Saturday, June 15, 2013

Rifkin's 'real' infrastructure program

In light of my last post, this 11-minute video interview with Rifkin pretty much addresses Bryant's various 'real' political infrastructures and it is happening now. This is not just a theory or criticism of capitalism; it is being implemented in real time. His book The Third Industrial Revolution of course goes into much greater detail, including how this revolution also changes our social relations when energy is in the hands of the people. This is a must-read for anyone with even the slightest pretension of being in the new breed of realism.
(Also see the IPS Rifkin thread.)


Update: Seems some kennilinguists see him as 'green.' A few counters to this speciousness follow:

From this post in the Rifkin thread:

Here's a review of the book* by Bruce Gibb in the June 2010 issue of Integral Leadership Review from an SDi perspective. An excerpt:

"One might conclude that Rifkin’s COG is at green because the values he espouses and the demons he denounces are typically those of a person at green. At the same time, however, since his articulation of these values are in the service of global turquoise, one could argue that his COG is at the turquoise level. I conclude the latter....

"His enumeration of the life conditions that support turquoise empathetic emergence will be a challenge to those who only think of turquoise mainly in terms of spiritual consciousness." 

Bruce Gibb, PhD, an organizational psychologist, has been in private practice since 1973.... Since 2001 he has been studying and applying SDi concepts of cultural evolution in his practice.

* The Empathic Civilization.

I argue in the Rifkin thread that he is P2P and I see that as most definitely not green. For those not familiar with P2P see Bauwens' website generally and more particularly his essay "P2P and human evolution." An excerpt of the latter:

"For me, P2P is nothing less that the most likely next civilisational stage."

"So in my view, it is a mix, there is a kind of center of gravity, which draws together green/yellow/turquoise types, while making it uninteresting for orange 'capitalist' types, and difficult to adhere to for blue 'fundamentalist' types.... Life is clearly more complex than any totalizing system's efforts to bring it into neat categories.... The difficulty in clearly identifying P2P in that [developmental] scheme, is also a warning against any 'psychological reductionisms', as practiced in the SD system."

As an aside, Rifkin is featured prominently and often at the P2P site.

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