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Unlike the ontological insecurity, the identity-focused uncertainty needs neither the carrot of heaven nor the stick of hell to cause insomnia. It is all around, salient and tangible, all-too-protruding in the rapidly ageing and abruptly devalued skills, in human bonds entered until further notice, in jobs which can be taken away without any notice, and the ever new allures of the consumer feast, each promising untried kinds of happiness while wiping the shine off the tried ones.

— Postmodernity and its discontents by Zygmunt Bauman

[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