Larvatus Prodeo

The Guardian’s Comment is Free website and Soundings magazine are organising a series of debates on the theme of After New Labour: Who owns the progressive future?. Some of the contributions are making it online. After excoriating the “Third Way” for its lack of focus on what used to be the left’s core goal – working to put into practice the belief “that it is the sacrosanct duty of community to care for and to assist all its members, collectively, against the powerful forces they are unable to fight alone”, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman poses a problem which haunts anyone concerned with political action in the name of social justice:

Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances of most of our contemporaries, have evaporated from the nation state into the global space, where they float free from political control: politics has remained as local as before and therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One of the effects of globalisation is the divorce between power (the capacity to have things done) and politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space, and politics deprived of power in the local space.

Continue reading ‘All politics is local, but power is global’