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 • all that is solid melts into air

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 • all that is solid melts into air

Posted by kerrb at 2005-02-11 05:42 PM


Modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells
- Communist Manifesto
At Harry's Place Marcus has been promising to talk about the relevance of the Manifesto today but most of the time when he posts he can't help but find fault.  It's very disappointing. For instance, he critically dissects a ten point programme which Marx and Engels themselves repudiated in their 1872 Preface ("That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today").

I think Marcus is just reading it the wrong way, looking for a programme rather than a whole new way of thinking about the world.

Partly as a response, but a good idea anyway, I've started rereading Marshall Berman's far, far superior analysis of the same text. Berman's book is called All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).

Berman's book is available at Penguin and Amazon and a google search reveals other reviews and commentaries about it.

"All that is solid melts into air" is a quote from the Manifesto, the full sentence reads:

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

The section headings for Berman's analysis of the Manifesto (part 2 of a 5 part book) are:

  1. The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic
  2. Innovative Sef-Destruction
  3. Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Man
  4. The Metamorphosis of Values
  5. The Loss of a Halo
Just reading the subheadings indicates that Marshall Berman analyses the Manifesto as a dynamic, alive, contradictory, gut wrenching,  personal  document  which  strives  mightily to help us understand  what the hell is going down in our society.  Not an ahistorical curiosity  that Marcus keeps alleging while promising otherwise.
 
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Bill Kerr
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 • Re: all that is solid melts into air

Posted by byork at 2005-02-11 09:19 PM

I like the way Berman also looks at the Manifesto as literature: its rhythm and bounce reflects its author's optimism and enthusi8asm for the modern world. Berman's book is a study of the Modernist thinkers, of which Marx is at the head. The chapter on the Communist Manifesto is a great read, I think, and relevant to distinctions between pseudo and left outlooks. Chapter Two is about Marxism and is sub-titled 'Marx, Modernism and Modernisation'.

 

Berman is opposed to post-modernism and says in his Introduction:

 

"Post-modernists may be said to have developed a paradigm that clashes sharply with the one in this book. I have argued that modern life and art and thought have the capacity for perpetual self-critique and self-renewal. Post-modernists maintain that the horizon of modernity is closed, its energies exhausted - in effect, that modernity is passe. Post-modernist social thought pours scorn on all the collective hopes for moral and social progress, for personal freedom and public happiness, that were bequeathed to us by modernists of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment."

 

Berman's book is also about Goethe (ch. 1), Baudelaire (ch. 3), the city of Petersburg and the city of New York.

 

The book was first published in 1982 but has been reprinted. I have the 1988 Penguin edition.

 

Barry

 

 
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Posts: 421

 • Re: all that is solid melts into air

Posted by tgriffiths at 2005-02-12 05:44 AM

 

Berman's work is not so much superior to Marcus' as from a different part of the galaxy. What distinguishes the one from the other bears relevence to the postings on LS dealing with dialectics ie, Marcus' approach sees the ideas contained in the manifesto metaphysically while the bounce and flow that Barry refers to is a good example of writing that understands dialectics: dynamic, rooted in concrete life circumstances and its development...

Marcus' piece is nonetheless significant because it indicates the degree of, to me, appaling ignorance  that exists in progressive (pro war) circles. And I don't mean  as a field of study, divorced from the needs of the day.

It is for this reason that I think we all need to keep as eye on the discussions going on at Harry's and to contribute to them. With the exception of the erstwhile Arthur Dent who, no doubt because he has use of a copy of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and a trusty towel, none of us really have the time to devote to following threads closely enough to be able to contribute so consistently. However if we all have a little go on a regular basis we might have the same effect - which is proving positive from my reading.

Contributions are also likewly to draw attention to LS where the flow is slower but more substantial. Or at least, that's the general idea.
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Posts: 33

 • Re: all that is solid melts into air

Posted by tgriffiths at 2005-02-12 05:49 AM
Bugger it, I should have checked things more closely. I meant ignorance of Marxism that exists in progressive circles.
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