On beginning – Peter Beilharz

Thesis Eleven

1980, Volume 1 – Editorial

Marxism as a theory and as a movement is in crisis. Radical theory has become completely indiscriminating. In the movements and parties there are blockages, perhaps decay, but little advance. In the turn of Anglo-American Marxism away from the project of importing Continental theory there is a danger that theory will be allowed to lapse altogether. There is a need for a new ‘theoretical’ journal attaching a specifically political understanding to ‘theory’.

The fundamental tenet of the original Marxian project and its echoes and refractions through the principal representatives of Western Marxism is that theory and politics must find their necessary articulation in each other.

The struggle for socialism depends on the politicisation of theory and the theorization of politics. Neither of the dominant tendencies within Marxist theory – those which propagate more theory or more history in isolation from each other – can be adequate to this task. Within the left this division is maintained between activists who carry out the everyday organizing and theorists who stand back and survey the general tendencies. Marxist politics can only have meaning if it can begin to bridge this gap.

The intention of Thesis Eleven is to provide the framework in which these themes, problematics and struggles might be unified as politics.

Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism

(1987)

Leon Trotsky has passed into popular imagination as the Man of October, the hyperbolshevik, and later as the romantic in exile, spurned equally by the regime which he had helped to create and by the capitalist societies which he vilified. But there is another, forgotten Trotsky, who began his political life differently.

Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism, Social Democracy

Introduction (1992)

Oscar Wilde once wrote that there was no decent map which did not somewhere have a place for utopia upon it. The global events of the past few years would seem to vote against his judgement. Wedged between the dissolution of tyrannical communism in the east and economically triumphant but ethically decadent capitalism in the west, what then is the future of socialism? The argument of this book is that socialism remains a vital tradition, more vital than we have been prepared to recognise. It is also that socialism has more futures than are conventionally recognised. Indeed, there is a widespread, but thoroughly misleading sense that the varying socialist traditions are merely differing roads to the same end.

Arguing about the Welfare State: The Australian Experience

(with Mark Considine and Rob Watts) (1992)

If the topics of popular argument and political conjecture are any indication, the citizens of most modern societies have been long puzzled by the origin, purpose and effectiveness of their social institutions. Not the least of their concerns has been the difficulties that have confronted almost every attempt to redress the problems of poverty and inequality. A wide array of programs, professions and social institutions has been developed to deal with these conditions; yet major problems persist. Even more puzzling has been the fact that in some areas the problems actually appear to have multiplied, and the measures devised to treat them have more than once been indicated as prime causes of a host of new maladies.

Between Totalitarianism and Postmodernity

(with Gillian Robinson and John Rundell) (1992)

Introduction: Between Bolshevism and Democracy

Who would have imagined, five years ago, a world in which there would be one Germany, and no Soviet Union at all? For those who grew up with them, the two Germanies, constructed in different ways by Nazism and Social Democracy, and the Soviet empire which was the long-term result of the October Revolution through two world wars were simple facts. For those who lived with them, these facts lost any finer sense of contingency. Contingency seemed to have hardened into fate, as though the world could never really change again.

Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers

(editor) (1992)

Max Weber

Of all the classical social theorists, it is probably fair to say that none have suffered such distortion as Marx and Weber…Marx and Weber have been turned into apologists for the very phenomena which they set out to criticise, Marx set up as an apologist for Soviet ‘primitive communism’, Weber as an enthusiastic advocate of bureaucracy, the ‘value-free’ science, and the onward march of rationalisation. An accompanying problem in the reception of Weber has been the widespread tendency to set Marx and Weber against each other, as adversaries, with Weber as ‘the bourgeois Marx’.

Transforming Labor: Labour Tradition and the Labor Decade

(1994)

Everybody knows that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they? Perhaps one way to respond to the challenge of living in the 1990s is to work this out. The acidic novelties of the global system on the one hand, the power of ordinary tradition on the other – arguably our daily lives are made up of the confusion which results from encounters with both.

Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, City and State

(1994)

Modernity is an idea that routinely generates difference, controversy, and debate. At the same time, the ordinary conduct of everyday life continues, and usually in a moderately peaceful manner. Although attitudes to change and continuity remain mixed, most people would agree that one of the few norms we share is the fact of change itself. This, then, is how the scenario opens: how are we to make sense of the present, understand the past, and anticipate the future?

Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith

Beginnings (1997)

The Boy Adeodatus

Who is Bernard Smith? We do not need to accept his version of the story, but he has left us one. In 1984 Bernard Smith published his autobiography. Just this side of seventy, his life’s achievements were already remarkable. Smith had written the two most significant works of Australian art history, and had travelled to London to work at the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes on the thesis that became one of the most respected in the field, European Vision and the South Pacific. He had coordinated the controversial Antipodean Exhibition in Melbourne in 1959 and had established the Power Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Sydney.

He had taught at a bush school, painted and stopped painting, walked up the hill between Potts Point and the Gallery of New South Wales, promoted public art education, had a family, served as art critic for the Age and he had loved his first wife, Kate – not bad for a ward of the state, a bastard for whom things might have turned out differently. Yet none of this triumphal public path, so much itself the stuff of conventional biography, was to figure in The Boy Adeodatus – The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard.

Indeed, the charm of the book has to do with its focus upon that with which we empathise – youth, suburbs, kitchens with fresh linen and Vacola jars, fences to be climbed, worlds to be discovered or constructed, childhood, not the success of adults; the city, the bush, the self, new worlds, rather than suits and grave men and seriosity.

The Webbs, Fabianism and Feminism

(with Chris Nyland) (1998)

Fabianism

Fabianism, of all socialisms, is most consistently painted grey on grey. The Fabians, and especially the Webbs played up to this; they seemed almost happy to be ridiculed as they went about their business, doing committee work, scribbling endlessly, making acquaintances and influencing people. Ironically enough, this has helped to produce the situation where Fabianism has been incredibly influential, and yet rarely taken seriously; where Fabianism has been mocked, caricatured to death, syncretised and homogenised, Fabians turned into the boy-scouts of European socialism. All Fabian cats have become apparently grey…

Zygmunt Bauman: Dialectic of Modernity

Prologue (2000)

The work of Zygmunt Bauman has a curious presence in English-language sociology. In everyone’s footnotes, the arguments and larger themes themselves often seem to elude attention. The field covered by Bauman’s work is massive, diverse and challenging, shifting from class and culture, through utopia and its difficult bearers, the intellectuals, to the Holocaust and the postmodern, to globalization, tourists and vagabonds. More, Bauman offers his writing in a kind of take-it-or-leave-it sensibility; he will not act as his own interpreter, rather he posits his concerns and moves on. He will not put more value on his own work than to claim it, and he does not like to talk about his life’s path.

The Bauman Reader

Reading Zygmunt Bauman (2001)

Who is Zygmunt Bauman? The greatest sociologist writing in English today lives in Leeds and watches Polish television by satellite. He travels widely and writes at a blistering pace. His works are in everybody’s footnotes but, to use a characteristic term, the thinking is slippery, as difficult as it is powerful, puzzling, provocative…

Zygmunt Bauman – Masters of Social Thought

Volume 1 (editor) (2002)

An Anecdote

Let me begin with a story. Everybody knows Zygmunt Bauman as the leading postmodern sociologist. Now that the heat has gone from the controversy over the postmodern, it may become easier to align the modern and what comes after. Perspectives shift and slide with the passing of time. Yet all the same, the commonsense would be that Bauman is different, and that his project adds up to something like a critique of modernity. From what position? From the outside?

My study, Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity originally had as its working title Modernity as Ambivalence, a twist on Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence, the implication of which was twofold – first, that ambivalence was a central trope or mood in Bauman’s work; and second, that a serial and systematic reading of Bauman’s work would show ambivalence to be a modern, and not only a postmodern condition. As my own research progressed the subtitle began to seem ill-fitting for the project. Ambivalence, after all, is an attitude, not an ethic or theory.

Social Self, Global Culture: An Introduction to Sociological Ideas

(with Trevor Hogan) (2002)

Economy and Government

Imagine Australia, if you can, before the British invasion, before what White folks called the arrival of civilisation. Not more than two centuries ago the cities we call home were not there. Think of Melbourne and Sydney as raw topography, ‘nature’, no buildings of metal or concrete. Other people, earlier inhabitants, coped with everyday life and existence in different ways. Then White people came, bringing government and economy in packages.

Postwar American Critical Thought

Calhoun’s Critical Theory (2005)

If sociology could talk, it would say, I am tired. At the end of the American century, where modernism and sociology moved together like the Katzenjammer kids, world-weariness now abounds, apparently. The institution of American sociology at century’s end is awesome in its extent and strength and yet its institutional life seems somehow listless. If Roberto Michels chose the German Social Democrats as the exemplar of 19th-century pyrrhic institutional victory, then perhaps his Doppelgänger this century round would work on this case study instead.

Sociology: Place, Time and Division

(with Trevor Hogan) (2006), 1st edn

The Sixties and Seventies

What were the sixties, then the seventies? Whatever else they were, we now view these as decades of accelerating change – change in fashion, manners, roles, changes in sex, in work, in pleasure, in life. However else we view them, though, these were not clean, neat, or separated decades. In retrospect, the sixties and seventies now look continuous.

Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays

(with Robert Manne) (2006)

Robert Hughes and the Provincialism Problem

Everybody knows, loves, hates Robert Hughes. We love him because he is eminent, global; perhaps because he is like us, or some of us. We may not speak like him, but when we hear his voice we recognise it. We hate him because he left, because he left Australia in the sixties and yet insists that he remains connected to us, and might even know something about us or our place.

Socialism and Modernity

Introduction – from Socialism to Modernity, via Americanism (2009)

Over my lifetime the discourse of radicalism has shifted, from socialism to modernity; from marxism to critical theory, or whatever comes after. This volume gathers essays covering a twenty-year span. Across that period there has been a significant historical shift, and a conceptual semantic shift which reflects it. Twenty years ago there was still a Soviet world system; twenty years ago marxism was still a significant global influence, with or without reference to communism. The essays in this volume track these shifts, from socialism to modernity-talk, or to what I earlier called Postmodern Socialism in a book published in 1994; though both of those terms now have dispersed, as their objects have become diffused.

When did the dominant radical discourse shift from ‘capitalism’ to ‘modernity’? These days, we could well observe that capitalism, or at least its cognate global term, empire, has made a significant comeback. Marx has been partly rehabilitated, not least in this global frame of reference, where the Communist Manifesto is now identified as the founding text of globalization-talk. But the prior issue, before we ask when did the idea of ‘capitalism’ give way to that of ‘modernity’, is, where did the identification of modernity with capitalism come from in the first place?

Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays

(2015)

Being antipodean literally means having the feet elsewhere; coming from the other side of the earth, being elsewhere, outside the centres, displaced, implicitly disadvantaged. This is the metropolitan view of the Antipodes, historically. The antipodean view is that we are the centres, that they are our Antipodes, logically. Politically, the Antipodes have been seen as places too distant, inferior, too far away, culturally, as derivative of the centres, or else, by local inversion, as their superior. All of this was already evident by the time of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo; and it was already well exercised in Stephensen’s Foundations of Culture in Australia. Into the sixties, Bernard Smith began to put a different spin on the issues by suggesting that rather than dividing the world into two, and presuming a simple relation of subordination between north and south, or centre and periphery, it might be necessary to think of them as necessarily interconnected. Centres and Antipodes were mutually constituted, and worked through patterns of cultural traffic which could never be one-directional. There was only one world, and each sphere depended on the other.

As a young Marxist, growing up in Melbourne, it never really occurred to me that I should have to choose between these worlds, between centre and periphery. For being antipodean meant carrying a kind of dual passport, belonging to Europe and America and Australia or the Pacific all at the same time. My folks had come from Germany via Palestine via Fremantle via Tatura via Carlton to Melbourne; their Carlton room was just up the road from where Bernard Smith spent most of his Melbourne life, though I wasn’t to know that until much later. Of course, I knew that Australians were little fish globally, but I had no reason to imagine that our culture was necessarily inferior. My formative culture in Melbourne, in the rock music scene in my teens, was vibrant, sharp, mod, creative, even wacky, goony. I was later to realise, or at least to imagine, that my good fortune as a Croydon boy was to discover early on who I was; I was a musician, and a hippie, or at least that was my pretence, so that I suffered no early identity crisis (that came rather later). And then I discovered that I really wanted to be something else: a teacher, and a writer, or at least someone who worked with words. I liked words, and sounds. I knew a bit about images, but let them grow on me.

The Martin Presence: Jean Martin and the Making of the Social Sciences in Australia

(with Trevor Hogan and Sheila Shaver) (2015)

In 1943 Jean Isobel Martin, then known as Jean Craig, was one of a small group urging the establishment of sociology in Australia. Less than three decades later she was Professor of Sociology, one of the country’s first, an influential thinker about nation and policy, and leader of a burgeoning department in the new discipline. This is her story, but through her also the story of Australian social science in its formative period. The place and time are Australia in the thirty years after the Second World War, when the ‘never again’ ethos of the 1930s Depression was replaced with optimism and national ambition. It was a key moment for a small but growing nation whose economy was modernising, its population growing, and the elite university sector of its colonial past challenged by new universities in the suburbs. The war had given new recognition to the social sciences, especially economics but also psychology, anthropology and sociology, for their scientific value and policy utility. Post-war growth and stability lasted into the 1970s, university expansion considerably longer.

As an intellectual biography, the focus of our interest is Martin’s professional rather than personal life, but we begin with images and impressions of her as a person.

Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman

(2020)

How did this happen, a book on Bauman and me? There was a need for separation, after he died, more than in the fact of it. I needed to get all this out of my head. Writing it out seemed like the obvious resolution. So how did it happen? This book was drafted, thought and worked up at home in Melbourne and at Curtin University in Western Australia, where I worked as Professor of Culture and Society from 2015 to 2017. Curtin research professors get to choose their self-appellation. Mine was a nod to Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, but it was sotto voce a reference to a book by the same title by Zygmunt Bauman, published in 1966 in Warsaw and never to be translated into English. Bauman was my shadow, and I his, always at this distance of time and place, and yet with some intensity of the intimacy of postmodern times.

Circling Marx: Essays 1980–2020

(2020)

Across the path of my life there has been a great deal of motion, global and local, and there have also been some constants. A child of the fifties, I have never recovered from the formative influence of the British blues wave of the sixties. I have not been able to shake off a sense of comfort, release and belonging when I am on the beach or in the bush in Australia. The cities have changed rather more, and the suburbs continued to sprawl. And I have never got past Karl Marx, even though so many other things have moved on in terms of intellectual fads and fashions. The famous definition of what constitutes a classic includes the notion that each reading brings something afresh. I have spent more time reading Marx over fifty years than any other, though of course I also return to Gramsci, to Bauman and Heller, to Shakespeare and to Goethe, to the Russians and to Australian and New World fiction. Just now I am back to Kafka and Beckett. Like Baudelaire, I still also lust for something new. But Marx is the perennial, for me. There is always something new to learn there, and something fresh to pass on.

Stuart Macintyre – The Work of History

(with Sian Supski) (2022)

Stuart Macintyre is one of the leading Australian historians of our time. The breadth and quality of his work is exemplary, from labour history in Britain and then Australia to social and general history, social justice, civics and education. He is well known as an enabler, as one who makes things happen, as supervisor, editor, advisor and general dynamo. He has been a leading figure of the Melbourne History School, but has also gone his own way. He is well known as a superb writer, a stylist who combines involvement and detachment. There is much of the Protestant Ethic to his example. History here is central, professionally and in everyday life; but it is also work, and can best be understood as the work of gathering evidence and summoning argument, of memory and discernment, of text and archive that make the work of writing possible, and worth reading. All of which begs the question, How do we work intellectually, and what might our legacy be? Such is the purpose of this book: to appraise his work by looking back, in order to look forward.

The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman

(with Janet Wolff) (2023)

Zygmunt Bauman, internationally known and revered as the sociologist of postmodernity and of ‘liquid’ society, was for about a decade a serious and dedicated photographer…He studied and learned his new craft, attending sessions at the Leeds Camera Club. He took photos of street scenes, Yorkshire views, portraits, striking juxtapositions, caught in the moment. He turned an upstairs bedroom into a studio (for portraits) and the downstairs larder into a darkroom.

Chain – Toward the Blues

(2023)

A word, as my English friends might say, before you read on, or hit the cans. Better yet, do both together: read and listen at the same time.

Where to begin? As musicians may be heard to grumble, starting can be easier than finishing; sometimes you just can’t finish a song. It kind of takes over, that riff, the groove. Starting a performance is less straightforward. When an overseas band visits Australia there is often a moment of awkward banter, straight out of the American phrase book: ‘Good Evening, Melbawn’; no, it’s Melbun.