Collateral Damage (ePub)

The term 'collateral damage' has recently been added to the
vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended
consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are
unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human
and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the
world of armed intervention - it is also one of the most salient
and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The
inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising
volume of human suffering marginalized as 'collateral' is
becoming one of most cataclysmic problems of our time.

For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem
of law and order - a matter of how to deal with individuals, such
as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating
poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of
inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life
philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer-oriented economy,
on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available
to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid-modern
world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven,
consumer-oriented society - 'aliens inside' who are deprived
of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order.

In this new book Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and
influential social thinkers of our time - examines the selective
affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in
the volume of 'collateral damage' and considers its
implications and its costs.