EUROCOMMUNISM-MYTH, HOPE, DELUSION?:"ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR": MARXISM, MODERNISM, MODERNIZATION
Berman, Marshall
Several years ago I began a study of modernity. I meant to explore both the history of ideas—such ideas as "modern times," "modern society," "the modern predicament," and so on—and the...
...As members of the proletariat, modern professionals, intellectuals, and artists live only so long as they find work, and...
...New York Review of Books, August 1965...
...He knew that the way beyond the contradictions would have to lead through modernity, not out of it...
...In some ways, Marx knows, this is frightful: modern men and women may well stop at nothing, with no dread to hold them back...
...Marx's point is that what modern poets, artists, and intellectuals have only dreamed of, the modern bourgeoisie has actually done...
...Marx's basic opposition here is between what is open or naked and what is hidden, veiled, or clothed...
...In some traditions, reality is accessible through religious or philosophical meditation...
...Marx does not mean that they have been the first to celebrate the ideal of vita activa, an activistic stance toward the world...
...Thus, any imaginable mode of human conduct becomes morally permissible the moment it becomes economically possible—becomes "valuable...
...It appears that only the abstract forms of capitalism subsist—capital, wage labor, exploitation, surplus value—while their human contents are in perpetual flux...
...It has drowned the heavenly ecstasies of pious fanaticism, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egoistical calculation...
...The Modern Tradition, an anthology edited and Introduced by Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson (1965...
...This polarity, perennial in Eastern as well as Western thought, symbolizes everywhere a distinction between a "real" world and an illusory one...
...modern tragedy penetrates its awesome and fearsome depths...
...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 still alive...
...Modern erotic poetry elaborates this theme with playful irony...
...To bring out one of the paradoxes of their historical role: even though they tend to pride themselves on their emancipated and thoroughly secular minds, they turn out to be just about the only moderns who really believe that they are called to their vocations and that their work is holy...
...Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (1963...
...THE IRONY of bourgeois activism, as Marx sees it, is that the bourgeoisie is forced to close itself off from its richest possibilities, possibilities that can be realized only by those who break its power...
...This system requires constant revolutionizing, disturbance, agitation...
...Indeed, it opens up a whole new perspective on the Manifesto, as the archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come...
...Daniel Lerner, James Colemann and Ronald Dore, articles on modernization in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (1968), vol...
...National states arise and accumulate vast power, although that power is continually undermined by the international scope of capital...
...4 At this point Marx is ready to soar into one of his great set pieces, propelled by the desperate dynamism that he is striving to grasp: Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times...
...All "socialist" governments in our century have in fact done this, with different degrees of success...
...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 social roles...
...Since organized and concerted action can change the world in so many ways, why not organize and work together and fight to change it still more...
...There are many people in the modern world—mostly in capitalist countries, but many in "socialist" ones too—who are honestly searching for integration and integrity that they cannot seem to find in the life options that confront them...
...Alex Inkeles, The Modernization of Man (1975...
...The networks and ambiguities of the market are such that everybody is caught up and entangled in them...
...Modern men and women might well prefer the solitary pathos and grandeur of the Rousseauean unconditioned self, or the collective costumed comforts of the Burkean masque, rather than the Marxian attempt to fuse the best of both...
...WE CAN SEE, then, why Marx gets so excited and enthusiastic about the bourgeoisie and the world it has made...
...Whatever word we use, it is crucial to remember that Marx is talking here about the predicament of his own group, and hence about himself...
...But Marx's images also express what must accompany any genuine sense of wonder: a sense of dread...
...Because they know how to think of, by, and for themselves, they will demand a clear account of what their superiors are doing for them—and doing to them— and they will be ready to resist and rebel where they are getting nothing real in return...
...Modernization" has come to signify a complex of social, economic, and political processes: sustained economic development, industrial expansion, urban growth, bureaucratic regulation and rationality, mass media, mass participation in politics—including at least the pretense of democracy—large-scale social planning, shattering of traditional cultures and forms of life, continuous pressure to raise productivity and make progress...
...Everywhere it pulls like an undertow against the more "solid" Marxian visions we know so well...
...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, reach an end...
...The halo, for Marx, is a primary symbol of religious 'The word WissenschaJt may be translated in many ways, narrowly as "science," or more broadly as "knowledge," "learning," "scholarship," or any sustained and serious intellectual pursuit...
...For all this we must go to its most notorious enemy, to Marx...
...The liberal revolutionary movements that bring the 18th century to a climax act out this faith: if hereditary privileges and social roles are stripped away, so that all men can enjoy an unfettered freedom to use their powers, they will use them for the good of all mankind...
...Modernist consciousness and culture are often traced back to his generation, the generation that came of age in the 1840s—to Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wagner, Kierkegaard, Dos -toevsky—but Marx himself does not even rate a small branch on the genealogical tree: if he is even mentioned in this company, it is as a foil, or sometimes as a survival of an earlier and serener age—the Enlightenment, say—whose clear vistas and solid values modernism supposedly destroys...
...I have gone to him not so much for his answers—since his dialectical genius often generated questions that dissolved his own answers—as for his questions...
...it has taken on new depths and resonances in Marx's own century, in the age of Romanticism and Revolution, of Napoleon and Byron and Goethe's Faust...
...At different points in this essay it will be translated in different ways, whichever seems most apt in its context...
...To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well...
...Marx will try to strip these away in the first volume of Capital, in his brilliant analysis of "The Fetishism of Commodities"—a mystique that brings together here...
...Marx looks forward to communism as the consummation of modernity...
...First of all, there is the emergence of a world market...
...The "revolutionary activity, practical-critical activity" (as Marx put it in 1845) that overthrows bourgeois rule will be an expression of the active and activistic energies that the bourgeoisie itself has set free...
...We can see, too, how communism, in order to hold itself together, might stifle the active, dynamic, and developmental forces that have brought it into being, might betray many of the hopes that have made it worth fighting for, might reproduce the inequities and contradictions of bourgeois society under a new name...
...Ironically, then, we can see Marx's dialectic of modernity reenacting the fate of the society it describes, generating energies and ideas that melt it down into its own air...
...Marx is perfectly clear about his links to these writers, to whom he is constantly alluding (to Goethe most of all), and to their intellectual tradition...
...The intellectuals of Marx's time were particularly susceptible to this sort of bad faith...
...The bourgeois revolutions, in tearing away veils of "religious and political illusion," have left naked power and exploitation, cruelty and misery, exposed like open wounds...
...For this miraculous and magical world is also demonic and terrifying, swinging wildly out of control, menacing and devastating blindly as it moves...
...Marx's hope is that once the unaccommodated men of the working class are "forced to face...
...They are just the sort of thing we are prepared to find in Rimbaud or Nietzsche, Rilke or Yeats—"Things fall apart, the center does not hold...
...Now, at the climactic moment of the play, he tears off his royal robes—"Off, off you lendings"--and joins Poor Tom in naked authenticity...
...the bourgeoisie controls the means of production in culture, as in everything else, and anyone who wants to create must work within the orbit of its power...
...David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (1965...
...All that is solid"—from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men who work the machines, the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, the firms and corporations that support and exploit them, the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all—all are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or bio-degraded, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms...
...anything goes if it pays...
...It is easy to see why modern intellectuals, trapped in these ambiguities, would imagine radical ways out: in their situation, revolutionary ideas would spring from the most direct and intense personal needs...
...he despises all those vile ornaments that cramp the use of his powers...
...To do this, however, would be to miss what Marx saw as the essential point of critical thinking...
...In the climate of 1848, this bourgeois pseudoreligiosity has not yet established itself...
...Marx does not dwell much on particular inventions and innovations in their own right (in the tradition that runs from Saint-Simon through McLuhan...
...The dialectic of nakedness that culminates in Marx is defined at the very start of the modern age, in Shakespeare's King Lear...
...Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall still-born for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing profit out of thought...
...It may seem that I have overplayed this theme of convergence...
...Once again, we find Marx more responsive to what is going on in 59 bourgeois society than are the members and proponents of the bourgeoisie themselves...
...For Marx, writing in the aftermath of bourgeois revolutions and reactions, and looking forward to a new wave, the symbols of nakedness and unveiling regain the dialectical depth that Shakespeare gave them 250 years before...
...We can see that the fulfillment Marx sees as just around the bend may be a long time coming, if it comes at all...
...He unveils the modern bourgeois as consummate nihilists in action on a scale far vaster than modern intellectuals can ever dream...
...Thus, simply by reading the Manifesto closely, and taking its vision of modernity seriously, we arrive at serious questions about Marx's answers...
...Jacques Barzun, Classic Romantic & Modern (1961, 1975...
...Even those writers who claim to refute and surpass him generally recognize his work as a primary source and point of reference for their own...
...They have proved that it is possible, through organized and concerted action, to really change the world...
...and in place of all the freedoms that men have fought for, it has put one unprincipled freedom—free trade...
...67 one of the primary promises in Marx's work: the promise that communism, while upholding and actually deepenitxg the freedoms that capitalism has brought us, will free us from the horrors of bourgeois nihilism...
...We are caught up in a series of radical tensions between Marx's intentions and his insights, between what he wants and what he sees...
...the experience that makes him genuinely qualified to be a king makes it impossible for him to be one...
...5 If we look behind the sober scenes the members of our bourgeoisie create and see the way they really work and act, we realize that these solid citizens would tear down the world if it paid...
...After all, its members do it to themselves—it is the way they define themselves—so why shouldn't they do the same to everybody else...
...Marx believes that capitalism destroys this mode of experience for everybody: "all that is holy is profaned...
...For Marx, as for his contemporary Kierkegaard, experience, rather than belief or dogma or theology, forms the core of religious life...
...All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off...
...All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men...
...Here is a brief sampling: On modernization: Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958...
...Because the workers can come through the affliction and the fear only by making contact with the self's deepest resources, they will be prepared to fight for collective recognition of the self's beauty and value...
...Meanwhile, modernists have similarly avoided or shunned Marxism, largely out of fear that it will strip them of a halo they hold dear: their conviction of the artist's creative autonomy...
...55 We will see Marxism, modernism, and the bourgeoisie caught up in a strange dialectical dance, and if we follow their movements we may learn some important things about the modern world we all share...
...We will never ride the wave of the future if we don't learn to steer our way through the maelstrom we all live in now...
...All the super-added ideas, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our weak and shivering nature, and to raise it to a dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd and antiquated fashion...
...The one specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is one thing that traditional elites— and, for that matter, traditional masses— have always yearned for: solid stability...
...Thus the naked man will be not only a freer and happier man but a better man...
...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...
...One of the Manifesto's primary aims is to point the way out of the cold, to nourish and focus the common yearning for communal warmth...
...His tragedy is that the catastrophe that redeems him humanly destroys him politically...
...So Marx believes...
...This is the perspective I will develop here...
...instead, he exposes himself to the storm's full fury, looks it in the face and affirms himself against it even as it tosses and tears him...
...Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (1967...
...The immense amounts of money and energy put into building, and the selfconsciously monumental quality of so much of this building—indeed, throughout Marx's century, every piece of furniture built for a bourgeois interior was itself a monument— testify to the sincerity and seriousness of this claim...
...The sorcerer's apprentices, the members of the revolutionary proletariat, are bound to wrest control of our modern productive forces from the grasp of the Faustian-Frankensteinian bourgeoisie...
...As he stands and shivers, it dawns on him that his kingdom is full of people whose whole lives are consumed by the abandoned, defenseless suffering that he is going through right now...
...The modern variation, beginning in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation, places both these worlds on earth, in space and time, filled with human beings...
...The reason, I think, is that there is a dark side to this light that they cannot blot out...
...The paradoxes at the heart of the Manifesto are manifest almost at its very start: specifically, from the moment Marx starts to describe the modern bourgeoisie...
...others (Georg Lukacs is the most prominent) see Marx's outlook as far saner, healthier, and more "real" than those of the modernists...
...Indeed, in these pages he manages to praise the bourgeoisie more powerfully and profoundly than its members have ever known how to praise themselves...
...They are dimly aware of this, and deeply embarrassed and frightened by it, so that they will ignore or deny their own strength and creativity rather than look their virtues in the face and live with them...
...disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force...
...On the other hand, because they are personally involved in their work—unlike most wage laborers, who are alienated and indifferent—the fluctuations of the market strike them in a far deeper way...
...Humboldt, J. S. Mill, Justices Holmes and Brandeis and Douglas and Black have been still, small voices in bourgeois society, embattled and marginal at best...
...Such people often become very bitter toward modern culture and feel that if they could only assimilate and internalize another—Oriental, classical, medieval, or primitive—they could bring their lives together...
...Only the most radical economic and social changes could begin to lift modern men and women out of the maelstrom...
...What matters here is the processes, the powers, the expressions of life and energy: men working, moving, cultivating, communicating, organizing and reorganizing nature and themselves...
...Here a hopeful dialectic lights up the tragic bleakness and blight...
...In place of exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has put open, shameless, direct, bare exploitation...
...Although Marx is supposedly a materialist (he has identified himself as such since 1844), he does not seem especially interested in the things, the material structures that the bourgeoisie creates...
...Modernist thought, so brilliant in illuminating the dark side of everyone and everything, turns out to have some repressed dark corners of its own, and Marx can shine new light on these...
...The enemies of capitalism may enjoy a great deal of freedom to do their work—to meet, speak, write, organize, demonstrate, strike, elect...
...For the first time in history, all confront themselves and each other on a single plane of being...
...What is to prevent the social forces that melt capitalism from melting communism as well...
...This means that the bourgeoisie, taken as a whole, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production...
...Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to agriculture and industry, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even an intimation that such productive power slept in the womb of social labor...
...The first point is the immense power of the market in modern men's inner lives: they look to the price list for answers to questions not merely economic but metaphysical—questions of what is worthwhile, what is honorable, even what is real...
...I realize the word is anachronistic— it stems from the turn of the 20th century—but it has the advantage of bringing together, as Marx seeks to do, people in diverse occupations who, despite their differences, all work with their minds...
...Indeed, the sort of individualism that scorns and fears connections with other people as threats to the self's integrity, and the sort of collectivism that seeks to submerge the self in a social role, are probably a lot more appealing than the Marxian synthesis, because they are intellectually and emotionally so much easier...
...At first they recoiled in shock and horror from both, because both forced them to face the world they had created and the people they had become...
...The dialectical complexity and wholeness that we found in Shakespeare have faded away, and narrow polarizations have taken their place...
...Everybody within reach of this economy finds himself under pressure of relentless competition, whether from across the street or across the world...
...Next, it raises questions about Marx's own romantic image of the working class...
...Their only hope lies in lies: in their capacity to construct mythic draperies heavy enough to stifle their dreadful knowledge of who they are...
...Here Marx may be in danger—surprisingly, for him—of getting carried away by what ideologues say, and of losing touch with what the men with money and power actually do...
...As we read all this, however, strange things begin to happen...
...it would be sad—and self-destructive—to stop now...
...but how can it entrench itself in the modern world without suppressing those very modern energies it promises to set free...
...If the good life is a life of action, why should the range of human activities be limited to those that are profitable...
...Their goods and services go on sale, and it is "the vicissitudes of competition, the fluctuations of the market" rather than any intrinsic truth or beauty or value—or, for that matter, any lack of truth or beauty or value—that will determine their fate...
...58 on an open form...
...In the passage below, Marx is trying to show how capitalism has transformed people's relationships both with each other and with themselves...
...Even as we let ourselves be carried along by Marx's dialectical flow, we feel ourselves being carried away by uncharted currents of uncertainty and unease...
...Thus, along with community and society, individuality itself may be melting into the modern air...
...These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market...
...Although, in Marx's syntax, "the bourgeoisie" is the subject—it is its economic activities that bring the big changes about—modern men and women of every class are objects, for all are changed: The bourgeoisie has torn apart the many feudal ties that bound men to their "natural superiors," and left no other bond between man and man than naked interest, than callous cash payment...
...Thus it has "accomplished wonders that far surpass Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals...
...Along with everything else it is, it's the first great modernist work of art...
...0 I have ta'en Too little care of this: take physic, Pomp, Expose theyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou may shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just...
...Thus they can write books, paint pictures, discover physical or historical laws, save lives, only if someone with capital will pay them...
...The halo splits life into sacred and profane: it creates an aura of holy dread and radiance around the figure who wears it...
...we find that the solid social formations around us have, indeed, melted away...
...Art, science, social theory like Marx's own, all are modes of production...
...The more furiously bourgeois society agitates its members to grow or die, the more likely they will be to outgrow it, 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...
...They may deny this identity— for, after all, who wants to belong to the proletariat—but they are thrown into the working class by the historically defined conditions under which they are forced to work...
...These mythical figures, striving to expand human powers through reason and science, unleash demonic energies that erupt beyond all human control, with horrifying results...
...Marx's bourgeoisie doesn't lose much sleep over this...
...Finally, our skeptical doubts about promoters' promises must lead us to question 6 In Capital, in the climactic chapter on "The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation" (Volume 1, Chapter 32), Marx says that when a system of social relations acts as a fetter on "the free development of productive forces," that social system has simply got to go: "It must be annihilated...
...Marx is moving in the dimension of time, working to evoke an ongoing historical drama and trauma...
...as children of the Enlightenment, not of darkness...
...I was surprised to find that writers in each group were, with very few exceptions, wholly unaware of the existence of the other...
...It fosters, indeed forces, self-development for everybody, but we can only develop in warped, distorted ways...
...Thus he can live with bourgeois nihilism in the long run because he sees it as active and dynamic, a nihilism of plenitude...
...In the next 20 years or so, the bourgeoisie will prove remarkably inventive in constructing haloes of its own...
...But if this is so, then their solidarity, too, however impressive at any given moment, may prove to be as transient as the machines they operate or the products they turn out...
...Specifically, he can clarify the relationship between modernist culture and the bourgeois economy and society—the world of "modernization"— from which it has sprung...
...The celebrants of capitalism tell us surprisingly little of its infinite horizons, its revolutionary energy and audacity, its dynamic creativity, its adventurousness and romance, its capacity to make men not merely more comfortable but more alive...
...But their freedom to move transforms their movement into an enterprise, and they find themselves cast in the paradoxical role of merchants and promoters of revolution, which necessarily becomes a commodity like everything else...
...The scope of human needs and demands is enlarged far beyond the capacities of local industries, which consequently collapse...
...The basic fact of life for these intellectuals, as Marx sees them, is that they are "paid wage-laborers" of the bourgeoisie, members of "the modern working class, the proletariat...
...At this point a new symbolism emerges: clothes become an emblem of the old, illusory mode of life, nakedness comes to signify the newly discovered and experienced truth, and the act of taking off one's clothes becomes a symbol of spiritual liberation, of becoming real...
...we are hurtled along with a reckless momentum, a breathless intensity...
...Thus, both in the Manifesto and in its illustrious successors, we will find that against the creator's intentions and probably without his awareness, the vision of revolution and resolution generates its own immanent critique, and new contradictions thrust themselves through the veil that this vision weaves...
...It leaves us in strange and paradoxical positions...
...Thus the modern bourgeoisie holds vast material powers over the workers and everybody else, but it will never achieve the spiritual ascendancy that earlier ruling classes could take for granted...
...Many of the most creative modernist artists and thinkers will be simultaneously possessed by both, and driven endlessly from pole to 61 pole...
...Take, for instance, Marx's vision of the revolutionary community...
...Whether or not this ending should ever really come to pass, the Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power, its expression and grasp of the luminous and dreadful possibilities that pervade modern life...
...Bourgeois society, through its insatiable drive for destruction and development, and its need to satisfy the insatiable needs it creates, inevitably produces radical ideas and movements that aim to destroy it...
...The bourgeois' responses to both Marxism and modernism over the last century have fluctuated with the market...
...They learn only at moments of personal and general ruin—only, that is, when it is too late...
...Paul de Man, "What is Modern...
...The workers' communal bonds, generated by capitalist production, will generate militant political organizations, unions that will oppose and finally overthrow the private, atomistic framework of capitalist social relations...
...To surround oneself with a halo in this climate is to try to destroy the danger by denying it...
...I have intermittently used the word "intellectuals" as shorthand for the diverse occupational groups Marx experience, the experience of something holy...
...It isn't hard to imagine alternate endings to the dialectic of nakedness, endings less beautiful than Marx's but no less plausible...
...find work only so long as their labor increases capital...
...Marx's bourgeoisie moves within this tragic orbit...
...for Burke it is counteridyllic, an unmitigated disaster, a fall into nothingness from which nothing can come...
...We will see that they have far more in common than either modernists or bourgeoisie would like to think...
...It is easy to imagine how a communist society committed to the free development of each and all might develop its own distinctive varieties of nihilism...
...Moreover, even among the few who really do believe in free exchange, there are fewer still who would extend freedom of trade to ideas as well as things...
...What has been disguised, both then and now, is the fact that these cultural movements, for all their eruptive power, have been no more than bubbles on the surface of a social cauldron that has been teeming and boiling for more than a hundred years...
...Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," in Art and Culture (1966...
...When Marx depicts the bourgeois as sorcerers—remember, too, their enterprise has "conjured whole populations out of the ground," not to mention "the specter of communism"—he is pointing to depths they gone in less than 40 years—not only in Manchester but in nearly all cities dominated by capital (New York's Fifth Avenue is a vivid example)--leased or sold off to developers, pulled down by the same insatiable drives that had built them up...
...The point of this essay is that so long as the modern economy remains intact—an economy that reduces all values to market values, that runs on compulsory or compulsive acquisition, requires endless, mindless growth, and measures growth in quantity alone—people's lives are going to keep falling apart...
...His triumph lies in becoming something he never dreamed of being, a human being...
...Louis Kampf, On Modernism (1970...
...The final clause, "and men at last are forced to face...
...Marx does not seem to be disturbed by the ambiguities of this social role—maybe because he is sure that it will become obsolete before it can ossify, that the revolutionary enterprise will be put out of business by its fast success...
...S. N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and Change (1966...
...but everybody seems to agree that he and they are worlds apart...
...and yet, somehow, the tragic movement of modern history is supposed to culminate in a happy end...
...In "selling themselves piecemeal," they are selling not merely their physical energy but their minds, their deepest feelings, their visionary and imaginative powers, perhaps the whole of themselves...
...Even if these workers do build a successful revolutionary movement, how, amid the flood tides of modern life, will they ever manage to build a solid communist society...
...Thus, to unmask phony claims to transcendence...
...In order for anyone, whatever their class, to survive in modern bourgeois society, their personality must take °The German word here is Verhaltnisse, which can be translated as "conditions," "relations," "relationships," "circumstances," "affairs," and so on...
...If, as he believes, the members of the bourgeoisie really do want a free market, they will have to enforce the freedom of new products to enter the market...
...There is a further problem that might keep Marx's dialectic from even getting under way...
...Marx's point, in tearing the haloes from their heads, is that nobody in bourgeois society can be so pure or safe or free...
...The members of the bourgeoisie (and their ideologists), never known for humility or modesty, seem strangely determined to hide much of their light under a bushel...
...In times of expansion and prosperity, like the 1920s and the 1960s, they maelstrom, Marxism as ein'feste Burg of solid rock, and who expend great energy and anguish plunging back and forth between them: e.g., Mayakovski, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, Sartre...
...Even if a triumphant communism should someday flow through the floodgates that free trade opens up, who knows what dreadful impulses might flow in along with it, or in its wake, or are even impacted inside...
...their inner dynamism will reproduce and express the inward rhythms by which modern capitalism moves and lives...
...Marx plunges us into the depths of this life process, so that we feel ourselves charged with a vital energy that magnifies our whole being—and are simultaneously seized by shocks and convulsions that threaten at every instant to destroy us...
...Both these groups—sometimes in conflict with one another, sometimes interfused—sanctified themselves as avant-gardes: they were at once perceptive and trenchant in their criticisms of capitalism, and, at the same time, absurdly complacent in their faith that they had the power to transcend it, that they could live and work freely beyond its norms and demands...
...free from fear and trembling, they are free to trample down everyone in their way, if self-interest drives them to it...
...instead of the nightmare that it so often is in bourgeois society, it can be a source of beauty and joy for all...
...and its radical antithesis, the theme of nihilism, insatiable destruction, shattering and swallowing up the heart of darkness, the horror...
...The members of the bourgeoisie repress both wonder and dread at what they have made: these possessors don't want to know how deeply they are possessed...
...English version, 1968...
...all their enterprises are merely means to this end, in themselves of no more than transient and intermediary interest...
...Propelled by its nihilistic drives and energies, the bourgeoisie will open the political and cultural floodgates through which its revolutionary nemesis will flow...
...nothing is sacred, no one is untouchable, life becomes thoroughly desanctified...
...They must "sell themselves piecemeal" to an employer willing to exploit their brains for profit...
...The trouble with capitalism is that, here as elsewhere, it destroys the human possibilities it creates...
...How can any lasting human bonds grow in such loose and shifting soil...
...This recognition enables him to grow in sensitivity and insight, and to move beyond the bounds of his selfabsorded bitterness and misery...
...Here, as so often with Marx, the vision is 65 dazzling but the light flickers if we look hard...
...In the 18th century, the metaphors of nakedness as truth and stripping as selfdiscovery take on a new political resonance...
...All the pleasing illusions that made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life...
...Now, if Marx's vision of bourgeois society is accurate, there is every reason to think that it will generate a market for radical ideas...
...Beyond these formal resemblances, I have tried to read Marx as a modernist writer, to bring out the vividness and richness of his language, the depth and complexity of his imagery—clothes and nakedness, veils, haloes, heat, cold, etc.—and to show how brilliantly he develops the themes by which modernism will later define itself: the glory of modern energy and dynamism, the ravages of modern disintegration and nihilism, the strange intimacy between them...
...Both regard modernity with mixed emotions, awe and elation mixed with a sense of horror...
...if we try to act as if it isn't there, we may be the first to be swept away...
...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 scheme and hustle to present themselves in a maximally profitable light...
...Modernism" has come to denote a family of artistic and intellectual movements that have been radically experimental, spiritually turbulent and militant, iconoclastic to the point of nihilism, apocalyptic in their hopes and fantasies, savagely destructive to one another—and often to themselves as well— yet capable of recurrent self-renewal...
...The source of the trouble is the bourgeois claim to to be "the Party of Order" in modern civilization...
...As it spreads, it absorbs and destroys whatever local and regional markets it touches...
...As I followed this modernist "melting" vision, I found it throughout Marx's works...
...Hence they turn out to be dependent on the market not for bread alone, but for spiritual sustenance—a sustenance they know the market cannot be counted on to provide...
...The workers may sustain each other today, on the assembly line or the picket line, only to find themselves scattered tomorrow among different collectivities with different conditions, different processes and products, different needs and interests...
...and we can see that, even if it does come, it may well be only a fleeting, transitory historical episode, gone in a moment, obsolete before it can ossify, swept away by the same tide of perpetual change and progress that brought it briefly within our reach, leaving us endlessly, helplessly floating on...
...Indeed, we can carry this line of questioning a step farther: if we have followed Marx's unfolding vision of modernity and have confronted all its endemic ironies and ambiguities, how can we expect anybody to transcend all this...
...Marx himself will develop it in new directions, and it will go on evolving into our own era...
...The Loss of a Halo ALL THE AMBIGUITIES in Marx's thought are crystallized in one of his most luminous images, the last one we will explore here: "The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverant awe...
...Marx would say that their need for progress and innovation will force them to open up their societies even to ideas and movements they dread...
...it is annihilated...
...Now the false world is seen as a historical past, a world we have lost (or are in the process of losing), while the 63 true world is the physical and social world that exists for us here and now (or is in the process of coming into being...
...62 If all new relationships become obsolete before they can ossify, how can solidarity, fraternity, mutual aid be kept alive...
...What kinds of people do these permanent revolutions produce...
...Marx began by praising the bourgeoisie, not by burying it...
...Dankwart Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (1967...
...the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men," they will come together to overcome the cold that cuts through them all...
...at the same time, they have uncovered and exposed new options and hopes...
...what stirs him is the active and generative process through which one thing leads to another, dreams metamorphose into blueprints and fantasies into accounts, 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...
...They can go on playing their revolutionary role only by denying its full extent and depth...
...For one thing, they have "been the first to show what man's activity can bring 56 about...
...I should say, too, that Marxism's strength has always lain in its willingness to start from frightful social realities, to confront them, work through them and work them through...
...Burke's people lack King Lear's capacity to learn something from their mutual vulnerability in the cold...
...they must compete against others (often brutally and unscrupulously) for the privilege of being bought, simply in order to go on with their work...
...All the anarchic, measureless, explosive drives that a later generation of intellectuals will baptize with the name of Nihilism—drives that Nietzsche and his followers will ascribe to such cosmic traumas as "the death of God"—are located by Marx in the seemingly banal everyday working of the market economy...
...Our lives are controlled by a ruling class with vested interests, not merely in change, but in crisis and chaos...
...Where does all this leave us, the members of modern bourgeois society...
...Thou art the thing itself...
...Nakedness: The Unaccommodated Men NOW THAT we have seen Marx's "melting" vision in action, I want to use it to explicate several of the Manifesto's most powerful images of modern life...
...Is man no more than this...
...And yet, the truth of the matter, as Marx understands, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down...
...My emphases in this essay, and maybe my sympathies as well, have leaned toward the skeptical and self-critical undercurrents in Marx's thought...
...Shakespeare is telling us that the dreadful naked reality of the "unaccommodated man" is the point from which accommodation must be made, the only ground on which real community can grow...
...Some of Marx's most vivid and striking images are meant to force us all to confront that abyss...
...Marx is neither the first nor the last writer to celebrate the triumphs of bourgeois technology and social organization...
...Irving Howe, "The Culture of Modernism" (Commentary, January 1967), reprinted as Introduction to Howe's anthology, Literary Modernism (1967), Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962...
...But Lear is not broken by the storm's icy blasts, neither does he flee them...
...are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason...
...But the creators will be powerless to resist, because they must sell their labor power in order to live...
...A socialist government might try to dam the flood by imposing radical restrictions on personal, economic, cultural development...
...it needs to be perpetually pushed and pressed in order to maintain its elasticity and resilience, to appropriate and assimilate new energies, to drive itself to new heights of activity and growth...
...This means, however, that men and movements that proclaim their enmity to capitalism may turn out to be just the sort of stimulants capitalism needs...
...A century later, we can see how the business of promoting revolution is open to the same abuses and temptations, manipulative frauds and wishful self-deceptions, as any other promotional line...
...In periods of retrenchment and depression, like the 1930s and the 1970s, they donned their Party of Order robes, waxed righteous, accused political, racial, or cultural Outside Agitators, and passed the buck in every direction to deny their own complicity in collapse...
...it has "conducted expeditions that put all former migrations of nations and crusades in the shade...
...Production and consumption—and human needs— become increasingly international and cosmopolitan...
...Marx, in 1856, will speak of the workers as "newfangled men...
...indeed, much of their creative energy has gone into arrangements for doing this—chartered monopolies, trusts, holding companies, cartels and conglomerates, pricefixing, open or hidden subsidies from the state—all accompanied by paeans in praise of the free market...
...various discussions by Hilton Kramer, in The Age of the Avant-Garde (1972...
...It is only a matter of time before this dialectic is thought through and worked out...
...Harold Rosenberg, "What's New" (New Yorker, February 1973...
...The active power and processes that mean so much to Marx appear as mere incidental by-products in the minds of their producers...
...It is obvious to any reader of Marx that, in his commitment to his work, he shares this faith...
...When Marx says that other values are "resolved into" exchange-value, his point is that bourgeois society does not efface old structures of value but subsumes them: old modes of honor and dignity do not die...
...When he was in power he never noticed, but now he stretches his vision to take them in: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness defend you From such seasons as these...
...Then the experience of self-development, released from the demands and distortions of the market, can go on freely and spontaneously...
...If bourgeois society is really the maelstrom Marx thinks it is, how can he expect all its currents to flow only one way, toward peaceful harmony and integration...
...Once the work is done they are, like all other workers, separated from the products of their labor...
...Caesar Grana, Modernity and its Discontents (1964, 1967...
...Those traits, impulses, talents that the market can use are rushed (often prematurely) into development, and squeezed desperately till there is nothing left...
...Why does Marx place that halo on the heads of modern professionals and intellectuals in the first place...
...These changes are frequently but not always indicated by bracketed citations from the German...
...This is what modern nihilism is all about...
...Thus, by virtue of "free competition in the realm of knowledge," even the most subversive works and ideas—like the Manifesto itself—must be allowed to appear, on the grounds that they may sell...
...This act, which Lear believes has placed him at the very nadir of existence—"a poor, bare, forked animal"—turns out, ironically, to be his first step toward a full humanity, because, for the first time, he recognizes a connection between himself and another human being...
...If I have, it's been to compensate for the fact that it has always been so badly underplayed...
...In fact, my image comes from Marx—not from any esoteric, long hidden Marx, but from the heart of the Communist Manifesto...
...and a later piece, "Marxism: Criticism and / or Action (in Voices of Dissent, 1958...
...But the social conditions that inspire their radicalism also serve to frustrate it...
...This seems to be one thing—perhaps the only thing—that Marx is utterly incapable of imagining...
...Alas, to the bourgeois' embarrassment, they cannot afford to look down the roads they have opened up: the great wide vistas may turn into abysses...
...Uninterrupted disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation," instead of subverting this society, actually serve to strengthen it...
...Thus, "modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells...
...Catastrophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal...
...Thus capitalism will be melted by the heat of its own incandescent energies...
...But we can also find a plan going on within this play, a struggle inside the author's consciousness over what is really going on, what the larger struggle means...
...Then, by the power of his language and ideas, he tries to entice us to trust his vision, to let ourselves be swept along with him toward a climax that lies just ahead...
...Once again we encounter a problem we have met before: the tension between Marx's critical insights and his radical hopes...
...Nevertheless, the bourgeois have established themselves as the first ruling class whose authority is based not on who their ancestors were but on what they themselves actually do...
...All fixed, fast-frozen relationships with their train of venerable ideas and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify...
...For all the marvelous modes of activity the bourgeoisie has opened up, the only activity that really means anything to its members is making money, accumulating capital, piling up surplus value...
...The philosophes imagined nakedness as idyllic, opening up new vistas, beauty and virtue and happiness for all...
...Criticism, as he understood and practiced it, was part of an ongoing dialectical process...
...reprinted with further discussion in his book, Art on the Edge, 1976...
...But what would happen if, somehow, it didn't get annihilated...
...By the time Marx's proletarians finally appear, the world stage on which they were supposed to play their part has disintegrated and metamorphosed into something unrecognizable, surreal, a mobile construction that shifts and changes shape under the players' feet...
...As I explored the literature on modernization, I found, not surprisingly, that the figure of Marx bulks large...
...3 Marx's second clause, which proclaims the destruction of everything holy, is more complex and 'The one really striking exception here is Harold Rosenberg...
...The nature of the newly naked moderns may turn out to be just as elusive and mysterious as that of the old, clothed one—maybe even more elusive, because there is no longer any illusion of a real self underneath the masks...
...It comes as the climax of Marx's description of "modern bourgeois society...
...In Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the veils 64 that Persian women are forced to wear symbolize all the repressions that traditional social hierarchies inflict on people...
...By contrast, the absence of veils in the streets of Paris symbolizes a new kind of society where "liberty and equality reign," and where, as a consequence, "everything speaks out, everything is visible, everything is audible...
...Marx's targets here are, both for him and us, a lot closer to home: those professionals and intellectuals—"the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science"—who think they have the power to live on a higher plane than ordinary humanity, to transcend capitalism in life and work...
...In search of a place to begin, I have gone back to one of the first and greatest of modernists, Karl Marx...
...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...
...in others, it will be available to us only in a future existence after death—the Pauline "for now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face...
...But if bourgeois society is as volatile as Marx thinks it is, how can people ever settle on any real selves...
...We see his voracious family, aided by his blind vanity, tear away its own sentimental veil...
...The intense and relentless pressure to revolutionize production is bound to spill over and to transform what Marx calls "conditions of production" (or, alternately, "productive relationships") as well, "and, with them, all social conditions" and relationships...
...What have the bourgeois done to deserve Marx's praise...
...In order for all these changes to go on smoothly, administrative, legal, fiscal and political centralization must take place, and they do...
...deny...
...And why should modern men, who have seen what man's activity can bring about, passively accept the structure of their society as it is given...
...and a sympathetic reader might well be tempted to take only the criticism and self-criticism to heart, and throw out the hopes as utopian and naive...
...Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and their 20thcentury successors will ascribe this phenomenon to science, rationalism, the Death of God...
...Daniel Bell, "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism" (Public Interest, Fall 1970...
...and yet, in spite of all, thrown together by the same social forces that pull us apart, dimly aware of all we might be together, ready to stretch ourselves to grasp new human possibilities, to develop identities and mutual bonds that can help us hold together as the fierce modern air blows hot and cold through us all...
...On modernism: Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (1959...
...This theme and its development, still very much alive in our own day, may be Germany's deepest and most lasting contribution to world culture...
...For them, I've tried to close off an exit, by showing how this abyss opens up within Marxism itself...
...THE SECOND great bourgeois achievement has been to liberate the human capacity and drive for development: for permanent change, for perpetual upheavel and renewal in every form of personal and social life...
...This image, like all the great images in the history of literature and thought, contains depths that its creator could not have foreseen...
...Both see modern life as shot through with contradictory impulsions and potentialities, and both try to resolve or dissolve the contradictions...
...In this climate, then, radical intellectuals encounter radical obstacles: their ideas and movements are in danger of melting into the same modern air that decomposes the bourgeois order they are working to overcome...
...We must remember that Marx is writing at a historical moment when, especially in England and France (the Manifesto really has more to do with them than with the Germany of Marx's time), disenchantment with capitalism is pervasive, overt and intense, and almost ready to flare up in revolutionary forms...
...I found that two large bodies of thought and discussion about modernity have appeared in the last 20 years, organized around two separate and distinct ideas: Modernization and Modernism...
...Some writers see Marx'Among the few exceptions are Henri Lefebvre, Introduction ? la Modernize'( 1965...
...Considering the rapidity and brutality of capitalist development, the real surprise is not that so much of our architectural and constructive heritage has been destroyed, but that there is anything still left to preserve...
...8 Marxists have gener8There are two kinds of exceptions, which I plan to discuss in detail in the future...
...And yet, if his overall vision of modernity is true, why should the forms of community produced by capitalist industry be any more solid than any other capitalist product...
...In most ancient and medieval speculative thought, the whole world of sensuous experience appears illusory—the Hindu "veil of Maya"—and the true world is thought to be accessible only through transcendence of bodies, space, and time...
...The immense productive units inherent in modern industry will throw large numbers of workers together, will force them to depend on each other and to cooperate in their work—the modern division of labor requires intricate cooperation from moment to moment on a vast scale—and so will teach them to think and act collectively...
...To perpetuate it" would be, Marx says, "to decree universal mediocrity...
...the new and endlessly renewed modes of activity that the bourgeoisie brings into being...
...Its members present themselves as matter-of-fact and rational, not magical...
...Unlike the common people of all ages, who have been endlessly betrayed and broken by their devotion to their "natural superiors," modern men, washed in "the icy water of egotistical calculations," are free from deference to masters who destroy them, animated rather than numbed by the cold...
...Marx believes that the bourgeoisie really believe in this principle— that is, in an incessant, unrestricted flow of commodities in circulation, a continuous metamorphosis of market values...
...W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto (1960...
...I wanted to make these two worlds connect by discovering the underlying unity of life and experience that sustains them both...
...6 Another problem in Marx's dialectic of the free market is that it entails a strange collusion between bourgeois society and its most radical opponents...
...Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Keller, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (1973...
...Where is there a clear point of reference for the self's ultimate identity...
...Most of my citations from the Manifesto are drawn from Samuel Moore's classic translation (London: 1888), authorized and edited by Engels, and universally reprinted...
...After a few pages of this, we are exhilarated but perplexed...
...I It seemed bizarre that there should be no connection between them: after all, weren't they all thrown into the same modern world...
...I think we do, not only because he's there, but because he has something distinctive and important to say...
...The outcome of Marx's dialectic is that "the development of modern industry cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products...
...Independent peasants and artisans cannot compete with big capital and are forced to leave the land...
...They are beneficiaries of the bourgeois demand for perpetual innovation, which vastly expands the market for their products and skills, often 69 stimulates their creative audacity and imagination, and—if they are shrewd enough and lucky enough to exploit the perennial shortage of brains—enables them to escape the poverty of most workers...
...S. M. Lipset, The First New Nation (1963...
...but if his dialectic works out, it will be the virtues for which he praised the bourgeoisie that will bury it in the end...
...But radical thinkers and workers are free to see where the roads lead, 57 and to take them...
...Their secret—a secret they have managed to keep even from themselves—is that, behind their staid facades, they are the most violently destructive ruling class in history...
...The members of the bourgeoisie have alienated themselves from their own creativity because they cannot bear to look into the moral, social, and psychic abyss that their creativity opens up...
...The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe...
...The bourgeoisie," he begins, "has played a most revolutionary role in history," What is startling about Marx's next few pages—and his original readers, in 1848, must have been even more startled than we are today—is that he seems to have come not to bury the bourgeoisie but to praise it...
...He knew we must start where we are: psychically naked, stripped of all religious, aesthetic, moral haloes and sentimental veils, thrown back on our individual will and energy, forced to exploit each other and ourselves in order to survive...
...Their union will generate the collective energy that can fuel a new communal life...
...The poor and uprooted pour into cities, which grow almost magically—and catastrophically— overnight...
...next, in immense movements of people—to cities, to frontiers, to new lands— which the bourgeoisie has sometimes subsidized, sometimes brutally enforced, sometimes inspired...
...Note The literature on both modernization and modernism is immense, though the former has dropped off somewhat in the past decade, while the latter is still in the process of developing...
...2 And yet, the closer I got to Marx, the less this dualism made sense...
...We saw that even the most subversive ideas must manifest themselves through the media of the market...
...It will never be possible to overcome these contradictions unless we confront them directly and openly...
...He writes an impassioned, enthusiastic, often lyrical celebration of bourgeois works, ideas, and achievements...
...It is especially vivid and striking in the Communist Manifesto...
...reprinted with further discussion in his book, same title, 1975...
...We see this dialectical movement as much in the sphere of personal as in economic development: in a system where all situations and ideas, human values and relationships are volatile, how can capitalist forms of life— private property, wage-labor, exchangevalue, the insatiable pursuit of profit—alone hold still...
...Lear demands...
...Thus he hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity...
...Thus, for all his criticism and loathing of the bourgeois economy, he embraces enthusiastically the modern personality structure that this economy has produced...
...It is only now that Lear is fit to be what he claims to be, "every inch a king...
...It is as if the innate dynamism of the melting vision has run away with Marx, and carried him—and the workers, and us—far beyond the range of his intended plot, to a point where his revolutionary script will have to be radically reworked...
...Meanwhile, the industrial workers, terribly exploited, gradually begin to organize...
...Lionel Trilling, "The Modern Element in Modern Literature" (1961), reprinted with additional discussion in Beyond Culture (1965...
...Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their functions and their fate to tents and camps than to the "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals...
...Capital is concentrated in a few hands...
...Under pressure, every bourgeois, from the pettiest to the most powerful, is forced to innovate, simply in order to keep his business and himself afloat...
...It is modern capitalism, not modern art and culture, that sets and keeps the pot boiling—reluctant as capitalism may be to face the heat today...
...In all this we are on familiar ground...
...Meanwhile, those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most, to show us where we are and where we can begin to change our circumstances and ourselves...
...When we read about modernism, we find ourselves in the midst of an endless series of spiritual upheavals and cultural revolutions— the death of God, the theater of cruelty, Dada, jazz, the twelve-tone scale, Existentialism, abstract art, and on and on...
...54 ism as a deadweight that stifles the modernist spirit...
...First of all, Marx's indictment of the 70 19th-century artistic and scientific avantgardes cuts just as deeply against the twentieth-century Leninist "vanguards," who possess an identical (and, of course, equally groundless and self-deceptive) faith in their own powers of transcendence...
...But Marx also sees the virtue of a life without holy auras: it brings about a condition of spiritual equality...
...The scale of communications becomes worldwide, and mass media emerge...
...A more typical bourgeois pattern is to praise freedom when in opposition, and to repress it when in power...
...brilliant images succeed and blend into one another...
...First, those who have tried to act out an outright fusion of the two, to make revolutions simultaneously in art and in politics: e.g., the Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists and Constructivists of 1914-21...
...This, he says, is what human life comes down to in the end: the solitary and poor abandoned in the cold, while the nasty and brutish enjoy all the warmth that power can provide...
...instead, they get incorporated into the market, take on price tags, gain a new life as commodities...
...Marx's prose suddenly becomes luminous, incandescent...
...I will take the Manifesto as my text and explicate several of its images and ideas, to show how it expresses some of modernist culture's deepest insights and, at the same time, dramatizes some of its deepest inner contradictions...
...Marx would say that its basis is far more concrete and mundane: it is built into the banal everyday workings of the bourgeois economic order—an order that equates our human value with our market price, no more, no less, and that forces us to expend ourselves in pushing our price up as far as we can make it go...
...Even as they frighten everyone with fantasies of proletarian rapacity and revenge 5 Engels, just a few years earlier, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), was appalled to find that workers' housing, built by speculators for fast profits, was built to last only 40 years...
...The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and turned the family relation into a pure money relation...
...Now we must confront something even more perplexing: next to the Communist Manifesto, the whole body of literature in praise of capitalism, from Adam Ferguson to Milton Friedman, is remarkably lame, pale, empty of life...
...They must learn not to yearn 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...
...Yet their ingenuity might avoid this through a truly insidious innovation: a consensus of mutually enforced mediocrity, designed to protect each individual bourgeois from the risks of competition, and bourgeois society as a whole from the risks of change...
...But his paean is distinctive both in what it emphasizes and in what it leaves out...
...When Marx describes intellectuals as wage-workers, he is trying to make us see that modern culture is part of modern industry...
...A fusion of Marx and modernism would melt the toosolid body of Marxism—or at least thaw it out—but it would give modernist art and thought a new solidity and invest its creations with an unsuspected resonance and depth: it would reveal modernism as the realism of our time...
...Marx absorbs this developmental ideal from the German humanist culture of his youth, from the thought of Goethe and Schiller and their Romantic successors...
...Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, denounces "the uniform and deceptive veil of politeness" that covers his age, and says that "the good man is an athlete who loves to wrestle stark naked...
...68 disguises the intersubjective relations between men in a market society as purely physical, "objective," unalterable relations between things...
...For Lear, the naked truth is what a man is forced to face when he has lost everything that other men can take away except life itself...
...But he places its underworld in a worldly context, he shows its dark powers working in broad daylight, propelling a million factories, exchanges, mills, and banks: his vision brings this abyss close to home...
...Alone in the cold and, the wind and the rain, Lear develops the vision and courage to break out of his loneliness, to reach out to his fellowmen for mutual warmth...
...To the extent that such a policy is effective, doesn't it, however, betray the Marxian aim of free development for each and all...
...This passage is so arresting because, as we see Marx identifying himself with the critical force and insight of the bourgeoisie, and reaching out to tear the halo from modern intellectuals' heads, we realize that, in some sense, it is his own head that he is laying bare...
...Such knowledge seems to be too much for us: "man's nature cannot carry/Th'affliction, nor the fear...
...as much an invention of modern times as machinery itself...
...If being a "paid wagelaborer" is the antithesis of having a halo, how can Marx speak of the proletariat as a class of "new men," uniquely equipped to transcend the contradictions of modern life...
...But the cultural commodity market offers the only media in which dialogue on a public scale can take place: no idea can reach or change moderns unless it can be marketed and sold to them...
...The Metamorphosis of Values THE PROBLEM OF NIHILISM emerges again in Marx's next line: "The bourgeoisie has resolved all personal honor and dignity into exchange-value...
...The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate...
...C. E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization (1966...
...And yet, he is suggesting here, in some sense it is a bad faith, a self-deception...
...On the other hand, if it gives those energies free rein, mightn't the spontaneous flow of popular energy sweep away the new social formation itself...
...The great gift he can give us today, it seems to me, is not a way out of the contradictions of modern life, but rather a surer and deeper way into these contradictions...
...But the forces that shape and drive the economy cannot be compartmentalized and cut off from the totality of life...
...This society is driven by its unprincipled principle of free exchange to open itself to movements for radical change...
...Marx is confident that, once the ideas of revolution and communism become accessible to the masses, they will sell, and a "self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority" will come into its own...
...The members of the bourgeoisie, especially the most powerful, have always fought to restrict, manipulate, and control their markets...
...The ManJesto's first section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians," sets out to present an account of what is now called the process of modernization and sets the stage for what Marx believes will be its revolutionary climax...
...do we really need a modernist Marx, a kindred spirit of Eliot and Kafka and Gertrude Stein and Artaud, on top of all the rest...
...We might describe this conflict as a tension between Marx's "solid" and his "melting" visions 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...
...managed to live with, and even enjoy, the most subversive Marxist and modernist ideas—as the bejeweled Berlin audience of 1928 cheered Brecht's "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral"—comfortable in their nihilism, confident that they could exploit any challenge or change and make it pay...
...Marx shows how both these human possibilities are infused into the life of every modern man by the drives and pressures of the bourgeois economy...
...The inner life and energy of bourgeois development will sweep away the class that first brought it to life...
...After the Convergence I HAVE BEEN trying in this essay to define a space in which Marx's thought and the modernist tradition converge...
...Ironically, even the most splendid mansions of the richest capitalists would be 60 they themselves, through their inexhaustible dealing and developing, hurtle masses of men, materials and money up and down the earth, and erode or explode the foundations of everybody's lives as they go...
...Later on, modernists will produce a great array of cosmic and apocalyptic visions, visions of the most radiant joy and the bleakest despair...
...Insofar as these ideas attract and arouse people, they will expand and enrich the market, and so "increase capital...
...Next, those who experience modernism as a 71 ally ignored modernism, or done their best to repress it—out of fear, I suspect, that (in Nietzsche's phrase) if they look into the abyss, the abyss will start looking back into them...
...The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic THE CENTRAL DRAMA for which the Manifesto is famous is the development of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the struggle between them...
...This image evokes all the spirits of that dark medieval past our modern bourgeoisie is supposed to have buried...
...As he wanders with his royal fool, they meet a crazy beggar, stark naked, apparently even more wretched than he...
...Indeed, a communist nihilism might turn out to be far more explosive and disintegrative than its bourgeois precursor— though also more daring and original— because, while capitalism cuts the infinite possibilities of modern life with the limits of the bottom line, Marx's communism could launch the liberated self into immense, unknown human spaces with no limits at all...
...Stripped not only of political power, but of even the barest traces of human respect and dignity, he is thrown out of doors in the middle of the night at the height of a torrential and terrifying storm...
...BUT EVEN AS we honor the Manifesto as an archetype of modernism, we must remember that archetypal models serve to typify not only truths and strengths but also inner tensions and strains...
...Michael Walzer, "The Only Revolution: Notes on the Theory of Modernization" (Dissent, Fall 1964...
...When this is done, they will transform these volatile, explosive social forces into sources of joy and beauty for all, and bring the tragic history of modernity to a happy end...
...Here Marx describes the solid institutional core of modernity...
...the sense of being caught in a vortex in which all facts and values are whirled, exploded, decomposed, recombined...
...What is it that the members of the bourgeoisie are afraid to recognize in themselves...
...The first concerns the bourgeoisie's commitment to the unprincipled principle of free trade, whether in economics, politics, or culture...
...I have sometimes deviated from Moore, generally in the direction of more literalism and concreteness, or for the sake of a diction that is less Victorian and more vivid...
...Thus Marx lays out the polarities that will shape and animate the culture of modernism in the century to come: the theme of permanent revolution, infinite development, perpetual creation and renewal in every sphere of life...
...He is saying that the aura of holiness is suddenly missing, and that we can't understand ourselves in the present until we confront what is absent...
...a basic uncertainty about what is basic, what is valuable„ what is meaningful, even what is real...
...Even as Marx was discovering socialism, in the Paris of the 1840s, Gautier and Flaubert were developing their mystique of "art for art's sake," while the circle around Auguste Comte was constructing its own parallel mystique of "pure science...
...Marx, in fact, can tell us as much about modernism as it can tell us about him...
...But as time went by they learned, as usual, to adapt...
...Marx is appalled by the destructive brutalities that bourgeois nihilism brings to life, but he believes that it contains a hidden tendency to transcend itself...
...Marx's imagery projects, here as ever, a sense of wonder over the modern world: its vital powers are dazzling, overwhelming, beyond anything the bourgeoisie could have imagined, let along calculated or planned...
...Take an image like this: "All that is solid melts into air...
...We find this same narrowing of perspective in the counterrevolutionary Reflections of Edmund Burke: But now all is to be changed...
...He little suspected that this would become the archetypal pattern of construction in bourgeois society...
...Its foundations will be laid, ironically, by the bourgeoisie itself: "The progress of industry, whose inadvertent promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the workers through competition with their union [Vereinigung] through association...
...Thus modernism in the '70s, like "degenerate art" and "cultural Bolshevism" in the '30s, has played a prominent scapegoat's role...
...Until these changes take place—which could be a while—they are going to need a modernist culture to show them what they are doing and who they are...
...a flaring up of the most radical hopes, in the midst of their radical negations...
...That is what stripping away the halo means...
...With all the possibilities and necessities that bombard the self and all the desperate drives that propel it, how can anyone definitively define which ones are essential, and which merely incidental...
...unaccommodated man...
...The cosmic scope and visionary grandeur of this image, its highly compressed dramatic power, its vaguely apocalyptic undertones, the ambiguity of its point of view—the heat that destroys is also superabundant energy, an overflow of life—all these qualities are supposed to be hallmarks of the modernist imagination...
...Intellectuals occupy a peculiar position in the working class, one that generates special privileges, but also special ironies...
...Marx believes that the shocks and upheavals and catastrophes of life in bourgeois society enable moderns, by going through them, as Lear does, to discover who they "really are...
...But he understands better than any of his predecessors that the humanistic ideal of self-development grows out of the emerging reality of bourgeois economic development...
...Moreover, they are driven not only by a need to live, which they share with all men, but by a desire to communicate, to engage in dialogue with their fellowmen...
...Marx's bourgeois sorcerer in fact descends directly from two literary figures who haunted the imagination of his whole generation: Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1819) and Faust (Goethe's Faust, completed in 1831...
...But the pressures of bourgeois society are such that no one will pay them unless it pays to pay them—that is, unless their works somehow help to "increase capital...
...After the Revolution, "in the course of development," after wealth is redistributed, class privileges are wiped away, education is free and universal, then—so Marx prophesies at the Manifesto's climactic moment—then, at last, In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we will have an association in which the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all...
...At the same time, I have tried to read modernism in a Marxist way, to suggest how its characteristic energies, insights, and anxieties spring from the drives and strains of "modernized" economic life: from its insatiable pressure for growth and progress, its demands on everybody to exploit not only one's fellowmen but also oneself, its absorption of all values as commodities, the volatility and endless metamorphoses of all its market values, its pitiless destruction of everything and everyone it cannot use—so much of all the "premodern" worlds, but so much of itself and its own modern world as well—and its capacity to exploit crisis and chaos as a springboard for still more development, to feed itself on its own self-destruction...
...The affinities between Marx and the modernists are even clearer if we look at the whole of the sentence from which our image is drawn: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men...
...Its genius for activity expresses itself, first of all, in great works of physical construction—mills and factories, granaries, bridges, canals—these are the cathedrals of modernity...
...Writers on modernization project us into a world of power plants, steel mills, mass rallies and media events, growth rates, five-year plans...
...Might not these collectivities turn out to be, like everything else here, only temporary, provisional, built to obsolesce...
...This in turn means that any fullfledged bourgeois society must be a genuinely open society, not only economically but politically and culturally as well, so that people will be free to shop around and seek the best deals, in ideas, associations, laws, and social policies as well as in things...
...The unprincipled principle of free trade will force the bourgeoisie to grant even communists the 66 basic right that all businessmen enjoy, the right to offer and promote and sell their goods to as many customers as they can get...
...It was meant to be dynamic, to drive (and inspire) the person criticized to overcome not only his critics but himself, to propel both parties toward a new synthesis...
...To them I would say that although, indeed, a Marxist understanding would take this halo away, it could give them back something better in exchange: a heightened capacity to imagine and express the endlessly rich, complex, and ironic relationships between them and the "modern bourgeois society" they deny or defy...
...more interesting than the standard 19thcentury materialist assertion that God does not exist...
...We must note here a striking absence of worry as to what the naked human being will do or be...
...Intellectuals must recognize the depths of their own dependence— spiritual as well as economic dependence—on the bourgeois world they despise...
...Marx thinks and works in the tragic tradition: for him, the clothes are ripped off, the veils are torn away, the stripping process is violent and brutal...
...Marx, in a stirring, evocative paragraph, transmits the rhythm and drama of bourgeois activism: The bourgeoisie, in its reign of barely a hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive power than have all previous generations put together...
...This drive, Marx shows, is embedded in the everyday workings and needs of the bourgeois economy...
...The source of this drive is the paradoxically "unprincipled" principle of free trade...
...the sanctified figure is torn from the matrix of the human condition, split off inexorably from the needs and pressures that animate the men and women who surround it...
...The heart shows itself as clearly as the face...
...Their communism, when it comes, will appear as a kind of transparent garment, at once keeping its wearers warm and setting off their naked beauty, so that they can recognize themselves and each other in all their radiance...
...At this point it wouldn't be unreasonable to ask: Aren't there already more than enough interpretations of Marx...
...72 Even after such a revolution, they will still need it to show them what they were, could be, and might yet become...
...What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways that will dumbfound or horrify their creators...
...It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science [Mann der Wissenschaft],' into its paid wage-laborers...
...To give up the quest for transcendence is to erect a halo around one's own resignation, and to betray not only Marx but ourselves...
...This is a problem because, if the members of the bourgeoisie really don't give a damn about freedom, then they will do all they can to keep the societies they control closed against new ideas, and it will be harder than ever for communism to take root...
...not only describes a confrontation with a perplexing reality, but acts it out, forces it on the reader—and, indeed, on the writer too, for "die Menschen" are all in it together, at once subjects and objects of the pervasive process that melts everything solid into air...
...On the other hand, in the literature on modernism, Marx is not recognized in any way at all...
...This has been a central theme of Western culture since the Renaissance...
...Not their drive to exploit people, to treat them purely as means or (in economic rather than moralistic language) as commodities...
...But its very capacity for development enables it to negate its own inner negations: to nourish itself and thrive on opposition, to become stronger amid pressure and crisis than it could ever be in peace, to transform enmity into intimacy and attackers into inadvertent allies...
...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...
...In fact, this principle has generally been more honored in the breach than in the observance...
...First of all, both are attempts to evoke and to grasp a distinctively modern realm of experience...
...Production is increasingly centralized and rationalized in factories or vast agricultural estates run like factories...
...I meant to explore both the history of ideas—such ideas as "modern times," "modern society," "the modern predicament," and so on—and the human realities that these ideas were meant to grasp...
...anyone who does not actively change, on his own, will become a passive victim of changes draconically imposed by his rivals...
...This dialectic presents several problems...
...the last two essays can also be found in Rosenberg's collection, Act and Actor: Making the Sell (1970...
...I owe a great deal to his brilliant essays of 1949, "The Resurrected Romans" (reprinted in The Tradition of the New) and "The Pathos of the Proletariat" (in Howe, ed., The Essential Works of Socialism...
...he is not only describing, but evoking and enacting the desperate pace and frantic rhythm that capitalism imparts to every facet of modern life...
...They have produced vivid new images and paradigms of the good life as a life of action...
Vol. 25 • January 1978 • No. 1
