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\f0\fs24 \cf2 Eva Paus\cf0 : \'93Good Evening.
Welcome, thank you for coming out tonight.
Guy Standing is one of the foremost analytical
and creative thinkers of our time about the
changing conditions of labor and work in the
age of globalization. He is a world-renowned
expert on economic security or economic insecurity,
working conditions, labor and basic income
strategies in developed countries as well
as developing countries. Professor Standing
is currently at university of Bath in England
and before that he was the director of the
social-economic security program at the International
Labor Organization, one of the UN organizations
headquartered in Geneva. Professor Standing
has published prolifically hundreds of articles,
many books and his latest book is \'91The
Precariat\'92 which you see over here and
which he will talk on, tonight. Without any
further a-do please welcome Guy Standing to
\cf3 back onto it\cf0 .\'94\
\
\cf2 Guy Standing\cf0 : \'93 Thank you very
much Eva. I\'92d like to begin by saying that
I\'92ve reached the stage in life where I
am thinking of offering payment to the chair
persons so that they don't introduce me, it
makes me sound very old, so I think am going
to continue with that thought until I pay
somebody. I\'92d also like to thank John \cf3
Granier \cf0 for organizing this or part,
share or part organizing this and bringing
the books.\
Now what I am gonna talk about in the next
few minutes is a new book about a new group
that's growing in the world. The book is called
\'91The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class\'92
and a journalist, a prominent British Journalist
wrote. \'93Buy Guy Standing\'92s book or nick
it\'94. Now that's an English expression if
anyone doesn't know, which means steal it.
So I hope for that, for Jones stake that they
are not stolen this evening. \
Now what I am going to do is briefly address
the five questions that structure the book.
The five questions are: What is the precariat?
Why care about it? Why is it growing? Who
is in the precariat? And where is it taking
us as a society? And I\'92d like to begin
by mentioning two short anecdotes. A few years
ago, in Eva\'92s own country, in the city
of Hamburg, a group of youths all dressed
up as clowns and in cartoon characters, waltzed
into a gourmet supermarket and proceeded to
take the biggest trolleys they could find,
filled the trolleys with champagne, caviar,
smoked salmon. Everything they could get of
delicacy standard, took pictures of themselves
and waltzed up to the checkout lady and handed
her a rose and an envelop and then promptly,
they all left the shop without paying. The
checkout lady dashed to the owner handed him
the note and said, \'93look they\'92ve all
left\'94. He opened the note and the note
said: \'91We are the precarious workers of
Hamburg, we produce the wealth of Hamburg,
but we don't get anything. So we are going
to distribute all this food to the poor of
Hamburg.\'92 So the shop owner promptly mobilized
the police. They sent fourteen police cars,
searching for this this gang who were hardly
inconspicuous dressed as they were, and they
mobilized a helicopter just in case the cars
weren\'92t quick enough, spent vast proportions
of the funds of the police force looking for
them and I am delighted to say, they were
never caught. And they proceeded to distribute
the food in the slums of Hamburg and took
pictures of themselves and then put them on
the Internet. And this has gone down as a
folklore story, a Robin Hood story in the
growing precariat movement across Europe.
\
But there is another story that relates to
the precariat. Near where I live in Northern
Italy, in the city of Prato, which for generations
has been a center for garments and textiles
and really a traditional place of crafts people.
It was a 100% Italian until 1989. And always
voted for the left. Political left. And then
in 1989, a group of 36 Chinese migrant laborers
came through Frankfurt and set up a suede
shop. And over the next 19 years, the population
changed dramatically until such a point that
40% of the labor force of Prato consisted
of undocumented migrant Chinese. In suede
shops. Then the crash suddenly hit. Literally
overnight, the left was swept out; the neo-fascist
northern league took over. Immediately demonized
the migrant Chinese and with Berlusconi newly
re-elected and saying he would was going to
defeat the army of evil as he called it, which
were the immigrants. Vigilantes were beating
up all the Chinese and the Chinese ambassador
rushed and he said, reminded him of the 1930\'92s.
That's the downside of the precariat. One
part of it. Whereas our youthful educated
Robin hoods, primitive rebels are another
part. \
Now what is the precariat? Well, there are
two ways of thinking. One one can take a verbarain
approach of ideal types and think of groups.
Another way of looking at it is to see it
as a process of precariatization. A process
where model behavior changes, model expectations
and model insecurities change. Am going to
take the first approach but the book tries
to do it both ways. Now what we\'92ve seen,
and this was the subject of a previous book
called \'91Work after globalization\'92. We
have seen under globalization, a globalized
class structure emerging. At the top, we have
an elite. It\'92s not a 1%, it\'92s much smaller
than that. Of billionaires verging on criminality.
We know their names. Stride the globe, hugely
influential on politics and much else. Below
them you have a salariat doing very nicely,
with long-term employment security and all
the benefits that go with it and alongside
that, an emerging group of proficians. These
are people who are project oriented, they
don't want employment security they can deal
with their bundles of skills and their contacts
and are doing very well, thank you very much.
Below them is the shrinking, dying working
class of romantic memory. Its been dying for
a long time Andre Gorse wrote a famous book
that it has been shrinking everywhere. Now
the welfare states and the regulatory operators
of the 20\super th\nosupersub century were
built for that class. And it\'92s below them
that we have the emergence of the precariat.
The precariat is not at the bottom, below
them are the unemployed and a lumpenized lumpen-precariat.
And its very important, analytically and politically
to realize that the precariat is not an underclass.
The precariat was wanted, by global capitalism.
It is a needed part of the system that is
being built. Whereas a lumpenised-underclass
is a drag on accumulation. Now, the precariat
is not yet a class for itself in the Marxian
sense. It is a class in the making. It exists
through a very broad range of insecurities,
but it doesn't have a clear vision of where
it wants to go. Whereas a class for itself,
does have such a vision. It consists of people
who are nomadic, have existential insecurity.
They fleet in and out of short-term jobs,
their incomes fluctuate and they are more
like denizens than citizens. \
A denizen is an ancient concept that is rarely
used but I think will be increasingly used
in the future. A denizen is someone who doesn't
have the same range of rights as a citizen.
Is denied one or more rights by various ways.
The precariat lacks the seven forms of labor
security that I have tried to document in
earlier books. But, the more interesting characteristics
is that people in the precariat do not have
a secure occupational identity. They don't
have a secure occupational narrative that
they can give themselves and define themselves
as they go through life. They don't have that
belonging to a traditional occupation, a craft
or a profession. And this is why, people in
the precariat tend not to have, what Hanna
Arrant said in her wonderful book, \'91The
human Condition of 1957\'92, a sense of social
memory. They do not belong to a community
of values and ethics and standards handed
down from generation to generation to which
they can relate. And this absence of social
memory goes together with the sense that there
is no shadow of the future hanging over their
relations with other people. They don't have
a sense of empathy because they cannot easily
identify with others, but this absence of
a shadow of the future is: I only meet you
today, you meet me today, we are never gonna
meet again so there is no need to think about
reciprocity or social solidarity. You can
try and take advantage of me and be more competitive,
withhold something or whatever and I can do
the same to you. This real sense of belonging
to a lonely crowd where you don't actually
feel a sense of common empathy. But the last
part of the answer to the first question I
want to mention, because its very very important
later is that there are varieties of precariat.
There are some people who are falling into
the precariat from old working class families,
traditions and communities, often relatively
uneducated and therefore easily led astray
by the sirens of populism. You can identify
those very easily. There are also a middle
group, often made up of migrants and others
who treat jobs as instrumental. They\'92re
politically detached in many respects, they
keep their heads down for various well-known
reasons, but they are different from the first
category. And the third category tend to be
young, educated cultivated people who are
frustrated by the system and frustrated by
their insecurities but are not easily going
to be led to a right-wing agenda. It\'92s
important to keep those three categories in
mind. \
\
Second question: Why care? Why care that the
precariat is growing in our societies? Well
there are very good reasons. Obviously anybody
in insecurity is in danger of being marginalized
completely. That vulnerability can be summarized
in four A\'92s. The first A is anxiety. People
are anxious and insecure because they are
exposed to risks and uncertainty which you
cannot insure against. Chronic uncertainty,
which is uninsurable, produces very great
insecurity and anxiety. Many people, male
as well as female fear that they are going
to become bag ladies or bag men. Left, living
in the street with a couple of bags with all
their belongings. Millions of people confess
to having those feelings and it\'92s very
important to understand why. The second A
is people feel anomic. In the dark hermian
sense of that term, in a sense that they despair
of escape. They can hear the politicians and
they can hear people say social mobility,
meritocracy but they know actually, the probability
of moving up is low and declining. They\'92re
not fooled. But part of the anomy is the existence
of a precariatised mind. More and more people
are faced with such insecurity that they have
to balance a whole range of activities; they
have to network here, they have to use time
there, they have to fit here, they have to
retrain, they have to do these things, and
all the time the\'92re having to hedge their
bets/beds so they flick. If there is anybody
in this room who doesn't understand the precariatised
mind I hope they will give us the recipe because
all of us are feeling those pressures. The
third A is sense of alienation. Because too
many people are finding they have to do things
they do not wish to do and they cannot do
what they would like to do. If that is not
a recipe for alienation, I don't know what
is. They feel under-employed in the sense
they cannot use their skills and their competencies
and their aspirations and they feel over-employed
because they have too many things crashing
in on them they have to do. It's a pretty
bad mix. The fourth A, I think you probably
guessed. Anger. The first three is producing
a growing, pervasive anger. And that anger
can go in various directions. Those three
groups in mind, it can go in different ways.
The trouble is, the anger is compounded because
the precariat does not have a sense of agency
at the moment. It doesn't have a voice that
it can use inside the system. \
\
Alright, the third question. Why is the precariat
growing? Well, I don't think we should look
for a smoking gun. There is not just one factor.
But you can see a set of factors that have
gradually gathered strength in the past twentyfive
thirty years. The first one with neo-liberalism
and globalization led to what I call, a faustian
bargain. A faustian bargain went something
like this: If we open up our economies, liberalize
them, we are extending our market system across
the world and in the process we are trebling
our world\'92s labor supply to the open market
system. Trebling. You are adding 1.5 billion
extra workers. And that 1.5 billion workers,
all of them, from China, India, Indonesia,
Vietnam and so on were prepared to work or
labor for one thirtieth of the wages in the
united states or Britain or Europe or other
rich countries. In that circumstance, I\'92m
an economist, if there is an economist who
wouldn't tell you that there is going to be
a convergence. You cannot expect the productivity
levels to shoot up in the rich countries and
not shoot up in Chi-India. So either the good
jobs all flush down to the new countries or
out wages and benefits plunge. Politically
neither was sustainable and therefore, the
faustian bargain was made. The faustian bargain
essentially said we will top up declining
real wages by a mixture of labor subsidies
and tax credits. So the earned income tax
credit in this country became the biggest
welfare program in the world. You top it up.
Now a faustian bargain by definition can only
go on for so long because all the time you\'92re
postponing the day of reckoning by building
up the debts and by people running down their
own savings. And of course the day of reckoning
came with the financial crash. I think its
wrong to blame the bankers because the system
was designed to make inequality much greater.
It was designed that way. It was designed
to shift the risk onto workers and to produce
a growing precariat. \
The second issue, which is what I talked about
last time as it happens, is the bit, the growth
of three forms of labor market flexibility.
I\'92ll only be very brief on that because
it is dealt with in the books and anybody
who\'92s interested can look at that. But
essentially the three forms were: numerical
flexibility, whereby governments were told
or led the way in taking away employment security
from workers. In doing so, they made it easier
to hire and fire, lowering protections against
unfair dismissals and so on, encouraging the
growth of temporaries, encouraging outsourcing
etcetera all those stuff you are familiar
with. Once you\'92ve done that, you are never
going to reverse the track. I think that's
a key lesson. \
A second form is wage system flexibility.
Now wage system flexibility meant two things.
It meant lowering real wages and making them
more flexible i.e. likely to decline. But
it also meant, more importantly, a gradual
stripping away of the forms of social income
outside the wage. So enterprise benefits and
state benefits that made up a large part of
total income, were gradually taken away from
the emerging precariat. Meanwhile, the salariat
went on gaining them all the time; longer
paid holidays, paid this, paid that, subsidized
transport, subsidized housing, you name it
you know it better than I do. What that meant
was, that the actual growth of income inequality,
understated the growth of social income inequality
because not only did you have a widening of
wedge differentials, you had a big widening
in access to non-wage forms of remuneration.\
Now, while all this happened, something else
happened which was very painful. As it happened,
I have just come across from the united kingdom
and I got dragged into a seminar with a couple
of government ministers and one of the leaders
of opposition and I focused on this aspect.
And all the social workers in the audience
said that's what\'92s happening. What has
happened is, everywhere they went towards
means testing social assistance. Now means
testing means that only if you\'92re poor
do you get a benefit. Which is a means of
putting you into a poverty trap. If you were
poor and if you were receiving a benefit then
there is a disincentive for you to take a
low wage job. Now in many countries with a
means tested social assistance effectively
the poor and the precariat face a poverty
trap of something like 80%. In other words,
if they go from a benefits situation into
a low wage job, they\'92re going to lose 80%
of what they gain. Now meanwhile, as Warren
Buffet will be the first to tell us, the middle
class and the rich are all belly-aching about
paying 40% and his case 17% and the argument
of the politicians is \'91we cannot have higher
taxes on the middle class because if we do
that will act as a disincentive for them working
so tat-tat we must lower their tax rates.\'92
Meanwhile the precariat is facing marginal
tax rate of double what the rich are paying.
But the situation gets worse. Much worse.
Because with the poverty trap and assistance
along come the social reformers, the utilitarians
and say, \'93Look we have to separate the
deserving poor from the undeserving poor.
Because some people are poor because they
are lazy or they\'92re whatever, you know
they, scroungers. So we have to have tests
to determine whether the\'92re really deserving
of help.\'94 And what they do is that one
test leads to another test. The latest I have
heard in this country, and apologies for saying
it, but it seems so so well terrible is that
they\'92re now going to introduce urine tests
in 33 states to determine whether you as a
claimant have actually taken drugs of some
sort in the past 6months, 9 months or whatever,
and to make it really demeaning you\'92ll
have to pay for your own urine tests. Now,
that sort of thing not only is disgusting
and demonizing the poor, but think what it
does. It makes gaining entitlement to a benefit
much harder and it makes retaining entitlement
much harder. So what happens is, the people,
and there are millions and millions and millions
of such people, have to enter a queuing process
to try and gain access to benefits once they
lose their job. In many countries, it takes
2,3,4 months before a person actually gets
entitlement to a benefit and receives it.
Now, supposing you\'92ve run down your friends,
you\'92ve used up your friends, you\'92ve
used up your savings, you\'92ve gone into
debt, you cant pay your rent etcetera and
along comes a nice, friendly, privatized employment
exchange person, who is paid by putting people
into jobs. The number he can get into jobs,
the more he gets and he says, \'93Look, in
South Hadley, we found at the other side of
the town, we found a temporary, low paying
job. It might last for three weeks but we
think you should go for it.\'94 Now remember,
you got your poverty trap and you\'92ve got
a precariaty trap. Because the precariaty
trap thinking is: \'91if I go for that 3 week
job, I might lose it very quickly and I have
to start all over again trying to pass all
those tests. Prove that those slippers under
my bed don't belong to a breadwinner and not
me etcetera. So you\'92ve created poverty
traps and precariety traps. And there is only
one way that the state can go when it\'92s
faced with those two things. And that's the
way it has gone, which is going for workfare.
The famous Wisconsin model that is now exported
to my own country so one of the gurus of it
is now advising David Cameron in Downing Street.
And his motto is \'91We have to encourage
the unemployed to blame themselves for their
unemployment\'92. So you\'92ve got to the
end game of this process of a faustian bargain;
millions more being tipped into it and procariaty
trap and poverty trap really make them very
angry at the bottom. \
But there are other forms of flexibility that
have contributed. Functional flexibility is
when people have to move from job to job.
They lose control of their ability to define
their occupation. And in this regard, one
of the most important things that happened
under globalization is that there has been
systemic labor market re-regulation. Any teacher
of labor Economics who mentions the words
labor market deregulation should be sent off
to do something else because they don't know
what they\'92re talking about. Throughout
this period, what happened in particular that's
relevant to the growth of the precariat is
you had occupational dismantling. At the beginning
of the era, there was still a common sense
of self-regulation with the old guilds, professional
guilds, craft guilds. One can be critical
of those, they had certain monopolistic tendencies
but what they did do is reproduce the ethics
and values and standards over generations.
But what the state did was re-regulate by
taking control away from the occupational
bodies themselves and putting control in boards
and licensing systems. So if I give the United
States as a statistic, in 1980, fewer than
1 in 20 American workers was subject to licensing.
They needed a license of some sort in order
to do their occupation, today its more than
one in every three. That's a fundamental change
in which the restructuring of occupational
regulation has dramatically increased the
power of the state. But in doing so, it has
actually increased the fragmentation of occupations.
It has resulted in the splintering of them,
it has resulted in the oppression of certain
categories which I went to in great detail
in this book, and it has led to the growth
of a precariatised mass alongside an elite
who going up in stratospheres dealing with
celebrities and so on. And just to give one
example so you get the picture of what is
happening, in my own country in 2007, they
got the big one. The legal profession and
they introduced the legal services act. Now
the legal services act put control of the
bar, the lawyers, all the professionals in
a state body, headed by a non-lawyer with
terms of reference you have to go for competitiveness,
market clearing consumer. Never mind the providers.
Well, most of us don't like lawyers and therefore
we think, \'91got them\'92, but its being
called the Tesco law. And the reason it\'92s
called a Tesco law, Tesco is a well-known
supermarket chain in Britain. And henceforth,
you will be able to go into Tesco\'92s or
any supermarket of your choice and you would
be able to go up to somebody dressed in a
nice white tunic with \'91Legal Services Assistant\'92
written on their lapel and you would be able
to go up and you say, \'93Look today I would
like a divorce\'94. Alright, well if you go
over there, what sort of divorce? No contensticals,
if you go over there you press the key buttons
and you get a standardized form and if you
sign it in duplicate, then you\'92ll be able
to get a divorce in a couple of weeks. You
want a will, well you better go over there
and fill in this form and press these buttons.
I\'92m joking not. Because the lawyers have
admitted that this is going to happen and
it is already happening. So you\'92re going
to get and you are getting a huge growth of
paralegal people just as there are paramedical
and Para educational and para this and para-that.
And these paras will never have the opportunity
to move out of a para-status. It is very keypart
of occupational dismantling. \
The next factor is something closer to home.
So I apologize if I offend the sensibilities
of some of the professors in the room. We
have seen a steady process of educational
commodification. Increasingly both at tertiary
level and even at Secondary level. We are
expected to produce two commodities: the first
one is degrees and the second one are graduates.
And we have to channel people through. And
we are preparing people for the job market.
All subversive critical thinking that is the
essence of higher education suddenly becomes
slightly irrelevant for preparing people for
a market society. We are expected to produce
docile minds and docile bodies who can be
function. But in a sense, this commodification
is leading to more and more people being given
those certificates and being sold a false
prospectus. Im not saying that's at Mount
Holyoke I\'92m sure you\'92re one of the few
kicking the trend. But, the false prospectus
is; you\'92re going to university to prepare
you for a career. To prepare you for something
that you will feel proud about as you go through
life. But more and more people are realizing
that is a false prospectus because they\'92re
actually buying a lottery ticket. A lottery
ticket where they\'92re a few winners who
are big winners and most people are coming
out with a ticket that's worth less and less.
That's putting it strongly, but there is a
powerful trend so you have the growth of teacherless
universities, which is a contradiction in
terms. You have prominent universities closing
their Philosophy departments, which is a contradiction
in term. I know a professor, who failed two
students. He was called in by his dean and
said, \'93You cant do that\'94. He said, \'93I\'92m
sorry but they were no good\'94, he said,
\'93You cant fail them\'94 \'93But they were
no good!\'94 \'93Look Jim, go home for the
weekend, think about it because if it gets
out that we fail students, the reputation
of our university will suffer and fewer people
will come to our University. Think about it
over the weekend Jim. You have a responsibility.\'94
Jim came back on a Monday and said, \'93I\'92m
sorry but they failed.\'94 So the dean said
\'93the vice chancellor would like to see
you.\'94 He went to see the vice chancellor
and I think you can guess the end of the story.
He got sacked. He took the university to court,
he won damages but he didn't get his job back.
Now were moving in strange times, but a lot
of educated young people are emerging from
their education system feeling very frustrated.
A state of frustration, and at the same time
knowing that the system is leaving them exposed
to an educational bubble. They\'92ve incurred
vast debts. Student debt in this country has
multiplied sevenfold in the last decade. And
they are getting value, less and less from
those tickets. It's a contributing factor.
\
The last factor I wanna mention is something
that I hope someone will do a Ph.D. maybe
hope several. We do not have a good concept
of tertiary time. In an industrial society,
life was lived in blocks. You got up in the
morning, you went to labor for ten hours or
12 hours or whatever it was. You went home,
dropped to sleep. Got up as a child, if you
were lucky, went to school for a few years,
you labored for 30 years, you had two years
in retirement, dead. Blocks of time. But in
a tertiary society, we do not have any sense
of control over time, and more and more people
have to spend more and more time doing work
for labor. Work that they have to undertake,
for which they are not remunerated but which
if they don't undertake they risk losing out
in the competitive market. The consultants
tell us that all of us must spend at least
15% of your time every year, retraining. We
have to spend an enormous amount of time dealing
with financial matters, dealing with bureaucracies,
dealing with job searches, updating your resumes
every 3 months, networking with different
groups. They\'92re all work, to say there
not work is to misuse the English language.
But in that process, just think what its like
if you\'92re in the precaria because the precariat
has to do much more work for labor and work
for reproduction. Then someone who is in the
salariat and someone who can buy expertise
to deal with the various challenges of ordinary
civilized living. The precariat just for this
precariatised mind has to fleet between activities.
The amount of transaction costs for the precariat
dealing with the bureaucracies facing them
is enormous. Its very stressful and you have
to realize that a lot of the people in the
precariat are mentally on the edge, they\'92re
suffering from some disability, they\'92re
suffering from the fact that they don't have
any other income but they\'92ve got a small
child to support. All the things that make
time use so incredibly important. Now that
contributes to a precaraitised existence.\
Because of time I\'92m going to deal with
the next chapter very briefly. Who is in the
precariat?\
In principle, all of us. All of us at any
stage could end up in the precariat. A TV
producer recently, I did an interview and
the next morning I didn't know the producer,
made a major program. He called me up the
next morning and he said, look Guy I just
want to tell you that I feel that I\'92m joining
the precariat any day now. And he was a well-established
person. But there is a sense in which many
of us feel that we are only an accident away,
were only something a mishap away from being
in the precariat. But, of course, they\'92re
certain groups and society that have a much
higher probability than others. Youth, educated
youth I\'92ve already alluded to you I you
understand that, women, women obviously have
always been suffering from the triple burdens
and all those things that we know about and
the very fact that women are taking a growing
proportion of all jobs is only because more
of the jobs are becoming precariatised in
character and that is why women are gaining
their share. But the bag lady syndrome is
a very international phenomenon that a lot
of women experience. All dangers are a funny
bunch in a sense that some of them are grinners
as they enter the precariat. They don't want
a career they just want to feel active and
have something to do. But there are also the
groaners, the groaners who are without a good
pension, without any security and they have
to live precariously into their old age. But
the biggest group in the precariat is the
migrants. Today we have more migrants than
at any time in human history, the official
number is 214 million but that doesn't include
the millions and millions of undocumented
who get demonized and called illegals. The
migrants of the light infantry of capitalism
but unlike the last period of migration, of
mass migration a century ago into the new
world, primarily the United States most migration
these days is circular, people being almost
nomadic rather than settlers going from one
culture to another so many more people are
denizens. I wont go into the other characteristics
except to highlight one development that has
not been given any attention as far as I know.
We have the emergence of new labor export
regimes. A labor export regime is a country
which systematically organizes the mass movement
of workers on a project basis around the world.
So you find that China is sending hundreds
of thousands of people on short-term projects,
around from country to country. Hundreds of
thousands are convicts. They are only sent
because they are convicts. India is changing
and doing it too, Vietnam, Indonesia and so
on. We are talking about a major sense of
movement. But don't think its only going into
Africa, Latin America and Asia. Because increasingly
its going into the rich industrialized countries.
To give you one example; recently, the Polish
government put out a tender, its highway system
to be renovated. The tender was won by a Chinese
state cooperation and one of the conditions
was that it would bring its own workers into
Poland. But the irony is that they received
a subsidy from the European Union in order
to cheapen it so that they could do that.
They are now doing it in the Greek ports,
the Portuguese ports as part of the price
to help them, these indebted countries out
and in Italy. And there was a poem that was
observed on the door of a dormitory of one
of these groups of migrants. Now, the poem
in Mandarin was \'91We are all people floating
around in the world, we meet each other but
we never really get to know each other.\'92
That seems to me a fantastic poem for the
precariat. \
\
That leads to my last question. Where is it
leading us? Well the penultimate chapter is
called a politics of inferno and the final
chapter is called, a politics of paradise
with apologies to Dante. The politics of inferno
is essentially the continuation of the existing
trends. Lets trace it forward. We have societies
of yawning inequality; we have societies where
more and more people, not just migrants, are
denizens denied some rights by some circumstance
or another. We have an erosion of privacy,
we have the growth of a panoptical society
where data surveyance is used to control people
and to penalize people. We have workfare spreading
so that a growing number of people are forced,
coerced to take really undignified forms of
labor. And we have the growth of libertarian
paternalism\cf3 . \cf0 Our\cf3 \cf0 modern
policy makers are nothing else but utilitarians
and they've forgotten to read Benthos Penopticums
papers. The happiness of the majority goes
very nicely with the misery of the minority
and if that helps to make the majority feel
happier we\'92ll do it. But libertarian paternalism
unnudged is very pernicious. Everybody should
study it and make up their mind where they
stand. Coz the essence essencertarian paternalism\cf3
\cf0 is, you look out there, and me too, have
too much information. You can\'92t make rational
decisions yourself, so we the experts, the
state, will nudge you to make the right choice.
And if you don't make the right choice, then
you will pay for it. Now when Barack Obama,
and I hope he is reelected, when Barack Obama
was elected he appointed one of the authors
of nudge as a regulator, chief regulator in
the white house. When David Cameron was elected
prime minister last year, he appointed the
other co-author as an advisor in Downing Street
and they've set up what\'92s called \'91the
nudge unit\'92. And the deputy prime minister
was sufficiently impressed that he actually
said, \'93 we are going to making sure people
make the right choices for society\'94. Well
I don't need to spell it out where that leads.
We have the worst thing of this politics of
inferno, and that is a drift to a neo-fascist
populism. The populists with their charisma,
their buzzwords their money from the elite.
Luring people into thinking that the problem
is the government and the migrants, or the
Roma, or the Catholics, or the Muslims or
whatever group you want to demonize wherever
you are \
are the problems. That neo-fascism is not
a minority thing any more, it is a growing
phenomenon almost everywhere. If you live
in Europe, you see it in every single country,
you see the equivalent of the tea party and
all the disgraceful types. We thought we\'92d
seen the end of that forever, but I\'92m afraid
to say that part of the precariat and those
fearing they're falling into the precariat
are being lured into finding that agenda rather
attractive. It is a real fear and it will
only be combatted when we have a genuine politics
of paradise to put against it. I believe it
is emerging. I believe and that\'92s why that
our long last chapter goes into some of the
posibilities. I believe that we are gradually
going to move from the primitive rebels phase
of resistance to what is going on. We are
seeing the occupy wall street, were seeing
the events in St. agmus square in Athens I
was speaking in Madrid were seeing it in Milano,
were seeing the euro mayday parades, were
seeing precariat movements emerging which
are saying, no we do not need to have this
insecurity we do not need to have the inequalities.
But the movement has got to have a positive
agenda, and that positive agenda is what I
try and spell out. I will not go into it now
because I have overused my time and also because
I hope some of you will be sufficiently motivated
to read the book. But I tell you this, that
the only way we are going to avoid the worst
of the politics of inferno is if we collectively
start taking action ourselves. Only when the
precariat becomes a class for itself, a realization
that we must act as agency, and we must work
for a much better form of society will we
stop what\'92s been going on. Unless that
happens, then the years ahead are going to
be bad. But I think that the politicians of
the center, the center left and center have
certainly woken up and are realizing that
they have no clothes. Everywhere, the social
democrats, social democrat incarnation, labor
parties and so on have beam losing. And they\'92ve
been losing for very very good reasons. I
have no sorry for them many of them are my
friends but for too long they went along with
the neo-liberal economic agenda, for too long
they refused to address inequality and they
accepted the faustian bargain. But now, they\'92re
suddenly getting very worried because this
far right monster is growing and the precariat
is a dangerous class in a double sense. It\'92s
dangerous because it could go over there but
it\'92s dangerous too to the political middle
because its not interested in that old agenda.
I think that makes it a very exciting development
and I hope that we will become active and
more optimistic in the future. Thank you very
much for listening.
\f1 \
}
