FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE INVISIBLE WEDGE

people, therefore, production and consumption wen- IM-…I into a single life-giving function. So complete was HUM umiy that the Greeks, the Romans, and the medieval I (mop- .m •< did not distinguish between the two. They lacked even n w«>i.i for consumer. Throughout the First Wave era only n liny fraction of the population was dependent on the maikri; most people lived largely outside it. In the words of the hisici-rian R. H. Tawney, “pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of natural economy.”

The Second Wave violently changed this situation. Instead of essentially self-sufficient people and communities, it created for the first time in history a situation in which the overwheliming bulk of all food, goods and services was destined for sale, barter, or exchange. It virtually wiped out of existence goods produced for one’s own consumption—for use by the actual producer and his or her family— and created a civilization in which almost no one, not even a farmer, was self-sufficient any longer. Everyone became almost totally dependent upon food, goods and services produced by somebody else.

In short, industrialism broke the union of production and consumption, and split the producer from the costumer. The fused economy of the First Wave was transformed into the split economy of the Second Wave.

THE MEANING OF THE MARKET

The consequences of this fission were momentous. Even now we scarcely understand them. First, the marketplace—once a mirror and peripheral phenomenon—moved into the very vortex of life. The economy became “marketized” And this happened in both capitalist and socialist industrial economies.

Western economists tend to think of the market as a purely capitalist fact of life and often use the term as though it were synonymous with “profit economy.” Yet from all we know of history, exchange—and hence a marketplace—sprang up earlier than, and independently of, profit. For the market, properly speaking, is nothing more than an exchange network, a switchboard, as it were, through which goods or services, like message, are routed their appropriate destinations. It is not inherently capitalist. Such a switchboard is just as essential to a socialist industrial society as it is profit-motivated industrialism.*