Living on Borrowed Time E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 366

Beschreibung

The global financial crisis has shattered the illusion that all was well with capitalism and forced us to confront the great challenges we face today with a new sense of urgency. Few are better placed to do this than Zygmunt Bauman, a social thinker whose writings on liquid modernity have pioneered a new way of seeing the world in which we live at the dawn of the 21st Century. Our liquid modern world is characterized by the transition from a society of producers to a society of consumers, the natural extension of which is the society of perpetual debtors. The ruling idea of the society of consumers is to prevent needs from being satisfied and to create demand; its natural extension is to enable consumers to consume more by borrowing. Debt was transformed into a crucial profit-earning asset of capitalism in liquid modern times. The present-day 'credit crunch' is not the outcome of the banks' failure but rather the fruit of their success in transforming the majority of men and women, young and old, into a race of debtors. They got what they were looking for: a society of debtors whose condition of being in debt was made self-perpetuating, with more debts being offered, and more undertaken, as the only way of escaping from the debts already incurred. Starting from this reflection on the current global financial crisis and prompted by the probing questions of his interlocutor, Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo, Bauman examines in an historical perspective some of the most pressing moral and political issues of our time, from international terrorism and the rise of religious and secular fundamentalism to the decline of the nation-state and the threats posed by global warming, issues whose seriousness and urgency attest to the fact that we are living today not only on borrowed money but also on borrowed time.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction

Part One

Conversation I: The credit crunch: an outcome of the Bank’s failure, or a fruit of its outstanding success? Capitalism is not dead

Conversation II: The welfare state in the age of economic globalization: the last remaining vestiges of Bentham’s Panopticon. Policing or helping the poor?

Conversation III: This thing called ‘the state’: revisiting democracy, sovereignty and human rights

Part Two

Conversation IV: Modernity, postmodernity and genocide: from decimation and annexation to ‘collateral damage’

Conversation V: Population, production and re-production of human waste: from contingency and indeterminacy to the inexorability of biotechnology (beyond Wall Street)

Conversation VI: Secular fundamentalism versus religious fundamentalism: the race of dogmas or the battle for power in the twenty-first century

Conversation VII: DNA inscription: a new grammatology for a new economy. From homines mortales, to DIY ‘post-humans’ in the advent of genetocracy

Conversation VIII: Utopia, love, or the lost generation

Index

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman and Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo 2010

The right of Zygmunt Bauman and Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4738-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4739-5(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5922-0 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5921-3 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Introduction

The first great recession of the last century, following the 1929 stock market crash, resulted in rival political systems and institutions that shaped a polarized world, with antagonistic forces fighting to establish different visions of economic development and, indeed, different visions of hegemonic domination; only to throw us back into decay when another recession, originating in Wall Street, lashed with the force of a tsunami in 2008.

This time, however, more challenging and decisive factors that no other civilization had known before were brought into the equation: unprecedented environmental threats – with natural disasters attributed to climate change – unprecedented levels of world poverty and an increase in the numbers of ‘surplus population’; extraordinary scientific and technological developments presenting our society with critical predicaments; and a decline in the moral and political systems that had given the institutions of modernity a degree of social cohesion and stability.

Based on the work of Zygmunt Bauman, this book considers in historical context the meaning of the first global financial crisis of our young century, establishing links and considering its causes, implications and some of the moral and political challenges ahead. What may be considered a ‘final’ passage in the decline of the political institutions of modernity is addressed in this book, which seeks to explore matters beyond the mere economic phenomena of the Wall Street crash.

Financial slumps occur in historical contexts, in specific economic, political and moral discursive formations. The two largest financial downturns to have taken place in the space of two centuries have been associated with the long drawn out transition from modernity and with major historical developments – from fascism and totalitarianism to neoliberalism, from the Holocaust, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decline of the ethnocratic state in Latin America1 and the war in Iraq. Both recessions took place in the context of huge political, moral, technological and military developments, which cannot be understood without looking into the archives of history and the ideological and economic formations that produced them.

Crisis can present us with opportunities to both modify and reflect on our situation, opportunities to try to understand how we got to the place where we are now and what we can do, if at all, to change our direction. It can represent a genuine opportunity for the production of ‘new knowledge’ and the drawing of new epistemological frontiers, with implications for future lines of research and debate. If anything, this crisis should be a chance to step back and ask more questions, an occasion to review and challenge all our theoretical frameworks and explore some of our historical and mental caves with more appropriate analytical and epistemological tools, hoping that we can identify and learn from our historical candidness. It is not good enough to try to look at the immediate economic and financial causes and effects of the financial collapse of the autumn of 2008: a thorough check-up is in order; a review of the framework that shaped our approach to the economy, assessing at today’s historical crossroads which institutions will survive, and which may indeed become redundant or ‘extinct’.