The End of Work

Jeremy Rifkin

The term "consumption" has both English and French roots. In its original form, to consume meant to destroy, to pillage, to subdue, to exhaust. It is a word steeped in violence and until the present century had only negative connotations. [In the past the word was] used to refer to the most deadly disease of the day--tuberculosis. Today the average American is consuming twice as much as he or she did at the end of World War II. The metamorphosis of consumption from vice to virtue is one of the most important yet least examined phenomena of the twentieth century.

The mass-consumption phenomenon did not occur spontaneously, nor was it the inevitable by-product of an insatiable human nature. Quite the contrary. Economists at the turn of the century noted that most working people were content to earn just enough income to provide for their basic needs and a few luxuries, after which they preferred increased leisure time over additional work hours and extra income. According to economists of the day like Stanley Trevor and John Bates Clark, as people's income and affluence increase, a diminishing utility of returns sets in, making each increment in wealth less desirable. The fact that people preferred to trade additional hours of work for additional hours of leisure time became a critical concern and a bane to businessmen whose inventories of goods were quickly piling up on factory floors and in warehouses across the nation.

With an increasing number of workers being displaced by new laborsaving technologies and with production soaring, the business community desperately searched for new ways to reorient the psychology of existing wage earners, to draw them into what Edward Cowdrick, an industrial relations consultant of the time, called "the new economic gospel of consumption." Converting Americans from a psychology of thrift to one of spendthrift proved a daunting task. The Protestant work ethic, which had so dominated the American frontier ethos, was deeply ingrained. Parsimony and savings were cornerstones of the American way of life, part of the early Yankee tradition that had served as a guidepost for generations of Americans as well as an anchor for newly arrived immigrants determined to make a better life for their children's generation. For most Americans, the virtue of self-sacrifice continued to hold sway over the lure of immediate gratification in the marketplace.

The American business community set out to radically change the psychology that had built a nation--to turn American workers from investors in the future to spenders in the present. Early on, business leaders realized that in order to make people "want" things they had never previously desired, they had to create "the dissatisfied consumer." Charles Kettering of General Motors was among the first to preach the new gospel of consumption. GM had already begun to introduce annual model changes in its automobiles and launched a vigorous advertising campaign designed to make consumers discontent with the car they already owned. "The key to economic prosperity," said Kettering, "is the organized creation of dissatisfaction." The economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it more succinctly years later, observing that the new mission of business was to "create the wants it seeks to satisfy." [..]

Consumption economists like Hazel Kyrk were quick to point out the commercial advantages of turning a nation of working people into status-conscious consumers. Growth, she declared, required a new level of consumer buying. "Luxuries for the well-off," she argued, had to be "turned into necessities for the poorer classes." Overproduction and technological unemployment could be mitigated, even eliminated, if only the working class could be re-educated toward the "dynamic consumption of luxuries."

Transforming the American worker into a status-conscious consumer was a radical undertaking. Most Americans were still making most of their own goods at home. Advertisers used every available means and opportunity to denigrate "homemade" products and to promote the "store-bought" and "factory-made" items. The young were particularly targeted. Advertising messages were designed to make them feel ashamed of wearing or using homemade products. Increasingly, the battle lines were drawn around the issue of being [..] "old-fashioned." Fear of being left behind proved a powerful motivating force in stimulating purchasing power. Labor historian Harry Braverman captured the commercial spirit of the times, remarking that "the source of status is no longer the ability to make things but simply the ability to purchase them."

By 1929 the mass psychology of consumerism had taken hold in America. The traditional American virtues of Yankee frugality and frontier self-sacrifice were fading. That year President Herbert Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes published a revealing report on the profound change in human psychology that had taken place in less than a decade. The report ended with a glowing prediction of what lay ahead for America: The survey has proved conclusively what has long been held theoretically to be true, that wants are insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants as fast as they are satisfied .... By advertising and other promotional devices... a measurable pull on production has been created... It would seem that we can go on with increasing activity... Our situation is fortunate, our momentum remarkable.

Just a few short months later the stock market crashed, plunging the nation and the world into the darkest depression of the modern age. The Hoover Committee, like many of the politicians and business leaders of the day, was so fixated on the idea that supply creates demand that it was unable to see the negative dynamic that was careening the economy into a major depression. In order to compensate for the rising technological unemployment brought about by the introduction of new laborsaving technologies, American corporations poured millions of dollars into advertising and marketing campaigns, hoping to convince the still-employed workforce to engage in an orgy of spending. Unfortunately, the income of wage earners was not rising fast enough to keep up with the increases in productivity and output. Most employers preferred to pocket the extra profit realized from productivity gains rather than pass the savings along to the workers in the form of higher wages. Henry Ford, to his credit, suggested that workers be paid enough to buy the products companies were producing. Otherwise, he asked, "who would buy my cars?" His colleagues chose to ignore the advice...

The increasing violence taking place on the streets of America is being played out in other industrialized nations throughout the world. In October 1999 in Vaulx-en-Velin, a depressed working class town near Lyon, hundreds of youth took to the streets, clashing with police and later riot troops, for more than three days. Although the riot was triggered by the death of a teenager run over by a police car, local residents and government officials alike blamed increasing unemployment and poverty for the rampage. Youths stoned cars, burned down local businesses, and injured scores of people. By the time it was over, the damages had run to $2o million.

In Bristol, England, in July 1992, violence erupted in the wake of an accident uncannily similar to the one that occurred in Vaulx-en-Velin. A police car had run over and killed two teenagers who had stolen a police motorcycle. Hundreds of youth rampaged through the shopping area, destroying commercial property. Over 5oo elite troops had to be called up to quell the disturbance."

French sociologist Loic Wacquant, who has made an extensive study of urban rioting in first-world cities, says that in almost every instance the communities that riot share a common sociological profile. Most are formerly working class communities that have been caught up in and left behind by the transition from a manufacturing to an information-based society. According to Wacquant, "For the residents of flagging working class areas, the reorganization of capitalist economies--visible in the shift from manufacturing to education intensive services, the impact of electronic and automation technologies in factories and offices, and the erosion of unions... have translated into unusually high rates of long-term joblessness and a regression of material conditions." [..]

A growing number of politicians and political parties--especially in Europe--have been playing off the concerns of working class and poor communities, exploiting their xenophobic fears of immigrants taking away precious jobs [..]. Rarely, in their public statements, do any of the leaders of the extreme right broach the issue of technology displacement. Yet it is the forces of downsizing, re-engineering, and automation that are having the most effect on eliminating jobs in working class communities in every industrial country.

Nathan Gardeis, the editor of New Perspectives Quarterly, summed up the prevailing mood in terms remarkably similar to the arguments used to characterize the plight of urban blacks just thirty years ago, when they were uprooted first by new agricultural technologies in the South and then by mechanical and numerical-control technologies in Northern factories. "From the standpoint of the market," says Gardeis, "the ever swelling ranks of the [unemployed] face a fate worse than colonialism: economic irrelevance." The bottom line, argues Gardeis, is that "we don't need what they have and they can't buy what we sell." Gardeis foresees an increasingly lawless and foreboding future--a world populated by "patches of order and swaths of pandemonium." Some military experts believe that we are entering into a new and dangerous period of history increasingly characterized by what they call low-intensity conflict: warfare fought by terrorist gangs, bandits, guerrillas, and others.

Military historian Martin Van Creveld says that the distinctions between war and crime are going to blur and even break down as marauding bands of outlaws, some with vague political goals, menace the global village with hit-and-run murders, car bombings, kidnappings, and high-profile massacres. In the new environment of low-intensity conflict, standing armies and national police forces will become increasingly powerless to quell or even contain the mayhem, and will likely give way to private security forces that will be paid to secure safe zones for the elite classes of the high-tech global village.

Two very specific courses of action will need to be vigorously pursued if the industrialized nations are to successfully make the transition into a post-market era in the twenty-first century. First, productivity gains resulting from the introduction of new labor and time-saving technologies will have to be shared with millions of working people. Dramatic advances in productivity will need to be matched by reductions in the number of hours worked and steady increases in salaries and wages in order to ensure an equitable distribution of the fruits of technological progress. Secondly, the shrinking of mass employment in the formal market economy and the reduction of government spending in the public sector will require that greater attention be focused on the third sector: the non-market economy.

It is the third sector--the social economy--that people will likely look to in the coming century to help address personal and societal needs that can no longer be dealt with by either the marketplace or legislative decrees. This is the arena where men and women can explore new roles and responsibilities and find new meaning in their lives now that the commodity value of their time is vanishing. The partial transfer of personal loyalties and commitments away from the market and the public sector and to the informal, social economy foreshadows fundamental changes in institutional alignments and a new social compact as different from the one governing the market era as it, in turn, is different from the feudal arrangements of the medieval era that preceded it.