Wasted Lives (2003)

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 characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, modernizing societies treated them as lands capable of absorbing excess populations from the “developed countries.” Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest corners of the planet, “redundant populations” are produced everywhere, and all localities must bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now faced with the need to seek – seemingly in vain – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of modernity has created growing numbers of people deprived of adequate means of survival, while the planet is rapidly running out of places to put them. This explains the new anxieties about “immigrants” and “asylum seekers” and the growing role of diffuse “security fears” on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, Zygmunt Bauman explores the impact of this transformation on contemporary culture and politics and shows that coping with “human waste” provides a key to understanding otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.