Zygmunt Bauman’s Moral and Political Commitment

With the death of Zygmunt Bauman (19252017), 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