All That Is Solid: How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times, and What We Can Do About It

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All that is Solid Melts into Air tells the story of the Soviet Union in 1986. A nine year-old piano prodigy continuously falling victim to bullies, a surgeon throwing himself into his work to avoid the emotion pain of a failed marriage, a former dissident struggling to free herself from political constraints. Everyday Russians trying to make life work in this repressed state; that was until a disaster in Ukraine changes things. Yet, to look at Dave, Osborne, and Clegg, their horrific legacy was delivered with an observance of the rules of the constitutional game. They were courteous in public, paid lip service to the rule of law, pretended their policies were driven by evidence and not ideology (and certainly not interests). They gave off a vibe of being at ease in office, of having a plan for dealing with the problems they defined and definitely exacerbated, and all three were accomplished performers in the media. Not that it mattered much. They too were beneficiaries of the real blue wall - the barrier collectively erected by the right wing press against criticism and democratic pressures. Marrying this to always being seen in a suit and never in casual clothing, and how comfortable they were in front of TV camera,s they gave off vibes of competence. They had their long-term economic plan, even though it didn't exist. They knew what they were doing, when the indices for GDP and living standards showed they did not. Their accomplishment was seeding a structure of feeling that appealed to just enough people to win the Tories their second term and a slim majority. But what Berman believes more deeply is invoked by Marx is Shakespeare's King Lear, specifically when he is thrown out into the tempest and strips himself naked embracing his true, cold and carnal animal self. It is in this state of primitive weakness that "they [the proletariat] will come together to overcome the cold that cuts through them all." [11]

If I were interested in finding out what it was like to be a peasant or artisan or town-dweller or vagabond or monk or nun or whatever in a particular part of Europe in the high Middle Ages (say, circa 1200 or so), and specifically what kinds of economic and/or social arrangements governed one’s existence, and whether they seemed permanent and fixed by a divinely ordained dispensation or open to some kind of challenge under certain circumstances, I would not turn to Marx and Engels for the answers. I just don’t think they’re very interested in those questions. She then has a go over the Palestinian solidarity marches, showing no contrition for her role in Saturday's white riot. Braverman says she's "become hoarse in urging you to ban the hate marches [sic]" on grounds that they, not she, threaten "community cohesion". Again, she complains about his weakness and refusal to use his office to do things. I.e. Turn the country into an outright authoritarian hellhole in which Braverman has free rein to prosecute and persecute any groups she wishes to. Berman than questions this, stating the obvious paradox of Marx's assumptions, saying, "Thus, simply by reading the Manifesto closely and taking its vision of modernity seriously, we arrive at serious questions about Marx's answers." The problem is that if Modernity and the ruling Bourgeois have created an environment of constant change where things become obsolete before they can ossify, than how will a permanent Communist Society ever exist? I would like to add to this interesting discussion. The problem of translation is ubiquitous across scholarship. Example: The translation of de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxieme Sexe by H.M. Parshley is another example. The English translation of The Second Sex has been contested for decades producing realms of critique. This what de Beauvoir scholar Margaret Simon has to say about it: The main focus which Berman wishes us to glean from this Part I (which will set the tone for the rest of the book), is that Faust is the epitome of Modernity in that he is like a "sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells. [4]"Here, Berman analyzes a poem by Baudelaire called, "The Eyes of the Poor". He uses it and its contextualization to discuss the modernization happening around Baudelaire which he is reflecting in his Modernism. Berman notes the effects of "the Napoleon-Haussmann boulevards", a project of urban (re)development which radically altered social relations via material. That is the only way, I think to read the sentence as a whole, which emphasizes not some sort of capitalist destruction of a permanent way of life, but of capitalism’s ability to dispel the myths that could interfere with its operation: “ Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen.” Goethe’s Faust shows that transformation—modernism—envelops the entire physical, social, and moral world. This work, according to Berman, is representative of the beginning of modernism, a period from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. The second phase of modernism, which extended from the revolutionary 1790’s until the end of the nineteenth century, was marked by a sense of change in personal, social, and political life as well as by the sense of living simultaneously in modern and premodern worlds. Those who lived in this second epoch of modernism had memories of the world before modernism while living in a world that was completely modern. Berman says that this period yielded the clearest definitions of modernism, the classic being Karl Marx’s vision in the Kommunistisches Manifest (1848; Communist Manifesto):All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men. Another issue I had with it was that I didn't feel like it was happening in the '80s—with a few exceptions, the majority of the book felt very modern. As someone born in Kyiv in the '80s, I can tell you the setting didn't feel right to me. The book did have a few powerful moments, particularly the parts that had to do with the tragedy and its effects directly, but I feel like I shouldn't have been looking forward to the author talking about the nuclear disaster just because I was bored otherwise. My favorite chapter, by far, was the one that described the incident—the beautiful writing combined with the horror of the event had a heartbreaking, yet almost poetic effect on me. In the Communist Manifesto, Berman states that Marx believed that Modernity itself and the Bourgeois revolution will reveal the cold truth of reality and leave men naked. [10] While Marx has somewhat rosy visions of the great emancipation that will occur when the proletariat understand what it means to be cold and naked in the storm of the world, Berman questions this affirming that there are many other pathways Modernity might take, citing the pessimism of British Conservativism via Burke, and also the positivity of the " philosophes" via Rousseau& Montesquieu.

a b c d e f g Marshall, Berman (1982). "Part I. Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development; Second Metamorphosis: The Lover". All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc. ISBN 0-14-010962-5. In the meantime, Gretchen's traditional world community has found out about her changing faith and turns on her with "cruelty and vindictive fury." When she turns to the church to be saved, she only receives is "the day of wrath, that day shall dissolve the world in fire [6]". Marshall Berman makes the insight here that, "Once, perhaps, the Gothic vision might have offered mankind an ideal of life and activity, of heroic striving toward heaven; now, however, as Goethe presents it at the end of the eighteenth century, all it has to offer is dead weight pressing down on its subjects, crushing their bodies and strangling their souls. [6]"

An interpretation of the same text (Goethe's Faust) by Gyorgy Lukacs stated that the last act of Faust is a tragedy of capitalist development in its early industrial phase. Berman strongly disagrees stating that while Mephistopheles conforms well to the capitalist entrepreneur, Goethe's Faust is "worlds away" with "the deepest horrors of Faustian development spring from its most honorable aims and its most authentic achievements. If we want to locate Faustian visions and designs in the aged Goethe’s time, the place to look is not in the economic and social realities of that age but in its radical and Utopian dreams; and, moreover, not in the capitalism of that age, but in its socialism. [10]". This essay depicts the spirit of modernity and the process of modernization through the lens of experience in St. Petersburg. Berman states that historically, St. Petersburg has been a cosmopolitan center for Russia and Moscow has represented the Russian orthodoxy, tradition and lineage.