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Conference day one - first reflections

Category
Renewing Politics and Civil Society
The Social Thought of Zygmunt Bauman
Date

Home now in Bradford and slightly tipsy after the reception (too much wine on an empty stomach!) but I thought I would post some immediate reflections and perhaps expand on them after the conference when I have more time and detachment. What a great day! Each of the 3 keynote presentations was fascinating. Neal Lawson's opening presentation got us off to a good start and immediately foregrounded the inescapable political nuance of the conference. I'd love to get him in a pub with a few pints of beer and encourage him into indiscretions about New Labour and the 'Famous Five' (with apologies to Enid Blyton). I must look up the articles in the New Statesman he mentioned Zygmunt wrote that so inspired him and I loved his comparison of modern consciousness and awareness with the scenario in the film The Matrix. His recipe for what we must do is describe the good society, develop a political economy that constrains the excesses of markets, reform the state (from the bureaucratic state, to the market state to the 'social state'), and work out how to get there. What is needed is a theory of change that can be linked to areas and instances of real action. He pointed to the tendency for deregulated overly-free markets to lead to, paradoxically given the tenets of neoliberalism, increasingly strong states with a focus on the regulation of their populations. There is no inherent alignment in the interests of markets and the interests of humanity and a political programme based on market solutions will, as in the case of New Labour according to Lawson, lose sight of the ideals that formed its vision and its reason to get its hands on the levers of state power. Traditional politics is in the thrall of the markets and processes of marketisation so a different approach is needed by the Left.

The second keynote was given by Sakia Sassen, an illegal immigrant cleaning lady! Her presentation was full of thought provoking observations and ideas. She drew attention to global patterns of 'expulsion' rather than exclusion. Her focus was on what goes on in the shadows of liquid modernity, on what gets 'stuck' and 'dragged down'. This referred particularly to manufactured surplus populations that, in the context of neoliberal economics and environmental depletion, degradation and scarcities, are living on 'earth' more valuable than the humans. Her account of 'land grabs' by the US, China, Sweden, South Korea, etc. to gain ownership and control of water, rare minerals and agricultural potential, and the disastrous human and ecological implications, was quite chilling. As did Neal Lawson, she introduced what may become a conference subtext - the oscillation between pessimism and optimism. In a section that echoed Lawson's on the conflict between markets and humanity, she made some observations about the logic of financial markets - the logic of finance is to invade all sectors of society and implant its own logic. It operates on the basis of a predatory algorithm. According to Sakia the US is a failed state, liberal democracy is in serious decay and our traditional politics will not provide the answers to our predicaments. We can't start from the top. We can learn from the persistence (and implied relative autonomy) of social formations like the city. This depends on an element of anarchism in its make up and processes. So what is the way forward? We need to look for the cracks in the system of power (which reminded me of John Holloway's 'Crack Capitalism') and take the little steps that are possible. This also seemed to resonate with another emerging theme at the conference, the usually modest but important forms of civic action and politics possible in conditions of liquid modernity and how theory links to practice. This was an explicit or implicit aspect of all the other sessions I went to - for instance Lawson's notion of fitting theory to actual sites of alternative activity, and the 'small steps' described by Irena Bauman, Phil Wood and Rachael Unsworth in the 'Leeds Love It Share It' session on regeneration in Dewsbury and the Richmond Hill area in Leeds.

The final keynote was very interesting but I found it difficult to relate it to the themes of liquid modernity and the political implications that previous sessions had explicitly raised or hinted at. The architecture Daniel Libeskind showed us and his discussion of some of the conceptual and symbolic rationales (and the process of winning architectural competitions) were fascinating but I felt I was left to make my own connections to what had gone before - perhaps a lack of imagination on my part. I needed the connections between civic and corporate architecture and liquid modernity to be spelled out for me or explored in discussion. How does this fit in with 'wasted 'lives and the political implications and opportunities of liquid modernity? How does this relate, if at all, to developing the 'social state' that Lawson outlines and the small steps to an alternative good society - vision and actuality? I'm not saying it doesn't, only that I need some help on this. What is the relation between the architectural 'Master Plan' that Libeskind explained so clearly and interestingly within the context of architectural competitions and achieving the consensus and consent of the civic movers and shakers, and the rather different plan laid out in Neal Lawson's four point itemisation of how we might proceed to the good, sustainable, society?

Please fell free to post your reflections and/or comment on others' posts.