Bauman Zygmunt - Globalization: the human consequences

The company belongs to people who invest in it not to its employees, suppliers, nor the locality in which it is situated. summarized his creed in the self-congratulating report of his activities which Times Books published for the enlightenment and edification of all seekers of economic progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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