With the death of Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), contemporary culture loses a critical voice, which has been able to combine the analysis of the main dramas of our time with a constant civil and political tension towards a project of human emancipation.
Bauman is an exemplary committed-intellectual figure, convinced that the role of social sciences is to provide human beings with the knowledge necessary to understand the situation in which they live in and be thus in the position to expand their freedom of action. The historical task of intellectual elites is to take sides, denouncing the often imperceptible ways in which domination mechanisms, generators of exclusion, inequalities, “wasted lives” (2004), operate. Consistently with this conviction, he has always tried to give voice to the victims, demonstrating that there is an alternative to the evils of the present and that this alternative can only be built in the public sphere, with political action.
There is no doubt that Bauman was strongly influenced by having experienced himself totalitarianism in its most brutal forms – Nazism and Stalinism –, the mechanisms of exclusion brought by anti-Semitism, and the horrors of war.
Born in Poznan, he left Poland with his family in 1939 to escape the anti-Semitic Pogroms, seeking shelter in Russia. At the age of 18, he joined the Communist Party and joined the Polish Volunteers Brigade of the Red Army, taking part in the battles of Kolobrzeg and Berlin. After the war, he returned to Warsaw, where he started university studies of sociology and where he remained as a lecturer until 1968. With his return to Poland, his criticism of the official Marxism-Leninism matures; he breaks away from it, and approaches, in the late 1950s, the anti-Stalinist and anti-dogmatic component of the Polish “humanist Marxism”. His relationship with Marxism evolves further, thanks to his encounter with Gramsci's thought. As noted by Bauman himself, in an interview with Madeleine Bunting on the Guardian (April 5, 2003), “I discovered Gramsci and he gave me the opportunity of an honorable discharge from Marxism. It was a way out of orthodox Marxism, but I never became anti-Marxist as most did. I learned a lot from Karl Marx and I'm grateful”.
In 1968, a new wave of anti-Semitism in Poland led him to emigrate with his family to Israel. He teaches at the University of Tel Aviv until 1971, when he accepts a chair at the University of Leeds, where he settles permanently and where his post-Marxist evolution of the 1980s takes shape. It is no coincidence that the writings of that period are focused on the end of class society and the failure of real socialism in the realization of the project of human emancipation. Bauman begins to consider the evils of his time, not so much as the result of the capitalist system, but as a by-product of the search for order, certainty, predictability, that modern rationality induces men to pursue, transforming the state into a powerful tool of social engineering. The establishment of the nation-state coincides with the “solid” phase of modernity, that assures citizens rights and protection, but at the same time allows the germs of exclusion and injustice to develop in the society. In the name of efficiency, of the need to compute, of controlling things, the sense of collective acting is likely to be flattened on technical responsibility only, shadowing the moral dimension.
For Bauman, that dimension must be understood as the responsibility that each person must take towards other human beings as such, not as beings similar to oneself. On this definition of responsibility he constructs his criticism of the nation-state. In his view, this form of State not only introduces a stark separation between the inner community of We and the group of the Others who are outside, but also tends to marginalize what in its interior space does not fall into the prevailing pattern of harmony and order, up to legitimizing the extermination of those for whom the prevailing orderly scheme does not contemplate a place (2000). This is, among other things, the central thesis of Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), a very innovative work, for at least two reasons. First of all, because it overrides the prevailing idea that the Holocaust is an anomaly of modernity. By adopting an approach that calls to mind Hanna Arendt's “Banality of Evil” (1963), Bauman shows that the Holocaust germs are inherent in the socio-political order inspired by modern rationality; in particular, such germs feed on the we/others dualism taken as the foundation stone of the principle of national citizenship. Secondly, the book is innovative for the evolution of Bauman's thinking, as it lays the foundations for a re-focusing of his scientific interests towards the peculiar features of late- or post-modernity. Not surprisingly, the year of publication of this book – 1989 – is a timing symbol of the changes associated with the globalization process, which puts into question the modern geo-political order, beginning with the exclusive sovereignty of the nation-states. A new phase of history opens up, which presents unprecedented risks along with new opportunities. Reflecting on this phase, Bauman cones the expression “liquid modernity” (2000), to the extraordinary success of which he owes the notoriety enjoyed in the last period of his life. Around this concept, the author develops an articulate reflection that, for some critics, is excessively eclectic, and non-systematic. It is not possible to summarize it in a few words. We can, however, highlight a nodal point – the separation between power and politics – on which Bauman's denunciation work has been focused over the last few years and makes him appear very close to the federalist thought tradition.
In the globalized world, power - meant as the “ability to have things done” (Social Europe, 25-5-2012) - moves from the territorial level of the states to the de-territorialized one of the global flows, of which Manuel Castells talks. On the other hand, politics, i.e. the “ability to decide which things need/ought to be done” (ibid.), remains confined within the states and ends up dealing with limited local issues, renouncing its peculiar role to guarantee the security and well-being of citizens, in a prospect of progress. The divorce between power and politics creates a deep crisis of confidence: in parties, in institutions, in the possibilities of democratic participation. Grows thus the solitude of the global citizen (1999), prisoner of a paradoxical situation. To build an alternative, people have to act politically in the public space, but that space has crumbled and nobody knows how to reconstruct it. The outcome is a new form of alienation: dominated by anonymous, extra-political (global markets and finance) power centers, humanity is confined to a condition of “privatized individuality... [which] means essentially unfreedom” (1999: 63) and becomes easy prey to fear (2006). A strong responsibility lies with the political class and the intellectual elites, unable to produce a creative vision aimed to bring politics back to the same level where power is. “We are still deprived of a global equivalent/homologue of the institutions invented, designed and put into operation by our grandfathers and great-grand fathers at the level of the territorial nation-state, in order to secure the marriage of power and politics: institutions to serve, or at least meant and pressed to serve, the coalescence and coordination of diffuse interests and opinions, and their proper representation and reflection in the practice of executive organs and in universally binding codes of law, as well as juridical procedures” (Social Europe, 2012). For Bauman, therefore, the reunion between power and politics presupposes the creation of world institutions, free from any anchorage to the sovereignty of the by now evaporated nation-states. And it is precisely the persistence of such anchorage in the EU structure which, in his view, explains the current impotence of Europe, its inability to propose itself as a stage – a “half-way-inn on the road” (Social Europe, 2013) – towards the creation of the institutions and the new public space that are needed.
Bauman's denunciation is clear and pounding. It is also reiterated in one of his recent interviews. Commenting on Trump's success, he notes that the complexity of the challenges we face looks unbearable. Thus, the desire increases to reduce this complexity with simple, instantaneous measures. So does the fascination of “strong men”, promising – irresponsibly, deceitfully and shamelessly – to find those measures, to resolve complexity, asking in return unconditional obedience. It is, however, undeniable that “promises of demagogues are catching, but fortunately short-lived. Once new walls have been built, more armed guards deployed on airports and in public places, more refused asylums and more migrants deported, their irrelevance to the genuine roots of our uncertainty and the fears and anxieties they generate will become, fortunately, transparent. Deregulated market forces will go on playing havoc with all and any of our existential certainties. Demons that haunt us (fear of losing our place in society, suspected fragility of our life-achievements, the menace of social degradation and exclusion) will not evaporate and disappear. We may come back to our senses and acquire immunity to the siren songs of the haranguers and rabble-rousers striving to build political capital on leading us astray. The big question, however, is how many people will need to fall victim and find their lives wasted before it happens” (Social Europe, 2016).
An obstacle that federalists are well aware of and are committed to overcome with their battle.
Translated by Lionello Casalegno
References:
Arendt H. (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: the Viking Press.
Bauman Z. (1989), Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press.
Bauman Z. (1999), In Search of Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman Z. (2000), Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman Z. (2004), Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman Z. (2006), Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman Z. (2012), “Politics, the Good Society and ‘Westphalian Sovereignty’”. Social Europe, 25 May
(https://www.socialeurope.eu/2012/05/politics-the-good-society-and-westphalian-sovereignty/).
Bauman Z. (2013), “Europe is Trapped Between Power and Politics”. Social Europe, 14 May
(https://www.socialeurope.eu/2013/05/europe-is-trapped-between-power-and-politics/).
Bauman Z. ( 2016), “No More Walls in Europe: Tear Them Down!”. Social Europe, 27 July
(https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/07/no-walls-europe-tear/).
Bauman Z. (2017), Retrotopia. Cambridge, Polity Press.
Bunting M. (2003), “Passion and Pessimism”. The Guardian, 5 April
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/05/society).