THE FOURTH SECTOR Interview with Loic Wacquant
Paris, 26.06.1999
My name is L.W. and I am a sociologist at the Center for European Sociology at the College de France in Paris, as well as professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley. My research deals with two main issues currently. One is the new forms of urban poverty, marginality and inequality in advanced societies, particularly comparing the evolution of what we could call neighborhoods of relegation or neighborhoods of exclusion in both Europe and America. The second topic in which I’m interested and which is directly related, is the new state forms and the new state policies that have emerged to manage and to control the new forms of urban poverty that we see emerging in advanced societies concurrently with the transformation of work.
The TÜV-Akademie in Berlin is retraining unemployed persons in 10-months-long courses to become private investigators and security guards. What is your reaction to this? Is there anything comparable in other countries?
L.W.: My reaction is not one of surprise because this is a temptation or a tendency that we are seeing in several advanced societies simultaneously, which has to do with what I call a shift from the welfare state or the social state to the penal state, and the downsizing of the welfare state has a counterpart which is the upsizing and the development of the police and surveillance and also prison activities of the state as a means of controlling the new forms of poverty and insecurity that have arisen. And these new forms of poverty and insecurity themselves haven’t arisen out of the blue; they have arisen out of the transformation of work and the transformation of work to which this is related is what we could call the desocialization of work and the rise of new insecure forms of wage work, the rise of informal forms of wage work, the flexibilization of the wage – labor relationship. All of this is creating widespread social insecurity and the way in which many governments are choosing to deal with this social insecurity is to present it as in a sense a physical or criminal insecurity. And so they propose to citizens that they will reinforce their law and order component, they will beef ip their police, they will develop their court systems, they will have more punitive policies, they will reassert the strength of the state to deal with disorder, at the same time as the state is, in a sense, ceding to the market the regulation of work and the regulation of new economic exchanges and the regulation of capital. And so, just as , in a sense, the elite of the contemporary states are claiming that they are impotent in the face of the market and they are ceding the capacity of the state to regulate the economy, they want to reassert the capacity of the state to do something and that is to establish law and order. I could mention several similar tendencies to take just the neighbor across the Rhine, in France. Currently the French socialist government has a very important youth jobs program, in which they have proposed to create a total of 750.000 jobs for youths under 25 so as to decrease the rate of youth unemployment. And one out of every 10 jobs that the state is going to create are gonna be jobs that ate related to the surveillance of poor neighborhoods. They are jobs such as an assistant policeman, such as what they call „agents of mediation“, which is an euphemism to designate another police adjunct. That is somebody who will come from a poor neighborhood, who will know the people and who will serve as a sort of go-between. The poor youths who create trouble for the police and the police. The police has to have them under soft surveillance. So the French state has proposed in effect to create a lot of jobs that are in the, if you wish, surveillance industry. And the surveillance industry to survey whom? To survey people who don’t have access to stable work positions and therefore become trouble for the government.
We are seeing in all advanced societies, the US, the UK, France, Germany, very prominently in other societies as well, I think right now a moral panic around youth violence and youth crimes. We are told by the media and by government in all of these societies that certainly youth crime has become a very salient problem, there is an upsurge. But the statistics don’t really bear that out. The statistics show that there is little variations, little blimps, little up, little down. There is a rise of petty crime, certainly, but not more this year than the year before or 5 years ago. But there is a political use of these moral panics. It serves the media to make people believe that there is, in a sense, a brand-new wave of youth crime that the government has to take care of, because it allows them to get good ratings on TV, it allows them to sell a lot of newspapers. The politicians also like to have people believe that, because it gives them the opportunity to reassert the power of the state to bear down and to be tough on crime and to reestablish law and order. And then the people at the bottom of society also are living in a great degree of insecurity. Much of this insecurity is not really criminal insecurity, it’s just social insecurity generally. It’s having insecure jobs, it’s having insecure access to health, it’s living in insecure housing, and so they project this general insecurity onto the crime question. So you have this kind of triangle where the media and the politicians and the public all want to believe that this is going on, where the reality is that there has been a slight increase, but not one that justifies a drastic change in the reorientation of government policy. The reorientation of the criminal justice and the police policies that are being proposed in a number of European countries really have to do with normalizing insecure wage work. We have to make people at the bottom of society accept that now having part-time, insecure work is the normal way of life. And in order to normalize this , we have to make alternatives to this kind of work more costly. And so, if for instance going into the informal economy, going into the criminal economy is getting more costly because you have more chance of being arrested and you have more chance of being sentenced to prison, to longer terms in prison, then, in a sense, you will be more ready to accept to take lousy jobs because the alternative is too costly and therefore you will see that OK well now this is the normal way of life and this is work as we now know it. A lot oft he talk we hear about welfare about crime about the incapacity of government to provide services really has to do with normalizing and making people accept insecure wage work because it is going to be the statistical norm, it is going to be the major source and kind of employment for people who don’t have high skills and rare credentials.
One of the dangers when you say the new police and penal policies that are punitive policies they are being pushed by the government are driven by the needs to stabilize the economy is that of course this can be misunderstood as a kind of conspiracy theory. Some people will want to hear that you say factory owners and employers and government got together in a room and sort of hatched out a plan where they’re gonna do this. The social world is much more complicated. There’s a series of independent developments there’s a series of developments in the world of work, there’s a series of developments in the world of the state, there’s a series of developments in poor neighborhoods, there’s a series of transformations in the media as well. And so we have a set of converging forces that all occur at the same time and converge towards pushing towards this kind of policy, so we cannot say that anybody really intends this kind of policy in a rational way, that were gonna use the police to basically control people in poor neighborhoods, so that eventually they will either be kept there or they will accept to take low wage work. But the effect of these policies is really to do that. It’s creating a situation where either, particularly the younger generation who cannot find work, you have to hold them somewhere, so in a sense you hold them in these neighborhoods, and if they are too disruptive as in America you will hold them in prison. Thus the enormous growth of the prison population in the US. And those who accept work you will allow them to come into the work world. But these are complicated non-intended processes that are going on: transformation of the state, transformation of the labor market, transformation of neighborhoods , transformation of the media that all converge into this drift, where for people at the bottom of society it amounts really to a shift from the welfare state, where their life used to be regulated by a state, which was essentially providing support and expanding opportunities, and protecting people from the sanctions of the market, to a penal or punitive state that tries to control people’s behavior make them behave in accordance to the new dictates of the labor market or sanctions their bad behavior with punitive means and controls them either in these neighborhoods of relegation where they are kept or puts them away in the prison system.
What is striking is that you see this drift from a social welfare state to a penal state in many of the advanced societies simultaneously, and if you look back 25 or 30 years ago there was also a common tendency which was the opposite, which was to downsize the police and the penal state this a period of innovation, of decline in the prison population, and there was a tendency to try and develop more of the welfare state. So we have to ask the question: what has changed? Why did we go from the left direction of developing the welfare state to the right direction towards developing the penal state. I think there has been two major factors that explain this turnaround this turnabout. The first is the economic crisis into which a s enter in the mid-70s, with the rise of unemployment, which then transforms to mass unemployment rather than cyclical unemployment, and which immediately brings forth the call to downsize the state, because the state is presumed, particularly by dominant economic theory to be one of the factors that explain the economic crisis. And the second, which is related but somewhat independent, is that there is an ideological battle which starts right around the mid-70s and that is about a 20 year war, a war of ideology in which people – there was a struggle to reshape the way in which people think about these problems. Now this is where there is intention, where there is a plan you can see the creation of new think tanks, particularly you can see the emergence of neo-conservative think tanks, first in America then in England and now spreading slowly in Germany and France and Italy. These neo-conservative think tanks, very powerful in the US, were able to win the ideological battle, to redefine the terms of the debate. By redefining the terms of the debate they transformed the political language with which we understand the contemporary problems of society. For instance they manage to associate welfare with something negative. In the US it’s very very clear: welfare is a pejorative word. Even taxes, they managed transform the word tax. 30 years ago people didn’t necessarily hear something negative, but now when you hear TAX it’s something negative, it’s a break, it’s a burden, it shouldn’t be there, it should always be lower than what it is. So they transformed the meaning of the political vocabulary we use. For Instance the term employability, which is used a lot by the British, particularly to justify the spread of insecure wage work. They created all of these new terms to describe the contemporary reality of work. In a way that made the conservative or neo- conservative solutions palatable. Once you have defined welfare as something that has negative connotations, anybody who proposes to downsize and reduce welfare program is a positive policy. It was a war of words. And the war of words was really won by the neo-liberal ideologues. We also see for instance an enormous rise in the influence of economics as the discipline that is used to interpret the evolution of advanced societies. During that period economics becomes the ruling science that tells you what is going on advanced societies as opposed to history or sociology or social work or many other disciplines that could contribute to understanding society. So you have on the one hand an economistic vision of society that is on the rise, and secondly, it’s not just any economistic vision, it’s a neo-liberal market-oriented vision of society that for instance props up the idea that the market is something good, the state is something bad. If you can have more market and less state, you are going in the right direction. This ideological battle that was waged by these think tanks and ideologues working in the university, journalism, and so on, I think that by large they have won that war because the have convinced the political elite, even left-wing political elites in all advanced societies, that having a smaller state is something good by definition, having more market is good by definition. Of course there are people who are going to pay the costs, not everybody will benefit, but in the long run, if not everybody benefits, it’s because we don’t have enough market, so they propose that if we have unemployment it’s because we have minimum wage, if we didn’t have minimum wage more people would find more work. The market was proposed as a sort of universal solution to all the social problems, when in fact sociology and history tell you that markets are really institutions, they’re not natural entities that resolve problems on their own, they’re sets of political and legal and economic rules. You can’t have a market without property rights, you can’t have a market without an administrative regulatory apparatus, etc. So really, markets are political fabrications. But the great victory of the neo-liberal ideologues in the last 20 years was to make people believe that markets were not institutions and they were not political entities, that there is this natural mechanism to resolve all the social problems in the world, and if we want to resolve problems, then we should have more market and less state. This is how we’ve seen this drift, as work has continued to change and large segments of the population have been de-proletarianized that is they have been excluded even from the world of proletarian work. That is they will no longer work. Or they will work simply in the informal sector, they will work often in the criminal economy, or they will survive from the social economy, by getting income from the state or from their parents and their kin and their community. So as the transformation of work has continued to exclude or marginalize large numbers of people, there was a need to present this as something inevitable and normal, and legitimate and that neo-liberal ideology spread and provided, in a sense, a way of justifying these new emerging inequalities.
You have a huge transformation of work that necessitates a transformation of the state. And you have a rising ascendancy of this neo-liberal ideology, but at the same time this neo-liberal ideology becomes very powerful because the traditional left ideologies are weakened by the transformation of work. We have seen in the past 30 years the destruction of the industrial working class as we have known it for about a century. A lot of the political and trade union organization of the left were premised on the existence of a very strong homogeneous working class based in the factory. As this working class was undergoing decomposition, was being weakened and fragmented and broken into pieces, then the traditional instruments of mobilization and of symbolic sense-making of the left were weakened simultaneously. So you have a weakening of the left interpretation of the world, a very systematic plan to diffuse -throughout the world – through the work of these think tanks the neo-liberal vision that sacralizes the market. The neo-liberal ideology of the market has filled up this vacuum left by the decline of left ideologies, and here I think left intellectuals, progressive intellectuals have a responsibility. They didn’t do the work of political and ideological innovation that was necessary to keep up with the new state of the world and to understand the new ways in which they ought to form new forms of organization that correspond the fragmented state of the working class in this new world of work.
In 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it seems that capitalism has succeeded everywhere and therefore, if what seemed to be the only historical alternative has collapsed, then the market is reigning everywhere, so it is not one ideology among others, but the description of the world. This is how come this neo-liberal doxa can present itself not as one particular vision of the world, but as simply a description of how the world ought to be. This is where the positive joins the normative, the neoclassical economists will tell you , see now: all economies are being run on the basis of markets and this is how it ought to be. Where you don’t have enough markets, they say, well if we still have problems, like in Russia, they will explain the recent collapse of Russian economy by saying, well, it’s not because Russia moved from a Soviet command-style economy to a market-style economy, it didn’t really move enough to a market economy, so we need more markets to create more of the disaster that we’ve seen in the past decade in Russia.
A lot of the transformations that we are seeing, both material transformations and ideological transformations are really elements of a class war that is going on, even though they don’t receive this interpretation. And precisely those who wage this class war do not want it to be seen as a class war. But we are seeing the affirmation of a new capitalist class, a new global capitalist class that wants to transform the conditions of exploitation of workers throughout advanced societies. They are doing this in two ways: They are doing this both organizationally by transforming the shape of work, and they are also doing this ideologically by transforming the way we perceive the new work conditions. Certainly one can see these think tanks these neo-conservative think tanks that have proliferated throughout advanced societies as the sort of ideological vanguard of this new ruling class that disseminates ideas and disseminates concepts and themes. For instance we have seen from NY to London and from London to Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Milan: this idea of zero tolerance for crime. This idea of zero tolerance was an idea that incubated in the think tank called Manhattan Institute, which is a right-wing think tank created in the early 80s, late 70s, to help the rise of the Reaganites to power. The basic motto, slogan, idea of that think tank is: we ought to find market solutions to all problems. They created this idea that for crime we have to make cities more livable. In order to make cities more livable, we shouldn’t tolerate any crime, even petty crime. So they incubated this idea of zero tolerance. The police in NY used that idea of zero tolerance. Then they propagated the idea that the decline in crime in NY City was due to that policy, even though there was a decline in crime 3 years before that policy started, and even though we are seeing a very strong decline in crime in other American cities, who don’t use that policy. But they became an ideological beacon for that, they became a model for all over the world. And then the chief of the police in NY went and traveled all over the world, he went to England and gave conferences, he went to Frankfurt and was received like a Messiah by the mayor of Frankfurt, he’s gone Italy, he’s gone to South Africa, – he hasn’t come to France yet. Everywhere he’s proselytized this ideas that zero tolerance is the way to restore order in cities, and if you restore order in cities, things will be a lot better. You could say: how does that fit with the transformation of work? Well obviously, William Bratton the chief of police of NY hasn’t sat down and thought: if I do that I am reinforcing the normalization of insecure wage work. But really it has the effect of doing that because he’s putting forth an ideology that glorifies the tough police and penal state and certainly helps the institution of more punitive and police-oriented policies, particularly towards poor neighborhoods. One of the results of that is either to contain the disorder in those neighborhoods or to make low wage work acceptable for those who are unemployed in those neighborhoods because the alternative of going into the informal economy or going into the drug economy or going into the criminal economy is gonna be much more costly. Indirectly these think tanks are really engaged in an ideological class war and right now we can see that it is a war where they are winning. This is why we are seeing the same ideas being diffused in Germany, France, Italy, England. Many of these ideas we can trace back: they actually come from the US. They are generally transformed when they cross the Atlantic, when they cross the Channel they are in a sense Europeanized. Many of these ideas can be traced directly to the work done by researchers and scholars in these think tanks, and they partake in this general neo- liberal vision of the social world that paradoxically denigrates the state when it is the social state – they will say: we want to put an end to big government, as Clinton says – but when they say big government they mean government in terms of supplying health, in terms of supplying regulation of work, in terms of helping peoples subsistence. Simultaneously they say they want less government, and they have produced less government in economic and social issue/front. But at the same time these are the same people who want more government and more state when you are talking about controlling via the police and the prison system the social consequences and the disorders created by the retrenchment of the state on the social side. So paradoxically it is really: you downsize, you decrease, you withdraw the left hand of the state. Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, has a very nice expression: he describes the state as having 2 hands, you have the left hand of the state which is historically associated with the left, which is the hand that nurtures and uplifts, that includes education, social housing, regulation of work, minimum guaranteed income, social assistance, programs and so on. Then you have the right hand of the state. The right hand of the state holds the budgets, it’s also the police and the prison system and the army. What we are seeing is: you retrench your left hand of the state and you create a lot of insecurity and a lot of disorders, and then you justify raising, expanding your right hand of the state by saying: look at all this disorder, we cannot tolerate this. And you make it look like the response, the expansion of your police and prison system is really a response to social conditions that are going on out there. But really it’s a response indirectly to your having retrenched your social welfare state. So it’s really the right hand of the state responding to what the left hand of the state is doing, which shows that it’s really a political situation, it’s a matter of political choice. So long as advanced societies continue to withdraw, to retrench the economic and social state, they will need to expand the police and prison state. Because you have to regulate peoples lives in one way or the other, either you regulate it through work or through social welfare or you regulate it through the penal and police apparatus of the state.
We have to ask: why is this new class war so virulent, so strong, so brutal? I think here is a new phenomenon. You remember that in 1848 Marx wrote in the communist manifesto that the bourgeoisie is international. He was wrong in that respect. It is potentially international, but it really remained a set of separate bourgeoisies that each had it’s very own ingrained interests, so that the French bourgeoisie had to wage it’s own class war in accordance to it’s own interests on French soil. The German bourgeoisie had it’s own interest on German soil, and the British and American… What is truly new and what has become new in the last 25 years is that we are seeing a worldwide formation of a truly global bourgeoisie in a sense. A lot of the virulence of the class war, the zeal with which each national bourgeoisie is waging this new class war is part of the process of integration of the worldwide integration of these bourgeoisies. For instance, each of them wants to take it’s place in this new emerging global bourgeoisie and they want to take a place at the top. Sometimes we wonder: why do they want to consume so much, when people are so rich already, what is driving them to do this and so on. Part of it is that they want to establish their standard and their position in this new emerging bourgeoisie, for which the model is the new American businessman, the new American entrepreneurs of the Internet and of the new information technology, which is presented as this sort of new El Dorado, the new economic elite, which is also creating extraordinary wealth, and which is changing the standards of wealth, and the standards of life and the standards of consumption. There is also a sort of international competition for who will be the top dog among the top dogs. This is fueling… Why are companies who are making profits asking to downsize and to fire 2000 workers, because they’re already making profit. Well, they need to make more profit, partly because there is now a genuinely global financial market on which they are judged and the financial market is the mechanism that accelerates the competition among the various ruling classes and among the various holders of capital, and holders also of high skills. It has intensified not only competition at the bottom, but the competition at the top of society has also increased. Those who are at the top are not competing with those at the bottom, they are competing with those who are on the top in the other countries. For the first time there is, in a sense, a sort of rat race among all of the holders of power in the various societies that push them to want to have more accumulation and more wealth, more profit rates, at a rhythm at a pace that they didn’t need to 20 years ago. 20 years ago, if you held a textile factory in northern France, if you made enough money, you were very wealthy, there was no need to raise your profit rate all the way to the roof . But today you are in a global market. You are not only engaged in a competition with your workers, you not only have vertical class struggle, you also have horizontal class competition between the various national fractions of the new ruling class. So you have a twofold acceleration: vertically you have a growing class conflict and class distance and inequality between those at the top and those at the bottom, but also horizontally you have growing competition among those who are at the top. A lot of the economic decisions that are being made today are not really based on the classical vertical top-down class conflict, they’re really related to internal conflicts among the various fractions of the new ruling bourgeoisie, particularly for instance conflicts between the industrial segments of the bourgeoisie and the financial sector of the bourgeoisie. Or conflicts and competitions between different economic sectors such as the real-estate industry which doesn’t have the same interest as the new computer- driven, electronic information-age technologies. And so the competition among the various segments of the ruling class has increased drastically and is pushing them to wage that class war with a speed and a ferocity that they didn’t need to 20 or 30 years ago.
We have to answer to the neo-liberal proposition: that the restructuring of the welfare state is necessary, because the welfare state had reached a crisis stage, or had expanded so much that it was killing the economy, or that it was fiscally impossible to continue running a welfare state, as we had for a very short span of history, really. When we look, we had about two decades when the welfare state was running full speed. First we have to realize that if you do a comparative study, and you look across Europe: those countries that have the best economic performances are also those countries who have the biggest welfare state as measured in the proportion of social redistribution as a percentage of the economic product. So those countries, contrary to the neo- liberal vision, those countries that have had very extensive and very re-distributive welfare states have done very well economically. Nonetheless, it is true that there is a need, starting in the mid- 70s and running up to today, there is a need to reconstruct a welfare state, in a sense that is fitted for the new conditions of work. In the post-war years we invented a welfare state that was premised on the existence of homogeneous wage work. It’s what I call: the 40-50-60-package. You work 40 hours a week, for 50 weeks of the year, for 60 years, and basically you have the same job most of your life, and you have stabile pay, and basically your whole life-course is stabilized by the fact that you are within this standard package of wage work. And that has been disbanded. There is no question that today there’s an enormous – what I call: de-socialization of wage labor -, means that when people used to enter into work in this 40-50-60-scheme, they would have very similar lives and this provided a commonality of fate and of conditions across wide spans of the population. Whereas today, you have people who can’t enter into work, then you have people who enter into very insecure wage work and sort of cycle in and out of work, and even if you take people entering into the world of work, the number of hours that you work is highly variable: people working 20 hours a week, people working 100 hours a week, the number of weeks you’re going to work are highly variable, the life-span when you’re going to retire is highly variable. So we have seen an enormous diversification of the conditions of employment. This has lead to a break-up of this linear life-course: where you go to school, you enter into work at the age between 18 and 25, and then you work until you’re 65 and you retire. This linear life-cycle has also been broken. But the welfare state that we have constructed presupposed that people had stable work, work that homogenized life conditions across wide stretches of the population, and work that provided for linear, stable life-course. And because work has changed in many ways, for technological reasons, for social reasons, the welfare state we have constructed is out of kilter, it’s out of sync, because it presupposes universal, uniform wage work and we no longer have universal, uniform wage work. So we do need to reinvent a new welfare state. But oftentimes the response of progressive intellectuals or academics has been a defensive response: we have to try to defend what exists. In my view that has been a mistake. Instead of defending, in a negative stance, trying to preserve something that the advocates of „market über alles“ are proposing, we should be proposing, having a very offensive attitude, and expanding the capacities of the welfare state, and invent a flexible, a more nimble, a more intelligent welfare state, in particular that will do… In my view: one of the most important measures would be to de-couple subsistence from work. Because today so many people cannot access stable full employment over the life-course, it is very important to provide subsistence mechanisms outside of wage work. We have to transform our very idea of work, we have to recognize new forms of activity, as activities that are deserving of monetary reward. We have also to recognize officially – we have done it piece-meal, we have recognized that people are humans and have a right not to die on the street of hunger, or they have a right to health care even if they can’t pay for it, or they have a right to have a roof over their heads, even if they don’t work and can’t pay rent or can’t own a place – so we have sort of piece- mealed bit by bit, we have recognized a variety of social rights, but we have not made the next step, which is in a sense to recognize that people have a right to a decent subsistence level outside of the labor market, irrespective whether they work or not. So the next step, in my view the next revolution that we have to make, and it’s both a mental revolution as well as an institutional revolution, it means we have to change our way of thinking: for instance to change our way of thinking about work. We have to recognize domestic work as work. We have to recognize a lot of activities that people do, they are not monetary activities for which they receive wages, as really a form of life-sustaining activity that is deserving of reward by the collectivity. And therefore we have to de-couple – this is the mental revolution – but also we need an organizational revolution, we need an institutional revolution, where we recognize and perhaps we create something like a basic income right or a citizens wage, a basic income grant, a basic life grant that people will get from the collectivity, that everyone will get on a universal basis irrespective of whether they work or not. Now, of course this seems to many people to be going backwards: we need more work rather than less work, how can we reward people for sitting on their butts? But the reality is that we are no longer able to generate standard wage work for the totality of the population who wants it. Partly it has to do with that we have expanded the moral and cultural dictate for people to have work. There are more people today who are seeking work than 30 years ago, if only, for instance, the enormous entry of women into the labor market, which has created a new supply of potential workers. And at the same time we have all these new technologies and this worldwide competition for work that has created a situation of long-term scarcity of work positions. We can do one of two things: we can choose the route of the US, which is to say we will allow the conditions of work to deteriorate – all the way to where everyone will, in a sense, find a work – but they won’t be able to survive with this work. Or we can say that we will provide those who cannot find work with the means of decent subsistence. In such a situation, if you created a guaranteed minimum income, unconditional, not based on any work performance, you will find that a lot of people, older people, who have worked all their life, might prefer to do other activities. They would have income and they would engage in other activities, they would play music, they would run a workshop, they would do many things. And then they would free up positions perhaps for younger people who are more keen to work, and so we would have a whole redefinition of what counts as work, what doesn’t count as work. We would question the idea: why should people get remuneration only if they produce wage work rather than if they produce other activities that are good for the collectivity, for instance raising children. Raising children is probably the single most valuable activity in any given society. And yet if you look at the wages of people who are in effect raising children in the child-raising industry, all of the ??? works that exist, it’s the lowest paid work of all. If you look also at domestic work, work which is still massively done by women, is of course not under-remunerated, it is not remunerated at all – and then it’s not recognized as work. So we have to change what we define as work and we have to go through a mental revolution, and I think eventually we have to develop offensive strategies of expansion of creation of a new, a more intelligent, a more flexible welfare state that will provide different kinds of cushioning from the market rather than contract and expand this sphere of the market, which then expands insecurity, which then creates all kinds of problems and then the state has to deal with by expanding it’s penal and police apparatus.
There is a group of economists and sociologists and political scientists and philosophers and activists and unionists called „The Basic Income European Network“, BIEN, which in French means GOOD. Many economists have done econometric evaluations of the capacity of advanced societies to provide for guaranteed citizens income irrespective of work performance. And all of the analyses show in fact that we live in extraordinary productive economies. Nobody 30 years ago would have anticipated, even with the 3 decades of continuous growth of the post-war, nobody, particularly as unemployment started to rise, would have anticipated the extraordinary spurt and growth of productivity we are now seeing. And certainly we can look at the expansion of the new electronic technology and information technology as one that will boost the productivity. So we have enormously productive economies, what we don’t have is intelligent systems to redistribute time, to redistribute work or activities and to redistribute income. We are still left with mechanisms of the 19th century, we still think of work as we used to in the 19th century. Work was really an invention of the 19th century. When first wage labor emerged it was seen as something abnormal. People in a sense had to undergo a mental revolution before they would consider wage labor as work. Likewise we now have to do a mental revolution to bring our capacities to think and invent new institutions of sharing, up to date with the new state of the economy. We are still thinking with 19 century categories of industrial society, in a society in which the shape of work, the shape of families, the shape of states, the shape of society has been radically transformed. And it is really our own incapacity to think these new mechanisms of risk- sharing, these new mechanisms of wealth-sharing these new mechanisms of activity-sharing, that we have to invent them. And for this we need a new vocabulary, we need to invent new terms, we need to forsake the old ways of thinking, and the irony is that the neo-liberal vision of the world is the 19th century vision of the world, it’s the mercantilist view of the late 18th, early 19th century. Remember that in the 18th century the notion of market emerges, it’s a revolution it’s a concept and now it’s been presented to us as the new concept for the 21st century, when really it’s taking us back to the 19th century.
Of course one of the paradoxes of people who advocate a society in which people should work less are people like myself, or researchers, or academics who are working these crazy 100-hour a week work schedules and who are really constantly working. If you ask me, why am I working so hard, it’s because I like what I do, I am never at work or not at work, I mean sociology is a way of looking at the world, it’s a way of continuously looking at the mechanisms that produce the social world that we see in front of us. So I am never out of work, even when I watch a rugby game like I did this afternoon, I’m always, you know, somewhere in the back of my mind there’s always an analytical machine that tries to understand why are things the way they are in the social world. But in a sense this is an example of what work should be, a life-sustaining activity, it should be a rewarding, a self-making, life-sustaining activity. But what is work for many people? Unfortunately it is not that at all, it’s really a life-killing, an impoverishing, where there’s an impoverishment of the self, doing drudgery. This is why it is particularly important, for instance, if you had a device where people had the choice between getting 1000 DM a month as a citizens income, which they would get independently anyway, and they could choose to work or not. Well, if the work was boring and not life-sustaining, then they wouldn’t engage in it and they would engage in other activities. And then those other activities, maybe there would be people willing to remunerate them, for instance, to teach them how to play the guitar. Then it would become work, but it would be work that is life-sustaining and community-building and self-actualizing as opposed to the drudgery of forced wage labor. Of course people will say, if that’s the case, then who is going to do the lousy work, who’s gonna do the humdrum? Well, then employers will have to pay people better for them to do that, and there will be people who are willing to do the dirty work, but they will have to be remunerated higher. In our economies we are certainly capable of doing that.
Some people criticize this idea of guaranteed minimum wage for everyone by saying, yes but if we gave people 1000 Dm a month irrespective of what they do, they would sit on their behinds and they would do nothing, they would be lazy. But the reality is that people want life-sustaining activities. We see it when people retire, oftentimes it’s a terrible void, because people want activities, they want to keep busy, they want keep their time filled, they want to know that what they do is meaningful, they want to engage in social relationships. People would do that nevertheless, except that they would do it under conditions of their own choosing rather than being forced to enter into conditions where they don’t find fulfilling activities.
I think we are all children of the 19th century revolution. The 19th century industrial revolution really implanting into people’s brains the idea that, if you are forced to work, if you have to sell your labor power in order to survive, in the end it’s good for you also, and it’s moral, this is how we create moral being by enforcing on them the necessity of work. But really if you look historically, it’s a very small period of time in which we had this belief, but we still have that in the back of our minds. We still believe that, if people could engage in various activities and could survive without having to work , wouldn’t they undergo moral degeneration? But the reality is that that’s not true, because if you compare people today at work, their life span at work is much shorter than 20 or 30 years ago. Are they for all that undergoing moral degeneration when they seize work?
The question is, if people weren’t obliged to work, wouldn’t they become decadent? If we look historically over the long span of human society, we see decadence in every society, of every type. There are always social milieus in which people will do things that are not deemed desirable, whether they are forced to work or not. If everyone in today’s society were put into wage labor you would still have social milieus that would create decadent lifestyles, its just our sheer capacity to innovate things. As soon as you set a norm, somebody has to violate the norm even for the norm to exist. We wouldn’t know there was a norm of work, if there weren’t people who violated that norm, they are necessary. Its the old proposition of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, that the criminals are very useful, because they remind us that there are laws by breaking them. The idea that you could have a society without crime, he argues, makes no sense, because anytime you set up a norm, a rule, in order to know the rule, it has to be broken. And if people cease breaking that rule, then we will use a more detailed lens to see other small deviations. Its deviations from the norms, really. But every norm creates its own deviations and so, whether we have the norm that wage work is universal and necessary or whether we have a different norm that wage work is valuable but there are also other life activities for which you should be able to engage and you should be able to survive at a relatively acceptable standard without having to engage in wage work, if you so choose. Which ever norm you choose, this norm is gonna create its deviance and you will have people who violate the norm and who are deemed amoral, who are deemed deviant, whether its the norm of work or whether its some other norm. I think that the problem of decadence, of not following the rule, I think you encounter that problem whichever system you set up, whether it’s a system of required work or whether it’s a system that combines work with other life activities, or whether it’s a system where the collectivity grants universally to everyone the means of surviving.
What gives me a lot of energy is a sense of injustice and the sense of the enormous gap between what is and what could be, particularly in this period. I think the gap has never been wider than in the current era. Especially after living 10 years in the US, I think the US is the epitome of that. It is a society of tremendous wealth, and it is a society that has an enormous potential for providing a life-sustaining environment for everyone, and yet it is a society of enormous inequalities, in which there is social and human wreckage and destruction on a scale incomprehensible, when you see the amount of wealth and potential that this society has. What fuels me in my work is to try to narrow that gap, is the idea that whichever way we choose to organize our societies, the gap between the is and the ought, what could be according to standards of justice and morality, and what is, should be the smallest possible gap. And the irony of the last 10 years is that we have seen that gap widen when we are told that it is really narrowing. We are told that we are now living in this nirvana.. I just saw today walking the streets of Paris, this ad for a magazine that says „California: autonomy, hybridity, prosperity, the new El Dorado“. So we are presented with this new model of the market society, and this new El Dorado where universal wealth is occurring, where in fact what we are seeing, and this is really a remarkable phenomenon, we are seeing social inequalities increase, we are seeing wealth inequality increase, we are seeing the resurgence of mass poverty in very wealthy societies, we are seeing the resurgence of beggars and street people that are a reminder of feudal society. We have an extraordinary potential for wealth and for solidarity and for more social justice, and right when we have that potential we are seeing exactly the opposite trend occurring. More inequality and more social injustice and narrowing that gap is what gives me the energy to do the work I try to do. In order to try to have an impact with your work you have to hold together the scientific impulse and the analytic impulse, you want to try to understand what are the mechanisms that are producing for instance rising social inequality when there is also rising social wealth. And you have to try to provide as good an explanation, as good a model of what is going on as you can, and then you try to reinvest that into your civic or political impulse, you try to write for the outside… You lead a double life, you do your strictly scientific work and you share that in the scientific world with your colleagues and then you also try to translate that into modes of writing, into interviewing, into mobilizing that can make that work useful and get served as instruments for people to mobilize for making that untapped potential, to realize that untapped potential for contemporary societies to be more humane. The paradox is that we have the potential for having more livable and more humane societies and right when we have that potential we are going exactly in the opposite direction. Part of it is because we have bought into this model of the market as the solution to all the problems and we are not seeing historically, really, what has allowed progress, what has allowed more social equality, what has allowed better living conditions for large masses of the population, has been really the civilizing effect of the state on the market. And right when the market as this extraordinary potential to create more collective wealth and more equality and more solidarity, we are giving up on this instrument of the state as the means whereby we civilize the market and we make the wealth-producing capacities of the market something that we will then control through civic and political means to have redistribution and a more livable society.
Are these people promoting this neo-liberal vision of the world regulated or reduced to a market, that they are evil? No, its really, you have to compare them to theocrats, they are people who have a religion, and they believe in their religion, they are genuine, they have a genuine belief in it. Just like when you believe in a religion you tend to see miracles, when things happen. Well, they only see the good side of what’s occurring in the world and there are many good sides, certainly the deregulation of economy has created massive wealth for certain sectors of the society. And it so happens that generally those are the sectors of the society that believe in the theology of the market. When you are a high-priced economist working at a top US university, and your salary is going way up because there is a competition for professors such as you, well, you are benefiting, you are on the right side of the effects of the market. So you tend to believe that the market does produce good things. But the trouble is that you also tend to be blind to the negative consequences of the unleashing of the forces of the market. For every winner you don’t see the thousands of losers. For every country that does well, you don’t see those parts of the countries that don’t do so well or you reinterpret them in different ways. In the US the enormous expansion of the criminal- justice system and of the prison system, which has quadrupled in 20 years, with the US incarcerating over 2 million people. Well this is interpreted in terms of crime and in terms of morality. There are a lot of criminals today, why? Because there’s a lot of immorality, there’s a lot of drugs, but the reality is that there is a lot of people who are being swept up by the police and the prison system, because they cannot find any other area of life, they have to be put somewhere. And so they have become superfluous in this new market society and they are warehoused in the prison system. The people who see the right side and the bright side of the market economy are not willing to see the social destruction and the social consequences, often very negative consequences that go on with the development of this market economy.
What is occurring is that we are seeing an enormous development of all kinds of security services. Security and surveillance has become a huge business in all advanced societies, and its related to two things: first you have the people who are derelict, poor, who are disreputable and who are deemed dangerous, and you have to survey and control them. And then concurrently you have, together with this transformation of work, there is a need to impose a new work ethic in a sense, and so there is a big premium on morality and engaging in moral behavior, and in order to see whether people engage in moral behavior, you have an enormous development in a new surveillance apparatus, with new detectives, private detectives of all kinds, a new testing industry. One of the fastest growing industries in the US today is the drug testing industry. Private employers test their employees, the police test people whom they arrest, prison guards test prisoners in prison to see whether they are consuming drugs, children in high school are getting tested to see whether they are consuming drugs, parents can now buy home kits to test children to see whether their own children are consuming drugs. How can we explain that? There’s a sort of a new premium on morality and controlling the individual behavior of people, making sure they abide by moral rules. And of course one of the big moral rules in a society that is still oriented towards the imperative of work, is, you shouldn’t have pleasure without having to pay for it, and you shouldn’t have the means to pay for it, if you don’t have to work for it. And that’s why drugs is such a big…particularly low-level, so-called soft drugs like marihuana, which are not addictive, which are not destructive, they give you pleasure, but they give you pleasure for nothing. In a sense they undermine the work ethic. And if you undermine the work ethic, you undermine the people’s willingness to see their life in terms of their job and their employment, and if you undermine that, you undermine their willingness to take the new insecure low-paid jobs that are now the fare that is being offered to the majority of the population at the bottom of society.
You can deal with poverty and unemployment in two ways, you can either socialize it and deal with it with social means, or you can criminalize it. And we are seeing throughout advanced societies either the reality of criminalization of poverty as in the US, or the temptation to criminalize poverty as we are seeing in European societies. And you do this in several ways. You expand the punishment that is given for existing crimes, or you redefine what counts as a crime. We are seeing this for instance with the homeless situation. Being on the streets and being badly dressed and being visibly a homeless person, it was not a problem 10 or 15 years ago. But today, in many societies, begging and loitering, hanging around without a given motive has been de facto criminalized. You can get arrested in many US cities, you will be pursued by the police, you will be harassed by the police. So we have criminalized homelessness de facto. We are also in European societies in the process of criminalizing immigration. Immigrants, a group that is deemed undesirable, a group that we associate spontaneously, without even knowing why, with crime. In a sense we all have that in our head. This sort of link between immigration, crime and insecurity. In Europe the Schengen Treaty explicitly defines immigration as a problem of security. We have de facto criminalized immigration which of course makes it easier and possible for the police and the courts to arrest more people, to sweep more people. We are not only expanding the capacity of the state to survey and arrest and prosecute people and punish them, we also redefined what the state will go after and will survey and will prosecute. In many societies in Europe, one of the big sources of the rise in prison population is the growing policy to punish the drug consumption with prison. Here we have a good example: you can treat drug consumption, either you can medicalize it, which is a way of socializing it, treating it with the left hand of the state with your social welfare apparatus, or you can criminalize it. Certainly in the past 15 years we’ve seen a growing shift away from the medicalization and socialization increasingly towards a penalization. You use the police and the courts and the prison system to deal with the problem which we know is not being resolved, in fact it is being amplified. As it is amplified it provides more justification for further expansion of the penal apparatus.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed in the 80s the idea that we are moving away from a surveillance society to a control society. I think he had spoken a little to fast. What is occurring is that the top of society is increasingly subjected to control and to self-control in particular through moral means. There’s the imposition of a new morality of work. One of the reasons that upper-class people and academics and professionals and business people work so hard is that they have internalized the norm that work is something highly valuable and they realize themselves through that. So control is reserved to the upper tiers of society, and for the lower tiers of society we are seeing a return to a 19th century means of control, to a brutal use of the police, to a systematic use of the prison system. If you look at the US, you could argue that the US in that respect is proposing potentially a new model of regulating social order, which I call liberal paternalism. It is liberal at the top, for those who are doing well in the new socioeconomic order, but it is very paternalistic and punitive for those at the bottom. Those at the top are encouraged through moral injunction and through rewards and through internalization, to participate in this new hyperactive world of work, and those at the bottom are not encouraged, those at the bottom are punished and are forced to go into a world of work which is a very different world of work, not as remunerative and not as rewarding for the fulfillment of the self.
Loic Wacquant has published a book on this issue: „Les prisons de la mière“ © Raisons d’agir 1999 The Titel of the english translation is:“Prisons of Poverty“ © University of Minnesota Press 2002