It is an essay on poverty and the “wasted lives” of contemporary society, starting from the category of “liquid modernity” and the denunciation of the consumer society exposed by Bauman in another work. In the introduction, the author acknowledges his work to be “introductory or “exploratory”, far from offering a more or less organized thought on the topic; it is rather a long reflection aloud on how the sociological categories he has discovered can be applied to enlighten the problem of social marginalization.
This is perhaps the main problem of the text: at the beginning Bauman tackles topics such as the situation of the unemployed, or the difficult integration of migrants by society, but soon the essay becomes repetitious with ideas taken from Consumer’s Life and “liquid Modernity”. Furthermore, the reader may consider that Bauman is going too far in applying his “liquid” category, because the first part of the essay treated “labour” and “the worker” as one more disposable and replaceable “consumer products” (in the line of what he wrote in Consumer’s Life).
P.V. (Spain, 2016)