The far-right AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) won a sweeping election victory in the German state of Saxon-Anhalt last Sunday.
I addressed the implications and motivations for the Alternative for Deutschland’s economic program.
While my work on the German economic decline of the past 10-15 years (teaching, talks) has focused on the German failure to embrace especially the tech/social/cultural/organizational/research imperatives of the Third Industrial Revolution in the country (in this interview I refer to the years-long trend of cutting of funding for such things), I did not refer to the other aspect.
That other key element has been the fateful and failed “strategy” of the German government and, following in Berlin’s footsteps, of the EU as well. That strategy was to substitute head-on competition with the USA in information technologies, to substitute coming up to speed in the digital economy (in production, communicating, computing, etc., in its requisite innovation and entrepreneurial culture, and the new, post-Fordist, information work culture of individual initiative, etc.) with a concerted strategy of building so-called “Green” and “Clean” tech to “leapfrog the USA information revolution” by “sparking a Fourth Industrial Revolution” based in Europe on the basis of renewables and associated green technologies.
This was a grave theoretical, historical and practical error, based on a combination of post-Great-Power hubris and a stubborn refusal to face the social-productive reality that Europe had NOT hosted the Third Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution, and had no option but to wholly embrace it, learn it and to catch up. But, it instead found a production/trade niche to fill with improved 1960-1970’s, Second Industrial Revolution technologies.
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