Michalis Lianos

Work is failing us

There is a strange passive consensus on the social significance of work. It often seems that the less we need it for production, the more we depend on it for social integration, belonging and identity. In fact, work appears to be the only way towards an adequate socioeconomic status, to the point that its perception has completely changed. Over the history of the species it was almost exclusively a necessity to ensure subsistence, an obligation. In the last decades in capitalist societies it has become a right. This is a shocking development because it establishes a universal consensus – even among otherwise rival actors (e.g. employers, trade unions, the unemployed) – that social belonging is not an automatic effect of mere physical existence; henceforth, the capacity to prove one’s use for some system or another is indispensable for any postindustrial human being. Evenwhen decent income support is available for those who do not work, they remain “excluded”, a neologism indicating that there is something fundamentally “inclusive” about holding a job and bringing home some wages, however meagre. We must ask ourselves why people need two salaries to maintain a household in societies that after the SecondWorldWar had an employment rate of about 55%, as the graph below shows for the US. For, it is not unreasonable to think that if half of the active population suffices to maintain abundance for everyone and if intelligent machines increasingly reduce the need for work, work is more of a problem than of a solution towards social well-being.

Brexit: should refusal (or even plate-smashing) be a sociological category?

The British referendum on leaving the European Union has certainly generated a great deal of superficial thoughts, not all of them misguided. But what are we, social scientists, to think of it? Shall we lament on the note of xenophobia and its feared political consequences, or are there possibly more encouraging tendencies to be researched and understood? Since social developments can never be monolithic, some early thoughts are in order. Firstly, there is a hopeful hypothesis to explore. Even in risk societies, elites cannot always successfully terrorise people into consenting. The strength of British liberalism, perhaps of all liberalism, lies precisely in maintaining confidence, even when told that one’s world is likely to collapse. Rebuilding does not seem as terrifying when the status quo is unsatisfactory. Interestingly, both staunch Eurosceptic middle-class conservatives and working-class nationalists, i.e., the great majority of the Leave vote, rejected the threat-based approach of the Remain campaign. Secondly, there is good reason to believe that an unlikely part of the electorate – namely some left-wing voters outside London – crucially tipped the balance. Without them, everything would have gone according to the plan laid out by the Cameron government and endorsed by a uniquely heterogeneous mix that included the Labour party, City bankers, leading industrialists and the Universities of the Russell Group. That voting behaviour was completely unexpected and European elites, British elites most of all, are puzzled at the outcome. How could it be possible, they think, that Labour heartlands contributed so critically to the Leave vote? These areas are the ones that benefited most from the EU model of social protection. The UK had an excellent deal as an EU member with all the benefits of participation and the privilege of controlling its own currency. What made people in the Midlands and the North of England think that they would be better without the EU? This is the problem with elites. They universally reason in terms of benefits because they do not need to consider their comparative social position: in their eyes, what seems better than the present is invariably

Europe, Dead in the water

People die every day in the Mediterranean. Parents risk the lives of their children and sometimes send them unaccompanied to another continent at an age where they should be accompanied to a school nearby. There, amidst “crisis”-ridden, and often hostile, majorities, refugees will struggle to obtain any precarious legal status and to step on the bottom rung of the social ladder. All this, to avoid the violent consequences of wars waged between autocrats and metaphysical believers. We live four centuries after the onset of the Enlightenment, two centuries after the French revolution, one century after the Russian revolution, seventy years after the defeat of Nazism. How is it possible that Europe lose its capacity for extroverted and innovative thinking? What is happening to us? The postindustrial world proves to be politically inefficient. Wealth is not a problem but its uses are, work is not a problem but social inclusion is, individual liberty is not a problem but collective decision-making is. We live in societies that cannot apply their proven capacities and ethical values to the benefit of their members. When social issues re-emerge, we need to become aware of the prestidigitation of history, so well exposed by Castel in the Transformation of the Social Question (2002). What used to be a subservient status assimilated to slavery (in that case waged labour) became the vehicle of social progress; and previous forms of sound independent socioeconomic existence (such as the status of craftsmen and tradesmen) descended the echelons of social hierarchy. The time may now have come for social inclusion to be articulated around other forms of contribution than waged labour. Will that materialise in the form of the “leisure society” that appeared so close in the 1970s? Will “unemployment” turn into assertive free time put to social use? Will “growth” – both material and financial – become unnecessary and be replaced with other forms of value-based social contributions? Of course, no one knows; but what we all come to discover is that contemporary political systems in capitalist societies have reached their limits. They balance interests defensively and cultivate citizen helplessness indifferently. This does nothing for the people who wither in tower blocks because they cannot do anything to prove that they are wanted and for the people who die on our shores because where they come from is even worse. European European Societies, 2015 Vol. 17, No. 4, 401–403, http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/14616696. 2015.1092210

Editorial: Sociology today

I would like to thank my predecessor, Professor Goran Therborn, for his hard work over four years as the Editor of this journal. Just where Goran situated his farewell editorial, I would like to st...

De facto urgency

Being in a more or less constant state of crisis is a de facto political condition. Urgency stops long-term thinking and replaces aspiration with defence. A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of helplessness. It is a logical oxymoron, but not a sociological one, how the most connected and wealthy human societies produce widespread guilt for those who feel unsolicited or even useless, and widespread fear of social falling for all the rest. Employment was magically transformed from an obligation into a ‘right’ and, what is worse, an indispensable foundation of personal adequacy. This is probably the ultimate proof in our times that – whatever the level of abundance – a field of scarcity can always be found in order to generate competitive social identities. It does so indeed, to the point where ‘unemployment’ appears as a universal, self-explanatory problem, brushing aside the issue of the reduced need for work and burying deeply the liberating potential of that reduction. This is probably how ‘social welfare’ measures keep being perceived as the only form of redistribution in societies that generate enormous amounts of capital. And this is also why urgency is so precious. It keeps us from thinking of new ways to organise our societies, ways that could liberate us from both guilt and fear. Until these ways emerge, we will keep our frustrating lines of division, mental and otherwise. This issue is a significant contribution to understanding where we stand today with regard to each other. Our version of democracy is that of an established polyarchy which has the terrible ‘dark side’ (Mann 2005) of generating lasting minorities. No wonder then that even in Europe substantive democratic mentalities characterise more the elites than the lower strata! To show the limits of our current political systems and explain their unintended and perverse effects, we publish in this issue two articles (Klicperová-Baker and Košťál, parts I and II) on the findings of a study that may be read as an alert, or at least as a grave instigation to rethink European political systems. Legitimation via relative electoral majorities from time to time increasingly shows its limits as the main process of political participation. At the same time, social division in capitalist democracies is discreetly represented via

Conflict as Closure

How is violent conflict socially possible? To answer this question, the paper discusses conflict in terms of sociality and develops an angle on the process of sociocultural “closure” that is necessary for any representation of radical polarisation. Social uncertainty is viewed as a regulator of tendencies towards closure, while institutions are understood in terms of promoting individual competition and averting polarisation. By looking at closure against the background of the distinction between modern. and developing. societies, it becomes clearer that the potential for closure in different socioeconomic conditions differs significantly. Depending on the extent and density of an institutional web of infrastructure, individualist perceptions of one.s society and one.s future make collective polarisation unlikely. Conflict presupposes closure and closure presupposes a collectivity that can become increasingly centripetal in conditions of uncertainty. Multiple options and choices (or the illusion that they exist) counter that tendency and provide peaceful, albeit not socially just, alternatives. A theoretical scheme for the sociological conception of this dynamics is proposed.

Volatility > indifference > obstinacy > defence

You might have been confronted, as I have, with requests to explain as a sociologist ‘what is happening in Europe these days’. Carefully calculated moves (Brexit, the recent British and French elections) produce unpredictable outcomes, people change their opinions between positions that were previously considered diametrically opposite, terrorist attacks cause remarkable waves of temporary cohesion before leading to further division and, in general, everyone wonders if this is simply a new condition to get accustomed to or the forerunning signs of a major social change. Of course, people are not happy with the truth that history has no predetermined direction; even less so when they hear that kind of truth from alleged experts, such as sociologists, whom they presume to know more about the future than the ‘average citizen’. This seems to be precisely the problem: there is no current dominant representation either of the future or of the average citizen. In that sense, we live more than ever in a true condition where socioculture increasingly embraces the defects of reality and fails to correct them via hegemonic representations. This is not to say that we are dealing with some fragmented ‘postmodern’ version of experience where ‘all that is solid melts into air’ as Marx and Engels famously put it. All is tangible, from the thousands drowning in the Mediterranean to the increasing impossibility of satisfactory work and the soaring rate of depression and other mental disorders. Material abundance – or minimal living conditions for the most deprived – do not seem to reduce uncertainty and European governments can no longer convince societies that ‘they are in control’ despite their efforts to avoid the collapse of the banking system. In short, volatility goes beyond the disembeddedness of social experience and reaches the systemics of contemporary societies, namely politics, the economy and the institutional and organisational web. While the causes are intensely discussed and the arguments abound on the contributing factors (from globalisation to algorithmic governance),

Religion: opium to amphetamine

The post-industrial rumours that God passed away proved to be exaggerated. Various geopolitical events are to blame – or to thank, depending on one’s beliefs; most importantly, the collapse of applied socialism as an alternative belief system in social and political practice. That development led to the immediate rearrangement of the vectors of various antagonisms around the globe. TheWelfare State had no longer a rival and acquired the luxury of reducing its welfare components and the priority awarded to social justice. Although precarity and insecurity spread everywhere, political consciousness had already developed enough to prevent a return to metaphysical beliefs. Both market society and social redistribution ideologies took by now the self-depending individual for granted.