ZYGMUNT BAUMAN: WASTING AND WASTED LIVES

Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and iIts Outcasts (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2004) (From the back cover: "The production of 'human waste'--or more precisely, wasted lives, the 'superfluous' populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts--is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity." "As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population i the 'developed countries.' Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the further lands of the planet, 'redundant population' is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity's global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek--in vain, it seems--local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of modernity has given rise to growing qualities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means o survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Once the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing rile played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda." [QUERY: Might those American workers who have not yet recovered--and probably never will recover--from The Great Recession of 2008 not only fear immigrants, asylum seekers, terrorists, etc., but also fear--if not know--that they themselves have become redundant, wasted lives? Donald Trump's "make-America-great-again" could be seen as pandering (and offering no real solution) to this fear. Clinton, though trying to strike a different tone, is no different when, for examples, she too attacks NAFTA and other trade agreements that, supposedly, fail to bring jobs to American workers. Are those manufacturing jobs every going to return? No! Globalization has made such jobs redundant.]  From the text: "'Overpopulation' is a fiction of actuaries: a code name for the appearance of a number of people who, instead of helping the smooth functioning of economy, make the attainment, let alone the rise, of indices by which the proper functioning is measured and evaluated all that much more difficult. The numbers of such people seem to grow uncontrollably, continually adding to expenses yet nothing to gains. In a society of producers, they are the people whose labour cannot be usefully deployed since all the goods that the existing and prospective demand is able to absorb may be produced, and produced more swiftly, profitably and 'economically', without keeping them in jobs. In a society of consumers, they are 'flawed consumers'--people lacking the money that would allow them to stretch the capacity of the consumer market, white they create another kind of demand to which the profit-oriented consumer industry cannot respond and which it cannot profitably 'colonize'. Consumers are the prime assets of consumer society; flawed consumers are it most irksome and costly liabilities." Id. at 39. "Refugees are human waste, with no useful function to play in the land of their arrival and temporary stay and no intention or realistic prospect of being assimilated and incorporated into the new social body; from their present place, the dumping site, there is no return and no road forward (unless it is a road toward yet more distant placed, as in the case of the Afghan refugees escorted by Australian warships to an island far away from all beaten tracks). A distance large enough to prevent the poisonous effluvia of social decomposition from reaching places inhabited by their native inhabitants is the main criterion by which the location of their permanently temporary camps are selected. Out of that place, refugees are an obstacle and a trouble; inside that place they are forgotten. In keeping them there and barring all leakage, in making the separation final and irreversible, 'compassion by some and hatred by others' cooperate in producing the same effect of taking distance and holding at a distance." "Nothing is left but the walls, the barbed wire, the controlled gates, the armed guards. Between them they define the refugees' identity--or rather put paid to their right to self-identification. All waste, including wasted humans, tends to be piled up indiscriminately on the same refuse tip." Id. at 77-78. "On a nutshell, prisons, like so many other social institutions, have moved form the task of recycling to that of waste disposal. They have been reallocated to the front line of the battle to resolve the crisis in which the waste disposal industry has fallen as a result of the global triumph of modernity and the new fullness of the planet. All waste is potentially poisonous . . . .  If recycling is no longer profitable and its chances . . . are not longer realistic, the right way to deal with waste is tor speed up its 'biodegradation' and decomposition while isolating it as securely as possible form the ordinary human habitat." Id. at 86-87.).