M O D ERN ITY AN D

CO M M U N ISM : ZY G M U N T
BAU M AN AN D TH E O TH ER
TO TALITARIAN ISM
Peter Beilharz
ABSTRACT Baum ans w ork can be understood as a critical theory, but its east
European context needs to be established alongside the w est European sensi-
bilities of the Frankfurt School. The question of Soviet m odernity and the status
of the Polish experience of w hich Baum an w as part need to be placed along-
side the m ore fam ous critique of the H olocaust, w hich can be m ore readily
aligned w ith H orkheim er and Adornos view s in Dialectic of Enlightenment. To
this end, som e of Baum ans essays and argum ents on the Soviet and Polish
experience are review ed in order to begin to ll out this other dim ension of
Baum ans critique of m odernity and totalitarianism . Both Baum ans view s on
eastern Europe, and m y survey of them , are offered as hints for those that
follow .
K EY W O RD S Baum an com m unism eastern Europe M arxism m od-
ernity socialism
Zygm unt Baum ans m ost in uential w ork is w ithout doubt Modernity
and the Holocaust (1989a). There is no com panion in his w ork to Modernity
and the Holocaust, no Modernity and Communism, or perhaps it should be
Communism and Modernity. For his lifes com m itm ent, in political term s, w as
to the left, to socialism , to utopia, differently, to Polish reconstruction after
the devastation of the w ar. Com m unism survives, as a ghost, as it ghosts us
all, those on the left or w ho cam e from it. In m y book, Zygmunt Bauman
Dialectic of Modernity, I have suggested that there is a sam izdat text on com -
m unism in Baum ans project. It is Legislators and Interpreters(Beilharz, 2000:
Thesis Eleven, N um ber 70, August 2002: 8899
SAG E Publications (London, Thousand O aks, CA and N ew D elhi)
Copyright 2002 SAG E Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
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ch. 3). If it is the case that Legislators and Interpreters does not fully hit its
ow n target, the Enlighteners, this m ay w ell be because it has another, m ore
explicitly political target in Bolshevism , or com m unist hum anism . The intel-
lectuals w ho sought directly to legislate and did so w ere not the
philosophes, but the Bolsheviks.
W here is com m unism , then, in Baum ans w ork? In one w ay, as in Legis-
lators and Interpreters, com m unism appears as the core narrative of m od-
ernity. Am ericanism is its boosterist capitalist version; N azism is the racial
im perialist or hum an engineering m odernity par excellence (Beilharz, 2000).
This echoes further in the w ay in w hich for Baum an, the postm odern also
m eans the post-M arxist. Part of the M arxist story is inextricably bound up
w ith the Soviet experience, so that to be after m odernity (or at least, after
m odernism ) also m eans to be after actually institutionalized M arxism in its
Soviet and satellite form .
Modernity and the Holocaust, then, also signals or anticipates the idea
of alternative or m ultiple m odernities. To think across Baum ans w ork, there
m ust be at least three prim ary form s of m odern w estern regim e liberal capi-
talist, com m unist and fascist across the 20th century. D evelopm ental
regim es, as in Latin Am erica or East Asia, have som ething in com m on w ith
all of these three, for they are each m odels of m odernization. As w e read
Baum ans w ork, it m ight be tem pting to add a fourth, social dem ocratic m od-
ernity. As Baum an puts it in Modernity and Ambivalence, Bolshevism
genetically is social dem ocracys hot-headed younger brother (Baum an, 1991:
ch. 7). Yet social dem ocracy from W eim ar to Bad G odesberg is also liberal
capitalist, even as it connects to com m unism and fascism in different w ays.
W hich is not to say that social dem ocracy is politically indefensible, no m atter
how com prom ised it m ay becom e, but that it cannot lay claim to the category
of a separate m odernity rather than a particular type of political regim e w ithin
it (though the persistence of a Scandic m odel rem ains signi cant here).
Tw o other, larger them es cut across this eld: totalitarianism and utopia.
Totalitarianism is used here as a term of convenience. From m y perspective,
the Bolshevik and N azi experiences need to be aligned rather than identi ed
or radically separated. The shadow texts here m ight be those of the Frank-
furt School, though neither of the classics, M arcuses One Dimensional Man
or H orkheim er and Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment directly ts our
needs. One Dimensional Man cam e close enough to arguing that all m od-
ernity w as totalitarian, a charge w hich m isreaders of Baum an have been
know n to direct at Modernity and the Holocaust. Dialectic of Enlightenment,
paradoxically, m ight itself be read as an anticipatory critique of com m unism ,
for unlike fascist rationality, com m unism w as a direct and self-conscious
extension of one stream of enlightenm ent rationality. Against the Frankfurt
School, or in com plem ent to it, this difference in Baum ans w ork serves to
rem ind that if his is a critical theory, then its orienting point alongside the
H olocaust is its east European context. W here the Frankfurt School w ere
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relatively silent on com m unism , Baum ans w ork grow s out of it, alongside it,
against it.
Yet Baum an rem ains, at the sam e tim e, a socialist, and the them e of
utopia persists in his thought, even as utopia itself persists as a necessary no-
place rather than (as per Bolshevism ) an im age of a w orld to be achieved,
now , w hatever the cost. This am bivalence tow ards utopia connects back to
the problem of enlightenm ent. For the Bolsheviks did violence to their people
in their ow n nam e. The m urders w ere done in the nam e of noble ends.
W here the Final Solution w as rational in its ow n term s, a m urderous solution
to a N azi-im posed Jew ish problem , the ethics of com m unism w ere w orse
than those of fascism , for the Bolsheviks w ere prepared to com m it m urder
for noble rather than ignoble ends. Thus the irony of the fellow -travelling
insistence that Stalinism w as superior to N azism because it sought to im prove
H um anity. U nlike the N azis, the Bolsheviks m eant w ell; this is supposed to
be som e kind of com pensation for their victim s.
Alongside the sam izdat critique of Bolshevism in Legislators and Inter-
preters, there are tw o other elds of analysis of com m unism in Baum ans
w ork. O ne addresses the Soviet experience, and the other Poland in particu-
lar. These notes are offered as hints for those w ho follow .
THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE
Various com m entators have identi ed the centrality of G ram sci to
Baum ans project, and Baum an w ould be the rst to agree. There is, how ever,
another M arxist soulm ate, a fellow Pole, w hose presence can be felt in his
w ork. This is Rosa Luxem burg. Their com patriot K olakow ski noted the
af nity in his 1971 critique of Baum ans Pleading for Revolution
(K olakow ski, 1971; Baum an, 1971a). All the sym pathies are there: the view
from below , the keen opposition to barracks socialism , the m aturational
sense that history w ill not be forced. Less than spontaneism , there is in
Baum ans w ork a sense that the w orld keeps m oving; unlike Rosa, perhaps,
he is am bivalent about both social actors, w orkers and intellectuals alike. As
in the w ork of Baum ans teacher, Julian H ochfeld, here it is both Bolshevism
and reform ism that are the problem (H ochfeld, 1957). If Baum an shares this
old sense that Bolshevism forces history w here reform ism m erely rolls w ith
it, how ever, his sociological sensibility is m ore open to the role of the
peasants. This is especially apparent in his 1985 Leeds sociology paper, Stalin
and the Peasant Revolution: A Case Study in the Dialectics of Master and Slave
(Baum an, 1985), w here it is Barrington M oore rather than Rosa Luxem burg
w ho sets the scene, for here the problem atic is fram ed by M arx, peasantry
and m odernization w ith H egel of course to com e. Lenin, like Tkachev,
view ed the peasants as the battering ram destined to sm ash the existing order
out of pure rage, leaving pow er to the revolutionary m inority w ho w ould
start the real revolution. For Baum an, it w as this unholy alliance betw een
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Bolsheviks and peasants that becam e a new dialectic of m asters and slaves,
the tw o locked together in asym m etric dependence just as H egel had
described. The problem , of course, w as that the peasants w ere not really
interested in com m unism . The m aster found him self at the m ercy of his slave:
The horror of the peasant beast on the loose w as never to leave them until
the m aster w ould m urder the slave, turning into the slave of his ow n crim e
(Baum an, 1985: 21). The revolution devoured its children, but they w ere, in
the rst instance, not the noble Jacobins but the peasants. H aving painted
them selves into a political corner, deprived of any possible options, the Bol-
sheviks then destroyed them selves: The possibility that this w ould happen
w as created by the original sin of deciding to force the socialist utopia upon
an overw helm ingly peasant, pre-industrial country(Baum an, 1985: 50).
Baum an revisits these issues in the 1986 Telos sym posium (Baum an,
1984) on Soviet peasants. H ere, again, it is the peasantry w hich plays the
central role of the Bolshevik tragedy, even though it is now a m inority class.
H ere its legacy is, am ong other things, ethical. Peasants steal to live, not to
get rich. But stealing becom es universalized, in consequence, w hich m eans
that the ethics of everyday life are jaundiced, and larger hopes of autonom y
dashed. The sam e im pulse inform s Baum ans response in the Telos sym -
posium on the Fehr-H eller-M arkus classic Dictatorship Over Needs. For there
is a sense in w hich, as M ichels w rote Political Parties so that W eber did not
have to (and Engels did M arxs favour in Anti-Dhring, all these rem aining
of course the view s of the w riters rather than the others) it is the Dictator-
ship Over Needs that lls the gap in Baum ans w ork. Baum an accepts this so
to say psychological sense, that dictatorship is about control, over bodies,
souls and needs (this is the sam e m om ent, of course, w hen Baum an brings
this kind of Foucauldian critique to bear upon the prim itive accum ulation of
capitalist relations in Memories of Class, 1982). Baum an accepts categorically
the sense of the H ungarians that Soviet-type societies are m odern not lap-
sarian socialist, not capitalist, absolutely not an historical throw back. Social-
ism w as born as the counterculture of capitalism , a legitim ate offspring of
the bourgeois revolution eager to continue the w ork that the latter started
but failed to com plete. H ere Baum an connects rationalism and the social
engineering of the Enlightenm ent project w ith capitalism and socialism . The
argum ent parallels that in Modernity and the Holocaust in its im plications:
To sum up: the Soviet system , w ithout being a sequence to capitalism or an
alternative form of industrial society, is nonetheless no freak or refractory event
in European history. Its claim s to the legacy of the Enlightenm ent or to the
unful lled prom ises of the bourgeois revolution are neither pretentious nor
grotesque. And thus it contains im portant lessons for the rest of the w orld.
(Baum an, 1984: 263)
The Soviet system is an acid test for the enlightenm ent utopia, for it
sets the idea of a social rationality against that of individual rationalities, by
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substituting state order for individual autonom y. Its failure indicates the hiatus
of all socialist utopia, and at the sam e tim e puts the global drive to ration-
ality and order on notice. Further, its failure indicates the renew ed possibility
of grassroots m ovem ent, as in the Polish Solidarity(and here the echo, again,
is w ith Rosa Luxem burg).
By the tim e of Postmodern Ethics, Baum an suggests that w e should live
no longer in the shadow of the Age of Reason; for the 20th century is the
Age of the Cam ps (Baum an, 1995). H ere the critique of the nal solution and
of Dictatorship Over Needs m eets, to indicate the necessity of a sociology of
m odern violence. Auschw itz m eets the G ulag in the m odernist w ill-to-order,
the liberal face of w hich is apparent in incarceration. Yet if the genocidal
urge of these regim es is ineluctable, the regim es are not identical, only
sim ilar. And if they are exem plary of the dark side of m odernity, those experi-
ences do not in them selves capture w hat follow s, in the experience of eastern
Europe.
EAST EUROPEAN MODERNITY
H ow best to explain these sim ilarities and differences? Plainly Baum an
rejects one analytical tem ptation, w hich is to subsum e Soviet and G erm an
totalitarianism . The next problem then em erges: how to explain the foun-
dational, Soviet experience in its connection to the satellites in eastern
Europe? If it is m eaningful to describe the Soviet U nion as Stalinist, w hat does
this m ean for its echoes in Budapest, Prague and W arsaw ? Is it m eaningful
to talk about Soviet-type societies as sui generis, or is each case, Poland in
this instance, sui generis in itself? Baum an m aintains an appropriate degree
of am bivalence about this classi catory bind, for it is, of course, explanans
rather than explanandum that m atters. W hat does Baum an tell us about
Poland? Baum ans analyses of Poland are acute, and they are local and
speci c but pow erfully sociological.
Baum ans available essays in English on Polish experience all com bine
the language of class and elite in the W eberian sense: class as appropriate to
econom ic life, elites as political leaders, in this regard, preem inently the Com -
m unist Party. Baum ans analyses of Polish com m unism are also consistently
historical, or generational, draw ing speci c attention to leadership styles and
rationalities as for exam ple w ith reference to the distinction betw een revol-
utionary political skills of the pioneers and the routine adm inistrative skills
of those w ho follow (Baum an, 1964). H ere party connections w ork as the
transm ission belt or line of the available xers. Party connections in the w ork
sphere into the 1960s are increasingly technocratic rather than ideological.
This generational curiosity is connected to the W eberian interest in person-
ality types. It also registers an acute sensitivity to the W eberian sensibility
regarding shortage and endless struggles over goods, both m aterial and
sym bolic. Baum ans critique of Soviet-type societies rests on the M ichels-like
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sense that socialism , too, is an alternative career ladder, like the m ilitary or
clergy in other circum stances. Socialism m ight be about good or evil inten-
tions, but in its institutional form s it represents ladders to be clim bed, or w hat
M ichels called career escalators in the case of the SPD .
Baum ans essays into the 1970s extend this W eberian interest in the
duality of pow er structures, or w hat he separates as of cialdom and class
as the bases of inequality in socialist society. Pow er is not bourgeois; rather
it represents a w eb of dependencies (Baum an, 1974: 129). In Baum ans self-
understanding, this is also to follow M arx, as interpreted by H ochfeld, and
the distinction betw een the tw o-class m odel of the Manifesto and the m ulti-
class m odel im plicit in The Eighteenth Brumaire(Baum an, 1974: 132). N ever-
theless, it is W eber w ho offers the anim ating spirit here, not least as Baum an
offers a M arxisant tw ist on the idea of patrim onialism as referring to the issue
of the futuristicrather than traditional legitim ation of the partynomial ruling
authority in Poland. H is contention is that the socialist societies w hich
em erged in the last half-century in eastern Europe do not t W ebers pro-
verbial categories traditional, charism atic, rational legal but m ay t a
fourth, parallel to patrim onialism , w here it is rule of the party rather than
strictly rule of the fathers that is predom inant. Baum an does not m ake the
point here it is central to H ellers contribution to Dictatorship Over Needs
10 years later that Stalins reinvention of tradition, G reat Patriotic W ar,
M other Russia shifts Soviet legitim ation from future to past for his curios-
ity is not about Stalin or Soviet foundationalism , but w ith the east European
results of Yalta.
Baum an enum erates the features of partynom ial rule as follow s. First,
their claim s to legitim acy are futuristic, not traditionalistic; these claim s are
to the society of the future, not to M other Russia, Blut or Boden. Second,
party rather than person is the object of loyalty. Loyalty to the party takes
the 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 vanguard
legitim ation of partynom ial authority requires teleological, not genetic,
determ ination of m acrosocial processes. The Plan is the m ajor instrum ent of
teleological determ ination. W e speak of the emergenceof capitalism , but of
the construction of socialism . Fourth, planning and the w ill-to-order never-
theless relies upon m arkets. Plan and m arket are m utually dependent, as in
m aster and slave (Baum an, 1974: 1379). Fifth, the struggle of plurality and
m arket principles m eans that there is a perm anent and dual structure of
inequality, and a duality of pow er elite w hich re ects this, itself m anifest as
ofcialdomand class. As a result, in the socialist societies of eastern Europe
each individuals situation is shaped by tw o relatively autonom ous and to an
extent antagonistic pow er structures, neither of w hich is entirely reducible to
the other (Baum an, 1974: 140). As Baum an notes, how ever, this is not a case
of the com m on W eberianM arxist addition, w here (as Lichtheim put it) M arx
explains base and W eber superstructure, for Baum ans case is that the tw o
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essential planes of inequality in eastern Europe do not overlap. There is no
direct correspondence betw een of cialdom -generated and class-generated
inequalities (Baum an, 1974: 144). Each individual in these societies is a
m em ber of tw o largely independent pow er structures: of cialdom and class.
The dialectic of m aster and slave appears again, then, in this tension
betw een state and m arket, for the dem and for freedom often m eans here
freedom of m arket forces. The peculiarity of this structure is apparent in
political term s, w here there em erges a kind of populist alliance betw een party
and w orkers against m anagers and professionals. Yet the problem of
equality seem s to be in the realm of class structure, w hile the problem of
freedom is related to of cialdom , so there is little obvious room for m a-
noeuvre w here large groups w hose interests are de nable in term s of
freedom and equality could act in concert. The oldest socialist dem and, for
bread and freedom , cannot here be voiced as one. The Polish rulers author-
ized by Stalin are not about to destroy them selves in the w ay that the Soviets
did, but nor have they show n any capacity to generate structures open to
political change or social reconstruction from w ithin. As Baum an concludes,
in anticipation of Solidarity a decade later, a new alliance m ight result not
from a new com m on goal so m uch as from a com m on dissatisfaction w ith a
social reality m utually perceived as unbearable (Baum an, 1974: 147).
Baum an returns to the historical or generational aspects of the satellites
in The Second G eneration of Socialism (1972). H ere the question is w hat
the class effects of the reproduction of the new social system s are over tim e.
M ore literally, Baum ans question is: w hat are the form s of the transm ission
of inherited advantage? H ere w e can see Baum an puzzling over the Polish
version of w hat w ere later to becom e British problem s, in his period of exile.
N ot only is there a dialectic of freedom and security w hether in Poland or
later in Blairs Britain; m ore, the value of discretional goods can be registered
as signs and not only as use-values. Beyond subsistence level, goods also
w ork as signs: there is a sem iotic role to consum ption (Baum an, 1972: 224).
The infam ous institution that em erges to indicate the distinction takes the
form of closed shops. At the sam e tim e as m arket form s of delivery indicate
a shift from w elfare stateto w elfare individualism after 1956 in Poland, the
political apparatus has to com e to grips w ith the crisis of the second gener-
ation. Stalin in 1937 and M ao in 1968 dealt w ith the succession problem by
purging. By the tim e of K hruschev, it had becom e apparent to the aging rulers
that a m ore peaceful approach w ould allow them rather to die in their beds
(Baum an, 1972: 2267). In 1968 in Poland and Czechoslovakia diam etrically
different processes ensued. In Czechoslovakia w orkers and intellectuals
united against the regim e. In Poland, no such alliance could be achieved.
Polish industrialization cam e later; new Polish w orkers w ere still culturally
peasant, susceptible to the attractions of urban consum erism and draw n to
political quiescence (Baum an, 1972: 2289). The socialist revolution of 1945
w as m ade in the nam e of an alm ost non-existent w orking class. Paradoxically,
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this revolution has now produced a social class that can challenge the claim s
m ade in its ow n nam e. They can pretend to w ork, w hile the rulers pretend
to rule. But no one can pretend to be outside the system , or outside the state.
These patterns are com m on to east European societies, but the w ay
they are played out is shaped in large part by indigenous factors (Baum an,
1971b: 46). Features com m on to Soviet-type societies nevertheless include a
new m iddle class, w here access to education is the key, though there are
also deep con icts betw een rulersand experts. In sym pathy w ith Luxem -
burg, again, Baum an w orries over the loss of proletarian collective m em ory
through the Second W orld W ar and the rise of institutional actors or appa-
ratciks w ho are happy to pretend to represent the peasant-cum -proletarians
from the com fort and safety of their dachas. Into the 1980s a new industrial
w orking class has been form ed, but it is labourist or corporatist in pro-
gram m e. U ntil 1980.
SOLIDARITY AND AFTER
The em ergence of the Solidarity m ovem ent in 1980 took everyone by
surprise, even if in retrospect this process looks like a belated trade-union-
ization of a belated industrial proletarian arrival. Baum ans 1981 essay, at the
cusp of the m ovem ent, w as m ore optim istic, speaking indeed of the m atu-
ration of socialism (Baum an, 1981). This w as because and here Baum an
talks like Castoriadis Poland in 1980 cam e close to the m odel of historical
creativity. Though it is Castoriadis w ho w e associate w ith both the Social-
isme ou Barbarie im pulse to w orkers autonom y and the later claim to an
ontology of creation, the other absent presence in Baum ans m argins is
H aberm as, for Baum an also interprets Solidarity as part of an enlightenm ent
process. The Polish venture seeks to alter the language of social discourse,
to rede ne social action both outside the logic of the regim e and its pow ers
(Baum an, 1981: 51). The point, and the achievem ent of Solidarity, on this
view , is that it does not talk to pow er, for to talk to the ruling party in its
ow n language is to lose the battle before it starts. The hope to loosen the
dead grip of dictatorship lies elsew here, in w inning legitim acy for a non-
political language(Baum an, 1981: 53). The Polish events open a new possi-
bility: one of a civil society grounded on the autonom y of the public sphere,
w on by the w orkers. It is this conjunction, of the opening public sphere and
the agency of the w orkers, w hich is the great historical novelty of Solidarity.
Enough, indeed, to m ake Baum an ponder this as a prem onition, if not
m aturation of socialism .
Baum an returns to the Polish story in 1989, in Poland: O n its O w n.
H ere the view , again, is for Polish socialism sui generis. The Polish regim e
only em ulated Soviet Stalinism into the 1950s, losing its im petus by 1953 and
ending w ith Berias death in 1956. The Polish Road to Socialism em phasized
differences, rather than sim ilarities w ith the U SSR. As a result, there w as little
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synchronization of the political histories of the tw o countries (Baum an,
1989b: 47). The Polish regim e prided itself as Polish, w estern, over the
Russian, eastern w ays. The problem w ith Solidarity, now , in retrospect, is the
log jam it confronted. W hile various social actors and interests agreed in prin-
ciple to all kinds of change, the practical steps to im plem enting reform seem
to con ict w ith everyones im m ediate interests. Con icts are channelled into
the distributive sphere; yet longer term struggles over life-chances are frus-
trated, as in all such com m unist countries m obility has been nationalized.
The Polish elite has circulatory problem s. The purge, the original Stalinist
solution, fell out of favour w ith the generation of rulers w ho in their youth
captured pow er through such m eans. The only obvious alternative is to m ake
m ore room at the top by m ultiplying positions of high status, prestige and
m aterial rew ards.
Thus Baum an revisits the M ichels problem , in its post-SPD , totalitarian
version, w here the party is not the opposition but the pow er, and all ladders
are internal. Solidarity, in this context, offers not only an alternative, public
sphere, but also the prospect of other ladders, other life-chances. The em erg-
ence of free trade unionsoffers a space for the ourishing of talents, skills
and am bitions of all kinds. Even if som e of the Solidarity actors w ere less
elevated in their m otives, they w ere obliged to prom ote pluralism (Baum an,
1989b: 63). It w as in the logic of their action to support pluralism . Politics,
here, m ight be a life-chance or a vocation; but its im pulse w as bound to be
positive, even if its im pact w ould be short-circuited. The result, in the Polish
case, w ould be all glasnost and no perestroika, at least until larger w orld-
historic forces cam e into play.
Finally, then, there com es Baum ans Com m unism : A Postm ortem
(Baum an, 1992). The anti-com m unist uprisings w ere system ic rather than
m erely political revolutions. The Polish problem w as that none of the estab-
lished classes dem onstrated, or could be attributed w ith, transform ative
interests. In the rst instance, none of the m ajor actors w anted a new society,
only som e relief from the tragicom ic aspects of the existing one. To m ove
forw ard w ould m ean dism antling the patronage state(the phenom enon
earlier described as partynom ialism ). This w ould m ean opening up a new
tradeoff betw een state and m arket, or security and freedom , w here m ore
freedom , like the earlier excess of security, cuts both w ays. Alongside this
scenario, Baum an reintroduces the fram e of m odernity and after. Com m u-
nism w as socialism in overdrive, socialism in a hurry, the younger, hot-
headed and im patient brother. Lenins political im patience led to a
sociological rupture. Lenin rede ned socialism (or com m unism ) as a substi-
tute for, rather than a continuation of, the bourgeois revolution. Com m unism
w ould be m odernity w ithout the bourgeois revolution, w ithout bourgeois
dem ocracy or a public sphere of any kind. Com m unism w as an im age of
m odernity one-sidedly adapted to the task of m obilizing social and natural
resources in the nam e of m odernization (Baum an, 1992).
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Those w ho w ould urge capitalism onto Soviet-type societies after 1989
often failed to acknow ledge that these econom ies lacked not only capital and
capitalists but even w orkers, in the Puritan sense. Baum ans conclusion here
is that this is one sense in w hich the events from 1989 onw ards indicate a
postm odern revolution: postm odern because post-puritan, and in a cultural
sense overw helm ed by a sense that capitalism rules victorious less in a pro-
ductivist than a consum ptive sense.
It w as the postm odern, narcissistic culture of self-enhancem ent, self-enjoym ent,
instant grati cation and life de ned in term s of consum er styles that nally
exposed the obsoleteness of the steel-per-headphilosophy stubbornly
preached and practiced under com m unism . (Baum an, 1992: 171)
You could say that Am ericanism w on, or perhaps the prospect of the
culture of the postm odern, even as the m asses toiled for subm inim um w ages
the w orld about.
CONCLUSIONS: FULL CIRCLE
I began these notes w ith the observation that there is no text in
Baum ans project called Modernity and Communism to m atch his m ost
prom inent book, Modernity and the Holocaust. There are other traces and
indications: the sam izdat critique of com m unist hum anism in Legislators and
Interpreters, the de facto authorization of Dictatorship Over Needsas a theory
of Soviet-type societies for sociology, and the essays on Poland, som e of
w hich have been scanned here. H ere the im plication is clear: w hile the Polish
story cannot be told outside of the Soviet story, its internal dynam ics are
peculiar. W hile the idea of Stalinism needs to be connected to the Polish
experience, it cannot suf ciently explain it. The Polish com m unists w ere not
utopians, the hot-headed younger brothers of Lenin. Their initial brief, after
the Second W orld W ar, w as less revolution than reconstruction.
The Polish context is crucial. The com m only encountered criticism of
Modernity and the Holocaust is that in foregrounding problem s of m odernity,
the book fails to say enough about G erm ans and Jew s. O ne of Baum ans
intellectual or w riterly habits is to continue the discussion in the next book,
so that the discussion of Jew s in particular continues in the next instalm ent,
Modernity and Ambivalence. There, as in the H olocaust book, the shadow
of Polish experience falls heavily; after all, Auschw itz w as in Poland. In Mod-
ernity and Ambivalence Baum an discusses am ong other things the internal
struggles betw een G erm an Jew s and Ostjuden. N ot all Ostjuden w ere Polish
Jew s, but all Polish Jew s w ere Ostjuden. Baum an turns full circle on this point
in his 1996 essay Assim ilation Into Exile: The Jew as a Polish W riter
(Baum an, 1996). M any good Polish Jew s, like the G erm an Jew s into the
1920s, im agined them selves to be Poles or G erm ans. Yet the Polish assim i-
lation of Jew s w hich Baum an elsew here connects w ith Lvi-Straussidea
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of the anthropophagic culture, that w hich sw allow s the outsiders up other
than vom iting them out, as the H olocaust did w as as successful as it w as
contingent, indeed w as successful because contingent: the Jew s w ould
alw ays still be exposed, found out (Baum an, 1996: 335). Then cam e the w ar,
G erm an invaders and Soviet. To the Poles, there w as little difference betw een
the invaders. For the Jew s, the difference w as betw een life and death. H orri-
ed, the Poles w atched the enthusiasm w ith w hich m ost Jew s greeted the
Red Arm y (Baum an, 1996: 337). The Jew s of Poland m ade an excellent
m aterial for the new pow er: here w ere ladders, opportunities to change the
w orld, or so it seem ed. This treachery w as neither forgotten nor forgiven by
the Poles, w ho periodically returned to anti-Sem itic purges, including the turn
w hich expelled Baum an from his chair in W arsaw in 1968 and opened a
longer road to Leeds. It w as tim e for Zygm unt Baum an to m ove on, to leave
this life behind, though it w ould follow .
Peter Beilharz is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe U niversity and D irector
of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Critical Theory. H e is author of Zygmunt Bauman
Dialectic of Modernity (2000), The Bauman Reader (2001) and Zygmunt Bauman
Masters of Social Thought (4 volum es, 2002). H e is currently w orking on a study of
the antipodes over the 20th century, called The Unhappy Country. [em ail:
P.Beilharz@ latrobe.edu.au].
References
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Beilharz, P. (ed.) (2001) The Bauman Reader. O xford: Blackw ell.
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Poland, International Social Science Journal V: xvi.
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