The New Planetary Vulgate

Within a matter of a few years, in all the advanced societies, employers, international officials, high-ranking civil servants, media intellectuals and high-flying journalists have all started to voice a strange Newspeak. Its vocabulary, which seems to have sprung out of nowhere, is now on everyone’s lips: ’globalization’ and ’flexibility’, ’governance’ and ’employability’, ’underclass’ and ’exclusion’, ’new economy’ and ’zero tolerance’, ’communitarianism’ and ’multiculturalism’, not to mention their so-called postmodern cousins, ’minority’, ’ethnicity’, ’identity’, ’fragmentation’, and so on. Th e diffusion of this new planetary vulgate – from which the terms ’capitalism’, ’class’, ’exploitation’, ’domination’ and ’inequality’ are conspicuous by their absence, having been peremptorily dismissed under the pretext that they are obsolete and non-pertinent – is the result of a new type of imperialism.