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Introduction
Zygmunt Bauman is widely regarded as one of the most profound
and original voices in contemporary social thought. His
work deftly interweaves issues of ethics, culture and politics,
with the express intention of interpreting society in a
way that challenges and provokes us to aspire towards something
better. Bauman's reflections on consumerism and poverty,
uncertainty and insecurity, political disengagement and
moral indifference, should give us pause for thought the
next time we hear the familiar New Labour incantation of
'good for the economy, good for social justice'.
In a manner that is by turns inspiring and bewildering,
Bauman's thought has always cross-pollinated diverse political
and intellectual perspectives, from the social democratic
values of William Beveridge to the radical democratic theories
of Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt. Suffice to say
he is notoriously difficult to categorise. While Bauman
has risen to prominence through his influential and demystifying
sociological understanding of postmodernity, he has explicitly
turned to politics in a series of books and essays published
between 1998 and 2001. These include Work, Consumerism
and the New Poor (1998), Globalisation - the Human
Consequences (1998), In Search of Politics (1999) and
Liquid Modernity (2000).
In his recent work, Bauman has wrestled with the political
dilemma of our postmodern, or (as he now prefers to categorise
them) 'Liquid Modern' times. Bauman has consistently highlighted
the decline of traditional political institutions and class
politics, the rise of neo-liberalism and identity politics,
and the fluid and fragmentary nature of social bonds and
individual identity. These pressures contribute to both
'individualisation' and narrow communitarianism, which Bauman
perceives as eroding our capacity to think in terms of common
interests and fates. Yet he refuses to drop the notion that
politics can be (or become) a vehicle for the translation
of private troubles into public concerns and the democratically
generated search for collective solutions. As such, while
his work accepts the premises that prompted Anthony Giddens
to seek a renewal of Social Democracy, he refuses to accept
many of the conclusions that make up the politics of Third
Way. Rather, he keeps posing awkward questions. Questions
that more often than not make us feel uncomfortable about
the limitations Labour has imposed on its current thinking
on the relationship between the state, markets, individual
responsibility and social justice.
Central to Bauman's analysis is the notion that today's
societies are integrated around consumption rather than
production. Freedom is modelled on freedom to choose how
one satisfies individual desires and constructs one's identity
via the medium of the consumer market. As a consequence,
Bauman contends that freedom and individual fate have increasingly
become 'privatised'. Yet an 'increasingly privatised life
feeds disinterest in politics', whether one can afford to
partake in consumer freedom or not. And politics freed from
constraints deepens the extent of privatisation, thus breeding
'moral indifference' (Bauman, 1994, p27).
At the same time, we live increasingly under conditions
of globally and systemically engendered insecurity and uncertainty,
which belie the promise of assertive individuality not only
for the 'excluded' but for many of the 'included'. As the
sociologist Richard Sennet has recently put it, where politicians
speak the language of individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism,
they suppose 'a confidence that ordinary people often do
not feel' (New Statesman 17.12.01). Even where politicians
speak the progressive language of community and social regeneration,
the ideal end point is modelled on consumer freedom and
'individual empowerment' that may in fact perpetuate insecurity
and uncertainty rather than address its root causes.
In promoting and idealising the model of consumer freedom
and individual responsibility, the Government replicates
the logic of a consumerism which promotes 'biographical
solutions to socially produced afflictions'. Hence, for
Bauman, the 'main obstacles that urgently need to be examined
relate to the rising difficulties in translating private
problems into public issues … in re-collectivising
the privatised utopias of "life politics" so that
that they can acquire once more the shape of the visions
of the "good society" and "just society"'
(Bauman, 2000, p51).
Lofty and anachronistic as these concerns may seem to some,
they raise a number of provocative and uncomfortable questions
about the limitations of New Labour's political vision.
The extent to which national governments can address the
systemic problems and structural inequalities of global
capitalism is a moot question. Yet the due recognition of
such systemic problems and a concerted attempt to address
them is often lacking not merely in the Government's policy
but in the ideals underlying it.
The Chancellor's November pre-budget report was commendably
entitled Building a Stronger, Fairer Britain in an Uncertain
World. The title seems to readily acknowledge the problem
of uncertainty mentioned above. Yet is a government that
proselytises economic growth, labour flexibility and enterprise,
as the answers to problems of social exclusion and wellbeing,
prepared to address the uncertainty and insecurity these
ostensible answers generate? Can the 'political economy
of uncertainty' arising from perpetual downsizing and restructuring
be tackled by invocations to individual responsibility and
the re-moralisation of the work ethic? Is Beveridge's principle
of social security, as a universal collective insurance
against the insecurity of employment, a morally pernicious
anachronism in an enterprise society or is it a building
block for engaged citizenship more relevant than ever before?
If sovereign consumers, enterprising individuals and god-fearing
(English speaking/oath signing) communities make the world
go round, what place is there for citizenship as a collective
political pursuit?
The following interview attempts to highlight the provocation
Bauman's thought poses to reigning New Labour orthodoxies
in relation to consumerism, welfare policy, social justice,
citizenship and the wider issues of political apathy and
political vision. The interview was conducted by email during
November 2001, and we are extremely grateful to Professor
Bauman for sharing his insight (and wit) with us. Given
the richness and depth of Bauman's writing, a rapid fire
e-mail exchange of this nature can but scratch the surface
of his thinking
INTERVIEW
Consumerism, welfare and the work ethic
In Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (hereafter WCP)
you delineate a shift from a society of producers to a society
of consumers. Why in your view does this shift demand a
change in the way we view the plight of poor in today's
society and what does this shift mean for a traditional
welfare policy based around the work ethic?
The move from the society of producers to the society of
consumers left the poor of this world without a 'useful
function'. Whenever the economy is in the doldrums, our
political leaders appeal to the citizens not to work harder
but to use credit cards more often, hoping for a 'consumer-led
recovery'. When it comes up to reinvigorating the 'economy'
(measured by the money changing hands in the market), the
poor would neither lead nor be led: they have neither credit
cards nor saving accounts to empty, and things they would
buy first if they had money are not the plum commodities
that the companies need to sell to recover the share-holders'
confidence.
The arch-adversary of early capitalism, as Max Weber noted,
was the 'traditional worker' - one that saw no reason to
work the whole week if today's wages were enough to stay
alive for seven days … 'Traditional workers' would
not expose themselves to the soulless routine of the factory
floor if it were not a matter of life and death. They had
not been drilled as yet to work for the work's sake, nor
resigned to the kind of work that had been stripped of all
previous meanings except bare bodily survival.
The arch-adversary of the present-day capitalism is, for
a change, the 'traditional consumer' - one that buys things
not because they are obtrusively and vociferously on offer,
but only because s/he needs them. The poor are such 'traditional
consumers' and nothing will change this as long as they
stay poor. As contemporary capitalism goes, they are a lost-and-hopeless
case. There is no point in appealing to their 'repressed
desires' and trying to sow new ones. No wonder they are
seen as a needless burden; the one service they could render
is to quietly disappear, at least from view.
In the world of producers, the poor were currently unemployed
producers to be called to active service when affairs brightened
up. Keeping them ready for that service was an investment
the soundness of which no one would deny. Long before that
curious phrase had been invented, collectivelyfunded provision
for the (temporarily) indolent was a question 'beyond left
and right'.
In the world of consumers, the poor who are currently un-performing
consumer duties are, purely and simply, 'flawed consumers'
and flawed beyond redemption (and vice versa: those who
cannot behave as the right and proper consumer should consider
themselves, and are viewed by others, as poor). Affairs
may hum up in the future, but by no stretch of imagination
will the poor be called then to active consumer service.
Investing in their survival means money wasted; it may be
called for by charitable impulses or for the sake of peace
and quiet - but 'economic sense' it most certainly makes
not. Such investing will only prolong, with little prospect
of ever stopping, the frownedupon procedure of withdrawing
money from the commodity market - the only site where spending
money does make economic sense … And so, in stark opposition
to the society of producers, cutting down on collectively-funded
lifelines for the (permanently) indolent is a question 'beyond
left and right'. The presence of the poor is therefore widely
felt as an unredeemed and unredeemable liability. A sore
in the eyes of consumers, they are chased out of the streets.
A sore in the eyes of the politicians, they are chased out
of the alltoo- visible statistics of social welfare expenditures
into the much-less-visible statistics of business subsidies.
All in all, it is not poverty that the wars are waged against,
but the 'problem of the poor'.
Harm is done to the poor - but it is society as a whole
that is harmed in the result. The Welfare State promoted
and sustained the principle of collective responsibility
for individual wellbeing, of collective insurance against
individual misfortune. Handouts to the poor, or bribing
private companies to assist in the effort of making the
poor invisible, saps and discredits that principle. The
poor may be disinherited and feel resented and excluded
- but all the rest of us lose the feeling of community in
the process.
Given your understanding of the new plight of the poor as
flawed consumers, how do you interpret the persistence of
the work ethic in New Labour's 'war against poverty'? Most
notable here is Labour's policy of Welfare to Work and its
extension of the 'New Deal' across the working population.
The 2001 manifesto states: 'With Labour, the welfare state
helps people into work, makes work pay, supports them at
work and demands responsibilities in return. Our ambition
is full employment in every region - good for the economy,
good for social justice'. This is presented as a virtuous
circle whereby The New Deal leads to 'real jobs, a lower
benefits bill and higher tax receipts'. In unpacking this
'virtuous circle' how do you understand the political function
of the work ethic in a society where business and the economy
no longer seem to require full time mass employment?
By widespread consent of the analysts, the programme 'welfare
to workfare' originated in the USA and was mainly motivated
by actuarian motives. It did not lead to raising the living
standards of the poor, let alone curtailing the spread and
the depth of poverty. It only removed the costs of repairing
or mitigating the social effects of the 'deregulated' labour
market from the rubric of social assistance - unemployment
benefits in the first place - and transferred them to another:
business subsidies and tax allowances, thereby making the
true extent of unemployment and so of the magnitude of the
deregulated economy's malfunctioning less easy to assess
and monitor. Such a transfer of funds and responsibilities
resulted in a further lowering of the living standards of
the poor and, in addition, in the practical dismantling
of the safety net; the certainty of social assistance has
vanished, replaced by the vagaries of the fluid and notoriously
unstable market. There is no better (and more cruel) method
of making labour 'flexible' - that is submissive to the
caprices of wouldbe employers - than (to use Pierre Bourdieu's
expression) existential precariousness generated and continuously
deepened by the refusal of a guaranteed living minimum -
that original idea, and the highest achievement, of the
welfare state grounded in Beveridge's principles.
The 'workfare' meant to fill the gap left by withdrawn social
wages proved to be not just poorly paid, but precarious
in the extreme: short-term, easily revocable, offering no
stability grounded in contractual obligations and no prospect
of rising skills and career progress. This fragile character
of employment made employees helpless to resist the employers'
conditions, however harsh they were; it virtually eliminated
the tried and tested methods of workers' self-defence and
discouraged all forms of collective action, and thus it
further atomised whatever was left of once solidary workers'
ranks, affecting not just the former recipients of welfare
but the established workforce. As a result, the gap between
the incomes of the rich and the poor has acquired formidable
proportions. Richard Rorty, keen and conscientious observer
of trends in American life, expects '75 per cent of Americans
will find their standard of living steadily shrinking'.
Ever more families - including those previously considered
staunchly middle-class - are reduced to a 'humiliating,
hand-to-mouth existence', and are 'constantly tormented
by fears of wage rollbacks and downsizing'. Seventy-two
per cent of Americans now think that 'layoffs and loss of
jobs in this country will continue indefinitely'.
There is another transfer of funds hidden behind the 'welfare
to workfare' policy: from social provision to expenditures
on law-and-order and punitive organs, signalling the overall
trend to the criminalisation of poverty. In New York for
instance, in the five years to 1999 the police budget rose
by 40 per cent, and the police force by 12,000 officers,
while the social service budget went down by 30 per cent
and the number of social workers by 8000. In California,
the penitentiary budget rose between 1975 and 1999 from
$200 millions to $4.3 billions, while the sums dedicated
to social assistance fell by 41 per cent. In Loïc Wacquant's
view, there is a close correlation (and probably causal
connection) between the number of people serving prison
sentences, degree of labour market deregulation and the
extent of income differentials. In view of all that, invocations
to the work ethic seem mostly instrumental, when used in
connection with curtailing collective insurance against
individual misfortune - that cornerstone of the welfare
state. The new deregulated labour market promotes everything
but the dedication and workmanship that the work ethic -
making work into a vocation - was meant to cultivate.
Citizenship
In both WCP and In Search of Politics you
put forward the 'irresponsible' idea of a universal basic
income as a possible means of mitigating the insecurity
of today's labour market. While you advocate the various
moral, social and economic arguments for decoupling income
entitlement from income earning capacity, you go further
in making a specifically political argument in favour of
the basic income. Why do you make this political move and
how is it related to your wider understanding of citizenship?
I am afraid we have moved (been moved, or moved ourselves)
a long distance away from an ability to understand what
it means to secure, by joint consent and shared effort,
a secure and dignified life to all - which a 'basic income'
could be a giant step towards. We find the idea difficult
to comprehend, since over the years we have heard all around
that welfare provisions should be 'targeted on those who
need them most'. That phrase is but a 'politically corrected'
(more exactly: varnished) way to say that we have abandoned
the high ambitions of our fathers and turned back to the
idea of charity, that pregnant-with-humiliation idea against
which the advocates of the welfare state rebelled.
That the poor need to be helped needs no argumentation.
Neither does the moral duty to mitigate their suffering.
But the idea of the welfare state, though most of us have
forgotten it by now, was about more, much more. It was about
everyone deserving the care of the community, not only when
they fell on hard times, but because of being a citizen
of the state that belonged to all its citizen equally. The
critics of the welfare state point out that welfare assistance
stigmatises its recipients; but we have made it stigmatising
- through neverending chains of ever stricter 'means tests',
surreptitiously transforming rights into handouts, casting
on the 'targets' an authoritatively endorsed suspicion of
indolence, ill will, work-shyness and cheating, and shifting
the blame for ill fortune on those who suffer it. As in
Samuel Butler's Erewhon, ill fortune has become a crime,
and the gravest crime of them all. 'Targeted' assistance
splits and antagonises: it sets 'people who give' against
those who 'take'. 'Basic income' is, on the contrary, an
idea of effacing the division between givers and takers
and dissolving the very distinction between giving and taking
in the vocation of the citizen. It is meant to make us all
'stakeholders' of the state-national community. It is meant
to unite, not to divide, and above all to make public issues
into genuinely shared issues, of everybody's interest, commanding
everybody's attention and calling for everybody's contribution.
One may say that it can give the status of active citizen
the tangible materiality it presently sorely lacks, and
by the same token open a way to the restoration of the link
between private concerns and public issues, which has been
brutally broken in the years of the neo-liberal craze. Perhaps
it may even help us all to recall the truth known already
to Aristotle, that there can be no 'good life' unless in
a good society.
This is what I mean by insisting that 'basic income' is
not just a way of resolving notorious problems of social
welfare; it is a way to the restoration of a fully-fledged,
vigorous, engaged citizenship; and to the recognition that
the country is a shared property of all its citizens, for
which all citizens bear responsibility; it is also a stimulus
to act on that recognition.
Your argument here raises the question of the relationship
between a government's political vision/policy and the conception
of citizenship it seeks to embody and promote. I'd like
to throw out a couple of recent quotes from the Government
to help ask how you see this relationship articulated by
New Labour:
"I want every young person to hear about business and
enterprise in school; every teacher to be able to communicate
the virtues and potential of business and enterprise; and
I want every community to see business leaders as role models"
- Gordon Brown, January 2001
In October 2001 the DTI launched the Confident Consumer
programme, which will help 'vulnerable adults become confident
consumers'. The tutor-led interactive CD-Rom aims to: give
young people and adults the skills, knowledge and confidence
they need to be discerning consumers; help combat social
exclusion; and seek to empower young adults and enable them
to play an active and fulfilling role in society.
How, given your claim that 'the more skilful the consumer
the more inept the citizen', do you interpret Labour's elevation
of business, enterprise and consumerism to the core virtues
of its political vision? Is it correct to see here an attempt
to promote citizenship through the virtues of business and
consumerism, or is there simply no conception of citizenship
operating at all?
The quotes speak for themselves; they leave little to the
imagination and little if any room for interpretative disputes.
Take Gordon Brown's ideas first. They brandish businessmen
as the role model of the 'good' (decent? dignified?) life;
they confuse (by design rather than default) 'good community'
with 'good life' so understood; they sign a blank cheque
for whatever businessmen (notorious for their changing moods
and fashions) may consider today or tomorrow as right and
proper; they surrender, before the battle has started, the
political leaders' prerogative (and not so long ago the
duty) to design and to submit to the citizens' judgement
the model of the good society and of the right order of
values - they cede to the market operators; and they propose
that teachers should be the servants of business, which
is only too well known for its lack of interest in all undertakings
and purposes that 'make no economic sense' (that is, unless
there should be a need to fight such undertakings - but
Gordon Brown assures that the government would take proper
care of pre-empting such a need).
Take the DTI 'Confident Consumer' programme second. The
document you quote is nothing but the continuation of John
Major's infamous series of 'citizen charters', with the
use of but slightly 'politically corrected' vocabulary (see
the clearly out-of-place reference to 'fighting social exclusion').
It reduces the citizen to a consumer: the citizen's right
to the offer of good commodity and after-sale service, the
citizen's duty to provide a 'consumer-led exit from economic
depressions' yet to come. And it propagates and perpetuates
the damaging (to society, and to each one of its members)
illusion that consumer confidence (a lie here: there can
be no confidence without resources allowing for confident
action) is the cure for shared and individually experienced
troubles. Though, as far as I can remember, John Major never
mustered enough guts to proclaim the consumer to be the
end-point and purpose of 'becoming adult', or that consumerism
is a cure for vulnerability. His charters were inspired
by the belief (and a correct one) that being left to the
vagaries of the market is a foolproof recipe for - not against
- vulnerability.
The truth is that the consumer's skills, indeed, rise at
the same time as the citizen's ineptitude and, ultimately,
the citizen's impotence. The 'consumer's skill' consists
in seeking biographical solutions to socially-produced afflictions;
to use a metaphor - it consists in fighting a nuclear threat
by purchasing family nuclear shelter, or pollution of drinking-water
supplies by finding a reliable brand of bottled water. Consumer
skills emphatically do not include the art of translating
private troubles into public issues, and public interests
into individual rights and duties - the art that constitutes
the citizen and holds together the polity as the congregation
of citizens.
I suspect that such fully-fledged citizenship is not the
first (perhaps any at all) priority for a government busy
shedding its traditional responsibilities, 'out-sourcing'
its social obligations and privatising conditions of human
life out of the reach of political, democratic control.
What the quoted documents do is empty the idea of citizenship
of its political substance and sell the empty shell that
remains after that sleight-of-hand.
Political apathy?
Reacting to lowest electoral turnout in Britain since
1918, The House of Commons Public Administration Committee
has called for a 'Democracy Commission' to tackle what it
has called a widespread crisis of 'civic disengagement'.
Yet the period 1997-2001 has seen the rise of direct action
and protest across the political and social spectrum, from
the 'anti globalisation' movement to the fuel protests and
anti-paedophile protests. Firstly, is 'civic disengagement'
the legitimate birth child of a government that reduces
citizens to consumers? Secondly, how do you think the disappearance
and search for the type of public space you discuss in In
Search of Politics has come into play with the upsurge of
protest movements? Does the paradox between 'civic disengagement'
with regard to government and the rise of protest movements
within civil society render the current usage of the term
'political apathy' problematic?
It is by now quite a common view in political science that
there are two ways to make an attitude felt on the political
stage (as in the consumer market): voice (making a nuisance)
and exit (voting with feet). Since the distinction was made,
the two strategies have been seen as alternatives: either-or.
It so happens now that voice - to be heard and listened
to - must accompany an exit. And nothing sounds as loudly
as the stampede of disenchanted voters … The voters
had to desert the elections in droves for a 'Democracy Commission'
to be established … as long as they were made inside
the corridors of power, the voices were (and continue to
be) easily silenced. What are the whips for? What is much
more difficult to make inaudible are the voices that bypass
the whips; voices that do not expect an answer from the
powers that be.
Fast falling participation in the established political
procedure is not a peculiarly British phenomenon. It is
happening all over Europe. Human memory getting in our information
society shorter by the year, the cycle repeats itself with
awesome regularity: dissent with a government that has outlived
its ingenuity and run out of ideas prompts the mass voter
to seek redress in an untried alternative: the elections
leading to a change of the ruling party are massively attended.
And then it becomes clear that the political party at the
helm has changed, but the policy has not, and that the prime
reasons for wanting change have not been addressed. Re-election
is therefore performed by a much reduced electorate. One
term, though, is not enough to re-forge disenchantment into
a desire of change. More time is needed to forget the last
disappointment and invest orphaned hopes in the competitors.
The cycle hides a rather consistent trend: the progressive
uncoupling of the electors' problems from elected institutions.
There are established political organs seeking support and
the nation's troubles seeking redress - and they meet on
ever less frequent occasions. Governments, having ceded
most of their resources to unelected and politically uncontrolled
forces, have less and less to offer. Above all, they can
do pretty little to allay what haunts the electors most:
the uncertainty of the future and insecurity of the present.
And having ceded most of their orthodox function to the
self-same unelected and politically uncontrolled market
forces, they do not need any 'political mobilisation' of
citizenship, and so do not need a political dialogue either:
'focus groups' will do splendidly, thank you.
The roots of uncertainty and insecurity lie, anyway, well
outside the reach of national governments. They are global,
and located in the 'space of flows' (Manuel Castells' expression)
- flows that governments, confined in the 'space of places',
have no means to arrest or even slow down. Directing complaints
about the vagaries and caprices of global forces to national
governments would be akin to a rain dance in a scorched
field. Alongside the loss of interest in political dialogue
by governments we witness therefore the loss of interest
in governments by the governed. What else would you expect
from humans blessed/cursed with reason?
There are not, and hardly could be, local solutions to global
problems. Globally incubated problems need to be tackled
globally. The global 'space of flows', in which politics
could be effective, is thoroughly cleansed of politics -
that has been entrapped in the 'space of places', where
it is doomed to remain ineffective. We have no 'global civil
society', no 'global legal code', no 'global judiciary',
no 'global ethics', and most conspicuously no 'global democracy'
(beware of confusing inter-state bargaining with global
politics!) And bridges leading from the present-day political
'balkanisation' of the Earth to any form of politics matching
the present-day globality of economics are, frankly speaking,
nowhere in sight. The floating, short-lived ad hoc coalitions
of selected states patched together for the duration of
successive crises reinforce rather than mitigate the political
fragmentation.
Well, modern states did not emerge from inter-communal conferences,
or as federations of parishes and townships. They were born
and grew up in dogfights with 'local particularisms', and
at the expense of expropriating the locally based powers
of a greater part of their pre-modern authority. One wonders
whether the same operation won't have to be repeated, two
centuries later - but this time on a global scale. I suspect
that non-governmental movements and organisations, deliberately
ignoring state boundaries and paying little attention to
state institutions, could be seen as manifestations of that
premonition, and as experimental, trial-and-error attempts
to act on it. There is a genuine, and growing, 'civic disengagement'
from 'politics as we know it' - the kind of politics that
has been developed through modern history to fit and serve
the political integration into 'nation-states'. But it would
be wrong to identify present trends as a retreat from politics
as such. Political interests, hopes and postulates, uncoupled
from the extant political institutions, are these days seeking
new havens in which to anchor. They will have to confront
at some point the fact that the sought-after havens have
not been yet constructed - and before casting anchor, they
must be built first. The agora meeting the needs of the
globalised planet would be a site of translating individual
and local problems into global issues …
To get to the point where we can think about finding
and building global collective agencies to translate private
troubles into public concerns, do we need to reframe the
current parameters of debate on Globalisation and Social
Democracy? Alternatively put, can the problems generated
by the political economy of uncertainty be adequately addressed
within the discourse of the Third Way - which has been presented
as the most viable form of social democracy in a global
era. If not, what do you see as being the orientation points
in terms of ethical and political principles that could
help us reframe the debate to address the cycle of insecurity/uncertainty/
disengagement?
I confess that I have some quite elementary difficulty with
grasping the meaning of the 'Third Way'. I remember a joke
made in communist Poland at a time when the country's rulers
were trying desperately to make the ailing economy a bit
less wasteful: 'there is one pair of rails on which trains
run in one direction, and another pair alongside on which
they run in the opposite direction. The right rail of the
first pair and the left rail of the second make another
pair - which stays wasted. What if we put it to work and
send trains in the third direction?!'
But seriously: I guess what advocates of the 'third way'
have in mind is to use capitalist tools (motivation of behaviour
by a mixture of economic necessity generated by uncertainty
of livelihood and a desire for gain) to promote socialist
ends (equity in human dignity achieved through collectively
guaranteed security of individual livelihood). Whether such
a feat can be performed is a moot question. I have my doubts,
and the most crucial among them comes from the awareness
that when you reduce the toolbox contents to capitalist
tools alone, what is being promoted is a world-view and
life politics which makes actors uninterested in collective
benefits and responsibilities, incapable of caring about
the first and taking up the second. Goals draw a distinction
between suitable and unsuitable tools; and tools determine
the range of works that can be performed.
This is what I guess. What I suspect in addition is that
the 'third way' is, for the formerly socialist left (one
never hears that expression used on the right of the political
spectrum), the 'politically correct' form of announcing
consent to the advances of the global juggernaut. One can
distinctly hear the TINA ('There Is No Alternative) axiom
behind every sentence of the 'third way' gospel. TINA in
our time means 'we cannot act against world finances and
world trade's unwritten but mercilessly exacted rules'.
So we have to play by the global powers' book - lower taxes
and cut all public expenditure except subsidies for private
enterprise, put as much as possible of the national wealth
beyond the reach of the citizens' political control, keep
dissent at bay and muzzle trade unions, and otherwise make
our land yet more hospitable, inviting and enticing for
nomadic capital - lest it pitch its tents among the next-door
neighbours … Well, I admit, this looks like a logically
cohesive strategy - but why call it 'the third way' ?!
I admit as well that people paving the way for the global
juggernaut (whether they wave the face-saving 'third way'
banner or not) have a point. The pressures of an already
global capitalism are overwhelming (the planet is just about
to turn into one huge and indivisible playground of market
forces, with no shelter left) and (in the short term at
least) the citizens of the countries that refuse to play
will have to pay the price of disobedience. Given that we
are all now, willy-nilly, players, stakes and pawns in that
global game, we are all dependent on each other, and from
that global inter-dependence there is no retreat. Karl Marx
charged with utopianism those early socialists who wished
to declare the capitalist departure null and void and go
back to the comfy/friendly guild and parish to start socialist
reform from there. I believe that the same charge can be
made against those among us who hope to annul our new global
interdependence and call Israel back to its nation-state
tents … Capitalism has now bolted from its nation-state
stables and into the global space, and to capture it once
more, tamed and drilled to obey ethical and legal rules,
one must follow it into that space.
Marx also explained why it is imperative for human survival
to reform the capitalist way of running human affairs: that
way passes no efficiency and morality tests. It is wasteful
of natural and human resources and blind to the suffering
it causes. Nothing has changed since Marx passed his verdict
- though both the waste and the suffering have now acquired
global proportions. Finally, Marx also suggested the reasons
why running human affairs the capitalist way was both uneconomical
and unethical. It was, he said, because our tools of action
were by their capacity and their consequences social, while
their management was private. We may say that today the
wastefulness and immorality of the new world-wide capitalist
disorder comes from the fact that our tools of action are
by their capacity and their consequences global, but they
are managed locally.
Nineteen- and twentieth-century socialism was a counterculture
of capitalism entrenched in its nation-state fortresses.
It was a counterculture since, having approved of the improvement
of human conditions capitalism promised, it criticised the
way of implementing that goal practised by capitalism. I
would say now that contemporary socialism cannot be but
a counterculture of capitalism freely roaming in the sorely
under-regulated, ethically and politically uncontrolled
global no-man's, or frontier, land. And I would say that
these days the road socialism can follow cannot but lead
to the raising of democracy and politics to the global level
at which capital seeks and enjoy its freedom from human
ideas of decency and justice. In our shared planetary home,
neither decency nor justice can be secure if confined within
one state's, or several states', borders.
References
Bauman, Z. (1998), Freedom, Milton Keynes: Open University
Press.
Bauman, Z. (1994), Alone Again - ethics after certainty,
London: Demos.
Bauman, Z. (1998), Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Milton
Keynes: Open University
Press.
Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization - The Human Consequences,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Z. (1999), In Search of Politics, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Tester, K. & Bauman, Z. (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt
Bauman, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Zygmunt Bauman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology
at the Universities of Leeds and Warsaw.
Daniel Leighton is a recent politics graduate from
the University of Leeds.
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