Modernism in the Streets. Marshall Berman
this is precisely the sort of absurdity that makes the American economy and our middle-class life run. But it is not at all absurd for our parents to feel that their old car and all the other things they have now do not make them happy. Indeed, it is the beginning of wisdom. And it is far from absurd for them to want to do something to change their lives! What we have to make clear to them is that it’s not so much the car, as the system that built it, that needs changing—and that we can’t trade a social system in, we must build a new one.
The perfectibility and avidity that have driven our parents in contradictory directions have been driving us too. We’ve demanded “Power to the people!” and we’ve identified with any and every people in the world—except our people. This drive has been genuinely liberating for many of us; it has enabled us, by getting into other people, to expand and deepen ourselves. This is what the word “psychedelic” legitimately means and what so much of the 1960s was all about. But getting into other people, identifying ourselves with them, is not enough for radicalism. Radicalism means going to the roots, and (as Marx said) the root for man is man, and if we mean to be men—Menschen, human beings—if we want our souls to expand authentically, we must make room for ourselves at the center. In the course of the sixties, we have learned to affirm, avidly, militantly, everyone but ourselves. Now we must affirm ourselves as well. We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic.
It is worth pointing out that the New Left began with dialectic, with a document Rousseau would have understood: the Port Huron Statement of 1962. “Some would have us believe,” the statement says, “that Americans feel contentment amidst their prosperity.” But the fact is, it goes on to say, most people are tormented by “deeply felt anxieties about their role in the world … [which] produce a yearning to believe that there is some alternative to the present, that something can be done to change the school, the bureaucracies, the work-places, the government … It is to this yearning, at once the spark and the engine of change, that we address our present appeal.” The signers of the statement were determined to discover or to create new forms of political life and action that would express people’s “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding and creativity”; forms that would fulfill their “unrealized capacities for reason, freedom and love.” These goals can be achieved only by transforming America into a “democracy of individual participation.” The New Left, at its birth, embarked on a “search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation.” It invited the American people as a whole to take this trip with it. Thus spoke the founders of the SDS in 1962. Where are they now? How often, since then, have we been side-tracked?
The question is, how can we start again? One thing we should have learned is not to go it alone, isolated from the “modern men”—and modern women—who share our discontents and our hopes. As Rousseau indicated, this requires an understanding of the contradictions of modern life—contradictions which Rousseau faced with remarkable clarity and courage. He was the first to explore the uncharted, perilous open sea of modernity. He left us logs and maps that we can use to learn where and who we are.
This essay originally appeared in the Partisan Review, Winter 1971–2.
The best story I’ve ever heard about The Communist Manifesto came from Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of international relations who died in 1980. It was the early seventies at CUNY, and he was reminiscing about his childhood in Bavaria before the First World War. Morgenthau’s father, a doctor in a working-class neighborhood of Coburg, often took his son along on house calls. Many of his patients were dying of TB; a doctor could do nothing to save their lives, but might help them die with dignity. When his father asked about last requests, many workers said they wanted to have the Manifesto buried with them when they died. They implored the doctor to see that the priest didn’t sneak in and plant the Bible on them instead.
This spring, the Manifesto is 150 years old. In that century and a half, apart from the Bible, it has become the most widely read book in the world. Eric Hobsbawm, in his splendid introduction to the handsome new Verso edition,1 gives a brief history of the book’s reception. It can be summed up fast: Whenever there’s trouble, anywhere in the world, the book becomes an item; when things quiet down, the book drops out of sight; when there’s trouble again, the people who forgot remember. When fascist-type regimes seize power, it’s always on the short list of books to burn. When people dream of resistance—even if they’re not communists, even if they distrust communists—it provides music for their dreams. Get the beat of the beginning and the end. First line: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Last lines: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” In Rick’s bar in Casablanca, you may or may not love France, but when the band breaks into “La Marseillaise,” you’ve got to stand up and sing.
Yet literate people today, even people with left politics, are amazingly ignorant of what’s actually in the book. For years, I’ve asked people what they think it consists of. The most popular answers are that it’s (1) a utopian handbook on how to run a society with no money or property, or else (2) a Machiavellian handbook on how to create a communist state and keep it in power. People who were communists didn’t seem to know the book any better than people who were not. (At first this amazed me; later I saw it was no accident. Classical communist education was Talmudic, based on a study of commentaries, with an underlying suspicion of sacred primary texts. Among Orthodox Jews, the Bible is a sort of adult movie—a yeshiva-bucher is exposed to it only after years of Talmudic training, to insure that he will respond in orthodox ways. Similarly, a trainee at a party school would begin with Stalin, until l956; then the great indoctrinator Lenin; then, with some hesitation, Engels. Marx came in only at the very end, and then only for those with security clearance.)
Now that security is gone. In just a few years, so many statues and magnifications of Marx have vanished from public squares; so many streets and parks named for him are going under other names today. What does it all mean? For some people, like our Sunday morning princes of the air, the implosion of the USSR simply confirmed what they had believed all along, and released them from having to show respect. One of my old bosses at CCNY said it concisely: “Nineteen eighty-nine proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” But there are other ways to read history. What happened to Marx after 1917 was a disaster: A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head. So we should welcome his descent from the pedestal as a fortunate fall. Maybe we can learn what Marx has to teach if we confront him at ground level, the level on which we ourselves are trying to stand.
So what does he offer? First, startling when you’re not prepared for it, praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early in the Manifesto, he describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates and the emotions that go with them, especially the sense of being caught up in something magical and uncanny:
The bourgeoisie has created … more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery; application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways … clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive powers slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Or a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and there by the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses,