bauman, zygmunt - totalitarianism

MODERNITY ANDCOMMUNISM: ZYGMUNTBAUMAN AND THE OTHERTOTALITARIANISM

Peter Beilharz

ABSTRACT Bauman’s work can be understood as a critical theory, but its eastEuropean context needs to be established alongside the west European sensi-bilities of the Frankfurt School. The question of Soviet modernity and the statusof the Polish experience of which Bauman was part need to be placed along-side the more famous critique of the Holocaust, which can be more readilyaligned with Horkheimer and Adorno’s views in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Tothis end, some of Bauman’s essays and arguments on the Soviet and Polishexperience are reviewed in order to begin to fill out this other dimension ofBauman’s critique of modernity and totalitarianism. Both Bauman’s views oneastern Europe, and my survey of them, are offered as hints for those thatfollow.

KEYWORDS Bauman • communism • eastern Europe • Marxism • mod-ernity • socialism

Zygmunt Bauman’s most influential work is without doubt Modernityand the Holocaust (1989a). There is no companion in his work to Modernityand the Holocaust, no Modernity and Communism, or perhaps it should beCommunism and Modernity. For his life’s commitment, in political terms, wasto the left, to socialism, to utopia, differently, to Polish reconstruction afterthe devastation of the war. Communism survives, as a ghost, as it ghosts usall, those on the left or who came from it. In my book, Zygmunt Bauman –Dialectic of Modernity, I have suggested that there is a samizdat text on com-munism in Bauman’s project. It is Legislators and Interpreters (Beilharz, 2000:

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ch. 3). If it is the case that Legislators and Interpreters does not fully hit itsown target, the Enlighteners, this may well be because it has another, moreexplicitly political target in Bolshevism, or communist humanism. The intel-lectuals who sought directly to legislate – and did so – were not thephilosophes, but the Bolsheviks.

Where is communism, then, in Bauman’s work? In one way, as in Legis-lators and Interpreters, communism appears as the core narrative of mod-ernity. Americanism is its boosterist capitalist version; Nazism is the racialimperialist or human engineering modernity par excellence (Beilharz, 2000).This echoes further in the way in which for Bauman, the postmodern alsomeans the post-Marxist. Part of the Marxist story is inextricably bound upwith the Soviet experience, so that to be after modernity (or at least, aftermodernism) also means to be after actually institutionalized Marxism in itsSoviet and satellite form.

Modernity and the Holocaust, then, also signals or anticipates the ideaof alternative or multiple modernities. To think across Bauman’s work, theremust be at least three primary forms of modern western regime – liberal capi-talist, communist and fascist – across the 20th century. Developmentalregimes, as in Latin America or East Asia, have something in common withall of these three, for they are each models of modernization. As we readBauman’s work, it might be tempting to add a fourth, social democratic mod-ernity. As Bauman puts it in Modernity and Ambivalence, Bolshevismgenetically is social democracy’s hot-headed younger brother (Bauman, 1991:ch. 7). Yet social democracy from Weimar to Bad Godesberg is also liberalcapitalist, even as it connects to communism and fascism in different ways.Which is not to say that social democracy is politically indefensible, no matterhow compromised it may become, but that it cannot lay claim to the categoryof a separate modernity rather than a particular type of political regime withinit (though the persistence of a Scandic model remains significant here).

Two other, larger themes cut across this field: totalitarianism and utopia.Totalitarianism is used here as a term of convenience. From my perspective,the Bolshevik and Nazi experiences need to be aligned rather than identifiedor radically separated. The shadow texts here might be those of the Frank-furt School, though neither of the classics, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Manor Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment directly fits ourneeds. One Dimensional Man came close enough to arguing that all mod-ernity was totalitarian, a charge which misreaders of Bauman have beenknown to direct at Modernity and the Holocaust. Dialectic of Enlightenment,paradoxically, might itself be read as an anticipatory critique of communism,for unlike fascist rationality, communism was a direct and self-consciousextension of one stream of enlightenment rationality. Against the FrankfurtSchool, or in complement to it, this difference in Bauman’s work serves toremind that if his is a critical theory, then its orienting point alongside theHolocaust is its east European context. Where the Frankfurt School were

Beilharz: Modernity and Communism 89


relatively silent on communism, Bauman’s work grows out of it, alongside it,against it.

Yet Bauman remains, at the same time, a socialist, and the theme ofutopia persists in his thought, even as utopia itself persists as a necessary no-place rather than (as per Bolshevism) an image of a world to be achieved,now, whatever the cost. This ambivalence towards utopia connects back tothe problem of enlightenment. For the Bolsheviks did violence to their peoplein their own name. The murders were done in the name of noble ends.Where the Final Solution was rational in its own terms, a murderous solutionto a Nazi-imposed Jewish problem, the ethics of communism were worsethan those of fascism, for the Bolsheviks were prepared to commit murderfor noble rather than ignoble ends. Thus the irony of the fellow-travellinginsistence that Stalinism was superior to Nazism because it sought to improveHumanity. Unlike the Nazis, the Bolsheviks meant well; this is supposed tobe some kind of compensation for their victims.

Alongside the samizdat critique of Bolshevism in Legislators and Inter-preters, there are two other fields of analysis of communism in Bauman’swork. One addresses the Soviet experience, and the other Poland in particu-lar. These notes are offered as hints for those who follow.

THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE

Various commentators have identified the centrality of Gramsci toBauman’s project, and Bauman would be the first to agree. There is, however,another Marxist soulmate, a fellow Pole, whose presence can be felt in hiswork. This is Rosa Luxemburg. Their compatriot Kolakowski noted theaffinity in his 1971 critique of Bauman’s ‘Pleading for Revolution’(Kolakowski, 1971; Bauman, 1971a). All the sympathies are there: the viewfrom below, the keen opposition to ‘barracks socialism’, the maturationalsense that history will not be forced. Less than spontaneism, there is inBauman’s work a sense that the world keeps moving; unlike Rosa, perhaps,he is ambivalent about both social actors, workers and intellectuals alike. Asin the work of Bauman’s teacher, Julian Hochfeld, here it is both Bolshevismand reformism that are the problem (Hochfeld, 1957). If Bauman shares thisold sense that Bolshevism forces history where reformism merely rolls withit, however, his sociological sensibility is more open to the role of thepeasants. This is especially apparent in his 1985 Leeds sociology paper, Stalinand the Peasant Revolution: A Case Study in the Dialectics of Master and Slave(Bauman, 1985), where it is Barrington Moore rather than Rosa Luxemburgwho sets the scene, for here the problematic is framed by Marx, peasantryand modernization with Hegel of course to come. Lenin, like Tkachev,viewed the peasants as the battering ram destined to smash the existing orderout of pure rage, leaving power to the revolutionary minority who wouldstart the real revolution. For Bauman, it was this unholy alliance between

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Bolsheviks and peasants that became a new dialectic of masters and slaves,the two locked together in asymmetric dependence just as Hegel haddescribed. The problem, of course, was that the peasants were not reallyinterested in communism. The master found himself at the mercy of his slave:‘The horror of the peasant beast on the loose was never to leave them – untilthe master would murder the slave, turning into the slave of his own crime’(Bauman, 1985: 21). The revolution devoured its children, but they were, inthe first instance, not the noble Jacobins but the peasants. Having paintedthemselves into a political corner, deprived of any possible options, the Bol-sheviks then destroyed themselves: ‘The possibility that this would happenwas created by the original sin of deciding to force the socialist utopia uponan overwhelmingly peasant, pre-industrial country’ (Bauman, 1985: 50).

Bauman revisits these issues in the 1986 Telos symposium (Bauman,1984) on Soviet peasants. Here, again, it is the peasantry which plays thecentral role of the Bolshevik tragedy, even though it is now a minority class.Here its legacy is, among other things, ethical. Peasants steal to live, not toget rich. But stealing becomes universalized, in consequence, which meansthat the ethics of everyday life are jaundiced, and larger hopes of autonomydashed. The same impulse informs Bauman’s response in the Telos sym-posium on the Fehér-Heller-Markus classic Dictatorship Over Needs. For thereis a sense in which, as Michels wrote Political Parties so that Weber did nothave to (and Engels did Marx’s favour in Anti-Dühring, all these remainingof course the views of the writers rather than the others) it is the Dictator-ship Over Needs that fills the gap in Bauman’s work. Bauman accepts this soto say psychological sense, that dictatorship is about control, over bodies,souls and needs (this is the same moment, of course, when Bauman bringsthis kind of Foucauldian critique to bear upon the primitive accumulation ofcapitalist relations in Memories of Class, 1982). Bauman accepts categoricallythe sense of the Hungarians that Soviet-type societies are modern – not lap-sarian socialist, not capitalist, absolutely not an historical throwback. Social-ism was born as the counterculture of capitalism, a legitimate offspring ofthe bourgeois revolution eager to continue the work that the latter startedbut failed to complete. Here Bauman connects rationalism and the socialengineering of the Enlightenment project with capitalism and socialism. Theargument parallels that in Modernity and the Holocaust in its implications:

To sum up: the Soviet system, without being a sequence to capitalism or analternative form of industrial society, is nonetheless no freak or refractory eventin European history. Its claims to the legacy of the Enlightenment or to theunfulfilled promises of the bourgeois revolution are neither pretentious norgrotesque. And thus it contains important lessons for the rest of the world.(Bauman, 1984: 263)

The Soviet system is an acid test for the enlightenment utopia, for itsets the idea of a social rationality against that of individual rationalities, by



substituting state order for individual autonomy. Its failure indicates the hiatusof all socialist utopia, and at the same time puts the global drive to ration-ality and order on notice. Further, its failure indicates the renewed possibilityof grassroots movement, as in the Polish Solidarity (and here the echo, again,is with Rosa Luxemburg).

By the time of Postmodern Ethics, Bauman suggests that we should liveno longer in the shadow of the Age of Reason; for the 20th century is theAge of the Camps (Bauman, 1995). Here the critique of the final solution andof Dictatorship Over Needs meets, to indicate the necessity of a sociology ofmodern violence. Auschwitz meets the Gulag in the modernist will-to-order,the liberal face of which is apparent in incarceration. Yet if the genocidalurge of these regimes is ineluctable, the regimes are not identical, onlysimilar. And if they are exemplary of the dark side of modernity, those experi-ences do not in themselves capture what follows, in the experience of easternEurope.

EAST EUROPEAN MODERNITY

How best to explain these similarities and differences? Plainly Baumanrejects one analytical temptation, which is to subsume Soviet and Germantotalitarianism. The next problem then emerges: how to explain the foun-dational, Soviet experience in its connection to the satellites in easternEurope? If it is meaningful to describe the Soviet Union as Stalinist, what doesthis mean for its echoes in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw? Is it meaningfulto talk about Soviet-type societies as sui generis, or is each case, Poland inthis instance, sui generis in itself? Bauman maintains an appropriate degreeof ambivalence about this classificatory bind, for it is, of course, explanansrather than explanandum that matters. What does Bauman tell us aboutPoland? Bauman’s analyses of Poland are acute, and they are local andspecific but powerfully sociological.

Bauman’s available essays in English on Polish experience all combinethe language of class and elite in the Weberian sense: class as appropriate toeconomic life, elites as political leaders, in this regard, preeminently the Com-munist Party. Bauman’s analyses of Polish communism are also consistentlyhistorical, or generational, drawing specific attention to leadership styles andrationalities as for example with reference to the distinction between revol-utionary political skills of the pioneers and the routine administrative skillsof those who follow (Bauman, 1964). Here party connections work as thetransmission belt or line of the available ‘fixers’. Party connections in the worksphere into the 1960s are increasingly technocratic rather than ideological.This generational curiosity is connected to the Weberian interest in person-ality types. It also registers an acute sensitivity to the Weberian sensibilityregarding shortage and endless struggles over goods, both material andsymbolic. Bauman’s critique of Soviet-type societies rests on the Michels-like



sense that socialism, too, is an alternative career ladder, like the military orclergy in other circumstances. Socialism might be about good or evil inten-tions, but in its institutional forms it represents ladders to be climbed, or whatMichels called career escalators in the case of the SPD.

Bauman’s essays into the 1970s extend this Weberian interest in theduality of power structures, or what he separates as ‘officialdom’ and ‘class’as the bases of inequality in socialist society. Power is not bourgeois; ratherit represents a web of dependencies (Bauman, 1974: 129). In Bauman’s self-understanding, this is also to follow Marx, as interpreted by Hochfeld, andthe distinction between the two-class model of the Manifesto and the multi-class model implicit in The Eighteenth Brumaire (Bauman, 1974: 132). Never-theless, it is Weber who offers the animating spirit here, not least as Baumanoffers a Marxisant twist on the idea of patrimonialism as referring to the issueof the ‘futuristic’ rather than traditional legitimation of the partynomial rulingauthority in Poland. His contention is that the socialist societies whichemerged in the last half-century in eastern Europe do not fit Weber’s pro-verbial categories – traditional, charismatic, rational legal – but may fit afourth, parallel to patrimonialism, where it is rule of the party rather thanstrictly rule of the fathers that is predominant. Bauman does not make thepoint here – it is central to Heller’s contribution to Dictatorship Over Needs10 years later – that Stalin’s reinvention of tradition, Great Patriotic War,Mother Russia shifts Soviet legitimation from future to past – for his curios-ity is not about Stalin or Soviet foundationalism, but with the east Europeanresults of Yalta.

Bauman enumerates the features of partynomial rule as follows. First,their claims to legitimacy are futuristic, not traditionalistic; these claims areto the society of the future, not to Mother Russia, Blut or Boden. Second,party rather than person is the object of loyalty. Loyalty to the party takesthe place of obedience to the person of the ruler, and faith in the desirabil-ity of the social order replaces respect for tradition. Third, the vanguardlegitimation of partynomial authority requires teleological, not genetic,determination of macrosocial processes. The Plan is the major instrument ofteleological determination. We speak of the emergence of capitalism, but ofthe construction of socialism. Fourth, planning and the will-to-order never-theless relies upon markets. Plan and market are mutually dependent, as inmaster and slave (Bauman, 1974: 137–9). Fifth, the struggle of plurality andmarket principles means that there is a permanent and dual structure ofinequality, and a duality of power elite which reflects this, itself manifest asofficialdom and class. As a result, in the socialist societies of eastern Europeeach individual’s situation is shaped by two relatively autonomous and to anextent antagonistic power structures, neither of which is entirely reducible tothe other (Bauman, 1974: 140). As Bauman notes, however, this is not a caseof the common Weberian–Marxist addition, where (as Lichtheim put it) Marxexplains base and Weber superstructure, for Bauman’s case is that the two



essential planes of inequality in eastern Europe do not overlap. There is nodirect correspondence between officialdom-generated and class-generatedinequalities (Bauman, 1974: 144). Each individual in these societies is amember of two largely independent power structures: officialdom and class.

The dialectic of master and slave appears again, then, in this tensionbetween state and market, for the demand for freedom often means herefreedom of market forces. The peculiarity of this structure is apparent inpolitical terms, where there emerges a kind of populist alliance between partyand workers – against managers and professionals. Yet the problem ofequality seems to be in the realm of class structure, while the problem offreedom is related to officialdom, so there is little obvious room for ma-noeuvre where large groups whose interests are definable in terms offreedom and equality could act in concert. The oldest socialist demand, forbread and freedom, cannot here be voiced as one. The Polish rulers author-ized by Stalin are not about to destroy themselves in the way that the Sovietsdid, but nor have they shown any capacity to generate structures open topolitical change or social reconstruction from within. As Bauman concludes,in anticipation of Solidarity a decade later, a new alliance might result notfrom a new common goal so much as from a common dissatisfaction with asocial reality mutually perceived as unbearable (Bauman, 1974: 147).

Bauman returns to the historical or generational aspects of the satellitesin ‘The Second Generation of Socialism’ (1972). Here the question is whatthe class effects of the reproduction of the new social systems are over time.More literally, Bauman’s question is: what are the forms of the transmissionof inherited advantage? Here we can see Bauman puzzling over the Polishversion of what were later to become British problems, in his period of exile.Not only is there a dialectic of freedom and security whether in Poland orlater in Blair’s Britain; more, the value of discretional goods can be registeredas signs and not only as use-values. Beyond subsistence level, goods alsowork as signs: there is a semiotic role to consumption (Bauman, 1972: 224).The infamous institution that emerges to indicate the distinction takes theform of closed shops. At the same time as market forms of delivery indicatea shift from ‘welfare state’ to ‘welfare individualism’ after 1956 in Poland, thepolitical apparatus has to come to grips with the crisis of the ‘second gener-ation’. Stalin in 1937 and Mao in 1968 dealt with the succession problem bypurging. By the time of Khruschev, it had become apparent to the aging rulersthat a more peaceful approach would allow them rather to die in their beds(Bauman, 1972: 226–7). In 1968 in Poland and Czechoslovakia diametricallydifferent processes ensued. In Czechoslovakia workers and intellectualsunited against the regime. In Poland, no such alliance could be achieved.Polish industrialization came later; new Polish workers were still culturallypeasant, susceptible to the attractions of urban consumerism and drawn topolitical quiescence (Bauman, 1972: 228–9). The socialist revolution of 1945was made in the name of an almost non-existent working class. Paradoxically,



this revolution has now produced a social class that can challenge the claimsmade in its own name. They can pretend to work, while the rulers pretendto rule. But no one can pretend to be outside the system, or outside the state.

These patterns are common to east European societies, but the waythey are played out is shaped in large part by indigenous factors (Bauman,1971b: 46). Features common to Soviet-type societies nevertheless include a‘new middle class’, where access to education is the key, though there arealso deep conflicts between ‘rulers’ and ‘experts’. In sympathy with Luxem-burg, again, Bauman worries over the loss of proletarian collective memorythrough the Second World War and the rise of institutional actors or appa-ratciks who are happy to pretend to represent the peasant-cum-proletariansfrom the comfort and safety of their dachas. Into the 1980s a new industrialworking class has been formed, but it is labourist or corporatist in pro-gramme. Until 1980.

SOLIDARITY AND AFTER

The emergence of the Solidarity movement in 1980 took everyone bysurprise, even if in retrospect this process looks like a belated trade-union-ization of a belated industrial proletarian arrival. Bauman’s 1981 essay, at thecusp of the movement, was more optimistic, speaking indeed of ‘the matu-ration of socialism’ (Bauman, 1981). This was because – and here Baumantalks like Castoriadis – Poland in 1980 came close to the model of historicalcreativity. Though it is Castoriadis who we associate with both the Social-isme ou Barbarie impulse to workers autonomy and the later claim to anontology of creation, the other absent presence in Bauman’s margins isHabermas, for Bauman also interprets Solidarity as part of an enlightenmentprocess. The Polish venture seeks to alter the language of social discourse,to redefine social action both outside the logic of the regime and its powers(Bauman, 1981: 51). The point, and the achievement of Solidarity, on thisview, is that it does not talk to power, for to talk to the ruling party in itsown language is to lose the battle before it starts. ‘The hope to loosen thedead grip of dictatorship lies elsewhere, in winning legitimacy for a non-political language’ (Bauman, 1981: 53). The Polish events open a new possi-bility: one of a civil society grounded on the autonomy of the public sphere,won by the workers. It is this conjunction, of the opening public sphere andthe agency of the workers, which is the great historical novelty of Solidarity.Enough, indeed, to make Bauman ponder this as a premonition, if notmaturation of socialism.

Bauman returns to the Polish story in 1989, in ‘Poland: On its Own’.Here the view, again, is for Polish socialism sui generis. The Polish regimeonly emulated Soviet Stalinism into the 1950s, losing its impetus by 1953 andending with Beria’s death in 1956. The ‘Polish Road to Socialism’ emphasizeddifferences, rather than similarities with the USSR. As a result, there was little



synchronization of the political histories of the two countries (Bauman,1989b: 47). The Polish regime prided itself as Polish, western, over theRussian, eastern ways. The problem with Solidarity, now, in retrospect, is thelog jam it confronted. While various social actors and interests agreed in prin-ciple to all kinds of change, the practical steps to implementing reform seemto conflict with everyone’s immediate interests. Conflicts are channelled intothe distributive sphere; yet longer term struggles over life-chances are frus-trated, as in all such communist countries mobility has been nationalized.The Polish elite has circulatory problems. The purge, the original Stalinistsolution, fell out of favour with the generation of rulers who in their youthcaptured power through such means. The only obvious alternative is to makemore room at the top by multiplying positions of high status, prestige andmaterial rewards.

Thus Bauman revisits the Michels problem, in its post-SPD, totalitarianversion, where the party is not the opposition but the power, and all laddersare internal. Solidarity, in this context, offers not only an alternative, publicsphere, but also the prospect of other ladders, other life-chances. The emerg-ence of ‘free trade unions’ offers a space for the flourishing of talents, skillsand ambitions of all kinds. Even if some of the Solidarity actors were lesselevated in their motives, they were obliged to promote pluralism (Bauman,1989b: 63). It was in the logic of their action to support pluralism. Politics,here, might be a life-chance or a vocation; but its impulse was bound to bepositive, even if its impact would be short-circuited. The result, in the Polishcase, would be all glasnost and no perestroika, at least until larger world-historic forces came into play.

Finally, then, there comes Bauman’s ‘Communism: A Postmortem’(Bauman, 1992). The anti-communist uprisings were systemic rather thanmerely political revolutions. The Polish problem was that none of the estab-lished classes demonstrated, or could be attributed with, ‘transformative’interests. In the first instance, none of the major actors wanted a new society,only some relief from the tragicomic aspects of the existing one. To moveforward would mean dismantling the ‘patronage state’ (the phenomenonearlier described as partynomialism). This would mean opening up a newtradeoff between state and market, or security and freedom, where morefreedom, like the earlier excess of security, cuts both ways. Alongside thisscenario, Bauman reintroduces the frame of modernity and after. Commu-nism was socialism in overdrive, socialism in a hurry, the younger, hot-headed and impatient brother. Lenin’s political impatience led to asociological rupture. Lenin redefined socialism (or communism) as a substi-tute for, rather than a continuation of, the bourgeois revolution. Communismwould be modernity without the bourgeois revolution, without bourgeoisdemocracy or a public sphere of any kind. Communism was an image ofmodernity one-sidedly adapted to the task of mobilizing social and naturalresources in the name of modernization (Bauman, 1992).


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Those who would urge capitalism onto Soviet-type societies after 1989often failed to acknowledge that these economies lacked not only capital andcapitalists but even workers, in the Puritan sense. Bauman’s conclusion hereis that this is one sense in which the events from 1989 onwards indicate apostmodern revolution: postmodern because post-puritan, and in a culturalsense overwhelmed by a sense that capitalism rules victorious less in a pro-ductivist than a consumptive sense.

It was the postmodern, narcissistic culture of self-enhancement, self-enjoyment,instant gratification and life defined in terms of consumer styles that finallyexposed the obsoleteness of the ‘steel-per-head’ philosophy stubbornlypreached and practiced under communism. (Bauman, 1992: 171)

You could say that Americanism won, or perhaps the prospect of theculture of the postmodern, even as the masses toiled for subminimum wagesthe world about.

CONCLUSIONS: FULL CIRCLE

I began these notes with the observation that there is no text inBauman’s project called Modernity and Communism to match his mostprominent book, Modernity and the Holocaust. There are other traces andindications: the samizdat critique of communist humanism in Legislators andInterpreters, the de facto authorization of Dictatorship Over Needs as a theoryof Soviet-type societies for sociology, and the essays on Poland, some ofwhich have been scanned here. Here the implication is clear: while the Polishstory cannot be told outside of the Soviet story, its internal dynamics arepeculiar. While the idea of Stalinism needs to be connected to the Polishexperience, it cannot sufficiently explain it. The Polish communists were notutopians, the hot-headed younger brothers of Lenin. Their initial brief, afterthe Second World War, was less revolution than reconstruction.

The Polish context is crucial. The commonly encountered criticism ofModernity and the Holocaust is that in foregrounding problems of modernity,the book fails to say enough about Germans and Jews. One of Bauman’sintellectual or writerly habits is to continue the discussion in the next book,so that the discussion of Jews in particular continues in the next instalment,Modernity and Ambivalence. There, as in the Holocaust book, the shadowof Polish experience falls heavily; after all, Auschwitz was in Poland. In Mod-ernity and Ambivalence Bauman discusses among other things the internalstruggles between German Jews and Ostjuden. Not all Ostjuden were PolishJews, but all Polish Jews were Ostjuden. Bauman turns full circle on this pointin his 1996 essay ‘Assimilation Into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’(Bauman, 1996). Many good Polish Jews, like the German Jews into the1920s, imagined themselves to be Poles or Germans. Yet the Polish assimi-lation of Jews – which Bauman elsewhere connects with Lévi-Strauss’ idea



of the anthropophagic culture, that which swallows the outsiders up otherthan vomiting them out, as the Holocaust did – was as successful as it wascontingent, indeed was successful because contingent: the Jews wouldalways still be exposed, found out (Bauman, 1996: 335). Then came the war,German invaders and Soviet. To the Poles, there was little difference betweenthe invaders. For the Jews, the difference was between life and death. Horri-fied, the Poles watched the enthusiasm with which most Jews greeted theRed Army (Bauman, 1996: 337). The Jews of Poland made an excellentmaterial for the new power: here were ladders, opportunities to change theworld, or so it seemed. This treachery was neither forgotten nor forgiven bythe Poles, who periodically returned to anti-Semitic purges, including the turnwhich expelled Bauman from his chair in Warsaw in 1968 and opened alonger road to Leeds. It was time for Zygmunt Bauman to move on, to leavethis life behind, though it would follow.

Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University and Directorof the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory. He is author of Zygmunt Bauman –Dialectic of Modernity (2000), The Bauman Reader (2001) and Zygmunt Bauman –Masters of Social Thought (4 volumes, 2002). He is currently working on a study ofthe antipodes over the 20th century, called The Unhappy Country. [email:[email protected]].

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F. Parkin (ed.) The Social Analysis of Class Structure. London: Tavistock.Bauman, Z. (1981) ‘On the Maturation of Socialism’, Telos 47: 48–54.Bauman, Z. (1982) Memories of Class. London: Routledge.Bauman, Z. (1984) ‘Dictatorship Over Needs’, Telos 60, reprinted in Beilharz (2001).Bauman, Z. (1985) Stalin and the Peasant Revolution: A Case Study in the Dialectics

of Master and Slave, Leeds Occasional Papers in Sociology, 19.Bauman, Z. (1989a) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Z. (1989b) ‘Poland – On its Own’, Telos 79: 47–68.Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press.Bauman, Z. (1992) ‘Communism – A Postmortem’, in Intimations of Postmodernity.

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Bauman, Z. (1995) ‘The Age of Camps’, in Postmodern Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press,reprinted in Beilharz (2001).

Bauman, Z. (1996) ‘Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer’, in S. Suleiman(ed.) Exile and Creativity – Signposts, Travellers, Outsiders, Backward Glances.Durham: Duke University Press.

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