Doug Henwood wrote,
>I just get irritated when Rifkin's stale idiocies are presented as
>fresh advances in human thought.
I can sympathize with Doug's irritation. Rifkin adds nothing to the
discussion other than a popularizing zeal and a slick presentation. Rifkin
is especially good at mining the painstaking work of scholars and taking --
or at least getting -- credit for the ideas. If you haven't seen Rifkin
perform in the flesh, I suggest you rent the video, "The Road to Wellsville"
starring Anthony Hopkins as Dr. John Kellogg -- it's about as close a
portrayal as you can get.
But there is a danger in attacking Rifkin and his "stale idiocies" because
Rifkin mixes those stale idiocies with some of the most important strategic
issues of the day. The popular expression is "throwing out the baby with the
bath water."
It's important to learn to separate the baby from the bath water. Rifkin's
best selling book is the only contact that many people have with arguments
about the effects of technology on labour markets, the shallowness of the
"high-tech, high-skills future" fantasy, the increasing polarization of the
work force, etc. To simply dismiss all of Rifkin as stale idiocy is to risk
re-inforcing the claims of the neo-liberals that the capitalist free market
is sorting things out just fine and dandy, thank you very much.
The point is that Rifkin has found a way to appeal to a broad audience that
the more analytically sound left has been unable to find. I would like to
ask, "what makes Rifkin's argument seem plausible to so many people?" rather
than denounce his arguments wholesale as stale idiocy.
While we're on the topic of stale idiocy, I'd like to bring up two other
phrases that lead us around in circles, "bourgeois ideology" and "false
consciousness". It has been the everlasting conceit of leftists that one
could build a mass audience through the polemical trick of demonstrating
that anyone who cared to listen was deluded in thinking what they did think
and the truth -- or at least the correct analysis -- was elsewhere. This has
been extremely effective, yes, in attracting a smattering of intellectual
masochists.
Is it really more important to be aloof than to be effective? Or is it
possible to combine political integrity with rhetorical appeal?
Regards,
Tom Walker
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