Memories of Class (Routledge Revivals)

The Pre-history and After-life of Class

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135155513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1982, Professor Bauman's discussion of the mechanism of class formation and institutionalisation of class conflict argues that our understanding of changes in social and political structure has been hindered by the freezing of concepts of class in the ice-age of industrial society. He investigates the impact of historical memory on the early transformation of rank into a class society, and on the current confusion in the analysis of the 'crisis of late-industrial society'.

The book traces the formation of a class society back to the patterns of 'surveillance power' and control, and shows how these patterns preceded and made possible the industrial system. Subsequently 'economised' into the industrial system, these same patterns of control have now proved to be inadequate under social conditions brought about by this economisation of the power conflict.

1
Class: before and after.
A preview

Memory is the after-life of history. It is through memory that history continues to live in the hopes, the ends, and the expectations of men and women as they seek to make sense of the business of life, to find a pattern in chaos, to construe familiar solutions to unfamiliar worries. Remembered history is the stuff of which these hopes, objectives and insights are made; in turn, the latter are the repositories where images of the past are rescued from oblivion. Memory is history-in-action. Remembered history is the logic which the actors inject into their strivings and which they employ to invest credibility into their hopes. In its after-life, history reincarnates as a Utopia which guides, and is guided by, the struggles of the present.

Remembered history seldom agrees with the history of the historians. This does not mean that historians, great or small, are immune to the group practice which shapes historical memory; neither does this mean that the work of the historians exerts no influence on the way the memory of the group selects and transforms its objects. By and large, however, remembered history and the history (histories?) of the historians follow their own respective courses. They are propelled by different needs, guided by different logic, and subject to different validity tests. There is little point, therefore, in asking whether the beliefs in which remembered history may be verbalised are true or false, by the standards set by professional historical inquiry. The ‘materiality’ of remembered history, its effectivity, indeed, its historical potential—do not rest on its truth so understood.

For a sociologist trying to grasp the springs of group practices, remembered history (or historical memory) is not a competitive account of something which can be presented by another, perhaps better, narrative; it is not an object of critique, a text called upon to hold out its credentials, and dismissed once it fails to do so. Sociology is neither a rival, nor the judge of historical memory. The failure of the latter to pass the professional truth-test is therefore of no relevance to the question of its sociological importance.

The phenomenon of historical memory presents, however, problems more complex than this of the choice between the attitude of critique and the attitude of description and explanation. Before such a choice is made, remembered history must first be ‘constructed’. Unlike the history of the historians, remembered history cannot be ‘referentially defined’ by pointing to so many books where its content has been duly and fully recorded. Worse still, it cannot always be gauged by extending inquiry to a new type of potentially objective evidence—say, the sales or library demand for some rather than other historical books, the intensity of the contemporary interest in or neglect of various types of historical literature, etc.; this latter method, if effective, is naturally limited to the ‘historical memory’ of the educated, the literate, the articulate. But not all historical actors belong to this category. In the case of those who do not (who neither write the books nor read them), one would search in vain for the direct or indirect articulations of history as they ‘remembered’ it. Also, the recently developing methods of ‘oral history’ would shed only oblique light on the issue; the problem with ‘remembered history’ of virtually all groups except the educated elite is not merely that it has not been recorded in writing, but that it rarely, if ever, surfaces to the level of verbal communication, written or oral. The historical memory of a group which has been ploughed into its collective actions, which finds its expression in the group’s proclivities to some rather than other behavioural responses, is not necessarily recognised by the group as a particular concept of the past. The authority of the past, and the ensuing need to possess some clear knowledge of the past in order to select right patterns of present conduct, is a philosophers’ issue, read into the collective actions by the interpreters, and not an organic factor of the action itself. The existential mode of historical memory is not unlike that of grammar. For the interpreter, the observed behaviour is incomprehensible unless its presence is assumed, and remains unexplained as long as its guiding rules remain inarticulate. But the actors themselves need not have the consciousness of the rules in order to follow them properly; and it is not they whom the interpreter would wish to interrogate in his search for the consistent formulation of the rules.

It is in this sense that the remembered history must be ‘constructed’. The reconstruction is, essentially, the task of the interpreter, a task which is indispensable for the understanding of group action, though not for its accomplishment. In the process of construction, recorded opinions of the actors are not seen by the interpreter as accounts, complete or partial, of the living history which merely need to be assembled into a cohesive totality through hypothesising the possible forms of the missing links and employing analogy to postulate affinities: they are not treated as incomplete or imperfect theories of tradition which ought to be implemented and at times corrected. Such opinions, together with non-verbalised actions, are seen rather as elements of behaviour which is to be understood in its totality, by reference to the antecedent experiences of the group, and to the challenge the new situation of the group presents if perceived against this background. The interpreter’s view of remembered, or living history emerges in the course of his effort to understand group reactions to the changing circumstances of life.

The procedure may be considered legitimate only if some assumptions are tacitly made. First, that—by and large— people prefer repetitive patterns of conduct, these being more economical and less unnerving than designing a response ad hoc, without being able to calculate the chance of success in advance. Second, that for this reason effective patterns practised in the past tend to be reinforced; the more they are habitualised, as it were, the more they are economical. Third, that it is precisely because of this propensity to learn that people experience a rapid change of circumstances as a threat; they resent the invalidation of the once trustworthy life wisdom. Fourth, when faced with such a change, people would be inclined either to refute the legitimacy of the new, or to try to force it into the familiar patterns; most often, they will attempt to do both things at the same time.

Projected upon our theme, these assumption generate the notion of remembered history as a residue of historical learning, which ‘makes sense’ of the group reactions to the change in the circumstances in which their business of life is conducted. What the notion implies is that these reactions are best understood as backward-looking. Even when articulated in a vocabulary of future, as-yet-unachieved states, and however profound the alteration of social realities they bring about as a consequence, the group actions derive their meaning from tradition. Historical action—human existence as such, as it were—is, to borrow Heidegger’s expression, a constant recapitulation of tradition: in other words, it is a process of constant negotiation between learned proclivities and new dependencies, marked by the resistance of the traditional language to resign its authority over perception of reality and the normative regulation of group behaviour. This account of the role of historical memory in historical action does not necessarily imply that a conservative bias is built into historical interpretation. What it does inevitably imply is the need for the interpreter to untangle the subtle dialectical interaction between the future orientation and the past determination, Utopia and tradition, the emergence of new structures of action and the language which had shaped, and was shaped by, the old.

To put it differently, the concept of historical memory does not imply the idea of well-formed, consciously appropriated and consulted visions of tradition, resilient to change and suggesting, by this very resilience, a ‘natural preference’ for traditionalism. Even less does the concept imply a version of the ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ historiosophy. The concept refers simply to the fact that at the foundation of any historical transformation lies the growing inadequacy of the learned pattern of expectation and behaviour to the circumstances in which the business of life is conducted. The likely reaction to such inadequacy is initially an attempt to bring the circumstances back into accordance with the pattern of learned behaviour. If this fails (and it normally does), a situation of crisis follows, marked by a high degree of disorganisation and reflected, on the one hand, in the prophecies of imminent doom, and on the other in the proliferation of revolutionary Utopias. Apathy coupled with growing ineffectivity of social institutions, or radical vigour leading to political, social and cultural re-alignments are both possible outcomes. Neither is predetermined by the sheer configuration of inadequacy and guaranteed in advance. The choice between possible outcomes cannot be predicted; its mechanism can be only described retrospectively.

The essays collected in this book attempt to do just this.

The two hypotheses followed in this book are concerned with the origins and the later crisis of a society articulated as a configuration of social classes characterised by opposed interests and preoccupied with rendering the distribution of social product to their advantage. According to the first hypothesis, the articulation of class society was an almost century-long process which culminated in the first part of the nineteenth century. It was an essentially unintended and unanticipated effect of a struggle to restore social institutions guaranteeing group status and individual security in a historical configuration which these institutions could not effectively serve: its mature product institutionalised the memory of this struggle as well as divisions and alliances which crystallised in its course. According to the second hypothesis, the current multifaceted crisis of class society (economic crisis: falling growth, falling rate of profit, growing unemployment; political crisis: ‘blocked’ corporatist state and a schizophrenic mixture of excessive expectations aimed at government with almost universal disapproval of the expansion of its activities; cultural crisis: the ever more evident ineffectuality of work-and-achievement ethics and the gradual substitution of the ‘power of disruption’ for the ‘contribution to communal welfare’ in the rhetoric of distributive struggle) is a symptom of the incapacity of the institutions of class society to guarantee group status and individual security in an essentially transformed social organisation. Either side can gain little, if anything at all, from the strategy of distributive class warfare. Nevertheless, it is the memorised class strategies which provide cognitive and normative patterns to deal with the crisis. In this sense, the present period rehashes the situation of the early nineteenth century: the rhetoric of restitution, restoration, defence of ancient rights and ancient justice actuated processes with effects which cannot be deduced from their conscious articulations, however strongly they depend on them.

The argument supporting the first hypothesis can be outlined in several points:

1 The factor mainly responsible for the crisis (an interruption in the gradual, accremental change when the extant institutions absorb new conditions, modifying in the process in a fashion not sudden enough to be perceived as revolutionary) in Western Europe which was to lead eventually to the articulation of class society was the demographic explosion of the eighteenth century. A rapid growth in population is by itself merely a statistical phenomenon. Its sociological significance, and its role as a factor of historical change, cannot be deduced from the numbers (though many interpretations, skipping the whole area of socio-cultural mediations, try to do just this, from Malthus on); they derive instead from the inability of available institutions to assimilate the growing numbers of people and meet their status and security needs in keeping with the established standards. No population, however large, is supernumerary or superfluous because of its sheer numbers; ‘superfluity’ itself is a notion which cannot be defined with sense without reference to concrete socio-cultural patterns. The problem with the eighteenth-century demographic upsurge was that it exceeded the absorptive capacity of the then available social institutions. As Barrington Moore Jr succintly put it, ‘it was surplus to that particular social order and that particular level of technical development at that specific stage of historical development. Later in the nineteenth century there was a much bigger increase in population without serious social strains.’¹

For the overwhelming majority of the pre-modern population, the tasks of status definition and maintenance, as well as the provision of life security, were performed on the local level and grounded in local institutions—parishes, village and town councils, craft guilds. The parish and the guild were not specialised organisations, assigned clearly defined jobs; for most of the people they were total worlds, in which the expectation of work and insurance against poverty—indeed, the guarantee of the place in society—was naturally inscribed. It is not that the parish and the guild performed the task better than alternative institutions and were for this reason preferred; simply, there were no alternative institutions fit for the task. The failure of the parish or the guild to deliver according to the time-sanctioned expectations took the bottom out of the entire mode of life.

It is worth emphasising that England, where the modern class society, as well as the new industrial system which underlay it, were theoretically and institutionally articulated earlier than elsewhere in Europe, had had an intricate network of social relief, and the concomitant notion of the state responsibility for the subsistence of all its subjects, well entrenched for several centuries before the dramatic take-off of the late eighteenth century. In Harold Perkin’s words, what made English history so different from that of continental Europe was the ‘defeat of the peasants and their transformation into large commercial rent-paying farmers on the one hand and a larger body of landless labourers on the other’, which, among other things, accounted ‘for the unique English system of poor relief…not needed in peasant societies where the holding supports everybody, or when famine comes they all starve together’.² Writing in 1764, Richard Burn listed some twenty-five different legislative acts spelling out the duties of towns, villages, parishes in providing for the survival of ‘impotent poor’ and for the employment of the able-bodied.³ The equally profuse legislation which conceptualised the phenomenon of vagrancy and called for an exceptionally harsh treatment of ‘unauthorised’ beggars and vagabonds, tied the poor even more firmly to their native parishes, thus reinforcing the bond of the locally inscribed duties and rights. The centuries of such legally fortified structure bore heavily on the kind of historical memory which proved to be instrumental in the articulation of class society.

2 The demographic bulge of the late eighteenth century, while providing the fuel for industrial take-off, stretched the locally based institutions of social security to the point of breakdown. The old system was slow to recognise its imminent bankruptcy, as testified by the abortive Speenhamland effort to maintain the old principles in the face of changed circumstances. But it had to declare its insolvency under the double pressure of the rapidly growing numbers of propertyless families and individuals, and the manufacturers keen to untie the local bonds which limited both the mobility and the pliancy of potential labourers. When the local network of the status and security allocation finally gave way, the crucial ‘second period’ in the history of social services began, ‘brief on the Continent, but more prolonged in England’, when the state in Ernest Barker’s words, had to take some responsibility for the ‘mass of uprooted country-workers employed in the factories of the towns or in mining centres’.⁴ With the benefit of hindsight, these times, marked by the despair, suffering, sometimes fury of the ‘uprooted’, appear as an intermediate stage between two successive systems through which society catered for status allocation and security needs; even as a period of ‘site clearing’ for the erection of the new, arguably more comprehensive and universal network of institutions. Obviously, this was not the way in which the contemporaries could perceive their turbulent times, when the old centre did not hold any more while the new could be at best conceived as a noble vision of social dreamers. The dearth of foresight was not the sole reason for alarm. The natural limits of historical imagination apart, the times were indeed institutionally under-provided, and the vanishing laws and ancient customs left a gaping hole where before (as historical memory suggested) spread the solid ground of secure existence.

No retrospective wisdom, however, can justify the dismissal of diagnoses and demands of the era as errors of historical judgment or product of sluggish imagination; still less can they be disposed of as retrograde, backward-looking ideas, slackening the pace of progress. If later history invalidated most of the diagnoses and took the steam off most of the demands, it did so precisely thanks to the shape these diagnoses and demands took, moulded as they were by historical memory. Far from being spokes in the wheel of history, these diagnoses and demands, and the ‘living history’ which gave them shape and vigour, set historical change in motion and pushed the vehicle of society to its qualitatively new mode of equilibrium.

3 What made the period in question an era of sharp conflicts, shifting alliances, consolidation of new divisions and, on the whole, an aceelerating social change, was ultimately (to borrow Barrington Moore’s cogent term) the sense of ‘outraged justice’ on the part of those who justly felt their status withdrawn and the grounds of their security undermined. Paradoxically, the most profound re-articulation of society in human history derived its momentum from the hostility to change which spurred the impaired and the threatened into defensive (to wit, subjectively conservative) action. The intensity of militancy did not reflect the absolute level of destitution, but the distance between expectations and reality. Penury correlated but feebly with social protest. The rebels were sometimes paupers—but more often than not they acted to stave off the spectre of indigence; invariably they took to the warpath when the rung of the social ladder on which they stood just started to feel slippery. Habitual rights withdrawn accomplished what a habitualised privation never would have done.

In his recent survey of the seminal half century of European history, Olwen H.Hufton explored the consequences of the rapid increase of population for the insecurity of habitual ways and means of existence. The effect of the demographic upsurge of 1760s was in all parts of the West ‘an uncomfortable imbalance between population and economic performance. Even in years of normal harvests the number of those unable to make their resources stretch without recourse to begging was rapidly growing.’ The remarkable result of the widespread insecurity was, as Hufton documented country by country, that ‘the poor themselves were not protesters but the same could not be said for those fighting to remain on the right side of the line marking sufficiency from destitution’.⁵ Insecurity as such made a miserable condition; but it ...