The next interview happened on the Vienna Humanities Pageant 2024 between Gavrilova, the competition’s co-founder, and Azmanova, the a number of award-winning creator and ex-fellow from the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).
Dessy Gavrilova: In your most up-to-date e-book, Capitalism on Edge, you analyse the altering nature of labor within the twenty-first century and the ensuing shifts in energy relations in our society. You intend a really authentic thought: a lens via which we will see the issue with world twenty-first-century capitalism. And what you’re saying is that, opposite to what most individuals imagine, inequality shouldn’t be the place the issue lies – it’s ‘precarity’. So, I’d like to start out this dialog by asking you to elaborate in your concepts.
Albena Azmanova: My tackle modern capitalism was triggered by one query a bunch of left events within the European Parliament requested me over 20 years in the past in 2003. They requested me the way it was doable that, regardless of the situations of fine employment and progress – this was properly earlier than the disaster of 2008 – the Left was dropping the vote of the working individuals to the Far Proper.
Possibly my rising up below communism and becoming a member of the dissident motion in my native Bulgaria within the Nineteen Eighties helped me method the difficulty of the troubles of the European Left from an unorthodox perspective. I got here to the conclusion that though the Left was speaking more and more about rising inequality – after which, after the monetary disaster of 2008, more and more concerning the disaster of capitalism – we had been overlooking the true challenge that was troubling the good majority of working individuals: what I’ve come to name a ‘pandemic of precarity’. And let me instantly make clear that once I speak about precarity, I don’t imply uncertainty and insecurity.
Now, there’s numerous speak about uncertainty. UN Secretary-Common António Guterres simply gave a superb discuss saying that the three evils which are making our state of affairs unsustainable are inequality, impunity and uncertainty. However once we criticize the world for being unsure, we danger idolizing, endorsing the worth of certainty. And for individuals who grew up below a dictatorship such as you and me, we bear in mind how oppressive this imposed certainty was: we knew the place we’d be working, the place we’d be dwelling, the place we’d go on trip; we rebelled towards that certainty. We wished freedom, the facility to resolve our life.
My thought about generalized, ubiquitous precarity as a trademark of our instances is that it’s a very particular type of insecurity. And that’s the reason I take advantage of the time period ‘precarity’, which didn’t exist in dictionaries within the English language till lately – the traditional phrase is ‘precariousness’. Individuals who like me write about precarity use this newly minted phrase to point that there’s something new occurring. It’s an insecurity that’s rooted within the elevated precariousness of livelihoods and lives. However largely I’m involved with the financial roots of that new type of insecurity.
Here’s what is particular about precarity. We’re not solely precarious when we’ve got a poorly paid and insecure job, we’re additionally precarious once we are tasked with duties that we can not carry out as a result of we don’t have the assets: time, abilities, cash. We expertise precarity as a result of we’re not outfitted to manage. And in that sense, younger individuals who can not enter the labour market, who can not get their first job, are precarious. Individuals who work on secure, well-paid jobs, however are pressured with so many tasks that they can’t take a vacation and their psychological well being suffers are additionally precarious.
Take the nurses and medical doctors within the British healthcare system. In line with the statistics I noticed final 12 months, over 50% of them are contemplating quitting their jobs as a result of they merely can not cope. If you happen to assume you can not cope, you wouldn’t have secure employment, since you are prone to lose it.
That is the tragedy with ubiquitous precarity. And the second characteristic that makes this a particular kind of insecurity is that it’s politically generated. It’s not simply the final uncertainty and insecurity of contemporary life. No, this stuff are a results of particular politics, ideological attitudes and insurance policies.
To place it shortly, our governments have made competitiveness within the world economic system the highest coverage precedence; they’re slashing budgets for public spending, making our employment insecure and pushing increasingly tasks down onto residents. So public authority is washing its arms of caring for society, of its residents, and is hand-picking particular financial gamers like huge firms to reinforce their world competitiveness. That is the massive new thought of the European Fee, to construct nationwide or European champions. So, they’re assuaging the aggressive pressures on the massive financial actors, the robust ones. After which all of the aggressive pressures are pushed down onto society – we’re all subjected to it: males, girls, the younger, the previous, these with tutorial levels or with primary schooling; I converse concerning the precarity of the 99%.
Protest towards NHS laws, UK, October 2015. Picture by Rohin Francis, through Flickr.
Dessy Gavrilova: You talked about that precarity is a brand new phrase, however how new is the phenomenon? Are you able to assign a birthdate to this phenomenon?
Albena Azmanova: Nicely, after all, trendy societies are insecure, however I take advantage of this time period to talk about these insurance policies that intentionally created this case. And I date them to someplace in the direction of the flip of the twenty-first century, when competitiveness within the world economic system began to trump every thing else. One instance is the pandemic.
What does COVID-19 should do with precarity? The general public well being emergency turned an financial disaster due to particular political choices. In 2017, I imagine, the European Fee proposed the improvement of vaccines towards a virus like COVID-19. Individuals knew that such a hazard existed. And the European Fee made a proposal to the massive pharmaceutical firms inside a public-private initiative referred to as Revolutionary Drugs Initiative. What did these firms say to the proposal? ‘No thanks, it isn’t going to promote. This isn’t aggressive in world markets.’ So, a really obligatory coverage was killed off.
One other aspect of precarity is the concern or anticipation of dropping your social standing. Western societies really feel very precarious as a result of we’re all fairly well-to-do. And we’re quickly experiencing this menace of social slippage. And for me, this explains rather a lot why the vote of the disillusioned and the threatened and the scared goes to the Proper quite than the Left.
Dessy Gavrilova: In your e-book, you criticize the leftist criticism of capitalism for 2 causes. You say it’s wrongly directed and it’s not radical sufficient. And also you discuss concerning the paradox of emancipation, the place you’re saying that even in among the most radical fights for justice and redistribution, the Left, or the critics of capitalism, are maintaining capitalism in a kind of zombie state. They’re reaffirming it. And also you quote the Indignados, who say, ‘We’re not towards the system, however the system is towards us’, which is kind of a plea for inclusion quite than for dismantling the system. So, my query is, what in your opinion – and following your logic – can be an ample leftist agenda?
Albena Azmanova: The Left has been more and more centered on inequality. After all, consciousness of inequality triggers our sense of injustice: the worldwide 1% of the wealthy possess 43% of the worldwide wealth. This doesn’t appear truthful. However this suggests we wish to be equal inside an in any other case unjust system. What does it imply to be included and equal inside a system? That we truly worth that system and all we have to do is struggle for our place inside it. In that sense, this isn’t a radical place.
So inside that logic, we’ve got arrived at teams of victims preventing one another, what I prefer to name the Victimhood Olympics – in situations of precarity, to assert the standing of a sufferer is the one method to acquire some social safety. After all, it’s important to play that card, if it’s the solely trump you’ve. In any other case, you might be doomed. However on that aircraft, one group of victims is preventing one other group of victims whereas the perpetrators stay invisible, having fun with the Olympics.
Dessy Gavrilova: What’s an ample leftist agenda?
Albena Azmanova: To begin with, to just accept this prognosis of common precarity – quite than going together with the trendy dogmas of the day that we’ve got inherited. After which seek for an answer that comes immediately from this prognosis. I’ll steal a phrase from one in all my favorite East European authors Stanisław Lec, a Polish author: he used to say that the exit is normally the identical place the place the doorway was.
So, if the doorway to this bother is the insurance policies that created precarity, let’s struggle these insurance policies, let’s struggle the truth that concerns of revenue have trumped all different concerns. We’re operating our universities for revenue, not for data. Numerous the bans on particular protests in universities are executed below concerns that we have to entice worldwide college students and this doesn’t look good for profit-making.
Extra particularly, the Left has been an excessive amount of just like the Proper, the Centre Left and the Centre Proper pushing the populist promise for inclusive prosperity for all. We can not proceed producing and redistributing prosperity once we are severe about saving the surroundings. Ecological insurance policies are pricey, and other people perceive this. So, once you ask them to just accept the worth tag of inexperienced coverage, it’s important to supply one thing to individuals within the place of prosperity. What I’m proposing is that we provide financial stability, safety for sources of revenue and livelihood, so that folks can see the long run with out anxiousness. As a result of irrespective of how wealthy you make individuals, if their wealth is insecure, they are going to be haunted by all of the anxieties that come from precarity.
Dessy Gavrilova: However how can capitalism be reformed? Yesterday we had been listening to Kotkin saying that dismantling capitalism shouldn’t be one thing that wins elections, as a result of it’s important to truly vote for making a gift of your wealth, and many others.
Albena Azmanova: I like to speak about subverting capitalism quite than overthrowing or reforming it – and we will try this by diminishing the function that the concerns of income play in coverage. As a result of the pressures of profitability are additionally hurting the ‘winners’ of capitalism. COVID-19 once more is a giant instance. It was a world socioeconomic disaster as a result of our insurance policies prioritized revenue – and that clearly wasn’t good for the wealthy both.
Now it’s vital to drop all discuss concerning the disaster of capitalism. The Left loves that, however it’s enjoying into the arms of the Proper as a result of that narrative additionally implies that capitalism, as supposedly the engine of prosperity, is in want of being saved. And it additionally invitations emergency insurance policies that stop us from wanting forward. It’s everlasting disaster administration. This turns into a part of the issue we’re attempting to unravel.
We don’t have to wage a battle utilizing slogans comparable to ‘overthrowing capitalism’ which both scares or confuses most individuals. I don’t assume that’s going to work. However we might assault the excessive concentrate on revenue that defines capitalism. Capitalism isn’t just a market economic system. Capitalism is a social system motivated by the pursuit of revenue, what Marx referred to as ‘the profit motive’. Even with out declaring a conflict on capitalism, in the event you struggle the revenue motive, you struggle capitalism.
Dessy Gavrilova: But when capitalism doesn’t should be saved, what would the choice seem like? You and I lived via another, and we all know the way it led to 1989. Is one thing like a primary unconditional revenue a method to an answer? What does post-capitalism seem like, in your opinion?
Albena Azmanova: I’m personally averse to utopias or grand beliefs, as a result of I believe they’re all the time getting us into bother – we don’t want them to press for change. You and I lived in a society that justified numerous dangerous issues via this dedication to the grand thought of communism. And I’d all the time go along with Václav Havel, who believed that socialism and capitalism are simply two types of a really poisonous type of modernity they usually’re not true options.
For me, it wouldn’t be essential to have a blueprint however to concentrate on what’s hurting individuals. And what’s hurting us is that this elevated dedication to competitiveness within the world economic system. The European Fee has fully made that its flagship coverage now. So, let’s begin the struggle at the moment towards these particular issues after which we’ll see the place that leads us. I don’t assume we have to know the tip consequence.
Dessy Gavrilova: In your work, you’ve been wanting into deliberative democracy rather a lot, together with in your e-book The Scandal of Purpose. However I used to be questioning what you consider this Habermasian concept that deliberation is the way in which to unravel social battle. In a state of affairs the place entire generations are raised on social media, the place they stick with like-minded individuals of their opinion bubbles, and this place of confrontation with the opposite aspect and deliberation is turning into smaller and smaller, what’s left of this concept?
Albena Azmanova: The concept of direct democracy, types of direct engagement, turned trendy 30 years in the past. And so they’re additionally very trendy now as a result of we see that the establishments of electoral politics usually are not giving good outcomes. However I’m very sceptical about two issues in deliberative democracy. I don’t imagine that we will remedy the disaster of democracy with extra democracy, as a result of when our political economic system produces scared and hateful democrats, all channels of democratic illustration translate that concern and anxiousness into coverage. That is precisely what’s occurring with the rise of the Far Proper. They’re coming to energy via democratic free and truthful elections.
Nonetheless, there are types of democratic engagement that would assist to finish the Victimhood Olympics. And I’ve seen that occur in deliberative boards produced in a specific method, for example, via random sampling, in order that we ensure that very poor and precarious individuals confront the annoyed businesspeople who’re indignant that their taxes are being wasted. When such individuals – supposedly ‘class enemies’ – step out of their silos and are made to speak to one another, there’s an opportunity that they direct their consideration not towards one another however towards the frequent sources of frustration and struggling, and attribute duty to the general public authorities that aren’t doing their job to create a good economic system for all.
This concept of the Habermasian perfect of deliberative democracy may be very a lot based mostly on the idea that when residents deal with one another as rational, equal and free people, they’re going to resolve their issues by speaking. Nicely, no, we actually want a real confrontation, the place individuals can struggle with out restraint, confront one another and create this important engagement with one another’s lives. I don’t have a lot endurance with the wishful considering that’s so frequent in normative philosophy. It’s an excellent perfect, nevertheless it doesn’t assist us advance a lot.
This interview has been edited for size and readability. It happened on 29 September 2024 on the Vienna Humanities Pageant 2024, which was organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Speak (TTT) in cooperation with FALTER, the Open Society Foundations, the Metropolis of Vienna, ERSTE Basis, the Academy of Wonderful Arts Vienna, the Wien Museum and the Volkstheater.
