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First published in 2017

Copyright Social Europe Publishing & Consulting GmbH

ISBN 978-1-9997151-0-6

Cover design by Dan Mogford

Open About The Author

Zygmunt Bauman was Professor of Sociology at Leeds University and one of Europe’s leading sociologists and public intellectuals.

Open On Zygmunt Bauman

On Zygmunt Bauman

By Neal Lawson

Zygmunt Bauman, who died on the 9th January 2017 aged 91, was often spoken of as the most influential sociologist of his era. Born in Poland, he had lived in the UK since 1971, settling in Leeds where he was professor of sociology until 1991, and subsequently emeritus. It was in his ‘retirement’ that a crescendo of writing and talking poured out of him. Better known outside the UK, a vast array of thinkers and activists have been guided by his brilliant mind.

Bauman’s big idea is that of liquid modernity. He described a society somewhere between the solid modern structures and cultures of the early to mid 20th century and the relativism of post-modernity. The era of secure jobs and institutions through which we navigated our lives with pretty well ease and certainty was being lost, giving way, some saw, to the supposed melting into air of post-modernity, where everything was entirely relative. In describing this half-way house as liquid, Bauman echoes Antonio Gram

Open 1. On The Outcast Generation

1. On The Outcast Generation

17 January 2011

Every generation has its measure of outcasts. There are people in each generation assigned to outcast status because a ‘generation change’ must mean some significant change in life conditions and life demands likely to force realities to depart from expectations implanted by the conditions-quo-ante. These changes devalue the skills they trained and promoted, and therefore render at least some among the new arrivals, those not flexible or prompt enough to adapt to the emergent standards, ill-prepared to cope with novel challenges and unarmed to resist their pressures. It does not, however, happen often that the plight of being outcast may stretch to embrace a generation as a whole. This may, however, be happening now.

Several generational changes have been noted during the post-war history of Europe. There was a ‘boomer generation’ first, followed by two generations called respectively X and Y; most recently (though not as recently as the shock of t

Open 2. On Sustainbility: This Time of Social Democracy

2. On Sustainbility: This Time of Social Democracy

28 January 2011

Social democrats: do they know where they are aiming? Do they have a notion of ‘good society’ worth fighting for? I doubt it. I believe they don’t. Not in the part of the world we inhabit, at any rate. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is on record squinting at both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s estates and saying, quite a few years ago, that there is no capitalist or socialist economy, only good or bad. For a long time now, at least thirty to forty years, the policy of social democratic parties has been articulated, one year of neoliberalism rule after another, by the principle ‘whatever you (the centre-right) do, we (the centre-left) can do better’.

Sometimes, although not very often, a particularly outrageous and arrogant initiative taken by the rulers provokes a pang of old socialist conscience. It’s at such times that, without making a big issue out of it, for ‘those who need it most’ or a ‘softening of the blow’ for t

Open 3. On Building Fortresses Under Siege

3. On Building Fortresses Under Siege

7 March 2011

Pat Bertroche, running for American Congress on behalf of Republicans in the state of Iowa, proposed on his blog that illegal immigrants ought to have microprocessors grafted into their bodies: after all, he explained, I may graft a microprocessor in my dog’s body, if I wish to be able to find it. Why not do the same to the illegals? Indeed, why?

In recent European reports from the scenes of massive clashes between pro-democratic protesters and the forces defending dictatorial regimes throughout the Arab world, two types of information took pride of place. One was the plight of the citizens of the reporting countries: their lives are in danger; they should be as soon as possible moved away at a safe distance from the spots of inflammation, from the southern to the northern coast of the Mediterranean; to make it happen is the government’s most urgent task, any delay is criminal. Another was the danger of the northern coast of the Mediterranean

Open 4. On Justice, And How to Know It Is There

4. On Justice, And How to Know It Is There

16 March 2011

In his essay Justice in the Global World, as before in his study The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen does not beat about the bush when analysing the lessons to be drawn from the 2008 global economic slump.

Whereas some very opulent persons saw their fortunes somewhat diminished, it was the poorest people, people ‘at the bottom of the pyramid’, local or global, that have been affected most badly: ‘Families who were already worst placed to face any further adversity have often suffered from still greater deprivation, in the form of lasting joblessness, loss of housing and shelter, loss of medical care, and other deprivations that have plagued the lives of hundreds of millions people.’

The conclusion, Amartya Sen asserts, is all too obvious: if you want to correctly evaluate the severity of the current global crisis, examine ‘what is happening to the lives of human beings, especially the less privileged people – their well-being and the

Open 5. On Internet, Slander, And Irresponsibility

5. On Internet, Slander, And Irresponsibility

14 March 2011

Reviewing in the NYT of 3rd January a collection of studies edited by Marta Nussbaum and Saul Levmore and published under the title The Offensive Internet, Stanley Fish follows the line taken by most of its contributors – who mapped the topic of the reviewed study, the issue of anonymous slander licensed by internet vs. the demands of its legal prohibition or limitation, within the freedom of speech frame.

Can one stand up against the glorious legacy of the First Amendment, known to assume that freedom of speech cannot be overprotected, and demand that voicing of certain opinions should be made illegal and punishable? The Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens dismissed in 1995 the potentially morbid consequences of anonymity of information, arguing within the same frame and in the same spirit: he insisted that 'the inherent worth of … speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its

Open 6. On The Shaky Prospects Of Meritocracy

6. On The Shaky Prospects Of Meritocracy

11 April 2011

The most prestigious academic institutions issuing the most prestigious academic diplomas – institutions most generous in granting social privileges or recompensing social deprivations – are year by year, one step at a time yet consistently and relentlessly, drifting out of the ‘social’ market and distancing themselves ever further from the throngs of youngsters whose hopes for glittering prizes they kindled and inflamed. As William D. Cohan informs in the NYT of 16th March, the annual price of tuition and fees at Harvard rose annually by 5 per cent for the last 20 years. This year, it has reached $52.000. ‘Generally speaking, in order to pay just Harvard’s tuition, someone would have to earn more than $100,000 in annual pre-tax compensation. And there are all the other family expenses – among them, the gasoline, the mortgage, food and medical expenses… Very quickly the numbers get astronomical’.

And yet… of the 30,000 applicants to Harva

Open 7. On The New Looks Of Inequality

7. On The New Looks Of Inequality

4 April 2011

Frank Rich, a leading NYT op-ed columnist, observed recently: ‘economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it…’ That was, he reminds his readers not counting on their memories, the nation’s mood 55 years ago.

As to the American middle class of today, Rich needs only ask a purely rhetorical question: ‘How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake?’ meaning how many Americans managed to preserve and retain the old trust, so much alive still a mere half-century ago: the trust in ‘social equality of mobility’, or ‘equality on the move’, ‘equality coming nearer and nearer’, ‘equality within reach’… A rhetorical question it is indeed, since in this case Rich can rely on his readers to answer, unhesitatingly: not

Open 8. On Dysfunctionality Of The Global Elites

8. On Dysfunctionality Of The Global Elites

27 April 2011

Sergei Magaril, teaching at Moscow University of Humanities, published (in the 9th February 2011 issue of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta) an article under the title ‘In Search of Social Quality’, which starts from a quotation from Ivan Pavlov, the first Russian Nobel laureate: ‘The fate of nations is determined by the minds of their intelligentsia’. In full agreement with that opinion, Magaril proceeds to charge Russian/Soviet/Russian intellectual elites with having caused, by design or by default, the catastrophes that led to the collapse of two successive Russian state regimes, and preparing now the collapse of the third.

Magaril found an early (jotted down in 1862) proclamation of Young Russia, the embryo of the violent dissidence bound to rise, spread and flourish through the following half a century – spelling out, in a fit of prophetic illumination, the strikingly detailed scenario of events leading to the imminent collapse of the 300 y

Open 9. On The Unclass Of Precarians

9. On The Unclass Of Precarians

14 June 2011

It has been, as far as I know, the economist Professor Guy Standing who (hitting the bull’s eye!) coined the term ‘precariat’ to replace, simultaneously, the terms ‘proletariat’ and ‘middle class’ – both well beyond their use-by date, fully and truly ‘zombie terms’, as Ulrich Beck would have undoubtedly classified them. As a blogger hiding under the pen name ‘Ageing Baby Boomer’ suggests, it is the market that defines our choices and isolates us, ensuring that none of us questions how those choices are defined. Make the wrong choices and you will be punished. But what makes it so savage is that it takes no account of how some people are much better equipped than others – have the social capital, knowledge or financial resources – in order to make good choices.

What ‘unites’ the precariat, integrating that exceedingly variegated aggregate into a cohesive category, is the condition of extreme disintegration, pulverisation, atomisation. Whatever their pro

Open 10. On The Future Of Migrants - And Of Europe

10. On The Future Of Migrants - And Of Europe

13 May 2011

‘Europe needs immigrants’ – former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema stated bluntly in the 10th May Le Monde – in direct dispute with ‘the two most active European pyromaniacs’, Berlusconi and Sarkozy. Calculation to support that postulate could hardly be simpler: there are today 333 million Europeans, but with the present (and still falling) average birth rate, this number will shrink to 242 million in the next 40 years.

To fill that gap, at least 30 million newcomers will be needed – otherwise our European economy will collapse together with our cherished standard of living. ‘Immigrants are an asset, not a danger’ – D’Alema concluded. And so is the process of cultural métissage (‘hybridisation’), which the influx of newcomers is bound to trigger; mixing of cultural inspirations is the source of enrichment and an engine of creativity – for European civilisation as much as for any other. All the same, there is but a thin line sepa

Open 11. On Never Being Alone Again

11. On Never Being Alone Again

28 June 2011

Two apparently unconnected items of news appeared on the same day, 19th June – though one can be forgiven for overlooking their appearance… Like any news, they arrived floating in an ‘information tsunami’ – just two tiny drops in a flood of news meant/hoped to do the job of enlightening and clarifying while serving that of obscuring and befuddling.

One item, authored by Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker, informed of the spectacular rise in the number of drones reduced to the size of a dragonfly, or of a hummingbird comfortably perching on windowsills; both designed, in the juicy expression of Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, ‘to hide in plain sight’. The second, penned down by Brian Shelter, proclaimed the internet to be ‘the place where anonymity dies’. The two messages spoke in unison, they both augured/portended the end of invisibility and autonomy, the two defining attributes of privacy – even if each of the two items was composed independently

Open 12. On Consumerism Coming Home To Roost

12. On Consumerism Coming Home To Roost

9th August 2011

The London riots are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers. Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time, will explode – but one can’t say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate and defuse them in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though.

In case of the minefields laid out by soldiers of one army you can send other soldiers, from another army, to dig mines out and disarm them; a dangerous job, if there ever was one – as the old soldiery wisdom keeps reminding: ‘the sapper errs only once’. But in the case of minefields laid out by social inequality even such a remedy, however treacherous, is unavailable: putting the mines in and digging them

Open 13. On The Nature Of Capitalism

13. On The Nature Of Capitalism

17 October 2011

The news of capitalism’s demise is (to borrow from Mark Twain) somewhat exaggerated. Capitalism has an in-built wondrous capacity for resurrection and regeneration; though this is capacity of a kind shared with parasites – organisms that feed on other organisms, belonging to other species. After a complete or near-complete exhaustion of one host organism, a parasite tends and manages to find another, that would supply it with life juices for a successive, albeit also limited, stretch of time.

A hundred years ago Rosa Luxemburg grasped that secret of the eerie, Phoenix-like ability of capitalism to rise, repeatedly, from the ashes; an ability which leaves behind a track of devastation – the history of capitalism is marked by the graves of living organisms sucked of their life juices to exhaustion. Luxemburg, however, confined the set of organisms, lined up for the outstanding visits of the parasite, to ‘pre-capitalist economies’ – whose number was li

Open 14. Soft Power And Hard Facts

14. Soft Power And Hard Facts

4 May 2012

Joseph S. Nye Jr. has turned upside down Machiavelli’s infamous recommendation to the Prince: it is safer when people fear you than when they love you… Whether or not that recommendation was right for the Prince remains a moot question; but it no longer makes sense for presidents and prime ministers.

Nye would agree that because of its eminently flickery habits love is not particularly fit for a foundation on which long-term confidence could be built and rest; but so is, he adds, the state of being frightened – and especially if not reconfirmed by the Prince continuing to deliver on his threat to punish: to be as cruel, ruthless, bestial – and above all as indomitable and irresistible – as he pretended and/or was believed to be.

Yet more unreliable and frustrating that recommendation turns out to be, if love (complete with awe, respect, trust and readiness to forgive occasional faux pas, misdeeds and improprieties) is absent or not strong enough to

Open 15. Do Facebook And Twitter Help Spread Democracy?

15. Do Facebook And Twitter Help Spread Democracy?

8 May 2012

The official American establishment’s reaction to the Iranian youth venting briefly on the streets of Tehran their protest against fraudulent elections in June 2009 bore striking resemblance to a commercial campaign on behalf of the likes of Facebook, Google or Twitter. I suppose that some gallant investigative journalist, to whose company alas I do not belong, could have supplied weighty material proofs of such impression.

The Wall Street Journal pontificated: ‘this would not happen without Twitter’! Andrew Sullivan, an influential and well-informed American blogger, pointed to Twitter as ‘the critical tool for organising the resistance in Iran’, whereas the venerable New York Times waxed lyrically, proclaiming a combat between ‘thugs firing bullets’ and ‘protesters firing tweets’. Hillary Clinton went on record announcing in her 21st January 2010 ‘Internet Freedom’ speech the birth of the ‘samizdat of our day’ and proclaiming the

Open 16. The Precariat Is Welcoming Generation Y

16. The Precariat Is Welcoming Generation Y

22 May 2012

In Natalie Brafman’s article titled Génération Y: du concept marketing à la réalité, published in its 19th May issue, Le Monde pronounced the Generation Y to be ‘more individualistic and disobedient to bosses, but above all more precarious’ – if compared with the ‘boom’ and ‘X’ generations that preceded it, that is.

Between themselves journalists, marketing experts and social researchers (in that order…) assembled into the imagined formation (class? category?) of ‘Generation Y’ young men and women between about 20 and 30 years of age (that is, born roughly between the middle of the 1980s and the middle of the 1990s). And what is becoming more obvious by the day is that the Generation Y, so composed, may have a better founded claim to the status of a culturally specific formation that is a bona fide ‘generation’, and so also a better justified plea for an acute attention of traders, news-chasers and scholars than had its predecessors.

Open 17. Europe Is Trapped Between Power And Politics

17. Europe Is Trapped Between Power And Politics

14 May 2013

That the disease which brought the European Union into the intensive-care ward and has kept it there since, for quite a few years, is best diagnosed as a ‘democratic deficit’ is fast turning into a commonplace. Indeed, it is taken increasingly for granted and is hardly ever seriously questioned. Some observers and analysts ascribe the illness to an inborn organic defect, some others seek carriers of the disease among the personalities of the European Council and the constituencies they represent; some believe the disease has by now become terminal and beyond treatment, some others trust that a bold and harsh surgical intervention may yet save the patient from agony. But hardly anyone questions the diagnosis. All, or nearly all, agree that the roots of the malaise lie in the breakdown of communication between the holders of political offices (policy-makers in Brussels and/or the politicians of the European Council) who set the tune and the

Open 18. Does The Richness Of The Few Benefit Us All?

18. Does The Richness Of The Few Benefit Us All?

28 January 2013

A most recent study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations University reports that the richest one percent of adult humans alone owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85 percent of total world wealth. The bottom half of the world’s adult population owned one percent of global wealth. This is, though, but a snapshot of the on-going process. Yet more and more bad and ever worse news for equality of humans, and so also for the quality of life of all of us, is lining up daily.

‘Social inequalities would have made the inventors of the modern project blush of shame’ – so Michel Rocard, Dominique Bourg and Floran Augagner conclude in the article ‘Human species, endangered’ they co-authored and published in Le Monde of 3rd April 2011. In the era of the Enlightenment, during the lifetimes of Francis Bacon, Descartes or even Hegel,

Open 19. The Changing Nature Of Work And Agency

19. The Changing Nature Of Work And Agency

9 January 2014

There are, no doubt, many – perhaps uncountable – unresolved issues that will demand close watching during the coming year and press us for bold decisions and fateful steps. They are too numerous and most of them are too grave for my attempt to provide their full inventory to be anything but to say the least presumptuous and to smack of irresponsibility. I confine myself therefore to only two, though as I believe deserving quite an honourable place among our preoccupations.

Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, my colleague teaching at the University of Sheffield, shared with me a few days ago the following observation: Last year, various beef and pork products sold in UK supermarkets were found to contain horsemeat. The continuing investigation was remarkable not because of uncovered dishonesty and profiteering (we have come to expect these in any story of corporate misconduct), but because it laid bare just how little managerial oversight there is in the

Open 20. The Charlie Hebdo Attack And What It Reveals

20. The Charlie Hebdo Attack And What It RevealsEnter fullscreenSearchEditing mode

13 January 2015

You went through the tragedies of the 20th century – two wars, Shoah, Stalinism. What’s the specific nature of the Islamic extremist threat we’re facing today, in your view?

Political assassination is as old as humanity and the chances that it will be dead before humanity dies are dim. Violence is an un-detachable companion of inter-human antagonisms and conflicts – and those in turn are part and parcel of the human condition. In various times, however, political murders tended to be aimed at different kinds of victims.

A hundred years or so ago it was targeted mostly against politicians – personalities like Jean Jaures, Aristide Briand, Abraham Lincoln, Archduke Ferdinand and countless others; ideologically varied, located at different points of the political spectrum yet all belonging to the category of current or future power holders. It was widely believed at that time that with their dea

Open 21. Floating Insecurity Searching For An Anchor

21. Floating Insecurity Searching For An Anchor

6 January 2016

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘security’ as ‘condition of being protected from or not exposed to danger’; but, at the same time, as ‘something which makes safe; a protection, guard, defence’: this means, as one of those not common (yet not uncommon either) terms that presume/hint/suggest/imply, an organic and so once and for all sealed unity of the condition with the assumed means to attain it (a sort of unity akin to that which for instance is suggested by the term ‘nobility’).

As the condition to which this particular term refers is highly and deeply as well as unquestionably appreciated and yearned for by most language users, the approbation and regard bestowed on it by the public rubs off thereby on its acknowledged guards or providers, also called ‘security’. Means bask in the glory of the condition and share in its indisputable desirability. This having been done, a fully predictable pattern of conduct foll

Open 22. No More Walls In Europe: Tear Them Down!

22. No More Walls In Europe: Tear Them Down!

27 July 2016

Professor Bauman, it seems like new walls are rising again in Europe. The reasons politicians push for the decision to build these walls – either real or ‘bureaucratic’ – refer to the issues of migration and security. How do you judge what is happening? What are the risks in this rush to ‘securitisation’ of the continent?

We need to study, memorise, and do our best do draw practical conclusions from Pope Francis’s analysis (in his ‘thank you’ speech on the occasion of receiving the European Charlemagne prize) of the mortal dangers signalled by ‘new walls rising in Europe’; walls raised – paradoxically and disingenuously – with the intention/hope of cutting out small plots of land safe for its residents from the hurly-burly world full of risks, traps and menaces. Having pointed out that ‘creativity, genius and a capacity for rebirth and renewal are part of the soul of Europe’, that in the last century Europe bore witness that ‘a new beg

Open 23. Trump: A Quick Fix For Existential Anxiety

23. Trump: A Quick Fix For Existential Anxiety

14 November 2016

Amongst the ‘liberal left’, in the UK and USA, there’s a major response to Donald Trump’s electoral success: fear. ‘This is a moment of great peril’, ‘Donald Trump’s victory challenges the western democratic model’; he will ‘carry us into a different political era, a post-neoliberal, post-end-of-history politics, than any other imaginable president…’; ‘the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution…’. Do you agree with this sort of apocalyptic response?

Apocalyptic visions crop up whenever people enter the Great Unknown: being certain that nothing, or not much will continue as it heretofore was, while having little if any inkling of what is bound to or likely to replace it.

Reactions to Trump’s victory, as you know, were instant and prolific but, amazingly, they were all but consensual: very much like in the case of the Brexit vote, ascrib

Open 24. How Neoliberalism Prepared The Way For Trump

24. How Neoliberalism Prepared The Way For Trump

16 November 2016

I still vividly remember what fewer and fewer people, as time goes by, can and do: the names that Nikita Khrushchev, having decided to expose and publicly decry and condemn the crimes of the Soviet regime to prevent their repetition, gave to the moral blindness and inhumanity which was until then its mark: he called them ‘mistakes and deformations’, committed by Joseph Stalin in the course of the successful implementation of essentially healthy, correct and deeply ethical policy.

In Khrushchev’s many hours-long speeches no room was found for the slightest suspicion that there must have been some inequity, indecency and immoral malignance with which that policy was from the start adulterated and poisoned; and which – unless arrested and thoroughly revised – had to lead to the now denunciated and decried atrocities. The system’s norm was presented and a series of blunders committed by one man, at best in cooperation with some others,