Paul Kennedy

Mobility, flexible lifestyles and cosmopolitanism: EU postgraduates in Manchester

Some commentators on globalisation and migration have suggested that a growing number of young, educated individuals regard moving overseas as a vehicle for pursing their project of self-realisation, whether imagined in terms of promoting careers or of the search for adventure and cultural variety or both. Drawing on the experiences of skilled migrants from EU countries living in Manchester, the paper examines the motives which induced them to migrate and suggests that economic constraints were often equally as or more significant in propelling them overseas and in influencing their choice of destination than their personal preferences. The paper then argues that their actual experiences abroad became much more significant to their life trajectories than earlier decisions. Most were propelled towards cosmopolitanism and greater world openness because of their exposure to, and involvement in, post-national relationships and intercultural encounters. Although these tended to push them even further away from their original national origins, thereby creating more scope for re-constructing a chosen life path, they also left them more exposed to, and dependent upon, these new relationships and cosmopolitan influences.

The Construction of Trans-social European Networks and the Neutralisation of Borders: Skilled EU Migrants in Manchester—Reconstituting Social and National Belonging

Abstract Drawing on an exploratory study conducted in Manchester, the paper examines several different ways in which not only territorial but also primordial cultural borders are being crossed, neutralised, dissolved and rendered irrelevant by the overseas experiences encountered by young, postgraduate EU migrants. At times, this occurs because national cultures are transplanted and constructed anew by expatriate groups within host societies. However, in other situations, especially where migrants remain for longer periods, borders are called into question by the formation of multinational interpersonal relationships requiring intercultural negotiation. These engender multiple affiliations and call into question national identities and a sense of belonging while requiring explorations into unchartered post-national social areas.

The Subversive Element in Interpersonal Relations—Cultural Border Crossings and Third Spaces: Skilled Migrants at Work and Play in the Global System

The role of human agency in the shape of micro-interpersonal relationships, and partly constructed around co-presence, in contributing to globalization has been little studied compared to the workings of abstract macro forces and powerful organizations. Based on two recent research projects, the paper argues that certain kinds of skilled migrants and overseas professionals may find themselves both able and perhaps compelled to construct new social spaces and interpersonal relations that cross primordial cultural borders. They may simultaneously find they can re-invent their life course but in ways that neither propels them towards social marginality nor to full assimilation in the host society. By engaging in such border crossings and by constructing new social exchanges they forge trans- and even post-national socialities, that challenge—and perhaps undermine—the cultural and national integrity societies once possessed. The paper draws on the unique experiences and narratives of a number of respondents in order to sharpen and flesh out the overall analysis. El rol de la agencia humana en la forma de relaciones micro-interpersonales y parcialmente construidas alrededor de la presencia en conjunto, en su contribución a la globalización ha sido poco estudiada, a comparación del funcionamiento de las organizaciones poderosas y fuerzas macro abstractas. Con base en dos proyectos recientes de investigación, el artículo plantea que cierto tipo de emigrantes cualificados y profesionales extranjeros pueden encontrarse tanto con la capacidad como talvez con la obligación de construir nuevos espacios sociales y relaciones interpersonales que cruzan fronteras culturales primordiales. Puede que ellos encuentren simultáneamente que pueden reinventar el curso de su vida pero en formas que no los empuje hacia la marginalidad ni a la asimilación completa dentro de la sociedad anfitriona. Al involucrarse en tales cruces fronterizos y construir nuevos intercambios sociales, establecen tendencias de socialización transnacionales y hasta postnacionales que desafían—y quizás minan—la integridad cultural y nacional que una vez poseyeron las sociedades. El artículo utiliza las experiencias exclusivas y los relatos de un número de encuestados para dar cuerpo al análisis global.

Global Transformations but Local, ‘Bubble’ Lives: Taking a Reality Check on Some Globalization Concepts

Several concepts and arguments have become an indispensable part of the standard discourse shared by globalization theorists and they point convincingly to real and deepening processes in global life. The paper suggests, however, that it is misleading and ultimately unproductive to assume that the vast majority of the worlds non-elite population possess an equal grasp of these concepts, and the processes which they are designed to illuminate, or that they are able or willing to take appropriate actions in response. With this in mind, and drawing on some recent theoretical critiques and empirical studies, the discussion interrogates ideas about interconnectivity, mobility, de-territorialization and globality. In doing so it argues that we need to pay much more attention to the everyday subjective lives of ordinary people since these continue to be locked into affiliations and obligations constructed, inevitably, as much around place as flows and which remain partly dependent on co-present, primordial socialities despite their exposure to multiple globalizing influences. Varios conceptos y argumentos se han convertido en parte indispensable del discurso convencional compartido por teóricos de la globalización, los cuales señalan en una manera convincente los procesos reales y cada vez más profundos en la vida global. El documento sugiere, sin embargo, que no es productivo asumir que la gran mayoría de la población que no pertenece a la élite posea un entendimiento equivalente sobre estos conceptos, así como de los procesos que se diseñaron para ilustrarlos, o que sean capaces o deseen tomar las acciones apropiadas como respuesta. Con esto en mente, y basándose en algunas críticas teóricas recientes así como en estudios empíricos, la discusión interroga sobre interconectividad, movilidad, desterritorialización y globalidad. Al hacerlo, argumenta que debemos prestar mucha más atención a la vidas diarias subjetivas de la gente común, puesto que éstas continúan ligadas a afiliaciones y obligaciones elaboradas inevitablemente, tanto alrededor del lugar como de los flujos y que continúan permaneciendo parcialmente dependientes a socialismos copresentes y primordiales a pesar de su exposición a diversas influencias a favor de la globalización.

Living with Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

We identify three underlying lines of fracture embedded in the core structures of global capitalism as practised today. The first concerns the impact of dogmatic neoliberal policies in a globalized world—‘there is no alternative’—and the various ways they are propelling economic life into a downward spiral: stagnant wages for most people, rising inequality, falling tax revenues and consequently a deficiency of effective demand across the global economy accompanied by the increased dependence of consumers and governments on debt. The failure of governments since 2008 to institute regulatory reforms capable of avoiding further financial turbulence only intensifies these uncertainties and divisions. Second, the virtually unquestioned emphasis on shrinking the state and privatizing public services and enterprises often worsens inequality, exposes workers to further job and income insecurity, and creates lucrative and guaranteed profit streams for favoured companies without increasing the quality of public services. Moreover, the evocation that ‘public’ equals ‘waste’ while ‘private’ means ‘efficiency’ ignores the reality that state funding and the collective nature of scientific research have together been critical factors in the development of many key advances including the Internet, bio-technology, space and other technologies. Third, the chapter critiques the assumption that economic growth and competition constitute entirely ‘rational’ and legitimate actions for modern people to pursue in perpetuity. It also questions the argument that these offer the only solution to overcoming poverty, coping with ageing societies, countering the destructive effects of inequality and dealing with environmental crises.

The Roots of Vampire Capitalism

Until the 1970s, the impact of two world wars, the 1930s Great Depression, the rise of Soviet Communism, the power of organized labour and the national basis of economic life centred partly on Fordism combined to keep capitalism in check. Yet as each lost its capacity to constrain capitalism, so three interlocking structural transformations, gathered pace from the 1960s and increasingly freed capital to roam the world largely unfettered: industrialization in the Global South and a more competitive world market; accelerating globalization processes which increased the mobility of money, goods, people, information and above all corporate power; and the massive growth of the de-regulated financial industries. However, neoliberal policies since the 1970s—especially as pushed on to the global stage by the USA—played a leading role in reinforcing the impact of these transformations. But neoliberalism also shaped a political and personal culture which insists on the individual’s culpability for his/her personal success or failure in responding to the mysterious ‘knowledge’ embodied in the market—an idea similar to Foucault’s notion of governmentality—thereby diverting blame for inequality and poverty away from capitalism.

The Juggernaut of Science and Technology: Friend or Foe?

The quest for scientific knowledge formed a central arch of the Enlightenment and the drive for modernity. Science has obviously brought humanity vast benefits, yet there is also concern that it shares some of the culpability alongside capitalism for the risks now faced by world society—including climate change and pollution, the incalculable dangers of nuclear/chemical/biological warfare and technological unemployment. We also need to remember that capitalism increasingly funds science and harnesses its knowledge for profit. A second theme examines how technological change increased worker productivity and hastened economic growth yet produced corresponding transformations in the nature, availability and security of employment. In the nineteenth century, employers wished to replace skilled craftsmen with machinery operated by cheaper semi-skilled labour. This culminated in the Fordist era of mass production and consumption and relative full employment in the first half of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, however, robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled to information technology, have rapidly reduced the numbers employed in many types of routine manual work, while a service economy has largely replaced an industrial one. Routine clerical, administrative and other jobs have also been taken over by computers. Many observers are predicting that robotization and AI will continue to threaten the jobs of growing numbers of workers—including many professionals and even some scientists—as technology becomes increasingly based on algorithms that can predict and control future situations and machines that perform ever more sophisticated human-type actions, including driverless vehicles. Since the cost of producing AI and robots continues to fall, capital has every incentive to replace humans with machines, and this will occur in the Global South too. It is happening in China now. Finally, we explore the situation faced by billions of people in the slums and villages of the Global South, who are already largely structurally irrelevant to global capitalism, and the prospect that a similar workless future awaits many, perhaps most, in the North. Why, then, do we allow science and capitalism to control our future without questioning the directions in which they are taking us?

The Rise of Vampire Capitalism (and not a slayer in sight)

The drive to accumulate capital by extracting value from labour while pursuing profit in a competitive market and relentlessly commercializing socio-economic life is etched in capitalism’s DNA. During the last 40 years or so, this unequal and uneven yet improving trajectory of capitalist advance over more than 200 years has become increasingly distorted by the rise of an unashamedly predatory capitalism. This vampire form applies particularly to some global and financial corporations and an elite of super-wealth holders—not all of whom are directly involved in business. Their members siphon a disproportionate and unearned share of existing and new forms of growth and enterprise out of economic life but fail to (a) reinvest much of this in promoting the continued expansion of production and employment and (b) resist contributing pro rata to the reproductive sustainability of wider social life—citizen pensions, educational needs, social welfare, innovation, and so on. The chapter explores in detail four overlapping processes that sustain vampire capitalism: the pursuit of rising asset or share values as the primary path to wealth rather than productive investment; the ability to capture the greater share of gains from growth and rising productivity rather than labour; persuading governments, the media and public opinion to shift the tax burden on to regressive forms while hiring corporate lawyers and financial experts to avoid taxation and conceal their private assets; and forging alliances with politicians and officials whose policies and control of communal or public resources allow them to divert money-making opportunities, based on rent-seeking rather than directly productive enterprise, to capital.

Introduction: Capitalist Modernity in Question

The chapter sets out the book’s central theme—that capitalism has always been riven with contradictions and conflicts that are intrinsic to its DNA: namely, the drive to create, extract and accumulate wealth in a competitive market. This, in turn, generates the relentless engine of economic growth at local, sectoral and international levels and pushes capital to overwhelm and commercialize ever more aspects of non-economic life. The chapter then explains the nature of the post-Enlightenment ‘partnership’ between capitalism and modernity and the nation-state system. It also provides an outline sketch which demonstrates capitalism’s impressive history of adaptability and innovation in the face of constant technical, political and economic crises and transformations and its formidable capacity to develop the productive forces helped by science and the state. However, in its present neoliberal and globalized form since the 1970s, the restraints that once enabled governments and citizens to exercise a degree of control over capitalism have loosened and even disappeared. Thus, the inherent one-dimensionality of capitalism that was always present is now rampant and underpins or is even the primary cause of three sets of events and problems of huge significance. First, it is aggravating, long-standing fractures over power, inequality and social exclusion that are deepening both within societies and between them. Second, it is inextricably bound up with the huge release and indeed intensification of ethnic, regional and sectarian conflicts that have erupted and spread since 2000 while contributing to the revival of nationalism and international rivalries—though these have additional causes. Third, neoliberal capitalism has given rise to an extreme predatory form we have called ‘vampire capitalism’ that increasingly operates in a separate economic universe from the majority of workers and citizens. The book further argues that without the implementation of major reforms to the structures of capitalism at a global level, the current post-2008 financial crisis, with its legacy of slow growth and indebtedness, will prove extremely difficult to overcome. But in addition, and without such reforms and a relative shift back to governmental and especially citizen power, capitalism and the market economy may prove to be dangerous distractions in the face of the looming worldwide problems of escalating climate change and technological unemployment—linked to robotization and artificial intelligence—and how to deal with them without collapsing into dystopic futures.

Does Capitalism Have a Future

The chapter asks whether neoliberal or any other form of capitalism can take us safely through the twenty-first century. Can it survive the coming crises of mass technological unemployment and climate change but also the rise of the knowledge economy and the impact of growing socio-economic divisions? First, we outline the recent anxieties expressed by conservative IGOs, such as the IMF and OECD, concerning the world economy’s low-growth performance. After decades insisting that only neoliberal free-market practices can engender global expansion, they now suggest governments should abandon austerity, reduce inequality, and borrow and invest where private capitalism fails to do so. Second, the discussion explores the argument that the vast wealth and income accruing to the top one and ten per cent places them in a different economic universe from everyone else. Thus, their consumption preferences, saving practices and investment choices increasingly shape the direction of entire economies, determine which industries and firms will flourish and trigger damaging financial speculation. A third section assesses the argument that the IT economy of cognitive capitalism makes possible abundant and free goods that can readily be imitated and shared by consumers who have access to iPods, laptops, tablets, and so on. Some economists argue that this new economy undermines the ability of capitalist firms to make profits. The latter’s response, as in the case of global IT and social media giants, is to protect their products by creating monopolies and extending intellectual property rights. But this stifles innovation and market growth and constitutes yet another aspect of super-exploitation by a vampire capitalists. Finally, the chapter sketches certain future dystopic scenarios that might arise should capitalist elites and governments prove unable or unwilling to implement global reforms, especially reducing inequality, achieving the transition to renewable energy sources and establishing fair distribution systems to replace the wage economy as a work-less future increasingly beckons. Here, we anticipate it will not be markets but the effectiveness and demands of future people’s socio-political movements that will mostly determine how these transformations work out.