🎓 Stefan Fuchs (Wissenschaftsjournalist) im Gespräch mit Richard Sennett. Der britisch-US-amerikanische Soziologe Richard Sennett (geb. 1943) lehrte an der New York Univercity und an der London school of Economics and Political Science. Seine Veröffentlichungen konzentrieren sich auf moderne Arbeitsorganisation, Vereinzelung der Individuen und Herrschaftsstrukturen. In der "Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus" seit Mitte der 90er Jahre des vergangenen Jahrhunderts ist die politische Öffentlichkeit machtlose Masse, die den Entscheidungen der politischen Eliten in repräsentativen Demokratien einflußlos ausgeliefert ist.
/🎓 Stefan Fuchs (science journalist) in conversation with Richard Sennett. The British-American sociologist Richard Sennett (born 1943) taught at New York University and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His publications focus on modern work organisation, the isolation of individuals and power structures. In the ‘culture of new capitalism’ since the mid-1990s, the political public is a powerless mass at the mercy of the decisions of the political elites in representative democracies.
📚 Veröffentlichungen u.a. / publications a.o.:
- Richard Sennett: "Der darstellende Mensch. Kunst, Leben, Politik." Hanser Verlag, Berlin 2024.
- Richard Sennett: "Die offene Stadt - Eine Ethik des Bauens und Bewohnens." Hanser Verlag, Berlin 2018.
- Richard Sennett: "Der flexible Mensch - Die Kultur des neuen Kapitalismus." Berlin Verlag, Berlin 1998.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Audioarchiv Team (00:08):
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with female writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
Richard Sennett (00:34):
Hello.
Anmod (00:35):
Are political parties in the brave new world of the 21st. Century merely marketing items?
Are they run like a business as a business model?
And is their business to enforce so-called reforms?
Perhaps the parties promote their reforms like the new formulation of an old detergent.
(00:59):
Whether it is pensions, retirement provisions, housing, or social security, the package that
the voter receives becomes more colourful and the offer more confusing each time, but is smaller
and more expensive to replicate.
In the USA, it seems to be a business for European party politics.
And like Donald Trump, they are proud of each of their reform deals, deals that they prefer
(01:23):
to make with business, trade unions, and industry.
Parties today function strictly hierarchically, like large corporations.
Their elites have external advisory teams, spin doctors, opinion polling institutes, and press release organs.
Since the mid-20th century, says Richard Sennett, a US-British sociologist, party politics can
(01:47):
no longer be distinguished from corporate management.
For the profit of the shareholders.
In the case of parties, these are informal networks, party-owned foundations, and asset structures.
One might agree with Richard Sennett that the greatest danger to the future of democracies is the parties themselves.
And it seems that the European far-right parties, from the German AfD to the Portuguese Chega,
(02:13):
are merely another radical, profit-oriented business model.
Richard Sennett explains why the call for new leaders is based on the lack of implementation
of political programmes, and why chancellors and prime ministers act like CEOs of companies.
Stefan Fuchs (02:31):
Mr Sennett, you have extensively described the radical new organisational forms of work in global capitalism.
Ever shorter contract durations, ever fewer linear career biographies, and ever more technically
networked teams that disperse after just a few months.
(02:52):
Mobility and flexibility are the categorical imperatives of the 21st. Century.
This deeply affects the psyche of individuals.
However, this cannot leave social coexistence untouched.
The post-industrial working world can create less and less social cohesion.
(03:14):
On the contrary, it destroys it at both the local and national levels, increasingly defaming
it as something outdated and obsolete.
This corrosion process of society, a system that radiates indifference, as they say, must also
raise the question of political renewal.
(03:36):
How does the political sphere change according to their analysis under the influence of such a transformed working world?
Richard Sennett (03:51):
On the one hand, there is a political programme that tries to universalise or generalise changes
at the cutting edge of the economy into institutional forms for politics.
On the other side, there is a compensation, which is a new importance placed on personality
(04:15):
divorced from these institutional changes on the institutional side.
What is striking is the fact that the cutting edge of the global economy, with its flexible
short-term character, suits a very small number of institutions.
(04:37):
It suits high technology companies and finances certain forms of human services.
Politicians look at this and say, well, this is a general model.
And so medical care, insurance, unemployment benefits, even education fall within this model
(05:00):
that an educational system or a medical system should resemble a finance business.
And this is a push that has continued under the name of reform, almost without interruption
from the mid-nineties up to the present.
(05:24):
And that model also enters politics.
That is to say, a politician emphasises his own personal qualities, not his fidelity to a set
of issues or a political programme.
He is a mobile agent and seeks legitimacy based on his own character, rather than on his capacity to enact a programme.
(05:54):
This is why in Britain, as in the United States, politicians constantly walk away from programmes
they've announced as though they were somehow divorced from the actions they are taking.
(06:15):
And it resonates in the economy in that frequently people who are working in short-term flexible
organisations cannot commit to programmes within them.
They act within these institutions, but they can't commit to them.
The institutions are too fragile, too changing.
(06:39):
So I think we're now seeing a kind of great paradox in politics, where politicians have very
strongly declared beliefs for a very short time and then surrender what they believe very quickly.
Just as in the economy, people easily surrender where they are in these organisations and move on.
(07:06):
And that, I also think, is a peculiarity of modern politics that may have.
Stefan Fuchs (07:10):
Very negative consequences this economic paradigm of management, the reduction of complexity,
the short-sightedness, the time horizon, how is it possible that this paradigm influences politics,
where there are parties like the Labour Party, for example, the Social Democracy in Germany,
(07:34):
which have a long history, which have a large apparatus with members.
How is it possible that it influences this area so quickly?
Richard Sennett (07:45):
You ask me a question that comes from the past.
What is the model of being a manager?
If you are a modern manager, you are not taking responsibility for an organisation long term,
you move increasingly frequently from organisation to organisation.
You manage processes to be very concrete about this in the economy.
(08:08):
And this cutting edge, this new model of management, the test of a good manager, is not long
term profitability of the company, it's the short term price of shares.
From quarter to quarter, managers are rewarded for share price, not for the ultimate viability of the company.
(08:32):
That model that is the manager managing processes lessens a kind of commitment and responsibility,
taking its reflection in politics, its echo in politics is that the politician is not managing
(08:52):
a long term project, he's managing a short term process.
His commitments are not ideological in that sense.
That is to say that the party organisation can be looked at as a business.
And when you think like a modern manager about it, your goal is not the long term growth of
(09:17):
the party, but your own position at a short term moment within it.
What has happened in Britain is that the Labour Party, as you describe it, is a Labour Party
that is in the process of dying, being replaced by a new Labour Party, which is much more centralised,
much more focused on the Prime Minister in which ordinary members of the party count for very
(09:43):
little, which causes those ordinary members?
Great pain, but they have essentially become an audience rather than actors in the political process.
And one of the reasons that Blair is so disliked by ordinary members of the Labour Party is
(10:04):
much broader than the war in Iraq or the relative failure of many of his reforms.
It's that he has disempowered them by cheating them, as though they were employees in a short term organisation.
I don't know whether there's a parallel in Germany, but certainly in the Anglo-American world.
(10:30):
This has happened in the Republican Party in the United States as well, the Republican Party
is no longer a grassroots organisation.
And that, in my view, is a consequence of politicians thinking more and more like modern managers.
Stefan Fuchs (10:49):
Could one say that this label new New Labour, New Democrats means that we have a sort of diet
version of politics that is increasingly abandoning its historical dimension, which can do without
party organisations more and more, and thus undergoes a very strong process of reduction abstraction.
Richard Sennett (11:21):
Just as in a corporation, where a manager at the top decides to reorganise and issues a dictate,
we will no longer do this.
There is no longer any discussion with unions or indeed, with lower levels of management.
So in politics, the dictate becomes a stronger phenomenon.
(11:46):
And again, it is seen as legitimate in politics, because this is how change supposedly occurs
for the better reform in business.
To me, the Iraq war was an extraordinary example of that in Britain, opposed by between seventy
(12:08):
and seventy-six percent of the British public, seventy to seventy-six percent of the public Blair went ahead.
He simply did it to put this another way.
And this is, I think, my general critique of what's happening to modern capitalism is that institutionally,
(12:31):
it leads in an undemocratic direction.
It leads to what I've called a form of soft fascism, a concept which drives people in America and Britain. Crazy.
It's the dictate, it's the leader, saying I embody what is right, no matter what my people think,
(12:55):
I embody what is right, which is a kind and I embody reform, which is a it's not national socialism,
it's not fascism of an Italian style, it's something new, but it is a notion of absolute arbitrary will.
And I am afraid that Iraq, what happened in Iraq is a foreshadowing of this kind of political
(13:23):
action in the future in the United States, President Bush is trying to do the same thing with
the courts that is by active dictate, would you say, in Germany, to transform these courts simply
by his own action, resisted by them again, by the majority of the public, even a majority of
(13:50):
Republicans to call this light is to mistake the gravity of this relationship between economics and politics.
Stefan Fuchs (14:02):
This brings me to the question, what are the factors of domination, the political power factors
that make it possible to bring such a political model into practice under the conditions of a formally functioning democracy.
Richard Sennett (14:29):
Edge economic organisations, we are seeing power exercised by an ever smaller number of elite managers at the top.
So we are seeing in the political realm an ever smaller number of political actors having ever greater power.
It's a consequence of the weakness of local parties; it makes for quicker decision making, which
(14:57):
becomes a positive under a system like this to have relatively few people do so to centralise in that way.
The measure for both the United States and for Great Britain is that the cabinets, the officials
charged with various ministries, have lost more and more power.
(15:19):
It's true in both countries, with the exception, of course, of the ministers of Finance.
Audioarchiv Team (15:27):
Now we continue with the interview.
Like us, if you enjoy it.
Richard Sennett (15:33):
In the nineteen seventies, if you were a home secretary in Britain, you were an enormously,
not only powerful but distinguished figure.
This was a position of great honour.
If you were a secretary of education in the United States again, a position of both power and great prestige.
(15:55):
Those positions now are nothing.
They are people who follow orders.
They are like vice presidents in a company.
You know who do what they're told to do.
Now, how long will this last? I don't know.
If I look in my crystal ball, it seems to me, at least in the Anglo-American world for a good
(16:18):
period of time, continental Europe.
I don't know, it's hard.
It would be harder for me to say whether this will happen to Germany as well. It seems to me.
This codetermination is so deeply rooted in your political culture that you would resist.
Stefan Fuchs (16:36):
How was it possible that we came into this situation? What were the instruments?
Where has this power gone?
Richard Sennett (16:44):
Ultimately, I can answer your question in terms of economic institutions, which is that these
are changes that came not out of some devilish desire of people at the top to centralise, but of more impersonal forces.
Short term management of companies is a consequence of an enormous unleashing of global investment capital.
(17:13):
After the Bretton Woods agreements broke down in the nineteen seventies, where suddenly you
have, what my friend Bennett Harrison once called, impatient capital from around the world,
looking to buy shares and get short term returns from it.
(17:37):
So, in that sense, the time dimension of this story begins with a kind of sudden release of
mobile capital thirty, thirty-five years ago.
Technology also plays a role in this; again, it's not a devil's role.
(17:58):
Well, one thing that's happened is that the power has gone into institutions which invest pension
funds, which become enormously potent economic actors, rather because they have massive amounts
of capital, and they begin to determine the fates of organisations.
(18:24):
It certainly has gone into a new kind of managerial class as I've argued in my books.
And this is a managerial class which knows how to play the system.
That is how to position itself in networks.
Oftentimes the networks are informal.
(18:47):
That is, if you're moving in between jobs, what allows you to move is a network of contacts and so on.
And the difficulty when we get into politics is that that kind of arrangement doesn't include citizens.
It's a thin slice of layer.
(19:07):
It's a very thin slice of society.
One of the reasons that I think if I could take your question in another direction, like many
people, I have been puzzling over why religionists become so important in American politics.
(19:28):
And the reason for it, I think in part, is that it provides a sense of agency, very primitive
agency in my view, but there's a name you can put to why things happen as they do.
God does not exist in a network.
(19:50):
He or she, who knows, is not a manager.
You find instead a kind of in religion, a kind of concretization, of some form of powerful agency,
which is very hard to see in the economy itself, even though these people feel more.
(20:14):
Many Americans who have become religious or put religion into politics, people who are suffering economically.
But I think that's the kind of.
There's a kind of clarification of agency that's occurred in this religious culture, which is
(20:35):
very, very powerfully seductive to people who can't find the power economically.
Who feel that they are subject to powers, which don't have a name, a clear label.
As I said before, very few modern managers actually taking responsibility for the organizations.
(20:55):
They manage, they're not there long enough to do that.
They don't work in the organization.
For life, they pass through it.
They're more mobile than employees.
Lower down, they're exercising power.
They're not exercising authority in the Weberian sense.
And that's enormously frustrating for people below.
(21:17):
It's a thought I have about why this kind of religiosity is.
I mean, there are other reasons for it in the United States as well, but I think this is one of them.
Stefan Fuchs (21:27):
They say, so these are the managers.
It is a very thin, ever-shrinking layer of managers that holds power today over politics, over society.
What about these famous super-rich?
These billionaires who own half of the world's wealth.
Richard Sennett (21:47):
Some of those very wealthy people, of course, inherited their money.
The Hunt family, an oil family in Texas, is like that.
But the money doesn't do them much good unless it's managed and put into play.
And that's as Bill Gates himself found, who's, I guess, the richest person in the world. Is that true?
(22:08):
It's not money that that mountain of cash is not something that he could move around now alone.
I mean, there's always organisation that surrounds wealth.
I think that it is in terms of this global capitalism.
At a turning point, we all know that the United States has become ever more caught economically
(22:34):
in a clinch, in an embrace with China.
China manufactures for the United States.
There's an enormous trade imbalance.
Many of the manufacturing jobs in the United States have been outsourced to China.
What worries me most about the United States at this point is that it is beginning to understand
(22:59):
that it's in a turning point in its own fortunes.
It is still the superpower.
But I think there is an awareness in the US that it's about to decline and that the institutions
in the US, which have turned towards China, have very little interest in keeping American hegemony alive.
(23:30):
Thinking specifically about a company like Walmart, which is an American concern but has increasingly
shifted its manufacturing operations to China.
What a company like this does is something quite different from the old-fashioned multinational corporation.
(23:55):
That's a very scary thing about the United States.
Now I think you feel it when you talk to ordinary people outside the big power centres, I mean,
in the provinces of the centre of the country or in the south, the southwest.
I don't mean rich people, I mean ordinary middle-class people, that they feel that this is a paradigmatic story for them.
(24:18):
What has happened with this company is that they are at a moment of losing hegemony.
And it's again one of the reasons for an almost hysterical worry about security about being
in control because the economy is taking that away from a people who have long been used to being in control.
(24:45):
I mean, America has enjoyed for three generations hegemony.
People take it for granted and now they can't.
And the political consequences of that to me are terrifying, that we will see more and more
wars to demonstrate that that hegemony can be asserted.
(25:06):
This is, I think, for the US, not for Britain, which is not really a military power, but for
the US, this is a very.
This is a perilous moment in some way and it's why Bush could be elected.
He is a man who asserts the absolute inflexibility of American power that it must be dominant.
(25:31):
Does it with the World Bank, does it with his appointment to the UN?
These are all people who are compensating for something that the economy is beginning to erode.
Stefan Fuchs (25:43):
How does the average American feel this loss of America's imperial power?
Normally, he is not an imperialist, who is now interested in any colonies.
Where can the trauma be identified?
Richard Sennett (25:57):
It's found in the loss of jobs.
The actual number of jobs within the American economy that are lost to a country like China
is significant, but not enormous.
Many of the people who have lost those jobs have found other forms of work.
But the work they found is of a different character than the work they had.
(26:18):
Most of these manufacturing and low service jobs were long term and the kinds of manual labour
they're finding to replace it or low-level service work is very uncertain in its tenure, very shifting.
They once identified with companies that were guarantors of long term employment.
(26:43):
The jobs they now find, no one serves as a guarantor to them, neither unions nor companies.
So it feels to people as though work is disappearing.
Even though, say, compared to Germany, America has much lower levels of unemployment.
But what is happening is that there's a shift in the character of the work itself.
(27:07):
I give you the paradigmatic case of this is of Koreans who moved to the United States.
When they moved, they did something that Americans didn't want to do.
They ran little stores, convenience stores, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Korean families in the United States enormously their culture is one that puts an enormous weight on education.
(27:32):
Now the second and even third generation of Koreans are entering the university system and they're
doing better than so-called Native Americans; places like MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
or California Institute of Technology have got tons of Korean students who are deeply motivated,
(27:55):
whose parents are deeply motivated that they get these scientific skills.
So now you get a very schizophrenic notion also response to immigrants.
It's not because they're low, that they're a threat.
It's that when they plant themselves in the United States, they move up; some of them become enormously socially mobile.
(28:20):
And so we're seeing a kind of resentment of immigration in the US, which parallels a little
the resentment of Jews in the nineteen twenties where the children of these poor Eastern European
Jews were suddenly appearing as the most talented motivated students in universities.
(28:44):
So that's also a source of instability and it's something for which American ideology poorly prepares people.
So it's not a very happy society at the moment.
Stefan Fuchs (28:55):
This means that, in the specific case of the United States, this social stress, this burden
on society due to accelerated capitalism is at risk of becoming a war-mongering element.
Richard Sennett (29:11):
Well, I think that's possible.
I put it another way that the paradox of the United States is that it's a superpower, which feels weak.
It's a very peculiar phenomenon.
It's a superpower without much self-confidence and less powerful countries have more of it.
(29:32):
Britain, certainly, is a more confident society.
It's more confident about itself as a society.
In my own experience, your ordinary people here feel good about what's going to happen in Britain,
even though it's no longer an imperial power.
But they feel things basically are going to work out.
I would say that's not the case for a lot of Americans, and it may be a good thing that they
(30:00):
lose their self-confidence, but it can take very irrational forms.
And I think this kind of religious extremism or these kinds of.
Stefan Fuchs (30:15):
Let us perhaps return to the question of redistribution, compensation of power in democracy.
When one considers what they say, one might suspect that there is a technological dimension
to power, that power is enhanced by new technologies and that due to this fact, democratic compensation,
(30:40):
distribution of power presents a completely different problem than has been seen so far.
Richard Sennett (30:51):
Because we were naive about this technology and enthusiasts, we didn't think about the possibilities it contains for democracy.
It was used in a way that was not very creative, and I believe it can be used in institutions
to liberate people rather than to make them Foucaultian subjects of surveillance and so on that
(31:16):
it could be a tool for enabling people below. How that would happen?
I need to learn more about, but I think this is one area where I think politics will really take itself.
How do you get a democratic form of technology?
How do you make that work?
(31:37):
What would it look like?
It's something that I think is terribly important.
It really means understanding different techniques of ways of programming machinery.
It's not just a question about political ideology.
It's a question about getting inside the machines themselves.
Audioarchiv Team (31:56):
Thank you for being with us at Audioarchiv.
Follow us, and you won't miss an episode.
And don't forget the like button.
See you next week, your Audio Archive Team.
Welcome to Audio Archive, the channel for historical interviews with female writers, philosophers,
activists, and intellectuals from around the world.
Richard Sennett (00:34):
Hello.
Anmod (00:35):
Are political parties in the brave new world of the 21st. Century merely marketing items?
Are they run like a business as a business model?
And is their business to enforce so-called reforms?
Perhaps the parties promote their reforms like the new formulation of an old detergent.
(00:59):
Whether it is pensions, retirement provisions, housing, or social security, the package that
the voter receives becomes more colourful and the offer more confusing each time, but is smaller
and more expensive to replicate.
In the USA, it seems to be a business for European party politics.
And like Donald Trump, they are proud of each of their reform deals, deals that they prefer
(01:23):
to make with business, trade unions, and industry.
Parties today function strictly hierarchically, like large corporations.
Their elites have external advisory teams, spin doctors, opinion polling institutes, and press release organs.
Since the mid-20th century, says Richard Sennett, a US-British sociologist, party politics can
(01:47):
no longer be distinguished from corporate management.
For the profit of the shareholders.
In the case of parties, these are informal networks, party-owned foundations, and asset structures.
One might agree with Richard Sennett that the greatest danger to the future of democracies is the parties themselves.
And it seems that the European far-right parties, from the German AfD to the Portuguese Chega,
(02:13):
are merely another radical, profit-oriented business model.
Richard Sennett explains why the call for new leaders is based on the lack of implementation
of political programmes, and why chancellors and prime ministers act like CEOs of companies.
Stefan Fuchs (02:31):
Mr Sennett, you have extensively described the radical new organisational forms of work in global capitalism.
Ever shorter contract durations, ever fewer linear career biographies, and ever more technically
networked teams that disperse after just a few months.
(02:52):
Mobility and flexibility are the categorical imperatives of the 21st. Century.
This deeply affects the psyche of individuals.
However, this cannot leave social coexistence untouched.
The post-industrial working world can create less and less social cohesion.
(03:14):
On the contrary, it destroys it at both the local and national levels, increasingly defaming
it as something outdated and obsolete.
This corrosion process of society, a system that radiates indifference, as they say, must also
raise the question of political renewal.
(03:36):
How does the political sphere change according to their analysis under the influence of such a transformed working world?
Richard Sennett (03:51):
On the one hand, there is a political programme that tries to universalise or generalise changes
at the cutting edge of the economy into institutional forms for politics.
On the other side, there is a compensation, which is a new importance placed on personality
(04:15):
divorced from these institutional changes on the institutional side.
What is striking is the fact that the cutting edge of the global economy, with its flexible
short-term character, suits a very small number of institutions.
(04:37):
It suits high technology companies and finances certain forms of human services.
Politicians look at this and say, well, this is a general model.
And so medical care, insurance, unemployment benefits, even education fall within this model
(05:00):
that an educational system or a medical system should resemble a finance business.
And this is a push that has continued under the name of reform, almost without interruption
from the mid-nineties up to the present.
(05:24):
And that model also enters politics.
That is to say, a politician emphasises his own personal qualities, not his fidelity to a set
of issues or a political programme.
He is a mobile agent and seeks legitimacy based on his own character, rather than on his capacity to enact a programme.
(05:54):
This is why in Britain, as in the United States, politicians constantly walk away from programmes
they've announced as though they were somehow divorced from the actions they are taking.
(06:15):
And it resonates in the economy in that frequently people who are working in short-term flexible
organisations cannot commit to programmes within them.
They act within these institutions, but they can't commit to them.
The institutions are too fragile, too changing.
(06:39):
So I think we're now seeing a kind of great paradox in politics, where politicians have very
strongly declared beliefs for a very short time and then surrender what they believe very quickly.
Just as in the economy, people easily surrender where they are in these organisations and move on.
(07:06):
And that, I also think, is a peculiarity of modern politics that may have.
Stefan Fuchs (07:10):
Very negative consequences this economic paradigm of management, the reduction of complexity,
the short-sightedness, the time horizon, how is it possible that this paradigm influences politics,
where there are parties like the Labour Party, for example, the Social Democracy in Germany,
(07:34):
which have a long history, which have a large apparatus with members.
How is it possible that it influences this area so quickly?
Richard Sennett (07:45):
You ask me a question that comes from the past.
What is the model of being a manager?
If you are a modern manager, you are not taking responsibility for an organisation long term,
you move increasingly frequently from organisation to organisation.
You manage processes to be very concrete about this in the economy.
(08:08):
And this cutting edge, this new model of management, the test of a good manager, is not long
term profitability of the company, it's the short term price of shares.
From quarter to quarter, managers are rewarded for share price, not for the ultimate viability of the company.
(08:32):
That model that is the manager managing processes lessens a kind of commitment and responsibility,
taking its reflection in politics, its echo in politics is that the politician is not managing
(08:52):
a long term project, he's managing a short term process.
His commitments are not ideological in that sense.
That is to say that the party organisation can be looked at as a business.
And when you think like a modern manager about it, your goal is not the long term growth of
(09:17):
the party, but your own position at a short term moment within it.
What has happened in Britain is that the Labour Party, as you describe it, is a Labour Party
that is in the process of dying, being replaced by a new Labour Party, which is much more centralised,
much more focused on the Prime Minister in which ordinary members of the party count for very
(09:43):
little, which causes those ordinary members?
Great pain, but they have essentially become an audience rather than actors in the political process.
And one of the reasons that Blair is so disliked by ordinary members of the Labour Party is
(10:04):
much broader than the war in Iraq or the relative failure of many of his reforms.
It's that he has disempowered them by cheating them, as though they were employees in a short term organisation.
I don't know whether there's a parallel in Germany, but certainly in the Anglo-American world.
(10:30):
This has happened in the Republican Party in the United States as well, the Republican Party
is no longer a grassroots organisation.
And that, in my view, is a consequence of politicians thinking more and more like modern managers.
Stefan Fuchs (10:49):
Could one say that this label new New Labour, New Democrats means that we have a sort of diet
version of politics that is increasingly abandoning its historical dimension, which can do without
party organisations more and more, and thus undergoes a very strong process of reduction abstraction.
Richard Sennett (11:21):
Just as in a corporation, where a manager at the top decides to reorganise and issues a dictate,
we will no longer do this.
There is no longer any discussion with unions or indeed, with lower levels of management.
So in politics, the dictate becomes a stronger phenomenon.
(11:46):
And again, it is seen as legitimate in politics, because this is how change supposedly occurs
for the better reform in business.
To me, the Iraq war was an extraordinary example of that in Britain, opposed by between seventy
(12:08):
and seventy-six percent of the British public, seventy to seventy-six percent of the public Blair went ahead.
He simply did it to put this another way.
And this is, I think, my general critique of what's happening to modern capitalism is that institutionally,
(12:31):
it leads in an undemocratic direction.
It leads to what I've called a form of soft fascism, a concept which drives people in America and Britain. Crazy.
It's the dictate, it's the leader, saying I embody what is right, no matter what my people think,
(12:55):
I embody what is right, which is a kind and I embody reform, which is a it's not national socialism,
it's not fascism of an Italian style, it's something new, but it is a notion of absolute arbitrary will.
And I am afraid that Iraq, what happened in Iraq is a foreshadowing of this kind of political
(13:23):
action in the future in the United States, President Bush is trying to do the same thing with
the courts that is by active dictate, would you say, in Germany, to transform these courts simply
by his own action, resisted by them again, by the majority of the public, even a majority of
(13:50):
Republicans to call this light is to mistake the gravity of this relationship between economics and politics.
Stefan Fuchs (14:02):
This brings me to the question, what are the factors of domination, the political power factors
that make it possible to bring such a political model into practice under the conditions of a formally functioning democracy.
Richard Sennett (14:29):
Edge economic organisations, we are seeing power exercised by an ever smaller number of elite managers at the top.
So we are seeing in the political realm an ever smaller number of political actors having ever greater power.
It's a consequence of the weakness of local parties; it makes for quicker decision making, which
(14:57):
becomes a positive under a system like this to have relatively few people do so to centralise in that way.
The measure for both the United States and for Great Britain is that the cabinets, the officials
charged with various ministries, have lost more and more power.
(15:19):
It's true in both countries, with the exception, of course, of the ministers of Finance.
Audioarchiv Team (15:27):
Now we continue with the interview.
Like us, if you enjoy it.
Richard Sennett (15:33):
In the nineteen seventies, if you were a home secretary in Britain, you were an enormously,
not only powerful but distinguished figure.
This was a position of great honour.
If you were a secretary of education in the United States again, a position of both power and great prestige.
(15:55):
Those positions now are nothing.
They are people who follow orders.
They are like vice presidents in a company.
You know who do what they're told to do.
Now, how long will this last? I don't know.
If I look in my crystal ball, it seems to me, at least in the Anglo-American world for a good
(16:18):
period of time, continental Europe.
I don't know, it's hard.
It would be harder for me to say whether this will happen to Germany as well. It seems to me.
This codetermination is so deeply rooted in your political culture that you would resist.
Stefan Fuchs (16:36):
How was it possible that we came into this situation? What were the instruments?
Where has this power gone?
Richard Sennett (16:44):
Ultimately, I can answer your question in terms of economic institutions, which is that these
are changes that came not out of some devilish desire of people at the top to centralise, but of more impersonal forces.
Short term management of companies is a consequence of an enormous unleashing of global investment capital.
(17:13):
After the Bretton Woods agreements broke down in the nineteen seventies, where suddenly you
have, what my friend Bennett Harrison once called, impatient capital from around the world,
looking to buy shares and get short term returns from it.
(17:37):
So, in that sense, the time dimension of this story begins with a kind of sudden release of
mobile capital thirty, thirty-five years ago.
Technology also plays a role in this; again, it's not a devil's role.
(17:58):
Well, one thing that's happened is that the power has gone into institutions which invest pension
funds, which become enormously potent economic actors, rather because they have massive amounts
of capital, and they begin to determine the fates of organisations.
(18:24):
It certainly has gone into a new kind of managerial class as I've argued in my books.
And this is a managerial class which knows how to play the system.
That is how to position itself in networks.
Oftentimes the networks are informal.
(18:47):
That is, if you're moving in between jobs, what allows you to move is a network of contacts and so on.
And the difficulty when we get into politics is that that kind of arrangement doesn't include citizens.
It's a thin slice of layer.
(19:07):
It's a very thin slice of society.
One of the reasons that I think if I could take your question in another direction, like many
people, I have been puzzling over why religionists become so important in American politics.
(19:28):
And the reason for it, I think in part, is that it provides a sense of agency, very primitive
agency in my view, but there's a name you can put to why things happen as they do.
God does not exist in a network.
(19:50):
He or she, who knows, is not a manager.
You find instead a kind of in religion, a kind of concretization, of some form of powerful agency,
which is very hard to see in the economy itself, even though these people feel more.
(20:14):
Many Americans who have become religious or put religion into politics, people who are suffering economically.
But I think that's the kind of.
There's a kind of clarification of agency that's occurred in this religious culture, which is
(20:35):
very, very powerfully seductive to people who can't find the power economically.
Who feel that they are subject to powers, which don't have a name, a clear label.
As I said before, very few modern managers actually taking responsibility for the organizations.
(20:55):
They manage, they're not there long enough to do that.
They don't work in the organization.
For life, they pass through it.
They're more mobile than employees.
Lower down, they're exercising power.
They're not exercising authority in the Weberian sense.
And that's enormously frustrating for people below.
(21:17):
It's a thought I have about why this kind of religiosity is.
I mean, there are other reasons for it in the United States as well, but I think this is one of them.
Stefan Fuchs (21:27):
They say, so these are the managers.
It is a very thin, ever-shrinking layer of managers that holds power today over politics, over society.
What about these famous super-rich?
These billionaires who own half of the world's wealth.
Richard Sennett (21:47):
Some of those very wealthy people, of course, inherited their money.
The Hunt family, an oil family in Texas, is like that.
But the money doesn't do them much good unless it's managed and put into play.
And that's as Bill Gates himself found, who's, I guess, the richest person in the world. Is that true?
(22:08):
It's not money that that mountain of cash is not something that he could move around now alone.
I mean, there's always organisation that surrounds wealth.
I think that it is in terms of this global capitalism.
At a turning point, we all know that the United States has become ever more caught economically
(22:34):
in a clinch, in an embrace with China.
China manufactures for the United States.
There's an enormous trade imbalance.
Many of the manufacturing jobs in the United States have been outsourced to China.
What worries me most about the United States at this point is that it is beginning to understand
(22:59):
that it's in a turning point in its own fortunes.
It is still the superpower.
But I think there is an awareness in the US that it's about to decline and that the institutions
in the US, which have turned towards China, have very little interest in keeping American hegemony alive.
(23:30):
Thinking specifically about a company like Walmart, which is an American concern but has increasingly
shifted its manufacturing operations to China.
What a company like this does is something quite different from the old-fashioned multinational corporation.
(23:55):
That's a very scary thing about the United States.
Now I think you feel it when you talk to ordinary people outside the big power centres, I mean,
in the provinces of the centre of the country or in the south, the southwest.
I don't mean rich people, I mean ordinary middle-class people, that they feel that this is a paradigmatic story for them.
(24:18):
What has happened with this company is that they are at a moment of losing hegemony.
And it's again one of the reasons for an almost hysterical worry about security about being
in control because the economy is taking that away from a people who have long been used to being in control.
(24:45):
I mean, America has enjoyed for three generations hegemony.
People take it for granted and now they can't.
And the political consequences of that to me are terrifying, that we will see more and more
wars to demonstrate that that hegemony can be asserted.
(25:06):
This is, I think, for the US, not for Britain, which is not really a military power, but for
the US, this is a very.
This is a perilous moment in some way and it's why Bush could be elected.
He is a man who asserts the absolute inflexibility of American power that it must be dominant.
(25:31):
Does it with the World Bank, does it with his appointment to the UN?
These are all people who are compensating for something that the economy is beginning to erode.
Stefan Fuchs (25:43):
How does the average American feel this loss of America's imperial power?
Normally, he is not an imperialist, who is now interested in any colonies.
Where can the trauma be identified?
Richard Sennett (25:57):
It's found in the loss of jobs.
The actual number of jobs within the American economy that are lost to a country like China
is significant, but not enormous.
Many of the people who have lost those jobs have found other forms of work.
But the work they found is of a different character than the work they had.
(26:18):
Most of these manufacturing and low service jobs were long term and the kinds of manual labour
they're finding to replace it or low-level service work is very uncertain in its tenure, very shifting.
They once identified with companies that were guarantors of long term employment.
(26:43):
The jobs they now find, no one serves as a guarantor to them, neither unions nor companies.
So it feels to people as though work is disappearing.
Even though, say, compared to Germany, America has much lower levels of unemployment.
But what is happening is that there's a shift in the character of the work itself.
(27:07):
I give you the paradigmatic case of this is of Koreans who moved to the United States.
When they moved, they did something that Americans didn't want to do.
They ran little stores, convenience stores, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Korean families in the United States enormously their culture is one that puts an enormous weight on education.
(27:32):
Now the second and even third generation of Koreans are entering the university system and they're
doing better than so-called Native Americans; places like MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
or California Institute of Technology have got tons of Korean students who are deeply motivated,
(27:55):
whose parents are deeply motivated that they get these scientific skills.
So now you get a very schizophrenic notion also response to immigrants.
It's not because they're low, that they're a threat.
It's that when they plant themselves in the United States, they move up; some of them become enormously socially mobile.
(28:20):
And so we're seeing a kind of resentment of immigration in the US, which parallels a little
the resentment of Jews in the nineteen twenties where the children of these poor Eastern European
Jews were suddenly appearing as the most talented motivated students in universities.
(28:44):
So that's also a source of instability and it's something for which American ideology poorly prepares people.
So it's not a very happy society at the moment.
Stefan Fuchs (28:55):
This means that, in the specific case of the United States, this social stress, this burden
on society due to accelerated capitalism is at risk of becoming a war-mongering element.
Richard Sennett (29:11):
Well, I think that's possible.
I put it another way that the paradox of the United States is that it's a superpower, which feels weak.
It's a very peculiar phenomenon.
It's a superpower without much self-confidence and less powerful countries have more of it.
(29:32):
Britain, certainly, is a more confident society.
It's more confident about itself as a society.
In my own experience, your ordinary people here feel good about what's going to happen in Britain,
even though it's no longer an imperial power.
But they feel things basically are going to work out.
I would say that's not the case for a lot of Americans, and it may be a good thing that they
(30:00):
lose their self-confidence, but it can take very irrational forms.
And I think this kind of religious extremism or these kinds of.
Stefan Fuchs (30:15):
Let us perhaps return to the question of redistribution, compensation of power in democracy.
When one considers what they say, one might suspect that there is a technological dimension
to power, that power is enhanced by new technologies and that due to this fact, democratic compensation,
(30:40):
distribution of power presents a completely different problem than has been seen so far.
Richard Sennett (30:51):
Because we were naive about this technology and enthusiasts, we didn't think about the possibilities it contains for democracy.
It was used in a way that was not very creative, and I believe it can be used in institutions
to liberate people rather than to make them Foucaultian subjects of surveillance and so on that
(31:16):
it could be a tool for enabling people below. How that would happen?
I need to learn more about, but I think this is one area where I think politics will really take itself.
How do you get a democratic form of technology?
How do you make that work?
(31:37):
What would it look like?
It's something that I think is terribly important.
It really means understanding different techniques of ways of programming machinery.
It's not just a question about political ideology.
It's a question about getting inside the machines themselves.
Audioarchiv Team (31:56):
Thank you for being with us at Audioarchiv.
Follow us, and you won't miss an episode.
And don't forget the like button.
See you next week, your Audio Archive Team.
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