasing economic inequality and declining social mobility. The question he poses is not what to do but how to do it.
The ideas and words that follow are all those of the authors indicated, and not my own.
HOW WE GOT HERE: THE RISE OF THE MODERN ORDER
Lenin and Mussolini
Harold T. Laski, September 1923
(Professor in London School of Economics)
A revolution in Russia was doubtless implied in the logic of events. No government, which is vicious in principle and corrupt in practice, can hope to retain the allegiance of those who do not share in the benefits of its dishonesty. But the Russian Revolution differs from all its predecessors in that it came in the name of a consistent system of doctrine; and it was largely made by men to whom that system contained the quintessence of social truth . . .
The state is in fact a method of protecting the owners of property; and the true division of men into those who own and those who do not own possessions other than their power to labor. The life of the state is an eternal struggle between them.
Just as the social order of the past has secreted within its womb the germ of its successor, as, for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does the latter contain within itself the germ of its communist successor. Capitalism, as Marx said, produces its own gravedigger….
Leninism has been the dictatorship of a party, Fascism (Mussolini) is the dictatorship of a man . . .For liberty, indeed, Mussolini professors no affection. He has called it a nineteenth century concept which has exhausted its utility. Liberty, for him, is the parent of anarchy…
LENIN
Victor Chernov, March 1924
(Russian Social-Revolutionary writer)
Lenin was a great man … Lenin’s intellect was energetic, but cold. It was above all an ironic, sarcastic and cynical intellect … Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple. Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise … Lenin always felt his audience ... . .. Yes, Lenin was good-natured. But good natured does not mean good hearted … He devoted his whole life to the working class…
STALIN’S POWER
Paul Scheffer, July 1930
(Foreign correspondent)
Stalin is not a man who appeals to the sympathies of crowds or stirs their imagination. He is not an electric person. Let us be more blunt: he is frankly unattractive, and all the more since he knows he is, and shows by his demeanor he does not care! Even his voice, a voice as hard and brittle as glass, lacks the undertones, the rhythm, that work so powerfully upon the music-loving populace of Russia … You feel at once that he is “dangerous”….Stalin is the dictator of dictators…
Making the Collective Man in Soviet Russia
William Henry Chamberlin, January 1932
(Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor)
The individual personality is fighting a losing battle against heavy odds in Russia today…What is perhaps not generally realized is that man himself is the firs and most important objective of Soviet planning and that the tendency to replace man, the individual, by collective man, is the product of social groups and forces, is one of the most important and interesting currents in Soviet life…Young pioneers (children about eight on) are not only taught to disbelieve religion; they are encouraged at Christmas time to go around and convert those “backward” children who may still want to have Christmas trees and celebrate the holidays in the traditional manner …So the individual personality is attacked from every side by forces which are all controlled from a common center and which are working in accordance with a prearranged plan to make the traditional human individualist into a collective man, a citizen of the future communist society …
The Philosophic Basis of Fascism
Giovanni Gentile, January 1928
(Italian philosopher)
In the definition of Fascism …concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation .. Fascism is not a philosophy .. Much less a religion. It is not even a political theory… It is eminently anti-intellectual .. if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence … It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men but rather creates pedants and aesthete, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent … For Fascism … the State is a wholly spiritual creation…
Radical Forces in Germany
Erich Koch-Weser, April 1931
(Former Minister of Justice of the German Republic)
The world is not ruled by reason, but by passion, and when a man is driven to despair he is ready to smash everything in the vague hope that a better world may arise out of the ruins….Intelligent and orderly as the German people are, patiently as they have borne the sufferings of war and of inflation, they are in danger today of falling into this reckless state of mind…. The watch-word is not the Christian one, “What is mine shall be thine,” but rather one of envy, “What is thine shall be mine.” The blind submission shown by the leaders of the party towards edicts issued by Soviet Russia increases its danger to Germany.. Greater danger is threatened at the present time from the National Socialists, popularly called the Nazis….
Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent
Paul Scheffer, April 1932
(Foreign correspondent)
Hitler is the most successful orator that Germany has ever possessed .. It is an interesting and a stirring experience to listen to Hitler, his bitterest enemies have often fallen under his spell … The hall where he is to speak often closes its doors and hour before the meeting is scheduled to begin because it is already filled to overflowing. One always sees a clean, neatly dressed crowd with faces that betray intellectual pursuits of one kind or another: clerks, professors, engineers, schoolteachers, students, civil service employees. These audiences are preoccupied, chary of words, quiet. Their faces are tense, often drawn. The only bustle in the room will come from the “hall guards,” a typical product of these times, rough young fellows, the Sturm Abteilungen, or “shock troops.”
Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase
Hamilton Fish Armstrong, July 1933
(The editor of Foreign Affairs)
A people has disappeared. Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone…There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea…Not merely is he (the German) wiped out, but the memory of him is wiped out. It is pretended that he never was…. This does not merely apply to Jews and Communists, fled or imprisoned or detained “for their own protection” in barbed-wire concentration camps. It applies to men like Otto Braun, leader of the great Social Democratic Party, perennial Premier of Prussia . ...... Federal Germany is gone….But the final determining condition which caused the Republic’s death was that it had no nourishment from below. As an eminent German said to the writer two or three years ago: “We made a republic; but there were no republicans…
Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century
Isaiah Berlin, April 1950
(Fellow of New College, Oxford)
The practice of Communist states and, more logically of Fascist states is not at all the training of the critical, or solution finding powers of their citizens, not yet the development in them of any capacity for special insights or intuitions regarded as likely to reveal the truth. It consists in something which any nineteenth century thinker with respect for science would have regarded with genuine horror, the training of individuals incapable of being troubled with questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system; the building and elaboration of a strong framework of institutions, “myths,” habits of life and thought intended to preserve it from sudden shocks or slow decay. This is the intellectual outlook which attends the rise of totalitarian ideologies, the substance of the hair raising satires of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the state of mind in which troublesome questions appear as a form of mental perturbations, noxious to the mental health of individuals, when too widely discussed, to the heath of societies…This is truly a for reaching conception, and something far more powerful than the pessimism or cynicism of thinkers like Plato or Machiavelli, Swift or Carlyle, who looked on the majority of mankind as unalterably stupid or incurably vicious…
Of Libety
Benedetto Croce, October 1932
(Italian senator)
Communism, it is the fashion to claim, has passed from theory to practice and is being applied in Russia. But it is a practice not as communism but in keeping with its inner contradiction as a form of autocracy as its critics had always predicted would be the case…The Russian Communists have not solved, nor will their violent and repressive methods ever enable them to solve, the fundamental problem of human society, the problem of freedom. For in freedom only can human society flourish and bear fruit. Freedom alone gives meaning to life … stirs in the souls .. And on the day that this problem is faced, the materialistic foundations of Soviet structure will crumble and new and very different supports will have to be found for it….For liberty is the only ideal which unites the stability that Catholicism once possessed with the flexibility which it could never attain, the only ideal which faces the future without proposing to mould it to some particular form, the only ideal that can survive criticism and give human society a fixed point by which from time to time to reestablish its balance…..
The Position and Prospects of Communism
Harold T. Laski, October 1932
(Professor in London School of Economics)
For a brief period, the sudden prosperity of America concealed from many the realities of the situation. It was argued that the condition of Russia was a special one; that elsewhere the problem was rather one of dealing with the excrescences of the capitalistic system than with capitalism itself. As late as 1928 President Hoover felt able to announce to an awestruck world that America had (under God) solved the problem of poverty…A hundred years ago the votaries of capitalism had a religious faith in its prospects…But those triumphs could not conceal the fact that the idol had feet of clay. The price to be paid for their accomplishment was a heavy one. The distribution of the rewards was incapable of justification in terms of moral principle…Its danger was foreseen by Tocqueville nearly a century ago. “The manufacturer,” he wrote, “asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages. The one contracts no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not permanently connected either by habit or by duty… The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public … Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations but no real partnership”..They realize that the essence of a capitalistic society is its division into a small number of rich men and a great mass of poor men … there should be no proportion between effort and reward…
Nationalism and Economic Life
Leon Trotsky, April 1934
(Leader of the October Russian Revolution in 1917)
The nineteenth century was marked by the fusion of the nation’s fate with the fate of its economic life; but the basic tendency of our century is the growing contradiction between the nation and economic life. In Europe this contradiction has become intolerably acute ..The League of Nations attempted to translate from the language of militarism into the language of diplomatic pacts the task which the war left unsolved. After Ludendorff (German military leader) had failed to “organize Europe” by the sword, Briand attempted to create “the United States of Europe” by means of sugary diplomatic eloquence. But the interminable series of political, economic, financial, tariff, and monetary conferences only unfolded the panorama of the bankruptcy of the ruling classes in face of the unpostponable and burning task of our epoch…How many unified Europe be included within a coordinated world economy? The solution to the question can be reached not by deifying the nation, but on the contrary by completely liberating productive forces from the fetters imposed upon them by the nation state …decadent fascist nationalism, preparing volcanic explosions and grandiose clashes in the world arena, bears nothing except ruin…
The Reconstruction of Liberalism
C. H. McIlwain, October 1937
(Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University)
The preservation of the status quo is a solution that can satisfy none but the contented; and just now most men are not contented…Liberalism means a common welfare with a constitutional guarantee…So-called liberals have ignored the first part of the definition and have fouled the nest by invoking the guarantee for privileges of their own, conducive only to the destruction of any true common weal. None have ever prated more of guarantees than these so-called liberal; but they have forgotten, if they ever believed, that these guarantees must secure the rights of all, not the selfish interests of a few. They are traitors within the gates who have probably done more than all others to betray liberalism to its enemies and put it to its defense …De minimis non curat lex; there is little or no safe guard for the weak against the strong; protection of the public against an adulterated product would be unthinkable, Caveat emptor…
The Economic Tasks of the Postwar World
Alvin H. Hansen and C. p. Kindleberger, April 1942
(Hansen, Littauer Professor, Harvard, Kindleberger, Economist, Federal Reserve)
There are still a good many people concerned with problems of international security who think exclusively in terms of political arrangements and economic mechanisms such as tariffs and currencies. We would call that the passive approach…Many questions at once arise. What will be the role of government in postwar economic life?…It can merely be said that in time of war governments must and do assume more direction of economic life; after this war they will probably be given increased responsibility for trying to get rid of unemployment in their respective nations and to establish higher minimum standards for the low income group; and that while the degree of control exercised in the postwar period will be less than that exercised during the war, it nevertheless will be greater than it used to be before the war…
Freedom and Control
Geoffrey Crowther, January 1944
(Editor, The Economist)
It is the thesis of E. C. Carr’s influential book, “Conditions of Peace,” that the dominant ideas of the nineteenth century are dead, or at least that they no longer have sufficient validity to serve as our guiding lights…if not dead, are so battered that they will not serve us any longer as our main props. We are, indeed, living in a vacuum of faith. But the trouble about a vacuum is that it gets filled, and if there are no angels available to fill it, fools, or worse, rush in…The trend away from liberal democracy has been a trend towards totalitarian dictatorship. The trend away from individualist capitalism has been a trend toward rigid state control .. The trend away from the sovereignty of the nation-state has been a trend towards the concentration of aggressive strength in the hands of a few Great Powers…The central dilemma of the present age is that we can no longer rely on the old principles alone, but that we abominate the alternatives that time and tide, if it is left to them, will produce. This dilemma can be solved in only one way, by the birth of a new faith, adjusted in its instrumentalities to the needs of the new century, but preserving the ultimate objectives of the old. The only way to avoid the murder of nineteenth century liberalism by twentieth century Fascism is through the birth of a twentieth century faith by the new out of the old…What we need is not a compromise between the old ideas and the new, but a fusion, not a mixture but an amalgam…
The Split Between Asian and Western Socialism
David T. Saposs, July 1954
(Statistician, European Labor Division)
Western Socialism has ceased to be class conscious and become reformist. It seeks the welfare state, but not revolution. The growing Christian (predominantly Catholic) labor movement in Western Europe has also arrived at maturity, and its social philosophy is likewise oriented toward the welfare state…The former sacred tenet that the workers are the class chosen to fulfill the holy mission of bringing about the inevitable capitulation of capitalism has fallen into limbo. The central theme of the new official pronouncements revolves about problems of social justice, economic planning, full employment, democracy and human rights. Emphasis is placed on the need to avoid deflation with its consequent depression and unemployment, and of course, on the role of the trade union movement in promoting social justice.
The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos
G. John Ikenberry, May/June 1996
(Professor of Political Science University of Pennsylvania)
The world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever. The challenge for American foreign policy is not to imagine and build a new world order but to reclaim and renew an old one … The end of the Cold War was a historical watershed. The collapse of communism brought the collapse of the order that took shape after World War II. While foreign policy theorists and officials scramble to design new grand strategies, the United States is rudderless on uncharted seas. The common wisdom is wrong. What ended with the Cold War was bipolarity; the nuclear stalemate; and decades of containment of the Soviet Union….But the world order created in the middle to late 1940s endures, more extensive and in some respects more robust than during the Cold War years … Its basic principle …are alive and well… commitment to an open world economy and its multilateral management, and the stabilization of socioeconomic welfare…World War II produced two postwar settlements .. The containment order, which was based on the balance of power, nuclear deterrence, and political and ideological competition. The other, a reaction to the economic rivalry and political turmoil of the 1930s and the resulting world war, which can be called the liberal democratic order…The problems the liberal democratic order confronts are most problems of success, foremost among them the need to integrate the newly developing and post-communist countries…Today economic globalization is producing much greater inequality between winners and losers, the wealthy and the poor …this will affect the stability of the liberal world order more than regional conflict…
The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers
Azar Gat, July/August 2007
(Professor of National Security, Tel Aviv University)
Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam …The second, and more significantly, challenge emanates from the rise of non-democratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia. Now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist regimes…Capitalism has expanded relentlessly since early modernity, its lower priced goods and superior economic power eroding and transforming all socioeconomic regimes, a process most memorably described by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Contrary to Marx’s expectations, capitalism had the same effect on communism, eventually “burying” it without the proverbial shot being fired. The triumph of the market, precipitating and reinforced by the industrial-technological revolution, led to the rise of the middle class, intensive urbanization, the spread of education, the emergence of mass society, and ever greater affluence. In the post-Cold War era (just as in the nineteenth century and the 1950s and 1960s), it is widely believed that liberal democracy naturally emerged from these developments, a view famously espoused by Francis Fukuyama. Today, more than half of the world’s states have elected governments, and close to half have sufficiently entrenched liberal rights to be considered fully free…By shifting from communism to capitalism, China has switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism….the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower….
How Development Leads to Democracy
Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, March/April 2009
(Inglehart, Professor Political Science, Michigan, Welzel, Professor Political Science Jacobs University Bremen in Germany)
A democratic boom has given way to a democratic recession. Between 1985 and 1995, scores of countries made the transition to democracy, bringing widespread euphoria about democracy’s future. But more recently, democracy has retreated … These developments, along with the growing power of China and Russia, have led many observers to argue that democracy has reached its high water mark … That conclusion is mistaken. The underlying conditions of societies around the world point to a more complicated reality. The bad new is that it is unrealistic to assume that democratic institutions can be set up easily … The good news, however, is that the conditions conducive to democracy can and do emerge, and the process of “modernization,” advances them . . In retrospect, it is obvious that .. early versions of modernization theory were wrong on several points. Today, virtually nobody expects a revolution of the proletariat that will abolish private property .. Nor does anyone expect that industrialization will automatically lead to democratic institutions; communism and fascism also emerged with industrialization. Nonetheless, a massive body of evidence suggests that modernization theory’s central premise was correct: economic development does tend to bring about important ..changes in society, culture, and politics…First, modernization is not linear. It does not move indefinitely in the same direction … Second, social and cultural change is path dependent: history matters… a society’s heritage, whether shaped by Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism, or communism, leave a lasting imprint on its worldview…Fifty years ago, the sociologist Seymour Lipset pointed out that rich countries are more likely to be democracies …it has held up against repeated tests …But growing mass pressures for liberalization are beginning to appear, and repressing them will bring growing costs in terms of economic efficiency and low public morale…
The Post-Washington Consensus
Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, March/April 2011
(Birdsall, President of Center for Global Development, Fukuyama. Stamford)
The Great Depression set the stage for a shift away from strict monetarism and laissez-faire polices toward Keynesian demand management…paving the way for the rise of radical and antiliberal movements across the world.. This time around, there has been no violent rejection of capitalism, even in the developing world. In early 2009, at the height of the global financial panic, China and Russia …made it clear to their domestic and foreign investors that they had no intention of abandoning the capitalist model....Why has the reaction in developing countries been so much less extreme after this crisis than it was after the Great Depression? For one, they blame the United States…Thus, The American version of capitalism is, if not in full disrepute, then at least no longer dominant … What the crisis did …was to underscore the instability inherent in capitalist systems, even ones developed and sophisticated as the United States …Capitalism is a dynamic process that regularly produces faultless victims …This is a lesson that politicians in developing country democracies are not likely to forget….
The Future of History
Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?
Francis Fukuyama, January/February 2012
(Author and Professor at Stanford University)
Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism … Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction. But…the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move…serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding…Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures…Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature…The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and than an industrial middle class …mature capitalism generated middle class societies, not working class ones.. Median incomes in the United States have been stagnating…most U.S. households have shifted to two income earners…Americans are reluctant to engage in straightforward redistribution, the United States has instead attempted a highly dangerous and inefficient form of redistribution…by subsidizing mortgages for low-income households…There was a lot of happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy, and how dirty, dangerous manufacturing jobs would inevitably be replaced by highly educated workers doing creative and interesting things. This was a gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrialization…What would that (new) ideology look like? It would have at least two components, political and economic… .redesign the public sector … more redistribution … the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism … It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change … The product would be a synthesis of ideas from both the left and the right, detached from the agenda of the marginalized groups that constitute the existing progressive movement….That mobilization will happen, however, as long s the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the pass generations … The alternative narrative is out there waiting to be born.
The Democratic Malaise
Globalization and the Threat to the West
Charles A. Kupchan, January/February 2012
(Professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University)
A crisis of governability has engulfed the world’s most advanced democracies…Voters in industrialized democracies are looking to their government to respond to the decline in living standards and the growing inequality resulting from unprecedented global flows of goods, services, and capita … But Western governments are not up to the task…. The international system is in the midst of tectonic change due to the diffusion of wealth and power to new quarters… the shift of economic stability from the developed to the developing world … Globalization has expended aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity … the main source of the West’s current crisis of governability: Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles, these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not experienced for generations … for the better part of two decades, middle class wages in the world’s leading democracies have been stagnant and economic inequality has been rising sharply … “The Way Forward,” a consequence of the integration of billions of low wage workers into the global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of information technology to the manufacturing sector. These developments have pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West… the industrialized West have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness. First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much blunter instruments…Second, many of the problems ..require a level of international cooperation that is unattainable … Third, democracies … are clumsy and sluggish when their citizens are downcast and divided … Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle class wages .. making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world .. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails. Facebook’s estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. The wealth of the United States cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class… What is needed is nothing less than a compelling twenty-first century answer to the fundamental tensions among democracy, capitalism, and globalization …
FINAL THOUGHTS
Segments of these essays appearing here are meant to interest the reader in perusing this issue, as there is much more to ponder. Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World” (2012) is a fitting complement as revolution implied or stated was the issue’s focus.
Rifkin views economic revolutions as having two components: the convergence of technology and energy. Revolutions come, he claims, when we create new energy regimes, and then we create new communication revolutions to manage the new energy regime.
In the nineteenth century, steam and coal were the energy regime leading to cheap print technology, and mass transit through railroads with steam power and a communication revolution in public school education to create a literate workforce to organize and manage society around these two components.
In the twentieth century, electrical power provided the energy for the communication revolution of telephone, radio and television, with oil the energy for fuel to run our automobiles, power our airplanes, which led to mass consumption, a ubiquitous interstate highway system connecting suburbs to shopping malls and cities coast-to-coast
Fossil fuel is now on life support. When crude oil rises to nearly $150 a barrel the price of everything goes up, incomes go down, jobs are lost, and ultimately, as in 2008, this leads to economic collapse, and social disruption.
Rifkin sees us on the cusp of a new power shift in the twenty-first century with the Internet communication revolution seeding a social, political, cultural and economic shift from the hierarchical organization where the few dictate to the many to a lateral distributive collaborative paradigm where everyone is a leader.
Private enterprise here is not a building or factory or consortium but the providence of two billion souls on the planet literate in computer technology with Silicon Valley imaginations.
Utopian? I don’t think so. Rifkin’s focus is on an economic model involving green energy complemented by the Internet revolution. Only the last “Foreign Affairs” essay in this 90th Anniversary issue compares Facebook with General Motors to underscore the energy-communication revolution now at full throttle.
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