Zygmunt Bauman - The Global Factory of Wasted Humans [part 2]

Zygmunt Bauman, one of the greatest sociologists of our time, a harsh critic of modernity, talks about "The Global Factory of Wasted Humans" in a filmed conference published on the French video portal "Audiovisual Research Archive" (part 2).

part 3: http://youtu.be/m_m8LTJqO8M
part 1: http://youtu.be/DfkcTVzTEsk

"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 in the 'developed countries'. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest 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 the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about 'immigrants' and 'asylum seekers' and the growing role played by diffuse 'security fears' on the contemporary political agenda" (from the description of his book "Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts").

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