An Orthodox Marxist Critique of the Third Wave Study Group:
Do Computers Change the Face of Capitalism or Only Give It a Facelift? (page 3 of 3)
By Class Struggle

Knowledge workers play no important role in the economy without the millions of workers they are linked to. Think of designers and computer programmers working in the auto industry. What is the meaning of their work if hundreds of thousands of workers don't make the steel, rubber and glass that goes into cars, if auto workers don't build cars, and the truck and rail workers don't transport the finished product to the dealers?

The supposed advantage of knowledge workers are their political concerns. The Third Wavers speak of a progressive sector of knowledge workers, whose concerns are "ecology, disarmament, peace and human rights issues, and expanded access to information and education." In fact, much of the new technology was developed for military purposes and many knowledge workers are involved in production connected to arms. It seems doubtful that those working in military production would have any greater interest in disarmament than other sectors of society, especially in the absence of any big social movement challenging militarism. In any case, we have no indication of this. The same is the case with human rights. Both the aerospace and computer industries have suffered massive layoffs in recent years. It's unlikely that many of the white male knowledge workers have become advocates of affirmative action when their jobs are under attack and the dominant ideas in this society blame minorities a white men's loss of jobs. Again, there's no indication of this. That's why rather than examining what knowledge workers actually feel about disarmament and human rights, the Study Group simply asserts that these are their concerns.

The Third Wave Study Group says that, "When socialism embraced the proletariat as the primary agency of progressive change, it also tended to romanticize industrial society." Rather than romanticize industrial society, socialism saw its contradictory nature: how it gave rise to a class whose role in the productive process gave it an interest in transforming society. Socialism never thought that this class would automatically have the social and political consciousness necessary to transform society. It's exactly why the socialist movement strove to build militant organizations to awaken this consciousness. It's the Third Wave Study Group that romanticizes knowledge workers, a disparate grouping which they endow with virtues it doesn't have and couldn't have. No social layer can have these virtues just by the technical roll they play in the economy.

In order to make its point, the Third Wave Study Group not only glorifies knowledge workers, but it denigrates the industrial proletariat. Their reasoning is based on industrial society itself: industry is based on hierarchy. They say, "the authoritarian patterns of managerial hierarchy always reasserted themselves; they were imbedded in the organization of work on the factory floor. Thus these relations could not be permanently transformed while trapped inside the second-wave industrial economic base." According to them, due to this situation, not only does the proletariat reflect the past, it tends to be reactionary: "some blue collar workers fear for the future and fight to retain old ways, regardless of the consequence to society or the environment." So not surprisingly the Third Wavers show little concern over the loss of industrial jobs. "It does no good, for instance, to call for a reindustrialization of the economy along the lines of the blue-collar industry. While some industries can be retained and some jobs can be restored mainly those that were lost due to the business cycle, mismanagement, or unrestricted runaways most of those jobs or industries eliminated by advances in technology and industrial organization cannot be restored." No more surprising is their conclusion: "Traditional Marxists who view point of production organizing as the most valid form of struggle need to rethink long held beliefs."

In fact, this is the crucial point: the Third Wave Study Group wants to discard the idea that capitalism has organized and socialized workers at the point of production to work together cooperatively and to collectively resist their exploitation, and thus has laid the basis for their running society from below, without hierarchy or bureaucracy. In doing so, the Third Wavers reject the idea that the working class has the power to bring society to a halt and also to reorganize it without a parasitic ruling class.

The Information Capitalists

Finally: The Third Wave Study Group sees a conflict among the capitalists over the old industrial past and the new technology, with the old industrial capitalists trying to defend the industries they are based on, while the new information capitalists are involved in bringing to birth new industries. Among the information capitalists themselves, some are tied to the military and are only interested in profit maximization, while others are "information capitalism with a socially responsible human face, with an eye on making its fortunes in the green industries' of the future." The Study Group sees some problems with these progressive information capitalists: "But we must not allow these factors to cover over the basic class conflict between third wave capitalists and third wave workers. For all their unique and progressive stands on certain issues, the Silicon Valley bigwigs are still notorious union busters and social reactionaries, especially when it comes to their treatment lower-skilled, female and nonwhite sectors of their labor force." Despite all this, the Study Group's policy is to find some allies among these capitalists: "These entrepreneurs may side, temporarily, with reform movements and progressives. This is the meaning of Al Gore's staking out a leading analysis on ecology, as well as John Scully of Apple Computer's sitting next to Hillary at Clinton's inaugural address."

The consequence of this analysis is clear: once more the left is urged to support a sector of the capitalists, the so-called progressive ones, who are far from perfect, but a sector that are supposed to share some of the objectives of the left. More precisely, what can a left movement do that believes an Al Gore can side with its concerns from the pinnacle of power, if not continue its self-destructive ties to the Democratic Party? So, all this so-called theory about the Third Wave and the new era of history ends up calling for support to ... politicians of the old era.

The Third Wave Study Group energetically recommends the works of Alvin and Heidi Toffler on the Third Wave as "one of the best analyses out there." When the Republicans took over Congress the Tofflers made the national news as they were invited to a conference organized by Newt Gingrich in Washington. The Tofflers have been friends with Gingrich for a couple of decades and Gingrich wrote the introduction to their latest book Creating a New Civilization. Gingrich calls the book "one of the seminal works of our time" and points to the Tofflers' visit to Fort Monroe to speak to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Gingrich says that the use of stealth technology in the Gulf War was the result of applying their Third Wave ideas, which resulted in the annihilation of the Iraqis' use of Second Wave anti-aircraft.

The Tofflers, with a background in the communist movement, have returned repeatedly to a battle with their former ideas in presentations to various corporate clients and the Reagan White House. "For Marxists, hardware was always more important than software. The computer revolution now teaches us that the opposite is true. If anything, it is knowledge that drives the economy, not the economy that drives knowledge." Further, "The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflects the principles of a low brow economy" i.e. a low knowledge-intensive one. The problem is not breaking the shackles on the proletariat, but freeing the service industries of the "shackles" of regulations. "Instead of decrying the rise of the service sector and continually attacking it as a source of low productivity, low wages and low performance, shouldn't it be expressly supported and expanded?" And they say, "For today the singl important political conflict is no longer between rich and poor, between top-dog and underdog ethnic groups or even between capitalism and socialism.

The decisive struggle today is between those who try to prop up and preserve industrial society and those who are ready to advance beyond it." The Tofflers take the logic of the Third Wave another step forward ... towards an energetic defense of capitalism.

But the Third Wave Study Group itself is already taking this route: "In our view of socialism, we affirm the entrepreneurial spirit, the motivating energy of the market and the right of individuals to become wealthy through the private ownership of the capital they have helped to create." They sing the praises of the market: "market forces, in particular the drive for innovation and new profits, will be the major devices used to carry out economic restructuring. It should be clear by now that the market is necessary for the practical functioning of any economy." Laws and regulations will be used to steer capital investment into "areas that benefit society," like "new environmentally beneficial technologies" which "may not be taxed at all for a set period." Instead there will be taxes on companies that pollute the environment or prevent unionization. (And no doubt the taxes will fall heavily on the blue collar workers, who stick obstinately t technology.) The Third Wave Study Group pretends it wants serious reforms, and even talks about the class struggle or socialism. But clearly what they call socialism is but a new era of capitalism ... with a computer in every home.

Technological changes are occurring and having an impact on the social classes. But technological change by itself won't bring about a social transformation of society. Such a transformation can be carried out only by a social class that has an interest in the end of capitalist society, that is, the working class, including many of the knowledge workers who owe their jobs to the new technology under the condition that they join the rest of their class and don't stand apart.

Computers will be very useful in the building of this new society. Today more than forty percent of industrial workers use computers at home, work or school, and even more office workers use computers daily. A more technically skilled working class is one that can use its skills to transform society and to run it in the future. Computers can facilitate the ways the working people of the world can directly participate in making democratic decisions about production and the use of natural resources. Everyone can have access to the plans and input into them. Computer-based automation without the hindrances of capitalist control, exploitation and national borders can free workers from all types of drudgery and unnecessary labor, establish true leisure and abundance, and the material possibilities of a decent life for everyone on earth.

We revolutionary communists see the tremendous potential in computers. But we also see that this potential can't be realized unless there is a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism and the proletariat takes power. May 21, 1995

From Class Struggle #8, the magazine of Spark, a revolutionary communist (Trotskyist) group, PO Box 1047, Detroit, MI 48231