Jeremy Rifkin: A post-capitalist future?

By Jim Gibbons

Imagine a world in which big corporations are no more, in which we all generate our own electricity and share everything. Utopia? American economic and social forecaster Jeremy Rifkin (pictured) doesn’t think so. The latest of his twelve books examining how things are going in the world predicts a post-capitalist future with everybody helping everybody else in what he calls “the collaborative commons”. He expects the transition to be complete no later than 2050. And in case you think this is cloud cuckoo-land thinking, a lot of world leaders take him very seriously indeed: he’s an official advisor to the European Union and the German Chancellor, to name but two.

Rifkin has been in Strasbourg to address delegates at the World Forum for Democracy, organized by the Council of Europe. Some twelve hundred delegates from all over Europe and beyond are there to discuss how to engage younger people in politics, to give them a voice and overcome scepticism about the political process and politicians in general. Recent events demonstrate that it can be done: 90% of 16 to 18-year-olds registered to vote in the referendum on Scottish independence, and although it’s not possible to say how many of the used their vote, turn-out was 84.15%. Compare that with the European election, in which only 34.19% of registered British voters took part (even that was far better than in Slovakia, where turn-out was just 13% bothered to cast a vote). Even the last US Presidential election saw no more than 61% voting, despite the razzmatazz and multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns.

Yet it’s unusual to permit people as young as 16 to vote; it only happens in Austria, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Cuba. At 17, they can vote in Indonesia, Sudan and– oddly, perhaps – North Korea. Everywhere else it’s 18 or even more. Yet according to Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University in Pennsylvania, the judgement of adolescents where unhurried decision-making is concerned – what psychologists call “cold cognition” – is likely to be as mature as that of adults by the age of 16. It’s in situations of heightened pressure or where there’s a possibility of social coercion – so-called “hot cognition” – where they may fall short. So the young are a vast and largely untapped source.

Perhaps that’s just as well: Jeremy Rifkin says they will be the driving force for the post-capitalist future, rejecting the values of previous generations and making use of the way in which the Internet and electronic communications. Coupled with more easily-accessible ways to generate electricity at home or in co-operative groups, Rifkin says this will drive down production costs and force the industrial giants to change the way they do business in what is, he claims, the third Industrial Revolution.

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