A Dialectical Humanism (Page 2)

Indeed, Babel was as intimately acquainted with sadistic Cossack officers as he was with Jewish mystic visionaries, figures like Gedali, solemn old men with little gray beards. If we look close enough, we find Babel's and Berman's Marxist adventures damned to both worlds, frantically oscillating back and forth, never quite belonging in either. "You do not know what you love, Gedali," says one Cossack. "I will shoot at you, and then you will find out, I cannot do otherwise than shoot, because I am the revolution." But Gedali remains "the founder of an unrealizable International," a "revolution of good deeds and good men." Perplexed, Gedali asks the army commander, "Where is the joy-giving revolution?"

Plainly, Berman still believes Marx to be the messenger of this joy-giving revolution. As ever with Berman, the conviction is up-close and personal. His adventure in Marxism goes back decades, to Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949: "The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell," cries Willy Loman's neighbor Charlie. Berman works through this proclamation, first via his father--who had a tiny garment business in the Bronx but who died of a heart attack in 1955 after his partner ran off with the firm's earnings--then via Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

The young Marx's enigmatic essays struck the similarly precocious Berman as some kind of cosmic epiphany, showing him the best way to avenge familial violation, laying bare the real perpetrator: the systemic nature of class oppression and injustice and what money does to one's soul. Hereafter the fledgling radical became a converted Marxist humanist. "The thing I found so striking in Marx's 1844 essays," Berman says, "and which I did not expect to find at all, was his feeling for the individual." "Those early essays articulate the conflict between Bildung and alienated labor...[Bildung] embraces a family of ideas like 'subjectivity,' 'finding yourself,' 'growing up,' 'identity,' 'self-development,' and 'becoming who you are.' Marx situates this ideal in modern history and gives it a social theory."

In the Manuscripts, Marx affirms the primacy of "free-conscious activity" in the "species-character" of human beings. Marx tells us, just in case we forgot, how capitalism restricts the parameters of free individual development and how private-property relations "makes us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital." Money, too, overturns all individuality, and makes what is yours "for sale": "the extent to the power of money is," says Marx, "the extent of my power." Money is the yardstick for all personal worth, and it overwhelms true human subjectivity and authenticity; it separates people from other people and people from themselves. It is indeed the universal measure of value.

In another extract from the 1844 essays, called "Alienated Labor," Marx goes on to illustrate how workers are "alienated" or "estranged" from their activity and product and from their fellow workers. A worker, Berman notes, quoting Marx, "mortifies his body and ruins his mind"; he "feels himself only outside his work, and in his work...feels outside himself"; he is "at home only when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home. His labor therefore is not free, but coerced; it is forced labor." As Berman makes apparent, "Marx is unique in his grasp of what the rack is made up of...in the Communist Manifesto and Capital, you have to look for it. In the 1844 Manuscripts, it's in your face."

And yet, the continuity between this existential Marx and the mature, political-economic Marx is unbroken growth. Berman has no truck with any Althusserian "rupture"; he sees no separation between an "ideological" and "scientific" Marx. Marx's trek from "alienation" in 1844 to "fetishism" in 1867 is a perspectival shift, not an epistemological one. And Berman emphasizes as much in a chapter called "Freedom and Fetishism"--one of the least satisfying offerings of his book. Originally penned when he was a graduate student in 1963, under Isaiah Berlin's guidance, it reveals a writer struggling to find his voice. That rich, textured style and lyricism he'd later make his own isn't quite there yet. Nevertheless, here Berman suggests that "Marx is constantly making the point that everything in [capitalism] is under 'illusions of the epoch,' is dominated by 'fetishism,' and hence is unfree." Worker and capitalist alike are condemned to the grind of necessity, to the monomania of accumulation for accumulation's sake, of production for production's sake. Both are fooled by an illusion of freedom.

The illusion--the fetishism--is materially real enough. Yet Marx insists that workers keep abreast of the bigger perspective: His section on the "fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof," in Volume One of Capital, suggests that bits of the puzzle are missed when reality is viewed merely perceptually, at the level of appearances. Indeed, for Marx, there's also an imperceptible realm at play, a world of processes and social relations, operative at different spatial and temporal scales, which become, in bourgeois society, the "mist-enveloped region" of relations between things. Thus market and exchange relations throw a veil over human relationships, cut off free conscious activity, objectify, thingify, reify and alienate ties and activities between actual people.

The fetishism, Marx and Berman concur, requires puncturing: "Only a 'world-historical class,' one whose interests and ideals are fused," Berman says, "is capable of decisively enlarging the scope of freedom for all. Marx saw the proletariat as the only group in his society that had any chance of becoming 'world-historical.'" While the working class's role is obviously paramount here, so too is the effort made by intellectuals, made by the poet, the thinker, the person of science, who can make a "special contribution" toward this world-historical project. Leftist intellectuals, especially, need to ally with the working class. But we can do this only if we learn to read the signs of Capital together with the "signs in the street." The journey isn't just To the Finland Station; it's to Grand Central Station as well.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.