Cultural Revolution. 1967
Empires fall when they lose balance, despite the accumulated scarcity or excess. Next time someone, even the President, comes out with the hogwash that we need more education or innovation you will know better. Let’s take the current recession as an example. China is overtaking the West propelled by the cheap labor, not by an educational advantage. It was only in the 60s and 70s when the Proletarian mob systematically slaughtered the educated class during the Cultural Revolution in the communist China. It takes more than a generation to recover from the catastrophe. Just imagine if the vast number of scientists and intellectuals in USA were killed or discredited between 1966 and 1976! Do you think a country can shrug it all off, just a mere 30 years later? Besides the most “educated elite” in America, in their infinite wisdom, outsourced the country. As a consequence only the low-skilled jobs at McDonald’s are in demand, while the experienced, skilled and educated middle class and creative class is no longer required. In fact the only sectors still holding the fort are the healthcare and education itself, in other words the hard to outsource professions (ala fast food). Also in demand are the computer engineers, the digital managers overseeing consolidation of wealth and facilitating the global flow of goods.
Furthermore the compulsory education is inverse to innovation. Ever heard of these college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, James Cameron, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., etc.? Even Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, are the products of Montessori (AKA the montessori mafia – wsj). Montessori system being a good example of the anti traditional top-down education.
But despite the educational credentials of the innovators one might still think that innovation is good for the economy, economy being the benefit of the broader populace. Take the Internet, the greatest innovation of the last decades, as an example. We now observe the inequality and consolidation of wealth. The Internet is the lubricant of outsourcing. China will never rise so rapidly without the networked logistics, the small business on the Main St. will not collapse so readily without the Amazon, the Wall St. and the Housing will not crash so violently without the sedative, interconnected, computational cruise control.
But there is as always the utopian promise of the better tomorrow, the cavalier and callous dismissal of the tragic human dislocations in both the industrial and the agricultural revolutions and the infantile and uninformed Luddite references. At this very moment there is the unprecedented crisis and the so-called innovation is the main contributing factor to the decline of the middle class and the associated human anguish. So when the next talking head pounces the panacea of education and innovation one wonders is he is a parrot, is he speaking on behalf of the economy or on behalf of his client, the plutocracy?
It stands to argue that during the fall of every empire the shift in the know-how occurs only after the shift in the economic reality. And it works both ways. For example the Chinese invented the gun powder but the seaworthy Europeans perfected the art of concurring islands and continents and shooting their way towards the golden age of colonialism.
Cultural Revolution. 1967
The popular fetish of education and innovation is a smokescreen to distract from the fact that this empire needs a very small number of the highly skilled nerds to run the server farms and a very large number of low skilled labor to run the pacific sweat shops or serve the food. This is the type of NBA propaganda trap for the millions of black teenagers, when the market can only support 50 NBA stars per graduating class. It’s no longer about education or innovation, perhaps it’s no longer about luck.
P.S. At the dawn for the information age one can rarely meet a person who is sober about the cost of the earlier Industrial revolution. The communist plague of the last century was a reaction to the humiliation and slavery of the workers huddled into the permanent inequality and the grim growth of the crime-ridden workforce camps in the metropolises. But there is a pattern actually, going all the way back to the archetypal Agricultural revolution described by Jared Diamond as “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. Beware of the shadows, the internet dealt a decisive blow to the centralized ideological control and the power of the nation-states but it cast a very, very long shadow.
Photos taken by 蒋少武
What Stops the Next American Revolution, a Response to Catherine Rampell
by Ben Atlas on 07.10.2011.5:05pm · 0 comments
Wallnut Village by Ross Racine
An organic, internal revolution is an urban event, it requires a dense economic and social block to wrestle the power and to change a political course. Every revolutionary disruption, brought as an example by Catherine Rampell, occurred on the stages of the most dense urban centers. Cairo is perhaps the most tightly populated metropolis in the history of the world.
Contrast this with America. For the past fifty or seventy years, the middle class camped out into the suburban sprawl. The great american cities have been left to the very rich and to the very poor (plus the occasionally visiting international oligarchy). This Great Recession has not impacted the urban, government-subsidized poor and yes the urban, government-subsidized rich as much as the outsourced and literally disconnected middle class. While in the West of the country, in LA, Dallas, Houston, etc., it’s actually the vast suburbia that calls itself a city.
Facebook, Twitter, etc., are very good in facilitating existing connections and relationships. Conversely the so called Social Media is very bad in creating new meaningful connections or deepening the relationships. In other words it’s a pretty good tool to signal to the preexisting, cohesive, urban networks and real “friends”. But it fails to infuse a sense of common purpose or comradery in the scattered and disjointed suburbanites. Hence the original Facebook acceleration under the framework of the college campuses.
Coincidentally in the traditional Marxist Leninist blueprint, it was the urban proletariat, newly huddled into the industrial European capitals, that was destined to take on the leading role in the revolutions, while the peasants were viewed with suspicion. Eventually Stalin decided that it was safer to starve millions of peasants than bring them on board of the new communist society. While Mao attempted the reverse during his Cultural Revolution in China.