Habermas and pimps: the world of the day and the world of the night

The Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated in 2003, after being in power for less than three years (the first PM after the fall of Milosevic). Because of his relative youth (50) when he was killed, exceptional intelligence, and most unusual life, he became and is increasingly seen as a hero, an icon to many in Serbia. Not unlike Kennedy, having been killed early in his political life, his interrupted life allows everyone to build a plausible story of how things would have been much better had he stayed alive. Djindjic’s friend from high-school (gymnasium) and university Dragan Lakicevic has  just written an excellent memoir on their friendship, entitled (with an obvious nod to Joyce) “A portrait of a politician as a young man”.

The book is very good and I would recommend it to all Serbian (Croatian) readers. But my intention here is not to discuss Djindjic’s life, but to highlight one small, incidental, feature of the book. Both Djindjic and Lakicevic studied philosophy at the graduate school in Frankfurt (in the early 1980s). They listened to many famous professors, Habermas being one of them. Djindjic succeeded, after being rudely turned down by Habermas’ secretary, to talk to Habermas himself by climbing up and jumping through the window of his office (and in the process seriously scaring Habermas). That’s how he managed to become a graduate student.

The author’s (Lakicevic) path to graduate education was somewhat less flamboyant, but it is his story that I find most interesting. Both Djindjic and Lakicevic were almost totally penniless, living on irregular and minute stipends, and surviving by doing odd jobs (from construction to night clubs and smuggling), mixing up with Yugoslav and Turkish gastarbeiters, and being treated by them or accidental women they seduced to dinners and drinks.   

It is the contrast between the day life composed of philosophy lectures at a prestigious and orderly university, where professors appear exactly on time, give appointments one month in advance, deliver lectures on social contract, alienation, ontology, epistemology….where libraries are immense and quiet, books arrive quickly, carried by the silent helpers, and the world of the night –when our heroes return to their lair—that is striking.

The large rental building where they live is divided in tiny rooms that have only sinks, with shared bathrooms, where practically no tenant owns any furniture, and where in many rooms live five or six or seven illegal or legal workers (with their families) from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Morocco, Bangladesh, Nigeria. The tenants, Lakicevic writes, almost never greet each other: ashamed of their poverty they silently “like phantoms” cross each other if they happen to meet in front of the building.

But some apartments are an exception to this surly, beaten-up, docile and bitter crowd. These are the apartments where pimps arrange fake marriages between gastarbeiters and German prostitutes—marriages that, as in the US, allow illegal workers to become legal. Serious, middle-aged men, dressed in their best checker-patterned suits, and with white socks and shoes on their feet come to the pimps’ apartments where they choose among the prospective wives and agree on the price and duration of the marriage.

When the night is over, Lakicevic goes back to the world of learning where the discussion is about the best ways to organize a community, citizens’ rights and duties, working class and bourgeoisie, l’etre et le néant. But the world of the day and the world of the night have nothing in common. It is not solely that the people of the day and the people of the night have different interests and backgrounds. The two cannot be said, in any meaningful way, to belong to the same community. They are two worlds.

Naipaul saw the same duality between the whites and  the enslaved and miserable African populations. In a beautiful passage he writes:  

There was the world of the day; that was the white world. There was the world of the night; that was the African world, of spirits and magic and the true gods. And in that world, ragged men, humiliated by day, were transformed--in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their fellows--into kings, sorcerers, herbalists, men in touch with the true forces of the earth and possessed of complete power...To the outsider, to the slave-owner, the African night world might appear a mimic worlds, a child's world, a carnival. But to the African… it was the true world: it turned white men to phantoms and plantation life to an illusion. (“The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro”, p. 280).

I saw myself too, although in much less dramatic ways, the gaping distance between the two worlds during the Indignados’ demonstrations in Spain. The demonstrations started in 2011 at Puerta del Sol, one evening in March, not more than 100 meters from the apartment where I then lived. The demonstrations continued for days spreading to the rest of Spain. Many people have commented how passionate and well-behaved were the young people who took over the streets of Spanish cities. And indeed I have frequently seen them in the evenings and even late in warm Spanish nights, sitting in small circles, as in agoras, discussing, raising their hands, voting on different proposals.

But what went unmentioned were the people at the edges of these exercises in direct democracy. They were not the police, or Guardia Civil. They were hundreds of Africans to whom the assemblies of so many people in one place provided new business opportunities:  selling bottled water, chewing gums, fruits, fake Vuitton bags and Rolex watches. Their activity, always present at Puerta del Sol and the neighboring streets, now skyrocketed. There were more and more of them and they were selling more stuff. The police which refrained from intervening against the Spanish youth could not move in force against the Africans. So the business flourished.

But the striking thing was the enormous chasm between these two worlds of the young—people of the same age. (I think that the young Spaniards, by and large, did not even notice the young Africans; they must have looked to them like the stage extras.)  While one group discussed Habermas and Bauman, the other group, probably unaware even of what the whole fuss was about, saw this human agglomeration as an opportunity to add a few more euros to their miserable incomes.  

Were they part of the same community? Not at all. Like in the German case from the 1980s, the Spanish case of 2011, illustrates the immense distance between those who are members of a community and those who are not.

The (difficult) task of Europe will be to integrate these two groups. But as the examples also show, little has changed in thirty years, and it is not easy to expect that things will get better in the next thirty years. Can two different communities, composed of citizens and meteques, coexist forever?

On growth and people: my reply to Kate Raworth's reply

Let me focus on two most important issues on which Kate Raworth and I differ.

(My original review of Kate Raworth's very good and challenging Doughnut Economics can be found here; Kate’s response is given here.)

Growth

When Kate allows that growth is necessary for poverty reduction and that countries with income levels less than $12,500 per capita should be “allowed” to grow, she fails to either tell us up to what level they should be “allowed” to grow or to provide an estimate of how much the world GDP would have to increase in order to accommodate such growth. As I mentioned in my review, any back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that “allowing” everybody in the world to live at an income level that is today considered barely acceptable in the rich countries  involves a tripling of global GDP. Kate should show us what are, according to her, correct numbers. But the reason why I think she prefers not to do so is because it allows her to leave the whole issue in an area of deliberate vagueness where poor countries are “allowed” to grow but the issue of “unsustainability” of that growth is elided.

Now, in the next stage of vagueness, it is acknowledged that perhaps the space for future growth of poor countries can be provided by voluntary restraint of growth in the rich world (“high-income countries and individuals have a moral obligation to create ecological space so that others have the chance to lead lives free of deprivation”). Technically, it should imply a voluntary reduction of rich countries’ real GDP (that is, negative growth) in order to create the “space” into which poor countries can grow. Is this realistic? I already wrote about that in my discussion with Jason Hickel and I do not think that it is necessary to repeat the arguments here or to highlight the obvious fact that no rich country (or rich countries’ populations) display any observable inclination either to degrow (for if they did, they should have been cheerfully accepting the Global Recession) or to share their income with poor people (for if they were, they would not be creating right now such a fuss with migration both in Europe and the US).

So, we can take it as given: (1) if poor countries are “allowed” to grow, today’s GDP envelop will have to be expanded severalfold, and (2) rich countries’ populations will not voluntarily immiserate themselves nor will they share, out of the goodness of their heart, their income with poor countries.

People

The second issue is less amenable to such (in my opinion) clear cut conclusion. It is the issue of human behavior under conditions of hyper-commercialized global capitalism.

I have already explained my views (and will do so  further in my forthcoming Capitalism, alone), so those interested can find them here.

Let me make just two paints.

The fact that people cooperate does not invalidate at all that people are motivated by self-interest alone. Self-interest can often be more effectively realized in cooperation than by trying to do everything alone. This is why companies, clubs and mafia (indeed, mafia) do exist. If accomplishment of self-interest required that one do everything alone, there will be no society, no family, and everybody would be self-employed. None of that is true. But none of that invalidates the notion that cooperation will be  a form in which, at times, self-interest will be best realized.

The next point has to do with human nature under hyper-commercialized global capitalism. Here I respectfully decline to be moved by the results of any of  the “games” that Kate cites and that are supposed to reveal human nature. These games are indeed games; they are not the way people behave in real life.  Games are good in generating publishable papers but they tell us nothing about how the same people would (or do) behave in real life. There, if Kate wants to convince me and others of our “improving” nature and greater willingness to share, I would like to find the evidence that we are becoming less engaged in market transactions, that we contribute more to charity, that we care less about income, wealth and prices…

But all the real world evidence I see goes exactly in the opposite direction. And for a reason. Globalized capitalism has to create new goods and services and it moves into what was hitherto a personal sphere (homes, cars, leisure hours). It pushes us to exploit these in order to make more money (because money is the sole indicator of success). Thus marketization (and numeracy which goes together with marketization) is greater than ever in history, and the more developed a society, the more marketized and money-conscious it is.

What we observe is that people have become ever more aware of small differences in incomes and prices. This is why Internet has brought such fierce competition between airline companies, hotels, restaurants, retailers. People consider the tiniest differences in prices. They go to stores, take a picture of an item, and then purchase it on the Internet from Walmart or Amazon. If people  were less commercially motivated, Walmart and Amazon would not be the behemoths they have become: people would have been happy to purchase the same item for a higher price in their local store. But they are not.

Professors, claiming altruism in their writings, bargain (as Kate must know) to the last possible cent when it comes to their salaries and fees. I have not noticed many of them foregoing higher income or altruistically declining higher fees. The same behavior is prevalent in all professions. I would like to be given examples of academics  (among others) who have seriously discarded the pecuniary motivation. The majority of them are like the real-world people depicted in “Inside Job”. I wrote before that out of almost 80 top economists who are recipients of the Nobel Prize, I understand that only Jan Tinbergen donated about a half of his prize. Everybody else kept it in full. And here we are talking about a group of old, very rich, extremely successful people. Yet they hoard the money. What can be expected from those who are less rich?

Again, this does not mean that we care only about money (income). Other considerations certainly do play a role. But the key consideration is that of money.

Thus, on this point I see close to zero evidence that Kate’s picture of today’s Homo Sapiens is accurate. Actually, for the reasons that are intrinsic to hyper-commercialized capitalism, I see us moving further away from the idealized picture that Kate depicts. 

Finally, let me mention that at times I think  a peculiar hypocrisy creeps into people’s discussion of human behavior because the authors seem to think that by claiming that humankind is altruistic they are thereby showing their own munificence. I think that this feeling was not entirely absent even in Adam Smith’s explicit critique of Mandeville—even if Smith himself gives us in The Wealth of Nations innumerable examples of the behavior fully consistent with the view of human nature advocated  by Mandeville.