working life has been full of uncertainty since time immemorial; but the present-day uncertainty is of a strikingly novel kind. The feared disasters which may play havoc with one’s livelihood and its prospects are not of the sort which can be staved off or at least resisted and mollified by joining forces, making a united stand, jointly debating, agreeing and enforcing measures. The most dreadful disasters strike now at random, picking their victims with a bizarre logic or no logic at all, scattering their blows capriciously, so that there is no way to anticipate who will be doomed and who saved. The present-day uncertainty is a powerful individualizing force. It divides instead of uniting, and since there is no telling who might wake up in what division, the idea of ‘common interests’ grows ever more nebulous and in the end becomes incomprehensible. Fears, anxieties and grievances are made in such a way as to be suffered alone. They do not add up, do not cumulate into ‘common cause’, have no ‘natural address’. This deprives the solidary stand of its past status as a rational tactic and suggests a life strategy quite different from the one which led to the establishment of the working-class defensive and militant organizations.
When the employment of labour has become short term, having been stripped of firm (let alone guaranteed) prospects and therefore made episodic, and when virtually all rules concerning the game of promotions and dismissals have been scrapped or tend to be altered well before the game is over, there is little chance for mutual loyalty and commitment to sprout up and take root. Unlike in the times of long-term mutual dependency, there is hardly any stimulus to take a serious, let alone critical, interest in the wisdom of an arrangement which is bound to be transient anyway. The place of employment feels like a camping site which one visits for but a few nights and which one may leave at any moment if the comforts on offer are not delivered or found wanting when delivered, rather than like a shared domicile where one is inclined to take trouble to work out the acceptable rules of interaction. Mark Granovetter has suggested that ours is a time of ‘weak ties’, while Sennett proposes that ‘fleeting forms of association are more useful to people than long-term connections.’7The present-day ‘liquefied’, ‘flowing’, dispersed, scattered and deregulated version of modernity does not portend divorce and a final break in communication, but it does augur a disengagement between capital and labour. One may say that this fateful departure replicates the passage from marriage to ‘living together’ with all its corollaries, among which the assumption of temporariness and the right to break the association when need or desire dries out loom larger than most. If the coming together and staying together was a matter of reciprocal dependency, the disengagement is unilateral: one side of the configuration has acquired an autonomy it never seriously adumbrated before. To an extent never achieved by the ‘absentee landlords’ of yore, capital has cut itself loose from its dependency on labour through a new freedom of movement undreamt of in the past. Its reproduction and growth has become by and large independent of the duration of any particular local engagement with labour.
The independence is not, of course, complete, and capital is not as yet as volatile as it would wish and strives to be. Territorial – local – factors still need to be reckoned with in most calculations, and the ‘nuisance power’ of local governments may still put vexing constraints on its freedom of movement. But capital has become exterritorial, light, disencumbered and disembedded to an unprecedented extent, and the level of spatial mobility it has already achieved is quite sufficient to blackmail the territory-bound political agencies into submission to its demands. The threat (even unspoken and merely guessed) of cutting local ties and moving elsewhere is something which any responsible government must treat with all seriousness, trying to shape its own actions accordingly. Politics has become today a tug-of-war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers, and it is the local institutions which feel as if they are waging an unwinnable battle. A government dedicated to the well-being of its constituency has little choice but to implore and cajole, rather than force, capital to fly in and once inside to build sky-scraping offices instead of renting hotel rooms. And this can be done or attempted to be done by ‘creating better conditions for free enterprise’, that is, adjusting the political game to the ‘free enterprise rules’; by using all the regulating power at the government’s disposal to make it clear and credible that the regulating powers won’t be used to restrain capital’s liberties; by refraining from everything which might create an impression that the territory politically administered by the government is inhospitable to the preferences, usages and expectations of globally thinking and globally acting capital, or less hospitable to them than the lands administered by the next-door neighbours. In practice, that means low taxes, few or no rules, and above all a ‘flexible labour market’. More generally, it means a docile population, unable and unwilling to put up an organized resistance to whatever decisions capital might take. Paradoxically, governments can hope to keep capital in place only by convincing it beyond reasonable doubt that it is free to move away – at short notice or without notice.
Extract from the book The Individualized Society
Piada, o plano ecônomo do Milei é jogar todo o país na miséria e dizer que acabou com a inflação.