The coming super struggle, by Alvin Toffler:

THE COMING SUPER-STRUGGLE

The need for new political institutions exactly parallels our need for new family, educational, and corporate institutions as well. It is deeply wired into our search for a new energy base, new technologies, and new industries. It reflects the upheaval in communications and the need to restructure relationships with the non-industrial world. It is, in short, the political reflection of accelerating changes in all these different spheres.

Without seeing these connections, it is impossible to make sense of the headlines around us. For today the single most important political conflict is no longer between rich and poor, between top-dog and underdog ethnic groups, or even between capitalist and communist. The decisive struggle today is between those who try to prop up and preserve industrial society and those who are ready to advance beyond it. This is the super-struggle for tomorrow.

Other, more traditional conflicts between classes, races, and ideologies will not vanish. They may even— as suggested earlier— grow more violent, especially if we undergo large-scale economic turbulence. But all these conflicts will be absorbed into, and play themselves out within, the super-struggle as it rages through every human activity from art and sex to business and balloting.

This is why we find two political wars raging around us simultaneously. At one level, we see a politics-as-usual clash of Second Wave groups battling each other for immediate gain. At a deeper level, however, these traditional Second Wave groups cooperate to oppose the new political forces of the Third Wave.

This analysis explains why our existing political parties, as obsolete in structure as in ideology, seem so much like blurry mirror images of one another. Democrats and Republicans, as well as Tories and Labourites, Christian Democrats and Gaullists, Liberals and Socialists, Communists and Conservatives, are all— despite their differences— parties of the Second Wave. All of them, while jockeying for power within it, are basically committed to preserving the dying industrial order.

Put differently, the most important political development of our time is the emergence in our midst of two basic camps, one committed to Second Wave civilization, the other to Third. One is tenaciously dedicated to preserving the core institutions of industrial mass society— the nuclear family, the mass education system, the giant corporation, the mass trade union, the centralized nation-state, and the politics of pseudorepresentative government. The other recognizes that oday’s most urgent problems, from energy, war, and poverty to ecological degradation and the breakdown of familial relationships, can no longer be solved within the framework of an industrial civilization. The lines between these two camps are not yet sharply drawn. As individuals, most of us are divided, with a foot in each. Issues still appear murky and unconnected to one another. In addition, each camp is composed of many groups pursuing their own narrowly perceived self-interest, without any overarching vision. Nor does either side have a monopoly on moral virtue. There are decent people ranged on both sides. Nevertheless, the differences between these two subsurface political formations are enormous.

The defenders of the Second Wave typically fight against minority power; they scoff at direct democracy as “populism”; they resist decentralization, regionalism, and diversity; they oppose efforts to de-massify the schools; they fight to preserve a backward energy system; they deify the nuclear family, pooh-pooh ecological concerns, preach traditional industrial-era nationalism, and oppose the move toward a fairer world economic order.

By contrast, the forces of the Third Wave favor a democracy of shared minority power; they are prepared to experiment with more direct democracy; they favor both transnationalism and a fun-
damental devolution of power. They call for a crack-up of the giant bureaucracies. They demand a renewable and less centralized energy system. They want to legitimate options to the nuclear family. They fight for less standardization, more individualization in the schools. They place a high priority on environmental problems. They recognize the necessity to restructure the world economy on a more balanced and just basis.

Above all, while the Second Wave defenders play the conventional political game, Third Wave people are suspicious of all political candidates and parties (even new ones), and sense that decisions crucial to our survival cannot be made within the present political framework.

The Second Wave camp still includes a majority of the nominal power-holders in our society— politicians, businessmen, union leaders, educators, the heads of the mass media— although many of them are deeply troubled by the inadequacies of the Second Wave world view. Numerically, the Second Wave camp undoubtedly still claims the unthinking support of most ordinary citizens as well, despite fast-spreading pessimism and disillusionment in their ranks.
The advocates of the Third Wave are more difficult to characterize. Some head up major corporations while others are zealous anticorporate consumerists. Some are worried environmentalists; others are more concerned with the issues of sexual roles, family life, or personal growth. Some focus almost exclusively on the development of alternative energy forms; others are mainly excited by the democratic promise of the communications revolution.

Some are drawn from the Second Wave ‘”right,” others from the Second Wave “left”— free marketeers and libertarians, neo-socialists, feminists, and civil rights activists, former flower children and the straightest of straight-arrows. Some are long-time activists in the peace movement; others have never marched or demonstrated for anything in their lives. Some are devoutly religious, others die-hard atheists.

Scholars may debate at length over whether or not so seemingly formless a group constitutes a “class,” or whether, if so, it is the “new class” of educated information-workers, intellectuals, and technicians. Surely many of those in the Third Wave camp are college-educated, middle-class people. Surely many are directly engaged in the production and dissemination of information, or in the services, and, by twisting the term, one could probably call them a class. Yet to do so obscures more than it reveals.

For among the key groups pressing toward the de-massification of industrial society are relatively uneducated ethnic minorities, many of whose members hardly fit the picture of the attache-case-carrying knowledge-worker.

How does one characterize women struggling to break out of confining roles in Second Wave society? How, moreover, does one describe the fast-expanding millions in the self-help movement? And what about many of the “psychologically oppressed”— the millions of victims of the epidemic of loneliness, the broken families, the single parents, the sexual minorities— who do not fit neatly into the notion of class? Such groups come from virtually all the ranks and occupations of society, yet are important sources of strength for the Third Wave movement.

Indeed even the term movement can be misleading— partly because it implies a higher level of shared consciousness than so far exists, partly because Third Wave people properly mistrust all the mass movements of the past.

Nevertheless, whether they comprise a class, a movement, or simply a changing configuration of individuals and transient groups, all of them share a radical disillusionment with the old institutions —a common recognition that the old system is now broken beyond repair.

The super-struggle between these Second and Third Wave forces, therefore, cuts like a jagged line across class and party, across age and ethnic groups, sexual preferences and subcultures. It reorganizes and realigns our political life. And, instead of a harmonious, classless, conflict-free, non-ideological future society, it points toward escalating crises and deep social unrest in the near-term future. Pitched political battles will be waged in many nations, not merely over who will benefit from what is left of industrial society but over who participates in shaping, and ultimately controlling, its successor.

This sharpening super-struggle will decisively influence the politics of tomorrow and the very form of the new civilization. It is as a partisan in this super-struggle, aware or unwitting, that each of us plays a role. That role can be either destructive or creative.

Some generations are born to create, others to maintain a civilization. The generations who launched the Second Wave of historic change were compelled, by force of circumstance, to be creators. The Montesquieus, Mills, and Madisons invented most of the political forms we still take for granted. Caught between two civilizations, it was their destiny to create.

Today in every sphere of social life, in our families, our schools, our businesses and churches, in our energy systems and communications, we face the need to create new Third Wave forms, and millions of people in many countries are already beginning to do so. Nowhere, however, is obsolescence more advanced or more dangerous than in our political life. And in no field today do we find less imagination, less experiment, less willingness to contemplate fundamental change.

Even people who are daringly innovative in their own work in their law offices or laboratories, their kitchens, classrooms, or companies— seem to freeze up at any suggestion that our Constitution or political structures are obsolete and in need of radical overhaul. So frightening is the prospect of deep political change, with its attendant risks, that the status quo, however surrealistic and oppressive, suddenly seems like the best of all possible worlds.

Conversely we have in every society a fringe of pseudorevolutionaries, steeped in obsolete Second Wave assumptions, for whom no proposed change is radical enough. Archaeo-Marxists, anarcho-romantics, right-wing fanatics, armchair guerrillas, and honest-to-God terrorists, dreaming of totalitarian technocracies or medieval utopias. Even as we speed into a new historical zone, they nurse dreams o£ revolution drawn from the yellowed pages of yesterday’s political tracts.

Yet what lies ahead as the super-struggle intensifies is not a replay of any previous revolutionary drama— no centrally directed overthrow of the ruling elites by some “vanguard party” with the masses in tow; no spontaneous, supposedly cathartic, mass uprising triggered by terrorism. The creation of new political structures for a Third Wave civilization will not come in a single climactic up-heaval, but as a consequence of a thousand innovations and collisions at many levels in many places over a period of decades.

This does not rule out the possibility of violence along the way to tomorrow. The transition from First Wave to Second Wave civilization was one long blood-drenched drama of wars, revolts, famines, forced migrations, coups d’etat, and calamities. Today the stakes are much higher, the time shorter, the acceleration faster, the dangers even greater.

Much depends on the flexibility and intelligence of today’s elites, sub-elites and super-elites. If these groups prove to be as short- sighted, unimaginative, and frightened as most ruling groups in the past, they will rigidly resist the Third Wave and thereby escalate the risks of violence and their own destruction.

If, by contrast, they flow with the Third Wave, if they recognize the need for a broadened democracy, they in fact can join in the process of creating a Third Wave civilization, just as the most intelligent First Wave elites anticipated the coming of a technologically based industrial society and joined in its creation.

Most of us know, or sense, how dangerous a world we live in. We know that social instability and political uncertainties can unleash savage energies. We know what war and economic cataclysm mean, and we remember how often totalitarianism has sprung from noble intentions and social breakdown. What most people seem to ignore, however, are the positive differences between present and past.

Circumstances differ from country to country, but never in history have there been so many reasonably educated people, collectively armed with so incredible a range of knowledge. Never have so many enjoyed so high a level of affluence, precarious perhaps, yet ample enough to allow them time and energy for civic concern and action. Never have so many been able to travel, to communicate, and to learn so much from other cultures. Above all, never have so many had so much to gain by guaranteeing that the necessary changes, though profound, be made peacefully.

Elites, no matter how enlightened, cannot by themselves make a new civilization. The energies of whole peoples will be required. But those energies are available, waiting to be tapped. Indeed if we, particularly in the high-technology countries, took as our explicit goal for the next generation the creation of wholly new institutions and constitutions, we could release something far more powerful even than energy: the collective imagination.

The sooner we begin to design alternative political institutions based on the three principles described above— minority power, semi-direct democracy, and decision division— the better our chances for a peaceful transition. It is the attempt to block such changes, not the changes themselves, that raises the level of risk. It is the blind attempt to defend obsolescence that creates the danger of bloodshed.

This means that to avoid violent upheaval we must begin now to focus on the problem of structural political obsolescence around the world. And we must take this issue not merely to the experts, the constitutionalists, lawyers, and politicians, but to the public itself— to civic organizations, trade unions, churches, to women’s groups, to ethnic and racial minorities, to scientists and housewives and businessmen.

We must, as a first step, launch the widest public debate over the need for a new political system attuned to the needs of a Third Wave civilization. We need conferences, television programs, contests, simulation exercises, mock constitutional conventions to generate the broadest array of imaginative proposals for political restructuring, to unleash an outpouring of fresh ideas. We should beprepared to use the most advanced tools available to us, from satellites and computers to video-disc and interactive television.

No one knows in detail what the future holds or what will work best in a Third Wave society. For this reason we should think not of a single massive reorganization or of a single revolutionary, cataclysmic change imposed from the top, but of thousands of conscious, decentralized experiments that permit us to test new models of political decision-making at local and regional levels in advance of their application to the national and transnational levels.

But, at the same time, we must also begin to build a constituency for similar experimentation— and radical redesign— of institutions at the national and transnational levels as well. Today’s widespread disillusionment, anger, and bitterness against the world’s Second Wave governments can either be whipped into fanatic frenzy by demagogues calling for authoritarian leadership or it can be mobilized for the process of democratic reconstruction.

By launching a vast process of social learning— an experiment in anticipatory democracy in many nations at once— we can head off the totalitarian thrust. We can prepare millions for the dislocations and dangerous crises that lie before us. And we can place strategic pressure on existing political systems to accelerate the necessary changes.

Without this tremendous pressure from below, we should not expect many of today’s nominal leaders— presidents and politicians, senators and central committee members— to challenge the very institutions that, no matter how obsolete, give them prestige, money, and the illusion, if not the reality, of power. Some unusual, far-seeing politicians or officials will lend their early support to the struggle for political transformation. But most will move only when the demands from outside are irresistible or when the crisis is already so advanced, and so close to violence, that they see no alternative.

The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on grounds of its impracticality, while defending what-ever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for freedom of expression—the right of people to voice their ideas, even if heretical.

Above all, it means starting this process of reconstruction now, before the further disintegration of existing political systems sends the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets, and makes impossible a peaceful transition to Twenty-first Century Democracy.

If we begin now, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstitution not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself.

Like the generation of the revolutionary dead, we have a destiny to create.

— Alvin Toffler, The 3rd Wave. 1980.