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[T]here seems to be an intimate kinship, a mutual conditioning and reciprocal reinforcement between the ‘globalization’ and ‘territorialization’. Global finance, trade and information industry depend for their liberty of movement and unconstrained freedom to pursue their ends on the political fragmentation of the world scene. They have all, one may say, developed vested interests in ‘weak states’ –that is, in such states as are weak but nevertheless remain states. Such states can easily be reduced to the (useful) role of local police stations, securing the modicum of order required for the conduct of business, but need not be feared as effective brakes on the global companies’ freedom. It is not difficult to see that the replacement of territorial ‘weak states’ by some sort of global legislative and policing powers would be detrimental to the extra-territorial companies’ interests. And so it is easy to suspect that far from being at war with each other, political ‘tribalization’ and economic ‘globalization’ are close allies and fellow conspirators. What they conspire against are the chances of justice being done and being seen to be done; but also the chances that neighbourhood responsibilities swell, stretch and eventually grow into the consistent care for global justice – and result in a politics effectively guided by ethical principles.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

Pictures of famine and destitution arouse universal alarm and anger – yet the destruction of the economic self-sufficiency of the afflicted peoples in the name of free trade, open markets and favourable trade balances can count on the wide support of the democratic electorate. The progressive depletion of world resources and associated mortgaging of the life conditions of future generations is unanimously bewailed and protested against – yet politicians promising increased ‘economic growth’, that is a yet larger consumption of non-renewable resorces, can invariably count on electoral success.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

Most democratic political systems move today from the parliamentary or party rule models towards the model of ‘opinion poll rule’, where the composition of political platforms and the making of decisions on controversial issues are guided by the advance consideration of the relative popularity of the intended move and careful calculation of the anticipated electoral gains and losses – the number of votes a given measure may attract and the number of electors it may repel. As has been noted by political scientists, this attitude leads in practice to the rule of the ‘median voter’ principle: no measure is likely to be undertaken by the government of the country which is not seen as being ‘in the interest’ of at least half the voters plus one … With the demise of the welfare state as all-inclusive, universal entitlement to collective insurance, and its replacement with a model of administered charity for the minority who fail the ‘means test’ (that is, are certified as ‘subnormal’), the chance of the ‘median voter’ approving of the larger welfare provision (now experienced by him first and foremost as an increased burden of taxation) has shrunk radically.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

The sins for which the original Welfare State was meant to pay were the sins of the capitalist economy and market competition, of capital which could not stay solvent without enormous social costs in shattered existences and broken lives – the costs which it refused, however, to pay, or could not pay underthe threat of insolvency. It was that damage for which the Welfare State promised to idemnify the present victims and to insure the prospective ones. If we hear now that we, the ‘taxpayers’, ‘cannot afford this any more’, it only means that the state, the community, does not see it fit or desirable any more to countersign the social, human costs of economic solvency (which under market conditions is equivalent to profitability). Instead, it shifts the payment to the victims themselves, present and future. It refuses the responsibility for their ill fate – just as it has abandoned the old task of the ‘recommodification’ of labour. No more collective insurance against the risks; the task of coping with the collectively produced risks has been privatized.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

The switch from the project of community as the guardian of the universal right to decent and dignified life, to the promotion of the market as the sufficient guarantee of the universal chance of self-enrichment, deepens further the suffering of the new poor – adding insult to their injury, glossing poverty with humiliation and with denial of consumer freedom, now identified with humanity.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

The universal deregulation – the unquestionable and unqualified priority awarded to the irrationality and moral blindness of market competition, the unbound freedom granted to capital and finance at the expense of all other freedoms, the tearing up of the socially woven and societally maintained safety nets, and the disavowal of all but economic reasons, gave a new push to the relentless process of polarization, once halted (only temporarily, as it now transpires) by the legal frameworks of the welfare state, trade union bargaining rights, labour legislation, and – on a global scale (though in this case much less convincingly) – by the initial effects of world agencies charged with the redistribution of capital. Inequality – inter-continental, inter-state, and most seminally the inner-societal (regardless of the level of the GNP boasted or bewailed by the country) reaches once more proportions which the yesteryear world confident of its ability to self-regulate and self-correct seemed to have left behind once for all.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

Today twenty or so wealthy, but worried and unself-assured, countries confront the rest of the world which is no longer inclined to look up to their definitions of progress and happiness, yet grows by the day ever more dependent on them for preserving whatever happiness or merely survival it can scrape together by its own means. Perhaps the concept of the ‘secondary barbarization’ best sums up the overall impact of the present-day metropoly on the world periphery.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

In the postmodern world of freely competing styles and life patterns there is still one stern test of purity which whoever applies for admission is required to pass: one needs to be capable of being seduced by the infinite possibility and constant renewal promoted by the consumer market, of rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off identities, of spending one’s life in the never ending chase after ever more intense sensations and even more exhilarating experience. Not everybody can pass that test. Those who do not are the ‘dirt’ of postmodern purity. Since the criterion of purity is the ability to partake in the consumerist game, those left outside as a ‘problem’, as the ‘dirt’ which needs to be ‘disposed of’, are flawed consumers – people unable to respond to the enticements of the consumer market because they lack the required resources, people unable to be ‘free individuals’ according to the sense of ‘freedom’ as defined in terms of consumer choice. They are the new ‘impure’, who do not fit into the new scheme of purity. Looked at from the now dominant perspective of the consumer market, they are redundant – truly ‘objects out of place’. The job of separating and eliminating that waste of consumerism is, like everything else in the postmodern world, deregulated and privatized. The shopping malls and supermarkets, the temples of the new consumerist creed and the stadiums where the game of consumerism is played, bar entry to the flawed consumers at their ownexpense, surrounding themselves with surveillance cameras, electronic alarms and heavily armed guards; so do the neighbourhoods where lucky and happy consumers live and enjoy their new freedoms; so do the individual consumers, viewing their homes and their cars as ramparts of permanently besieged fortresses. These deregulated, privatized, diffuse concerns with guarding the purity of consumerist life also come together in two contradictory, yet mutually reinforcing political demands directed towards the state. One is the demand to further enhance consumer freedoms of free consumers: to privatize the use of resources by ‘rolling back’ all collective intervention in private affairs, dismantling politically imposed constraints, cutting taxes and public expenditure. Another demand is to deal more energetically with the consequences of the first demand: surfacing in the public discourse under the name of ‘law andorder’, this second demand is about the prevention of the equally deregulated and privatized protest of the victims of deregulation and privatization. Those whom the expansion of consumer freedom deprived of consumer skills and powers need to be checked and kept at bay; being a drain on public funds, and therefore indirectly on ‘taxpayers’ money’ and the freedom of free consumers, they need to be checked and kept at bay at the least possible cost. If waste-disposal proves to be less costly than waste-recycling, it should be given priority; if it is cheaper to exclude and incarcerate the flawed consumers to keep them from mischief, this is preferable to the restoration of their consumer status through thoughtful employment policy coupled with ramified welfare provisions. And even the ways of exclusion and incarceration need to be ‘rationalized’, preferably subjected to the severe discipline of market competition: let the cheapest offer win …

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

In internal exile in Naples, the eminent liberal Italian philosopher-historian Benedetto Croce observed disdainfully that Mussolini had added a fourth type of misgovernment—“onagrocracy,” government by braying asses—to Aristotle’s famous three: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.

— The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton