Collateral Damage (2011)

The term “collateral damage” has recently entered military vocabulary to describe the unintended consequences of armed interventions: consequences that are unplanned yet damaging, often at great human and personal cost. But collateral damage is not confined to armed conflict; it is also one of the most striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The combustible combination of growing inequality and increasing human suffering, marginalized as “collateral,” is becoming one of the most catastrophic problems of our time. For the political class, poverty is commonly treated as a problem of law and order, a matter of dealing with individuals such as unemployed young people who fall foul of the law. Treating poverty as a criminal issue, however, obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist philosophy of life promoted by a consumer-oriented economy and the rapid shrinking of opportunities available to the poor. In our liquid-modern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven, consumer-oriented society, “aliens inside” deprived of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order. In this book, Zygmunt Bauman examines the connection between growing social inequality and the rising volume of collateral damage, together with its implications and costs.