What I love about Berman's discussion of the Communist Manifesto is that he brings it alive.  I think this is because he is fully conscious of  the dialectical nature of the entire document - he is struck by the drama of unfolding paradox , realizing that this drama is essential to the Manifesto. 

But why should Berman have to bring it alive?  Didn't Marx and Engels  do a good enough job? 

I think the problem is that many people don't tend to "get" the Manifesto  because they expect it to be something else altogether... something more straightforward such as an  attack on the evils of capitalism and  a call for communism .   And if you expect to be reading a boring diatribe of this nature you are quite likely to miss (or misunderstand) the drama altogether  as you skim the surface looking for a program, blueprint - or answers to circumscribed questions. 

Although only a single chapter of Berman's book is specifically devoted to Marxism,  he was so struck by the phrase "all that is solid melts into air" that he used it as the title for the entire book.

He opens his chapter on the Manifesto with the following series of quotes:

There followed on the birth of mechanization and modern industry…a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche in its intensity and its extent. All bounds of morals and nature, of age and sex, of day and night, were broken down. Capital celebrated its orgies. (Capital, Volume  One)

 

I am the spirit that negates all. (Mephistopheles in Faust)

 

Innovative self-Destruction!  (Ad for Mobil Oil, 1978)

 

In the research racks at Shearson Hayden Stone, Inc. in  a commodity letter bears this quotation from Heraclitus: "All is flux, nothing stays still" ("Shearson Chief Builds a New Wall Street Giant, " story in New York Times, 1979)

 

… that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order.  (Dostoevsky in London. 1862)

These quotes set the scene  for the rest of the chapter -  producing simultaneous images of  force, violence, innovation, movement, transformation - "a violent encroachment like that of an avalanche".

The chapter is written in 4 parts. In this message  however, I am restricting myself to Part One:  The Melting Vision and its Dialectic  (hopefully I'll write separately about the other 3 sections over the next week or so)

In Part 0ne, it  quickly becomes clear that the Manifesto is no simple diatribe against the evils of capitalism.  Indeed  Berman's description is quite the opposite:

What is startling … is that [marx] seems to have come not to bury
the bourgeoisie, but to praise it. He writes an impassioned, enthusiastic,
often lyrical celebration of bourgeois works, ideas and
achievements. Indeed, in these pages he manages to praise the
bourgeoisie more powerfully and profoundlv than its members
have ever known how to praise themselves.

And  "what have the bourgeoisie done to deserve Marx's praise?"  he asks.

They have done two things in particular, he responds:

1. "[they have] been the first to show what man's activity can bring about" (Marx)

2.  "they have liberated the human capacity and drive for development: for permanent change, for perpetual upheaval and renewal in every mode of personal and social life."  (Berman)

Part 1 of the  Manifesto famously opens  with an account of the process of modernization/globalization  (read it here) … a description of how the emergence of the world market  absorbs and destroys local markets producing a cascade of far-reaching consequences:

•  production and consumption (and human needs)  become increasingly international and cosmopolitan.
• communication becomes world wide - mass media emerges.
•  capital concentrated in fewer hands. 
• vast numbers of uprooted people to pour into cities independent peasants are forced to leave the land
•  legal, fiscal and administrative centralization becomes increasingly necessary.
•  powerful national state arise and conflict between them is undermined by capital's international scope.
•  Industrial workers develop class consciousness  and  begin to struggle against the oppression under which they live.

Although they  are often the type of thing extracted from the Manifesto in text book summaries, the dot points above just don't capture the real import of the Manifesto.  Berman  points out that if we  "read  with our full attention" rather than skimming the surface we will begin to see something else:  

As we read on, however, if we read with our full attention,
strange things begin to happen. Marx's prose suddenly becomes
luminous, incandescent; brilliant images succeed and blend into
one another; we are hurtled along with a reckless momentum, a
breathless intensity. Marx is not only describing but evoking and
enacting the desperate pace and frantic rhythm that capitalism
imparts to every facet of modern life. He makes us feel that we are
part of the action, drawn into the stream, hurtled along, out of
control , at once dazzled and menaced by the onward rush.
After a few pages of this we are exhilarated but perplexed:
we find that the social formations around us have melted away.

Another point made by Berman in this context (and more often than not missed) is this:

Although Marx identifies himself as a materialist, he
is not primarily interested in the things
that the bourgeoisie creates.
What matters to him is the processes, the powers,
the expressions of human life and energy: men working,
moving, cultivating, communicating, organisng and
reorganizing nature and themselves - the new  and endlessly
renewed modes of activity that the bourgeoisie brings into being.
Marx does not dwell much on particular inventions and
innovations in their own right (in the tradition that runs
from Saint-Simon through McLuhan), what stirs him is
the active and generative process through which one
thing leads to another, dreams metamorphose into blueprints
and fantasies into balance sheets,
the wildest and most extravagant ideas
get acted on and acted out ("whole populations
conjured out of the ground")
and ignite and nourish new forms of life and action.

In a similar vein, Berman pays special attention to another aspect of the achievements of the bourgeoisie as described by Marx  - its creation of a new type of  person.

The fact that the bourgeoisie "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production" [M&E] means that: 

Under pressure, every bourgeois from the pettiest to the most powerful is forced to innovate simply  in order to keep his business afloat: anyone who does not actively change on his own will become a passive victim of changes draconically imposed by those who dominate the market (Berman)

This is where Berman introduces (once again)  the quote after which his book is named, describing Marx as making "a great imaginative leap":

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation. Distinguish the bourgeoisie from all earlier times. All fixed and fast frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become obsolete. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their  relations with their fellow men. (Marx)

And here also he  directs  our attention to something that is almost always missed by people reading the Manifesto as a diatribe against capitalism and blueprint for the future - the significance of the instability engendered by capitalism and the way in which it stimulates human development.

The one specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is the one thing that traditional elites (and, for that matter, traditional masses) have always yearned for: prolonged solid stability.  In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To  say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well. (Berman)

Or in Marx's words:

uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation….. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. [In contrast] conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.

Next,  Berman asks: "What kinds of people does this permanent revolution produce?"  And his answer is that the experience of living in a capitalist economy produces a new 'personality structure' which Marx "embraces enthusiastically" 

In order for people, whatever their class, to survive in modern society, their personalities must take on the fluid and open form of this society. Modern  men and women must  learn to yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their personal and social lives, but positively to demand them, actively to seek them out and carry them through, They must learn not to long nostalgically for the "fixed, fast-frozen relationships" of the real or fantasized past, but to delight in mobility. to thrive on renewal, to look forward to future developments in their conditions of life and their relations with their fellow men. (Berman)

The ironic climax

Marx began by praising the bourgeoisie, not by burying it; but if his dialectic works out, it  will be the virtues for which he praised the bourgeoisie that will bury it in the end. (Berman)

The manifesto is essentially an ironic document. At each point Marx builds up  the bourgeoisie, emphasizing its revolutionary role only to tear it down by pointing out that in doing what it has to do it cannot help but create the conditions for its own destruction.

The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (Marx)

In Berman's words:

Thus, for a1l Marx's invective against the bourgeois economy,
He embraces enthusiastically the personality structure that economy has produced. The trouble with capitalism is
that here as elsewhere it destroys the human
possibilities it creates.  It  fosters, indeed  forces, self-development
for everybody;  but people can develop only in restricted,  distorted ways.  Those traits, impulses and talents that the market
can use are rushed (often prematurely) into development and
squeezed desperately till there is nothing left; everything else within us, everything nonmarketable, gets draconically repressed.
or withers away for lack of use, or never has a chance to come to
life at all.

 

The ironic and happy solution to this contradiction will occur,
Marx  says,  when "the development of modern industry cuts from under its feet the very  from  grounds on which  the bourgeoisie produces
and appropriates products." The inner life and energy of bourgeois development will  sweep away the class that first brought it to
life.  We can see this dialectical moment as much in the sphere of
personal as in economic development: in system where  a1l
relationships are volatile how  can capitalist forms of life - private
property, wage labor.,  exchange value,  the insatiable pursuit of
profit -- alone hold still.  Where the desires and sensibilities of people
in every class have become open-ended and insatiable, attuned to permanent upheavals  in every  sphere of life, what can possibly
keep them fixed and frozen in their bourgeois roles?  The more furiously  bourgeois society  agitates its members to grow or die,  the more likely they will be to outgrow it itself.  The more furiously they will eventually turn on it as a drag on their growth,  the more implacably they will fight it  in the name of the new life it has forced them to seek.  Thus capitalism will  be melted by the heat of its own incandescent energies.

There's  something about all this that reminds me of the dramatic tension in the old Greek tragedies . For example in Oedipus Rex - no matter what Oedipus does he cannot avoid marrying his mother and killing his father - and we the audience can see it coming (unlike Jocasta and Oedipus who remain in various states of denial until the very end).     But Marx is writing about real life and he's not talking of outcomes which are feted by the gods but of outcomes that arise from contradictions that are part of the very nature of things . And while we are sometimes a sort of audience we can also be (conscious) participants - we can have an impact on the details in ways which are of immense importance to ourselves and  to other human beings.  

Here is how Berman concludes Part One:

This vision of communism is unmistakably modern, first of all in its individualism, but even more in its ideal of development as the form of the good life. Here Marx  is closer to some of his bourgeois and liberal enemies than he is to traditional exponents of communism who,  since Plato and the Church Fathers have sanctified self-sacrifice, distrusted or loathed individuality and yearned for a still point at which all strife and all striving will reach an end. Once again we find Marx more responsive to what is going on in bourgeois society than are the members and supporters of the bourgeoisie themselves.  He sees in the dynamics of capitalist development - both the development of each individual and of society  as a whole -  a new image of the good life: not a life of definitive perfection, not the embodiment of prescribed  static essences, but a process of continual, restless, open-ended, unbounded growth. Thus he hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity