Globalization

The Human Consequences

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745656953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Globalizzazione

'Globalization' is a word that is currently much in use. This book is an attempt to show that there is far more to globalization than its surface manifestations. Unpacking the social roots and social consequences of globalizing processes, this book disperses some of the mist that surrounds the term.

Alongside the emerging planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade and information flow, a 'localizing', space-fixing process is set in motion. What appears as globalization for some, means localization for many others; signalling new freedom for some, globalizing processes appear as uninvited and cruel fate for many others. Freedom to move, a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, quickly becomes the main stratifying factor of our times.

Neo-tribal and fundamentalist tendencies are as legitimate offspring of globalization as the widely acclaimed 'hybridization' of top culture - the culture at the globalized top. A particular reason to worry is the progressive breakdown in communication between the increasingly global and extra- territorial elites and ever more 'localized' majority. The bulk of the population, the 'new middle class', bears the brunt of these problems, and suffers uncertainty, anxiety and fear as a result.

This book is a major contribution to the unfolding debate about globalization, and as such will be of interest to students and professionals in sociology, human geography and cultural issues.

1

Time and Class

‘The company belongs to people who invest in it – not to its employees, suppliers, nor the locality in which it is situated.’¹ This is how Albert J. Dunlap, the celebrated ‘rationalizer’ of modern enterprise (a dépeceur —‘chopper’, ‘quarterer’, ‘dismemberer’ – in the juicy yet precise designation of the CNRS sociologist Denis Duclos)² summarized his creed in the self-congratulating report of his activities which Times Books published for the enlightenment and edification of all seekers of economic progress.

What Dunlap had in mind was not, of course, the simple question of ‘belonging’ as just another name for the purely legal issue of ownership, an issue hardly contested and even less in need of restating – let alone such an emphatic restating. What Dunlap had in mind was, mostly, what the rest of the sentence implied: that the employees, the suppliers and the spokesmen of the community have no say in the decisions that the ‘people who invest’ may take; and that the true decision-makers, the investors, have the right to dismiss out of hand, and to declare irrelevant and invalid, any postulates which such people may make concerning the way they run the company.

Let us note: Dunlap’s message is not a declaration of intent, but a statement of fact. Dunlap takes it for granted that the principle it conveys has passed all the tests which economic, political, social and any other realities of our times might have set or make proper to examine its viability. It has by now entered the family of self-evident truths which serve to explain the world while themselves needing no explanation; which help to assert things about the world while themselves no longer being seen as assertions, let alone contentious and arguable assertions.

There were times (one would say ‘not so long ago’, if not for the fast shrinking span of collective attention, which makes even a week not just a long time in politics, but an exceedingly long stretch in the life of human memory) when Dunlap’s proclamation would have seemed by no means obvious to all; when it would have sounded more like a war-cry or a battlefield report. In the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s war of annihilation launched against local self-government, businessman after businessman felt the need to climb rostrums of the Tory Annual Conference to hammer out again and again a message they must have thought to be in need of hammering out because of sounding uncanny and bizarre to yet untuned ears: the message that companies would gladly pay local taxes to support road building or sewage repairs which they needed, but that they saw no reason to pay for the support of the local unemployed, invalids and other human waste, for whose fate they did not feel like carrying a responsibility or assuming an obligation. But those were the early years of the war which has been all but won a mere two dozen years later, at the time Dunlap dictated his credo, which he could rightly expect every listener to share.

There is not much point in debating whether that war was malevolently and surreptitiously plotted in smoke-free company boardrooms, or whether the necessity of war action was visited on unsuspecting, peace-loving leaders of industry by changes brought about by a mixture of the mysterious forces of new technology and the new global competitiveness; or whether it was a war planned in advance, duly declared and with its goals clearly defined, or just a series of scattered and often unanticipated warlike actions, each necessitated by causes of its own. Whichever of the two was the case (there are good arguments to be advanced for each, but it may well be that the two accounts only seem to be in competition with each other), it is quite probable that the last quarter of the current century will go down in history as the Great War of Independence from Space. What happened in the course of that war was a consistent and relentless wrenching of the decision-making centres, together with the calculations which ground the decisions such centres make, free from territorial constraints – the constraints of locality.

Let us look more closely at Dunlap’s principle. Employees are recruited from the local population and – burdened as they might be by family duties, home ownership and the like – could not easily follow the company once it moves elsewhere. Suppliers have to deliver the supplies, and low transport costs give the local suppliers an advantage which disappears once the company changes its location. As to the ‘locality’ itself – it will, obviously, stay where it is and can hardly change its location, whatever the new address of the company. Among all the named candidates who have a say in the running of a company, only ‘people who invest’ – the shareholders – are in no way space-tied; they can buy any share at any stock-exchange and through any broker, and the geographical nearness or distance of the company will be in all probability the least important consideration in their decision to buy or sell.

In principle there is nothing space-determined in the dispersion of the shareholders. They are the sole factor genuinely free from spatial determination. And it is to them, and to them only, that the company ‘belongs’. It is up to them therefore to move the company wherever they spy out or anticipate a chance of higher dividends, leaving to all others – locally bound as they are – the task of wound-licking, damage-repair and waste-disposal. The company is free to move; but the consequences of the move are bound to stay. Whoever is free to run away from the locality, is free to run away from the consequences. These are the most important spoils of victorious space war.

Absentee landlords, mark II

In the post-space-war world, mobility has become the most powerful and most coveted stratifying factor; the stuff of which the new, increasingly world-wide, social, political, economic and cultural hierarchies are daily built and rebuilt. And to those at the top of the new hierarchy freedom to move brings advantages far beyond those short-listed in Dunlap’s formula. That formula takes note of, promotes or demotes only such competitors who may make themselves audible – those who can, and are likely to, voice their grievances and forge their complaints into claims. But there are other – also locally bound, cut-off and left-behind connections, on which Dunlap’s formula keeps silent because they are unlikely to make themselves heard.

The mobility acquired by ‘people who invest’ – those with capital, with money which the investment requires – means the new, indeed unprecedented in its radical unconditionally, disconnection of power from obligations: duties towards employees, but also towards the younger and weaker, towards yet unborn generations and towards the self-reproduction of the living conditions of all; in short, freedom from the duty to contribute to daily life and the perpetuation of the community. There is a new asymmetry emerging between exterritorial nature of power and the continuing territoriality of the ‘whole life’ – which the now unanchored power, able to move at short notice or without warning, is free to exploit and abandon to the consequences of that exploitation. Shedding the responsibility for the consequences is the most coveted and cherished gain which the new mobility brings to free-floating, locally unbound capital. The costs of coping with the consequences need not be now counted in the calculation of the ‘effectiveness’ of investment.

The new freedom of capital is reminiscent of that of the absentee landlords of yore, notorious for their much resented neglect of the needs of the populations which fed them. Creaming off the ‘surplus product’ was the sole interest the absentee landlords held in the existence of the land they owned. There is certainly some similarity here – but the comparison does not give full justice to the kind of freedom from worry and responsibility which the mobile capital of the late twentieth century acquired but the absentee landlords never could.

The latter could not exchange one land estate for another and so remained – however tenuously – tied to the locality from which they drew their life juices; that circumstance set a practical limit to the theoretically and legally unconstrained possibility of exploitation, lest the future flow of income might thin out or dry up completely. True, the real limits tended to be on the whole more severe than the perceived ones, and these in their turn were all too often more severe than the limits observed in practice – a circumstance which made absentee land-ownership prone to inflict irreparable damage upon soil fertility and agricultural proficiency in general, and which also made the fortunes of absentee landlords notoriously precarious, tending to decline over the generations. And yet there were genuine limits, which reminded of their presence all the more cruelly for being unperceived and not complied with. And a limit, as Alberto Melucci put it, ‘stands for confinement, frontier, separation; it therefore also signifies recognition of the other, the different, the irreducible. The encounter with otherness is an experience that puts us to a test: from it is born the temptation to reduce difference by force, while it may equally generate the challenge of communication, as a constantly renewed endeavour.’³

In contradistinction to the absentee landlords of early modern times, the late-modern capitalists and land-brokers, thanks to the new mobility of their by now liquid resources, do not face limits sufficiently real – solid, tough, resistant – to enforce compliance. The sole limits which could make themselves felt and respected would be those administratively imposed on the free movement of capital and money. Such limits are, however, few and far between, and the handful that remain are under tremendous pressure to be effaced or just washed out. In their absence there would be few occasions for Melucci’s ‘encounter with otherness’. If it so happened that the encounter were enforced by the other side – the moment ‘otherness’ tried to flex its muscles and make its strength felt, capital would have little difficulty with packing its tents and finding an environment that was more hospitable – that is, unresistant, malleable, soft. There would therefore be fewer occasions likely to prompt either attempts to ‘reduce difference by force’ or the will to accept ‘the challenge of communication’.

Both attitudes would have implied recognition of the irreducibility of otherness, but, in order to be seen as irreducible, ‘otherness’ must first constitute itself into a resistant, inflexible, literally ‘gripping’, entity. Its chance to do so is, however, fast shrinking. To acquire a genuinely entity-constituting capacity the resistance needs a persistent and effective attacker – but the overall effect of the new mobility is that, for capital and finances, the need to bend the inflexible, to push the hurdles aside or to overcome or mitigate resistance hardly ever arises; if it does arise it may well be brushed aside in favour of a softer option. Capital can always move away to more peaceful sites if the engagement with ‘otherness’ requires a costly application of force or tiresome negotiations. No need to engage, if avoidance will do.

Freedom of movement and the self-constitution of societies

Looking backward in history, one can ask to what extent the geophysical factors, the natural and the artificial borders of territorial units, separate identities of populations and Kulturkreise, as well as the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – all the traditional objects of the science of geography – were in their essence merely the conceptual derivatives, or the material sediments/artifices of ‘speed limits’ – or, more generally, of the time-and-cost constraints imposed on freedom of movement.

Paul Virilio suggested recently that, while Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of the ‘end of history’ looks grossly premature, one can with growing confidence speak presently of the ‘end of geography’.⁴ The distances do not matter any more, while the idea of a geophysical border is increasingly difficult to sustain in the ‘real world’. It suddenly seems clear that the divisions of continents and of the globe as a whole were the function of distances made once imposingly real thanks to the primitiveness of transport and the hardships of travel.

Indeed, far from being an objective, impersonal, physical ‘given’, ‘distance’ is a social product; its length varies depending on the speed with which it may be overcome (and, in a monetary economy, on the cost involved in the attainment of that speed). All other socially produced factors of constitution, separation and the maintenance of collective identities – like state borders or cultural barriers – seem in retrospect merely secondary effects of that speed.

This seems to be the reason, let us note, why the ‘reality of borders’ was as a rule, most of the time, a class-stratified phenomenon: in the past, as they are today, the elites of the wealthy and the powerful were always more cosmopolitically inclined than the rest of the population of the lands they inhabited; at all times they tended to create a culture of their own which made little of the same borders that held fast for lesser folk; they had more in common with the elites across the borders than with the rest of the population inside them. This seems also to be the reason why Bill Clinton, the spokesman of the most powerful elite of the present-day world, could recently declare that for the first time there is no difference between domestic and foreign politics. Indeed, little in the elite’s life experience now implies a difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘close by’ and ‘far away’. With time of communication imploding and shrinking to the no-size of the instant, space and spatial markers cease to matter, at least to those whose actions can move with the speed of the electronic message.

The ‘inside’ vs. ‘outside’, ‘here’ vs. out there’, ‘near’ vs. ‘far away’ opposition recorded the degree of taming, domestication and familiarity of various fragments (human as much as inhuman) of the surrounding world.

Near, close to hand, is primarily what is usual, familiar and known to the point of obviousness; someone or something seen, met, dealt or interacted with daily, intertwined with habitual routine and day-to-day activities. ‘Near’ is a space inside which one can feel chez soi, at home; a space in which one seldom, if at all, finds oneself at a loss, feels lost for words or uncertain how to act. ‘Far away’, on the other hand, is a space which one enters only occasionally or not at all, in which things happen which one cannot anticipate or comprehend, and would not know how to react to once they occurred: a space containing things one knows little about, from which one does not expect much and regarding which one does not feel obliged to care. To find oneself in a ‘far-away’ space is an unnerving experience; venturing ‘far away’ means being beyond one’s ken, out of place and out of one’s element, inviting trouble and fearing harm.

Due to all such features, the ‘near-far’ opposition has one more, crucial dimension: that between certainty and uncertainty, self-assurance and hesitation. Being ‘far away’ means being in trouble – and so it demands cleverness, cunning, slyness or courage, learning foreign rules one can do without elsewhere, and mastering them through risky trials and often costly errors. The idea of the ‘near’, on the other hand, stands for the unproblematic; painlessly acquired habits will do, and since they are habits they feel weightless and call for no effort, giving no occasion to anxiety-prone hesitation. Whatever has come to be known as the ‘local community’ is brought into being by this opposition between ‘here’ and ‘out there’, ‘near’ and ‘far away’.

Modern history has been marked by the constant progress of the means of transportation. Transport and travel was the field of particularly radical and rapid change; progress here, as Schumpeter pointed out a long time ago, was not the result of multiplying the number of stage-coaches, but of the invention and mass production of totally new means of travel – trains, motorcars and airplanes. It was primarily the availability of means of fast travel that triggered the typically modern process of eroding and undermining all locally entrenched social and cultural ‘totalities’; the process first captured by Tonnies’ famous formula of modernity as the passage from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.

Among all the technical factors of mobility, a particularly great role was played by the transport of information – the kind of communication which does not involve movement of physical bodies or involves it only secondarily and marginally. Technical means were steadily and consistently developed which also allowed information to travel independently from its bodily carriers – and also from the objects of which the information informed: means which set the ‘signifiers’ free from the hold of the ‘signifieds’. The separation of the movements of information from those of its carriers and its objects allowed in its turn the differentiation of their speed; the movement of information gathered speed on a pace much faster than the travel of bodies, or the change of the situations of which the information informed, was able to reach. In the end, the appearance of the computer-served World Wide Web put paid – as far as information is concerned – to the very notion of ‘travel’ (and of ‘distance’ to be travelled) and renders information, in theory as well as in practice, instantaneously available throughout the globe.

The overall results of the latest development are enormous. Its impact on the interplay of social association/dissociation has been widely noted and described in great detail. Much as one notices the ‘essence of hammer’ only when the hammer has been broken, we now see more clearly than ever before the role played by time, space and the means of saddling them in the formation, stability/flexibility, and the demise of socio/cultural and political totalities. The so-called ‘closely knit communities’ of yore were, as we can now see, brought into being and kept alive by the gap between the nearly instantaneous communication inside the small-scale community (the size of which was determined by the innate qualities of ‘wetware’, and thus confined to the natural limits of human sight, hearing and memorizing capacity) and the enormity of time and expense needed to pass information between localities. On the other hand, the present-day fragility and short life-span of communities appears primarily to be the result of that gap shrinking or altogether disappearing: inner-community communication has no advantage over inter-communal exchange, if both are instantaneous.

Michael Benedikt thus summarizes our retrospective discovery and the new understanding of ...