men and women who share the desire to “be themselves” to come together, first to fight against the forms of class, sexual and racial oppression that force everyone’s identity into rigid moulds and keep anyone’s self from unfolding; and next, to create Marx’s “association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Nevertheless, All That Is Solid, and what I’ve written here, have a much thicker density and a richer atmosphere than my earlier work. This is because I’ve tried increasingly to situate my exploration of the modern self within the social contexts in which all modern selves come to be. I’m writing more about the environments and public spaces that are available to modern people, and the ones that they create, and the ways they act and interact in these spaces in the attempt to make themselves at home. I’m emphasizing those modes of modernism that seek to take over or to remake public space, to appropriate and transform it in the name of the people who are its public. This is why so much of All That Is Solid is taken up with public struggles and encounters, dialogues and confrontations in the streets; and why I’ve come to see the street and the demonstration as primary symbols of modern life.
Another reason that I’ve written so much about ordinary people and everyday life in the street, in the context of this controversy, is that Anderson’s vision is so remote from them. He only has eyes for world-historical Revolutions in politics and world-class Masterpieces in culture; he stakes out his claim on heights of metaphysical perfection, and won’t deign to notice anything less. This would be all right, I guess, except that he’s so clearly miserable over the lack of company up there. It might be more fruitful if, instead of demanding whether modernity can still produce masterpieces and revolutions, we were to ask whether it can generate sources and spaces of meaning, of freedom, dignity, beauty, joy, solidarity. Then we would have to confront the messy actuality in which modern men and women and children live. The air might be less pure, but the atmosphere would be a lot more nourishing; we would find, in Gertrude Stein’s phrase, a lot more there there. Who knows—it’s impossible to know in advance—we might even find some masterpieces or revolutions in the making.
Marxism and modernism, for Berman, happened on the ground, in the world. In this sense, he was a “connected critic”. But for Berman it was not enough to address the specific material needs of a community; the critic had to also address its spiritual and emotional ones: the subterranean desires that, when unfulfilled, also limit the range and variety of our freedom. “The complaint against democratic capitalism,” he argued, “was not that it was too individualistic, but rather that it wasn’t individualistic enough: It forced every individual into competitive and aggressive impasses (‘zero-sum games’) which prevented any individual feelings, needs, ideas, energies from being expressed.” There was a need for a new moral basis for the Left’s critique of what capitalism and modern life did to people. As he put it in Politics of Authenticity, there needed to be “a Marxism with soul.”
“Marxism with soul,” I think, always had a double meaning for Berman. It meant a Marxism that moved beyond the structuralist analyses and historical determinism of its more orthodox readings of the tradition. But it also meant that Marxism needed to address the soul. It had to be modern, carrying with it the messy energy and rhythms of our particular moment. This meant engaging with everyday culture, in all of its messiness, wherever it emerged. Berman never shied away from this, in appearance or commitment: His hair and beard sprang out in curlicues of gray and black, his shirts were almost always wrinkled tie-dyes. He had Freud and Marilyn Monroe bobble-heads on his desk at home. His body, in later years, was ailing; this was clear to many of us. But even as Berman got older, he was always full of life and surprises. At one meeting, having fallen asleep, he woke up to one of Dissent’s standard discussions despairing over the “state of things.” Sitting up in his chair he proposed we adopt a new motto: “Keep on truckin’!”
Berman’s sense of humanist exuberance, his vision of a feeling Left, offered many around Dissent a view of a different kind of left politics. Social criticism as psychic complaint has a long history, going back as far as Emerson, and finding its twentieth-century expression in figures like William James, Randolph Bourne, Paul Goodman, Ralph Ellison, Susan Sontag, and Ellen Willis. But Berman was our practitioner. It was not only the creative self to which he was committed. He was committed to masterpieces and revolutions, to solidarity and liberation, to utopias that exceed present imagination. He was also a master at finding meaning in the face of ruin and emptiness. He insisted that politics not only be one of feeling but also one that addressed the world as it was. It must seek out that Leibnizian imperative: the best of all possible worlds.
After a Dissent meeting in Soho shortly before he died, Berman and I walked up to the 1 train together. As we trod Wooster’s cobblestones, Berman kept pointing at various buildings and remarking on the artists who once lived there. Everything, he said, changed in the 1980s. Art became expensive—to make, to buy, to view. The art community was replaced by a financial one. On cue, a group of young people passed: a clatter of heels, a scent of cologne. Embarrassed for my generation, I said, “It’s a shame it’s all gone.” “No,” Berman said, “it’s back. Look at all the young people.”
David Marcus
Caught Up in the Mix: Some Adventures in Marxism
Once a theatregoer buttonholed [Arthur] Miller and put the question to him: “What’s he selling? You never say what he’s selling.” Miller quipped, “Well, himself. That’s what’s in the valise.”
John Lahr, “Making Willy Loman”
Marxism has been part of me for all my life. Late in my 50s, I’m still learning and sorting out how. Until now, I think I’ve had only one real adventure in Marxism. Still, that one was formidable. It helped me grow up and figure out who I was going to be in the world. And it makes a good story. My father also had a Marxist adventure, one more tragic than mine. It’s only by working through his life that I’ll be in a position to take hold of my own. Life studies is one of the big things Marxism is for.
My father, Murray Berman, died of a heart attack in 1955, when he was just short of forty-eight, and when I wasn’t quite fifteen. He grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and in the Bronx, left school at twelve, and was thrown into “the business world”—that’s what he and my mother called it—pushing a truck in the garment center to help support his parents and nine kids in one room. He called it “the rack” and often said he was still on it. But the garment center’s friendly malevolence felt like home to him, and we would never leave that home.
Over the years, he graduated from outdoor schlepper to indoor schlepper (I guess it would be called stock clerk today) and then to various clerical and sales jobs. He was on the road a lot before I was born and when I was very young. For several years he worked, as both reporter and an advertising salesman, for Women’s Wear Daily. All those years are vague to me. But I know that in 1948, he and a friend from the Bronx made a great leap: They founded a magazine. Its theme, announced on the mast head, was “The garment industry meets the world.” My father and his friend Dave had little education and less capital but lots of foresight—the Yiddish word is sachel. Globalization in the garment center was an idea whose time was coming, and for two years the magazine thrived, selling ever more advertising space (my father’s specialty), which in capitalist economies is what keeps newspapers and magazines alive.
But then, suddenly, in the spring of 1950, there was no money to meet the payroll, and just as suddenly his friend Dave disappeared. My father took me to the Natural History Museum one Saturday morning; Saturday afternoon, we walked around the Upper East Side, searching for Dave. In his favorite Third Avenue bars, no one had seen him for two
