ed. Beilhurx, Peter. The Bauman Reader. (Blackwell, 2001)

ed. Beilhurx, Peter. The Bauman Reader. (Blackwell, 2001)

FROM THE WORK ETHIC TO THE AESTHETIC OF CONSUMPTION

"The market might have already picked them up and groomed them as consumers, and so deprived themof their freedom to ignore its temptations, but on every successive visit to the market place consumers have every reason to feel in command. They are the judges, the critics and the choosers." p315

"'Economic growth', the main modern measure of things being normal and in good order, the main index of society working as it should be, is seen in the consumer society as dependent not so much on the "productive strenght of the nation"(healthy and pletiful labour force, full coffers and daring entrepreneurship of the capital owners and managers), as on the zest and vigour of its consumers. The role once performed by work in linking together individual motives, social integration and systematic reproduction has now been assigned to consumer activity." p315

"Nothing truly lasting could be reasonably hoped to be erected on this kind of shifting sand. Purely and simply, the prospect of constructing a lifelong identity on the foundation of work is , for the great majority of people) except for the time being at least, the practitioners of a few highly skilled and highly privliged professions), dead and bured." p317

"Perhaps it would be more to the point to speak of self identity in the plural: the life itinerary of most individuals is likely to be strewn with discarded and lost identities." p317

"A society of consumers is resentful of all legal restrictions imposed on freedom of choice, of any delegalisation of potential objects of consumption and manifests its resentment by widespread support willingly offered to most "deregulatory" measures." p319

"The activity of consumption is a natural enenmy of all co-ordination and integration. It is also immune to their influence, rendering all efforts of bonding impotent in overcoming the endemic lonliness of the consuming act. Consumers are alone even when they act together." p320

"As we have seen before, work has lost its privliged position - that of an axis around which all other effort at self constitution and identity building rotate. But work hsa also ceased to be the focus of a particularly intense ethical attention in terms of being a chosen road to moral improvement, repentence and redemption. Like other activities, work now comes first and foremost under aesthetic scrutiny. Its value judged by its capacity to generate pleasureable experience. Work devoid of such capacity - that does not offer "intrinsic satisfaction" - is also work devoid of value." p322

MODERN, TIMES, MODERN MARXISM (1968)

"To use the modern terminology we can say that Marxist social science aims at a "hologram" of man instead a series of photographs. It is the basis of methodological premise and at the same time, the discriminating feature of the Marxist approach to social science that "economic man" "social man," "cultural man," "political man" and similar products of scientific division of labor are nothing but model constructs, creatios of a long process of abstraction maturing in institutionally seperated micro-social settings." p40

"Managerial demand is the only demand organised and articulated, and combining lucid goal formation with adequate material resources. The alternative demand is, on the contrary, so diffuse and inarticulate that it can be easily overlooked and neglected. One can - as happens so often - doubt wheter it exists at all. Its social basis is incomparably broader, but it is not sheer numbers which count but the level of organisation." p43