Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid politics
“Anniversaries are occasions to celebrate the glory of surviving heroes, to praise the virtues of the fallen ones, to commemorate the defeat of the enemy.” So wrote Zygmunt Bauman in the pages of the New Statesman in February 1995, marking the half-century since the end of the Second World War. Today (19 November) marks the centenary of the famed sociologist’s birth. And given the extraordinarily perceptive and prodigious nature of Bauman’s thinking and writing, we can use this as an opportunity for almost all three: to praise Bauman’s heroism, to lament his loss from the debates of the left, and to – tentatively, gingerly – rally ourselves for our confrontation with the enemy.
Bauman wrote a series of thrilling political essays for the New Statesman from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, a time when British society was changing quickly, and unpredictably. Bauman’s essays were some of the most clear-sighted of this era. And at another time of similar convulsion, his legacy is more than mere inspiration: he provides rich analytical ammunition for a political movement caught in something less like a battle and more like a collapse.
A soldier and a communist who became a dissident and a career academic, Bauman was widely heralded as the world’s greatest living sociologist by the time of his death in 2017. He was born in Poznań in 1925, just seven years after Poland achieved independence following the First World War. And after his own service in the Second World War (on the Soviet side) he worked at the University of Warsaw, until he lost his position in 1968 in an anti-Semitic purge. Via Tel Aviv, he moved to Leeds, where he taught at the university until his retirement in 1991. And whether because of freedom from censorship, inspiration from life in the “late capitalist” West, or the fall of the Berlin Wall two years before and the collapse of actually existing socialism, it was only after retirement that that the real work of his life began. From then, books, articles and lectures on the deep crisis of the left poured out of him, and his influence grew.
Bauman had gained what he called “an honourable discharge” from orthodox Marxism after reading Antonio Gramsci and taking the turn towards a more nuanced and humanist socialism. Spread over more than 50 books, the tenets of “Baumanism” take their cue from Gramsci: an attempt to reckon with a capitalism more complex and entrenched than classical Marxism had allowed for. His most famous idea is the notion of “liquid modernity”. Writing in his book of the same name in 2000, Bauman identified the end of the 20th century as a moment of flux somewhere between the solidity of the fading modern world, in which life could be predicted and planned, and the relativism of post-modernity which dissolved our culture into a hybrid chaos in which little could be deemed good or bad.
Lacking the roots of solid jobs, in solid factories, all the certainty and routines of the production line and the hometown, individuals suffered an anomie of uncertainty. Bauman located the heart of the modern dilemma, and the motor for our lives, in the tension between our need for security and our desire freedom, as we rebound from one to the other. As he writes in Liquid Modernity: “What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.”
Causally related to the concept of liquid modernity was Bauman’s analysis of the shift from a producer to a consumer society. Writing in his 1998 book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Bauman walks us through the tortuous journey from the precarious joys of life on the land, through the enclosures, the poor houses, the relative calm of the post-war decades where Fordism offered a “golden age” of stability, to a post-Fordist society in which all that certainty melted away. The engine of reproduction in modern capitalism no longer came through work but through shopping, a restless quest for products in which nothing will ever be enough (if you can have a five-blade razor, then why settle for four?). When the algorithm can turn wants into needs without us even being aware, and can know when a woman is pregnant before she does, then the phrase “turbo-consumption” (Bauman’s phrase for our compulsory form of consumer culture) barely does justice to our Matrix-like existence.
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But it is the perverse socialising power of consumerism that Bauman most vividly charted. In Work, Consumerism, he writes “if ‘being poor’ once derived its meaning from the condition of being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from the plight of a flawed consumer”. In a producer society people lived with some level of certainty, in concert and solidarity with other workers with whom they shared cultural foundations in unions, clubs and pubs. As consumers we face the world alone, seduced by the empty promise that buying things we didn’t know we needed, to impress people we don’t know, with money we don’t have, will somehow bring us fulfilment. Up until the post-war decades, even the failed producer, Marx’s “lumpenproletariat”, served a role, to be ready enough as part of the reserve army to be brought on stream when the economic cycle or wars demanded it. But Bauman’s flawed consumers, those without the resources, tenacity and skills to stay on the treadmill, serve no useful purpose save one: to police us, to provide daily evidence of the horror of falling through the cracks, of not keeping up and paying up. The poor are simply there to be othered so that their plight disciplines us into a life of relentless consumer obedience.
In more recent times, the flawed consumer has been augmented by another other, a different policing force, the blame we can direct at the migrant or the “stranger at our door” in Bauman’s phraseology. Like the rest of us, they search for islands of certainty and security but are exploited to distract our anger from the real reason we feel overwhelmed, vulnerable and threatened – an economy geared to reinforce the interests of the already rich and powerful, so that they become ever more rich and powerful. This underclass, of which politics has only gradually become conscious in the 21st century, Bauman saw as it was only forming.
His prescience extended from the bottom of society to the top, and he also registered early on the shift to what we generally now call “technocracy”. In the absence of a muscular working class, and with the triumph of global and unaccountable corporations that “put company before country”, as Mark Zuckerberg foolishly made transparent, politics becomes an empty charade of pretence and spin in which the real decisions are made both beyond us and to us. “Instead of the emancipation of labour from capital,” Bauman wrote in an essay for the NS in July 1988, “what happened was emancipation of capital from labour.” Bauman spotted early on the ways in which critical decisions like interest rates and government spending were shifted from democrats to technocrats, as the people could not be trusted to act against their own self-interest. In the same essay he notes that today “power is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped”.
In this rootless, exhausting, lonely and powerless world, what does it mean to be on the left? Because of all the above, the left today has little if any transformative ambition, and simply trades on the basis that if it doesn’t govern then something worse will. At best it provides a slightly fairer version of an unfair society, the lesser of two evils. Hence the feeling of an endgame, of politics as a doom loop. But it is in this bleak landscape, so smotheringly dark that any pinpoints of light (and hope) appear all the brighter, Bauman reminds us of the eternal raison d’être of the left. “Just as the carrying capacity of a bridge is measured by the strength of its weakest support, so the quality of a society should be measured by the quality of life of its weakest members”.
How without its natural agent, the industrial working class, is this foundational idea of the left to be enacted? As Labour politicians cringingly speak of “hero voters” in “red wall” seats, a class politics so patronising and anachronistic that it amounts to a historical re-enactment, Bauman’s salutary judgement was that class didn’t have to mean either everything or nothing. Instead, we now have a kind of “liquid” class structure, somewhere between solid modernity and gas-like post-modernity. But clearly, as old class bonds weaken, there need to be new bonds of mobilisation.
Writing for the NS in September 1987 Bauman said: “A Labour Party which wants to be a force for the nation’s political revival has today no natural or inherited constituency. It must create such a constituency. It must become a social movement.” And he goes on in the same essay to write that if “the nation is to be made again into a political body” then “Private individuals are to become citizens. Democracy is to mean again political participation, not freedom from politics.” It is the reunification of a universal personhood with politics and power that Bauman sought. For this reason, the one policy idea he backed consistently was universal basic income, the means by which we support both society’s weakest link and ourselves.
This then is the moment to revive the ideas of Bauman. The crisis of the left has moved from the pages of periodicals to a political collapse taking place before our eyes. At the same time, the trade-off of liquid modernity – in which the consumer receives more “stuff” in exchange for the remains of their political power – lies shattered around us. More and more of us are now flawed consumers in a world in which the phrase “the cost of living” isn’t dry journalese, but a daily struggle for those who simply can’t afford to live.
During the foundational years of New Labour some influential voices around the project, such as Geoff Mulgan, then at Demos and later the head of the Tony Blair’s Strategy Unit in No 10, promoted Bauman’s work. But it was dismissed as too pessimistic at a moment when “Cool Britannia” was all the rage. Events have now accelerated well past that moment. The rise of national populism and the ecological crisis have combined to paint a darker canvas than even Bauman could have imagined. Mark Davis, the founding Director of the Bauman Institute at Leeds, recently told me his students now saw Bauman as being far too hopeful and optimistic. Maybe it’s not such a surprise given the gloomy outlook that faces their lives. Thankfully, Bauman’s greatest gift was the resilience of his utopianism. In 2007 he wrote, “If an optimist is someone who believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist someone who suspects that the optimist may be right, the left places itself in the third camp: that of hope.”
The left has stopped talking about the future and therefore has no claim on it. Instead, the peak of its ambition is the better technocratic management of what already is. Wes Streeting remarked just after the last general election that the “only thing worse than no hope is false hope”. But as we are finding out, even a limited technocracy cannot work in a hopeless world. What managerial decisions are being taken, how are they to be implemented, in whose interests and to take us in what direction? In June last year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the Guardian that he never dreams: what a perfect metaphor for the crisis of this moment, the inability to, even unconsciously, think of a place that is not this one. Bauman would have quietly and respectfully reminded him that “the good society is one that knows it is never good enough”.
[Further reading: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk and the Claremonsters]
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