Our societies are being eaten away by the invisible disease of ubiquitous precarity, where people feel deeply disempowered and at the mercy of forces beyond their control, says university professor and award-winning author Albena Azmanova, who delivered a powerful keynote speech during EESC Civil Society Week. In this interview for EESC Info, she unpacks the main causes of this epidemic, including the tendency to prioritise equality over economic stability.

In your keynote speech during Civil Society Week, you spoke about an epidemic of precarity, which was at the root of declining political liberties. You described it as an invisible disease that was driving us crazy. Can you tell us more about what you mean by 'epidemic of precarity'? How is it generated?

People are increasingly exasperated, and deaths triggered by despair - especially suicides in the workplace - are on the rise in affluent societies. This is the most painful, and hence the most visible, tip of a vast but invisible iceberg of precarity, driven by the insecurity of our livelihoods. It's not only that people are outraged and trust in political institutions is waning, although we often hear about that. Mistrust can be healthy: it drives demands for accountability. Anger can be productive: it can spark struggles for justice and lead to meaningful transformation.

The current disease of our societies – what in my work I discuss as 'ubiquitous precarity', is different. It is a special kind of insecurity, an acute disempowerment because people feel they are at the mercy of forces they cannot control.

As individuals, we experience precarity as incapacity to cope with the basic tasks of our lives. The sense of incapacity to cope creates a fear of falling, of losing what you have — your job, your savings, your capacity to perform, your sanity. So the trouble is not so much with poverty or inequality, but with experienced or anticipated loss, fear of falling. This is how individuals experience precarity.

Societies experience precarity as incapacity to govern themselves and manage adversity. Take COVID-19. How was it possible that our rich, scientifically brilliant and institutionally sophisticated societies allowed a public health problem, caused by a virus that was neither completely unknown nor too deadly, to become a severe health crisis, and then an economic and social crisis? The answer is because our governments had slashed public investment, including in healthcare.

There is another feature of precarity. It is triggered by specific policies, by the neoliberal combination of free markets and open economies where decisions are based on profitability. In order to ensure national or EU competitiveness in the global market, within a planetary competition for profit, center-left and center-right elites rushed to reduce both job security (to allow businesses the flexibility that made them competitive) and spending on public services. This meant that everyone had more responsibilities but fewer resources with which to carry them out. We are asked to do more with less.

Here is an example: the European Commission is asking states to do more for social justice, but it is also asking them to reduce spending. This mismatch between ever growing responsibilities and ever shrinking resources results in a sense of uncertainty and doubts that we have the capacity to cope. It is not the healthy kind of uncertainty that makes us eager to venture out into the world, to consider our options, take risks or prove ourselves. Instead, this is a toxic fear, the fear of losing your livelihood and the anticipation of a darker future.

In your opinion, what is the cause of the rise of authoritarian leaders and right-wing parties? How do you assess democratic freedoms and respect for core EU values in Europe today?

The rise in support for right-wing authoritarian leaders and parties is due to politically generated precarity.  People feel insecure, so they crave security and stability; they feel disempowered, so they put their hopes in strong leaders who will provide immediate stability with an iron fist. For example, they increase military spending and boost the power of the police - as the EU is about to do now.

The grounds for all this was laid earlier by centrist parties as they made our societies more precarious for neoliberal reasons. In my view, the center-left bears particular responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. While social democracy's self-proclaimed calling is to fight for justice, it has focused on fighting one form of injustice: inequality. Meanwhile, what people long for is economic stability: the ability to manage their lives and plan their futures.

Think about it: we could have perfectly equal, yet deeply precarious societies - and that is hardly what I would call a thriving society. Moreover, people aren’t necessarily eager to eradicate inequality if it means being treated like losers who are compensated (and humiliated) through a bit of redistribution: they don’t want to be losers in the first place.

In your speech, you also spoke about 'the victimhood Olympics'. Could you describe what this is and why we should move away from it?

Over the past five decades or so, the fight against discrimination has taken the form of identity politics. Groups that have historically suffered discrimination were treated as 'protected minorities', with their status elevated through affirmative action measures such as targeted promotions and quota systems. When this occurs in a context of ubiquitous precarity, where good jobs and other resources are scarce, these protected groups start competing for these limited resources. In such a climate, victimhood becomes a kind of trump card: the greater the perceived victimhood, the stronger the claim to protection.

On the one hand, this creates animosity between the competing groups, eroding solidarity. On the other hand, none of them truly wins, because they remain victims. After all, being a victim and suffering discrimination is precisely what grants them the grounds to claim protection. The only winners in this nasty game of competition for access to resources and special protection are the elites who magnanimously dispense patronage. The end result is that disempowered groups fight each other as enemies, while their patrons, the political elites, draw more power from those fights. 

Given all of this, why is civil society so important for the preservation of democracy and the civil liberties many of us take for granted? Why is civil society, and not democratic elections, the antidote to abuses of power?

When we vote, we are alone. We feel our disempowerment and the frustrations of insecurity acutely, and we give this anxiety a voice through our vote. Hence the rise of reactionary parties in free and fair elections. Civil society is moved by a different logic and has a special source of power: togetherness. When we are with others, united by the bonds of a common cause, we are not alone, we feel less precarious, less disempowered, because we can rely on the support of our comrades. Once precarity is reduced, fear subsides and we can think ahead, we can think big.

Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science at City St George's, University of London and co-editor of the journal Emancipations. Her last book, Capitalism on Edge (2020) won many awards, including the Michael Harrington Book Prize, which the American Political Science Association gives to 'an outstanding work that shows how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world'.