Zygmunt Bauman – Work, Consumerism and the New Poor

Slovenci imamo Žižka, Poljaki sociologa Zygmunta Baumana. No, verjetno se Baumanu glede na “zanimivo” osebno štorijo v domovini verjetno godi slabše kot Slavoju, ki mora trpeti le trganje izjav iz konteksta brez konca in kraja, pa še takrat ga imamo na sumu, da ob gledanju na to igro bedakov zelo uživa.

Kakorkoli že, trenutno se prebijam čez Baumanovo bukvo Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, ki navdušuje. Analiza nastanka famozne (“protestantske”) delovne etike ob prehodu iz predindustrijskih v industrijske družbe kot orodja bolj ali manj načrtne udomačitve “divjakov” in tesno povezane konstrukcije “revnih” (kot tistih, ki jih ni bilo mogoče reformirati v novem duhu), je brutalna in… navdušujoča. Da Baumanu to uspe v jeziku, ki je dostopen, je še toliko bolj pohvalno.

Za pokušino izsek o t.i. poorhouses, ki so se v Angliji pojavile med 1820 in 1930:

These and similar considerations must have been high in the minds of the ‘Poor Law’ reformers of the 1820s and 1830s, who after protracted and at times acrimonious debate came to a virtually unanimous decision to confine all the available assistance to the indigent part of the population (the part which Jeremy Bentham preferred to call the ‘refuse’ or the ‘dross’ of the population) to the inside of the poorhouses. This decision had a number of advantages, as far as the advancing of the work-ethic’s cause was concerned.

First and foremost, it sorted out the ‘true paupers’ from those who were suspected of merely masquerading as such in order to avoid the discomforts of regular work. No one but the ‘true pauper’ would choose confinement to the poorhouse if the conditions inside were made sufficiently horrifying. The limitation of assistance to such as could be obtained in the drab and squalid interior of the poorhouse made the ‘means test’ redundant, or rather self-administered by the poor themselves: whoever agreed to be locked up inside a poorhouse must indeed have had no other way of staying alive.

Second, the abolition of outside assistance made the poor think twice before deciding that the requirements of the work ethic were ‘not for them’, that they could not cope with what regular work demands, or that the stern and in many ways abhorrent demands of factory work were a choice worse than its alternative; even the most niggardly wages and the most gruelling and tedious drudgery on the factory floor would appear bearable – even desirable – in comparison.
…
Finally, the Poor Law guarded the working (or potentially working) poor from contamination by the hopelessly idle, separating them from trouble with the help of massive, impenetrable walls, soon to be duplicated by the invisible, yet no less tangible for that reason, walls of cultural estrangement. The more terrifying the news leaked from behind the poor- house walls, the more the slavery of factory hands would look like freedom and their wretchedness like a stroke of luck and a blessing.

Vzporednice s sodobnostjo (zavodi za zaposlovanje, globalizacja…) skačejo kar same od sebe, saj smo spet v času “reformiranja” ljudskih mas v ljubezen do “fleksibilnega”trga dela, “flexicurity”, gnetljivih poklicnih usmeritev… “divjaki” se spet upirajo. Obvezno branje.

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