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THE SHRINKING SOCIETY:
ETHICS & HOPE IN THE ERA OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Ghassan HageIn a lecture presented in London, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, Slavoj Zizek, reflected on the inability of the British left to dent Margaret Thatcher's electoral appeal among the working classes with their usual strategy of emphasising the massive inequalities her policies were generating. For Zizek, in its preoccupation with inequalities in the distribution of wealth and the distribution of goods and services, the opposition left out of its sight the very area where Thatcher's strength resided: her capacity to distribute 'fantasy'. 'Fantasy' here is a psychoanalytic term for the set of subliminal beliefs that individuals hold and which makes them feel that their life has a purpose, a meaningful future.
Thatcher distributed hope primarily through a racist emphasis on the causal power of the British character and through highlighting the possibility of the small shopkeeper's dreams of rising above one's situation and experiencing upward social mobility. Her message was simple and clear: if you 'possessed' the 'British character', you possessed the capacity to experience upward social mobility even if, in the present, you are at the bottom of the heap. The British character did not give you immediate equality and the good life but it enabled you to hope for a future good life. You could look at your Pakistani neighbours living in the same conditions you are living in and say: 'sure we're in the same hole, but, I' ve got the British character, so I can at least hope to get out of this hole, while these black bastards are hopelessly stuck where they are'.
This capacity to distribute hope (particularly the capitalist-specific dreams of upward social mobility) in the midst of massive social inequality has been the secret of the ability of the nation-state to provide such an enduring framework for capitalist accumulation. [...] We should remember that in the history of the West access to a share of 'dignity and hope' was not always open to the European lower classes. The rising bourgeoisie of Europe inherited from the court aristocracies of earlier times a perception of peasants and poor city people as a lower breed of humanity. The lower classes were 'racialised' as innately inferior beings considered biologically ill-equipped to access human forms of 'civilisation' which included particularly 'human dignity and hope'. 'Human' society within each emerging nation at that time did not coincide with the boundaries of the nation-states. Its borders were the borders of 'civilised' bourgeois culture. What Michelet's work describes to us is the important historical shift that began occurring in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century: the increasing inclusion of nationally delineated peasants and lower classes into the circle of what each nation defined as its own version of human society. But this de-racialisation of the interior went hand in hand with the intensification of the colonial racialisation of the exterior. Now skin colour in the form of European Whiteness was emphasised, more than ever before, as the most important basis for one's access to 'dignity and hope'. Nevertheless, Michelet captures the birth of the nation-state proper: A state committed to distribute hope, to 'foster life' as Foucault has put it, within a society whose borders coincide with the borders of the nation itself.
It is no secret that under capitalism government has always given primacy to the interest of investors. But thanks to the framework provided by the nation-state, the interest of investors did not seem to contradict a commitment to the construction of a viable society within national boundaries. Hope, as Ernest Bloch has theorised it in his 'Principles of Hope' made people determined 'by the future'. The capacity to dream a better future that is 'not too far off' was capable of overriding the determining power of the inequalities of the present. This worked well with capitalism. Hospitality towards migrants and refugees in this national system was also part of this dual economic/social logic. They represented an extra source of (often cheap) labour, but their reception was also represented as a commitment to an ethic of the good society in general. The fact that they were received reflected something positive about the quality of life within the host society and legitimised it in the eyes of its very nationals as capable of producing a surplus of hope. This was so even when this surplus was itself the product of the colonial plundering of resources, and the destruction of existing social structures which undermined the hopes of millions of people in what became known the Third World. The vacuum of hope left behind is still felt today within the societies of the colonised, whether in terms of the hopelessness found in some colonised indigenous societies or the migration generated by dysfunctional colonially produced nation-states unable to provide a sufficient 'share of hope' but to a small minority of their citizens.
Until recently, the capacity of the great majority of migrants to settle in Western Society was dependent on the availability of a Western 'surplus of hope'. This surplus is the pre-condition of all forms of hospitality. But it is clear today, that while the West is producing a surplus of many things, hope is not among them. This has been perhaps the most fundamental change that global capitalism has introduced to Western and non-western Society alike. In the era of global capitalism, the successful growth of the economy, the expansion of firms and rising profit margins no longer go hand in hand with the state's commitment to a distribution of hope within society. In fact what we are witnessing is not just a decrease of the state' s commitment to an ethical society but a decrease in its commitment to a national society tout court. We seem to be reverting to the time where the boundaries of society coincided with the boundaries of upper class society. Hope stops where the investment of global capital stops. Global Capitalism and the shrinking configuration of hope
It is well acknowledged today that what characterises the global corporation most and sets it apart from its multinational and national predecessors is the absence of a permanent national anchorage point that the corporation sees as its 'true home.' [...] The multinational firm, as its name implied, was no longer associated with a single nation-state. It had core bases in many parts of the world, though wherever it was, it was operated within a nation-state framework. The most important political aspect of global capitalism is the end of this reliance on a nation-state framework of operation. On one hand, global capitalism is simply the intensification of the tendencies of multinational capitalism towards capital accumulation outside the traditional industrial sector. Now there is a clear dominance of the finance sector and a massive expansion of an economy of services. These are also accompanied with the rise of a relatively new field of capital accumulation: the information sector. Partly because of the above, the global firm is characterised by an almost complete loss of a specific national anchoring. It is not that, like the multinational corporation, it has many, but rather that it hasn't got any. Wherever it locates itself, it is considered a home on a conjunctural non-permanent basis. Capitalism goes transcendental so to speak. It simply hovers over the earth looking for a suitable place to land and invest. until it is time to fly again.
It is here that emerges a significant phenomenon. The global corporation needs the state but does not need the nation. National and sub-National (like State) Governments all over the world are transformed from being primarily the managers of a national society to being the managers of the aesthetics of investment space. For among the many questions that guide government policy one becomes increasingly paramount: how are we to make ourselves attractive enough to entice this transcendental capital hovering above us to land in our nation? This involves a socio-economic aesthetic: How do we create a good work environment such as a well-disposed labour force or a suitable infrastructure? But it also involves an architectural and touristic aesthetics: how do we create a pleasing living environment for the culturally diverse, mobile managers and workers associated to these global firms to make them desire to come and live among us for a while? [...]
The global aestheticised city is thus made beautiful to attract others rather than to make its local occupants feel at home within it. Thus even the government's commitment to city space stops being a commitment to society. This global urban aesthetics comes with an authoritarian spatiality specific to it. More so than any of its predecessors, the global city has no room for marginals. How are we to rid ourselves of the homeless sleeping on the city's benches? How are we to rid ourselves of those under-classes, with their high proportion of indigenous people, third world looking (ie, yucky looking) migrants and descendants of migrants, still cramming the non-gentrified parts of the city? Not that long ago, the state was committed, at least minimally, to prop up and distribute hope to such people in order to maintain them as part of society. Now, the ideological and ethical space for perceiving the poor as a social/human problem has shrunk. In the dominant modes of representation the poor become primarily like pimples, an 'aesthetic nuisance.' They are standing between 'us' and the yet-to-land transcendental capital. They ought to be eradicated and removed from such a space. The aesthetics of globalisation is the aesthetics of zero tolerance. As the state retreats from its commitment to the general welfare of the marginal and the poor, they are increasingly, at best, left to their own devices. At worst, they are actively portrayed as outside society. The criminalisation and labelling of ethnic cultures, is one of the more unethical and lowly forms of such processes of exclusion. This is partly why globalisation has gone so well with the neo-liberal dismantling of the welfare state The state's retreat from its commitment to see poverty as a socio/ethical problem goes hand in hand with the increased criminalisation of poverty and the deployment of a penal state to fill in the void left by the retreat of the welfare state.
Hope is not related to an income level. It is about the sense of possibility that life can offer. Its enemy is a sense of entrapment not a sense of poverty. As the withdrawal of the state from society and the existing configuration of hope begins shrinking many people, even with middle class incomes, urban dwellers paradoxically stuck in insecure jobs, farmers working day and night without 'getting anywhere', small-business people struggling to keep their businesses going, all of these and more have begun suffering from various forms of hope scarcity. They join the already over-marginalised populations of indigenous communities, homeless people, poor immigrant workers and the chronically unemployed. But unlike them they are not used to their state of marginality, they don't know how to dig for new forms of hope where there is none, and they live in a state of denial, still hoping that their 'national identity' is bound to be a passport of hope for them. They become self-centred, jealous of anyone perceived to be 'advancing' while they are stuck, vindictive and bigoted and always ready to 'defend the nation' in the hope of re-accessing their lost hopes. They are not necessarily like this. Their new life condition brings the worst out of them as it would of any of us. That is the story of many of Howard's 'more than fifty percent'. They are the no-hopers produced by global capitalism and the policies of neo-liberal government, the 'refugees of the interior'. And it is ironic to see so many of them mobilised in defending 'the nation' against 'the refugees of the exterior'. Global rejects against global rejects. Only the lowly can rejoice at this sight.
Excerpted version edited by Joanne Richardson for Make World Paper, October 2001. Text originally published in The Australian Financial Review, 7 September 2001. A longer version can be found in Ghassan Hage's new book, Against Parnoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Pluto Press, 2002).