Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?

AuthorLawson, Neal
PositionThe Art of Life - Book review

Someone once said to me that you should have a job you never retire from. Zygmunt Bauman is emeritus professor of sociology at Leeds University, was born in Poland in 1925 and in June last year published two remarkable books, to add to over fifty that have gone before, about what it is to be human and to hope for a better life and better society in the thin soil of consumer society.

The quick Bauman back story is this. As a rather orthodox Marxist sociologist the reality of life in Stalinist Poland combined with growing sympathy for the more humanist Marxism of Gramsci and Simmel plus the events of 1968 meant he had to both renounce his membership of the Party and leave Poland for England in 1970. The following thirty-nine years have seen a cavalcade of books, articles and lectures that really took off after his retirement from teaching and which form one of the, if not the, richest vein of centre-left thinking we have to draw on.

Bauman is essential to the future of the centre-left because he gets the complexity of the modern world without falling into the lazy banalities of either Marxist orthodoxy or post-modernism. Instead he locates our struggles within the context of our paradoxical desire for freedom and security. This is the world of the 'liquid modern' in which we form and reform our identities based on what we buy and aspire to buy, but it is a world in which class, wealth and power still matter and are still distributed in a fundamentally unequal way.

At the centre of Bauman's thinking and writing is the consumer. For Bauman the age of the producer has been superseded by the age of the consumer; in short we know ourselves and each other not by what we make and do but by what we buy. The producer society was the world of solid modernity in which identities once formed endured. But the mass society of production has given way to the more free form world of the consumer. One of the best analogies for life in a consumer society can be found the Wachowski Brothers' film The Matrix. Here you will recall the machine has taken over people's lives; who are kept in a state of unconscious existence, their minds pumped for electricity by supplying their brains with images of a modern consumer society. We may not be plugged in and cocooned directly to a vast machine but the reality is rather similar. We live our lives on an ever quickening treadmill of turbo-consumption in which the most important and defining aspect is what we can buy and...

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