[R-G] "The Left That Is No Longer Capable of Providing Protection": Zygmunt Bauman interviewed by Elisabetta Ambrosi

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Bauman-interview.php>
"The Left that is no longer capable of providing protection"

[ IT ]
Zygmunt Bauman interviewed by Elisabetta Ambrosi

European citizens today are frightened, fearful, and in search of
protection for themselves and for their countries. They increasingly
vote for political coalitions promising protection from the effects of
globalisation. Is it therefore fair to state that the real criteria on
which choices are made in general elections are no longer the (old)
distinctions between the right and the left, but rather the position a
political party assumes with regards to global change? This is the
subject discussed in this interview with Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist
of Polish origin, who explains that the Left has lost its identity and
forgotten its commitment to defend the poor; hence the "no global"
logo has become the prerogative of the Right.

"How can one possible imagine, as the Left did, that it would be
possible to stem the tide of unbridled globalisation of capital,
trade, finances, industry, criminality, drug and weapon trafficking,
terrorism or migration of victims of all those forces - while having
at their disposal solely the means of one single State...", says the
author of books such as Liquid Fear and In search of Politics: "The
solution, if at all conceivable, is a remarriage of the now divorced
power and politics - but this time on a higher, global, planetary,
all-humanity level. All forces freely floating together in the global
"no-man's land" space, however antagonistic they might be to each
other, seem to be similarly hostile to the imposition of 'one law for
all'. Sooner or later, the 'answer to globalisation' will have to be
given. The worry, though, is how many human casualties and how and how
much human misery will result from our inability/ unwillingness to
give it sooner until it is given – later… ".

[Q] With the Northern League's victory the Italian elections seem to
indicate that the real criteria deciding political elections, those in
Italy for example (maybe also in Britain?), are no longer those of the
Right or the Left but rather a political party's position regards to
globalization. The main values expressed by the Italian Right are: the
battle against globalization, defending protectionism, dealing with
illegal immigration and protecting the nation's borders; the
newly-created Democratic Party instead is open to liberalization, free
markets, immigration, etc.

[A] Your conclusion (that the electors' choices are no longer between
'right' and 'left') is absolutely correct. I would only add that this
judgment refers to the choice between political parties presenting
themselves to the electors (or presented by the media) as respectively
'right' or 'left'. Criteria of such assignment or self-assignment are,
increasingly, doubtful: if you take this into account, your conclusion
may no longer feel so paradoxical! Two criteria of 'left credentials'
are currently most often applied – and both are misleading. The first
follows the line of the 'Third Way' thinking: to be 'left' means to be
able to do more thoroughly the job that the 'right' demands to be done
but fails to do properly. It was Tony Blair's 'New Labour' that laid
institutional foundations under Margaret Thatcher inchoate ideas of
'there is no society, only individuals and families', of her rampant
individualization, privatization and deregulation.

It was the French Socialist Party that did most for the dismantling of
the French social state. And as to the 'postcommunist' parties in
East-Central Europe, renamed as 'social democrats' - wary as they are
of being accused of their still un-extinguished devotion to their
communist past - they are the most enthusiastic and vociferous
advocates and most consistent practitioners of freedom for the rich
and leaving the poor to their own care… The second criterion is to
assemble the notion of 'the Left' out of the 'rainbow coalition'
patched of the scattered and variegated leftovers, rejects and refuse
of the political stage dominated by the agenda scripted by the Right.
The 'substance' behind the notion is in this case purely negative,
lacking an inner core and cohesion. Being rejected or
not-fully-accepted by the right-wing scriptwriters and directors is
the sole adhesive deemed/hoped to hold 'the Left' together. This has
been recently, for instance, the Italian or to somewhat lesser extent
the French way.

[Q] Is there another way of grasping and understanding this phenomenon
affecting the Left?

[A] This other way starts from two essential assumptions that lie
behind the specifically 'left' perception of human condition, its
prospects and untapped possibilities. The first of the two assumptions
asserts that it is the duty of the community to insure its individual
members against individually suffered misfortune. And the second avers
that just as the carrying power of a bridge needs to be measured by
the power of the weakest pillar, so the quality of a society ought to
be measured of the quality of life of its weakest members. Those two
constant, non-negotiable assumptions set the Left on a perpetual
collision course with the realities of human condition under the rule
of capitalism – charging as they must the capitalist order with the
twin sins of wastefulness and immorality manifested in social
injustice. The point is, though, that if judged in the light of those
two assumptions, most established parties currently denominated as
'the Left' hardly pass the test.

Over more than a century the distinctive mark of the Left was to
believe that it is the sacrosanct duty of community to care for and to
assist all its members, collectively, against the powerful forces they
are unable to fight alone. Social-democratic hopes to perform that
task used to be however invested in the modern state, powerful and
ambitious enough to limit the damage perpetuated by the free play of
the markets by forcing the economic interests to respect the political
will of the nation and the ethical principles of national community.
But nation-states are no longer as powerful as they used to be or
hoped to become. The political states once claiming full military,
economic and cultural sovereignty over their territory and its
population are no longer sovereign in any of those aspects of common
life. The condition sine qua non of an effective political control
over economic forces is that political and economic institutions
operate at the same level – this is not however the case today.
Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and
life chances of most our contemporaries, have evaporated from the
nation-state into the global space, where they float free from
political control: politics has remained as local as before and
therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One
of the effects of globalization is the divorce between power (in the
sense of the German Macht – capacity to have things done) and
politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space,
and politics deprived of power in the local space.

[Q] What in this sense is your opinion regards to this strange
turnaround, resulting in Left-wing liberal parties increasingly
defending open markets and globalization, while the Conservatives
appear to be doing the opposite?

[A] The development I was speaking about above left the socialists
without the crucial (the only?) instrument intended to be used in the
implementation of their project. Simply, a 'social state' guaranteeing
existential security to all can no longer be constructed, nor survive,
in the framework of the nation-state (the forces that would have to be
tamed for that purpose are not in the nation-state command). Attempts
to use the weakened state for that purpose were in most cases foiled
under the pressure of exterritorial, global economic forces or the
markets. Increasingly, social democrats revealed their sudden
inability to deliver on their promise. Hence the desperate effort to
find another trademark and legitimation; Italian Democratic Party or
for that matter Polish 'Left and Democrats' exemplify the destination
to which that search leads: total absence of trademark and
legitimation… In that ultimate form, the distant offspring of the past
Left can count only on the failures of their adversaries as their sole
electoral chance, and on the disaffected and angry victims of those
failures as their only electoral constituency.

The first collateral casualty was the issue of 'existential security'.
That past jewel in the Left's crown has been dropped by the parties
wrongly called 'Left'; it now lies, so to speak, on the street – from
which it has been promptly picked up by forces equally wrongly called
'Right'. The Italian 'Lega' is now promising to restore the
existential security - which the Democratic Party promises to further
undermine by more deregulation of capital and trade markets and more
flexibility of the labour market, and by a yet wider opening of the
country doors to the mysterious, unpredictable and uncontrollable
global forces (the doors which - as it knows from own bitter
experience – cannot be locked at any rate). Only, fraudulently, it
interprets the causes of existential insecurity differently from the
Left of the past: not as a product of the capitalist free-for-all
(freedom for the high and mighty, impotence for the lowly and
resource-less), but as the outcome of the well-off Lombardians needing
to share their wealth with indolent Calabrians or Sicilians and of the
need, common to them all, to share their means of living with the
foreigners (forgetting that the immigration of millions of ancestors
of the 21st Century Italians to the US and Latin America enormously
contributed to their present riches).

[Q] People, Italians in particular, are very frightened by change, and
most change is linked to globalization. Immigration, security issues,
competition between rich and poor countries putting pressure on
Italian businesses, unemployment, an increase in poorly paid and
temporary jobs, and inflation. These, perhaps mistakenly, are all seen
as the consequences of globalization; it is however very difficult for
ordinary people to understand the advantages of globalization. Are we
sure - as some pro-globalization observers say (Stiglitz, for example)
- that the good aspects of globalization can also benefit the lower
middle-classes and workers, for whom globalization (wrongly or
rightly) has only resulted in insecure jobs, increased criminality,
and uncertainty? Or should we now admit that globalization is not
necessarily an advantage for all of us?

[A] There is an English saying that leopard can't change its spots;
well, the fact is that spots may remain little changed, but leopards
wearing them may change, as they are now, on the left and on the right
alike. 'Right' is by definition a conservative force, defending the
status quo or restoring tradition. But by now it is some form of
responsibility of the community for the plight of its members that is
in Europe the 'status quo' and the best remembered and missed
'tradition': the real sense of conservative attitude is an intention
to save this status quo and this tradition from destruction… The big
question, however, is whether any political force can stem the tide of
unbridled globalization of capital, trade, finances, industry,
criminality, drug and weapon trafficking, terrorism or migration of
victims of all those forces – while having at their disposal solely
the means of one single state… Well, they may try – as the North Korea
does, or China, or Burma, or Cuba, or Kyrgyzstan – with the
consequences for their residents only too well known to all of us and
resented by most…

Globally produced problems can be only solved globally. Local changes
of governments won't bring us closer to their solution. The only
thinkable solution to the globally caused tide of existential
insecurity is the matching of powers of the already globalized forces
by the powers of politics, popular representation, law, jurisdiction.
The solution, if at all conceivable, is a re-marriage of the now
divorced power and politics – but this time on a higher, global,
planetary, all-humanity level. But we are at best at the very
beginning of that process, and most of the odds seem to militate
against its conclusion; turning one's back to global affairs
(including global misery), locking the doors and keeping the strangers
outside, drawing more borders and multiplying neo-feudal estates,
won't bring the improvement of security any closer. The more
pulverised is local politics, the smaller (and so weaker) its
agencies, the more indomitable and invincible become the already
global powers that can ignore at will any kind of borders or any local
habits and wishes.

[Q] The most important issue concerns security in cities. While
immigrants of course, have the right to search for a better life in
other countries, and by doing so also raise our standards of living,
how is it that (Left-wing) politicians appear to ignore how people
really live in the suburbs of Rome, Milan or Naples, where life is
grim and dangerous. It also appears to be pointless to tell those
frightened members of society that globalization is good. Which
immigration policies might address legitimate fears within society?

[A] Fear and the city are Siamese twins since the beginning of
modernity (remember the Italian film 'Neapolitans in Milan'?) City is
a place where strangers live among the strangers while remaining
strangers to each other (this is a curse, but also a blessing of the
city life… People from tranquil rural backwaters flock to the city in
search of excitement, opportunities, adventure). And strangers are
incarnations of the Unknown, and so the source of anxiety and
apprehension. The more the strangers are strange and the less we are
used to their presence in the city, the more fearsome they appear. And
so it is the latecomers who are 'naturally' targeted as the outlet for
our resentment of fear-bearing insecurity. But living among strangers
was a prolific source of fear long before the present wave of
migration and the current 'diasporisation' of big and not so big urban
centres on all continents of the planet. The very English, but bizarre
folk residing in the East End was already in the 19th century a
constant source of terror for the better-off Londoners able to shelter
in the prototypes of our 'gated communities', fortify them and pay the
police force to guard the entry. Only the language used then to
express their fears was different from the presently fashionable:
better-off Londoners spoke of 'dangerous classes' and the
'anti-conspiracy' policy, not of 'foreigners' and 'anti-immigration'
policy'.

If life in the peripheries of Rome, Milan or Naples is indeed 'awful
and dangerous', as it is, it is not because people forced to live
there in awful conditions and exposed to danger happen to have skin of
different hues and go to temples on different days of the week. Life
is awful and dangerous because those Italian city peripheries, just
like banlieus of Paris or Marseille or the urban ghettoes of Chicago
or Washington, serve as dustbins for rejected, humiliated and wasted
humans exiled from the 'greater society'; men and women whom their
shared fate notoriously divides instead of uniting. Whatever else they
do and feel, humiliated people would never respect their neighbours,
other rejects of society who like they have been denied human dignity
and right to human treatment. It would be utterly dishonest to blame
the 'immigrant problem' for their plight. Our ancestors charged the
social rejects – the unemployed, the miserable – with contemplating a
rebellion and threatening society with revolution. No one however
expects a unified resistance against the present sources of social
evil to come from the 'peripheries'… Only the beggars, the drug
pushers, the muggers and juvenile delinquents are expected to be
groomed there and arrive from there to here…

[Q] A further reflection arises from the fact that, while on one hand
no-global political forces are winning, on the other, the democratic
and liberal 'no global' message was unsuccessful. In the last Italian
elections, the dramatically no-global and anti-global radical left was
completely defeated, we could say nullified. For the first time in
Italian history Communists and Socialists were voted out of
Parliament. Has the no-global vote become a right-wing vote? Why? Is
it because of excessively emphasised ideology, too radical for a
moderate country like Italy? And what is the situation elsewhere in
the world?

[A] Globalization may be, as you (in my view rightly) suggest, at the
core of the present troubles and of the impossibility to go on as we
went before, choosing between the same targets and evaluating the
status quo and the future prospects by the same criteria – but I do
not think that mass electorate is in their choices guided by their
attitudes towards globalization. At least as the bulk of the
electorate is concerned, political leaders, present and aspiring, are
judged by the severity they manifest in the course of the 'security
auction'. They try to outdo each other in the promises of being tough
on the culprits of insecurity – genuine or putative, but such as are
near, within reach, can be fought and defeated. Forza Italia or the
Lega wouldn't win election under the slogan of fighting globalization
and global corporations… They may win elections promising to defend
the hard-working Lombardians against being robbed by lazy Calabrians,
to defend all of them among newcomers that remind them of the
shakiness of their own position, and to defend everybody against
obtrusive beggars, stalkers, prowlers and muggers. The threats of
globalization will emerge from all that unscathed.

[Q] The last Italian election has shown that workers, and also
industrial workers, vote increasingly less for the Left (even if in
the States and in Great Britain for example African and Asians vote
mostly for Democrats). Why is this in your opinion? Do you think there
is a Democrat responsibility (here in Italy many political observers -
and electors of course – have said that the radical Left was far more
engaged in drinking champagne than protecting poor people), or are
there broader economical, social and cultural reasons?

[A] Yes, there are broader reasons… Today's 'workers' or 'industrial
workers' are not the same social category as fifty years ago. Only
small and shrinking minority is attached to the companies for which
they work 'permanently', 'for life'; only minority have stable jobs
and anticipate that 'we will meet again, and again and again' – only a
minority therefore have a stimulus to develop mutual bonds and
loyalties. Most importantly, collective bargaining, collective labour
contracts and collective endorsed terms of employment are all in
demise, victims of deregulation. Rising majority of employees are now
'flexible' workers, who could hardly invest their life plans in the
(expectedly stable and durable) firms (which now are likely to merge,
be 'taken over', or declare insolvency) and in the company of their
workmates (whose composition is in constant flux). What used to be, by
the logic of their social setting, a 'working class', has been
atomized, and has turned into loose and fluid aggregate of individual
wage-earners in competition, rather than in solidarity, with each
other. The new situation does not favour joining forces, marching arm
to arm, class loyalties, common causes… It does not favour either the
search and the struggle for a more beneficial 'modus vivendi' with the
employers – who may stop offering employment or just disappear at any
moment. There is little chance therefore for 'class politics'. It
would be strange indeed if the individuals currently employed as
industrial workers made their political decisions in reference to
their class status.

[Q] To conclude, I would like to ask you how a political force should
articulate its political message about globalization. How is it
possible to truly answer people's fears, while not proposing a
conservative program, and accepting global challenges? The answer to
globalization is a very complex one, but politics rejects complexity,
does it not? Moreover, why is this task more difficult for the Left
than for the Right, and especially for the Democratic party in Italy,
which is more engaged in a process of change and of attempting to
become pro-reform than ideologically revolutionary?

[A] 'Answer to globalization' is not so much 'complicated', as it is
difficult to put in practice. It is relatively easy to say what needs
to be done; the real mystery is who is able (potent and determined
enough) to do it. As long as it remains 'wild', free-floating,
uncontrolled, globalization is bound to play havoc with human
projects, hopes and anticipations, and bring consequences more
reminiscent of a tsunami or an earthquake than of a motivated human
actions. Such consequences are unlikely to be mitigated, let alone
prevented, as long as there is no agency matching the territorial
reach and the powers of the already globalized powers. The snag,
however, is that all the odds seem to conspire against the emergence
of such agency.

Like in the 'Wild West' of the Hollywood westerns, where the rich
cattle barons and bandits, even if at war with each other, shared the
interest in continuation of the state of lawlessness and the absence
of firmly biding rules - all forces freely floating today in the
global 'no-man's land' space, however antagonistic they might be to
each other, seem to be similarly hostile to the imposition of 'one law
for all' or even making the globalization processes a bit less 'wild'
that they have been so far. Sooner or later, the 'answer to
globalization' will be given. The worry, though, is how many human
casualties and how and how much human misery will result from our
inability/ unwillingness to give it sooner until it is given – later…

27 May 2008

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>