A Dialectical Humanism (Page 3)

Berman's perspective is fundamentally a people perspective. His is a quintessentially human odyssey: Like Bruce Springsteen, he insists upon the "human touch." Berman points out that Marx was on intimate terms with "real" people, too. There are plenty of different characters with lively voices in Capital, and Marx chronicled them with verve and skill, taking us back, in Berman's words, to the "glory days of the nineteenth-century novel." Some of Marx's vivid working-class characters we might recognize from Dickens and Balzac, his favorite scribes. Others we know today; we hear their voices resound in our daily newspapers. Their presence makes Marx's vision a vision we should care to remember and learn from.

Take one such character, Mary Anne Walkley, not explicitly mentioned by Berman, but whose lot we know. She was a 20-year-old garment worker who, back in 1863, toiled on average sixteen-and-a-half hours a day without a break, often as much as thirty hours straight. The "flow of her failing 'labor-power,'" Marx quips, "is maintained by occasional supplies of sherry, port and coffee." One time, Mary Anne was busy "conjuring up magnificent dresses for the noble ladies invited to the ball in honor of the newly imported Princess of Wales." After twenty-six-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted toil, carried out in a small, stifling sweatshop, with thirty other girls, Mary Anne fell ill on a Friday and was dead by Sunday, "without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having finished off the bit of finery she was working on." "Death from simple overwork," was the verdict in the following day's newspaper.

On March 8, 1997--on International Women's Day--Carmelita Alonzo suffered a similarly gruesome fate, working fourteen hours a day at a Philippines factory, stitching garments for the Gap. Meanwhile, that same day, over at a "House of Terror" in Tae Kwang Vina in Vietnam, which makes shoes for Nike, a dozen young women machinists, each earning about $40 per month, were somewhat luckier, only collapsing from heat exhaustion. And in Tangerang, a grim factory town near Jakarta, Yunianti, a 24-year-old woman, was pocketing $24 a month making outsoles for Nike sneakers in a small, badly ventilated room, with no toilet or drinking facilities. She was regularly abused by supervisors and suffering chronic respiratory problems. Closer to home but part of the same capitalist universe, nineteenth-century sweatshop conditions persist in cities like Los Angeles and New York; child labor, too, is on the up in the First and Third World; exploitation rates intensify everywhere; and postmodern capitalism, forever "primitively accumulating," takes us rapidly back to the future.

These flagrant breaches of human rights are slowly prompting organized responses. Workers of the world are beginning to fight back: realigning at the core, bristling on the margins, striving to join hands. Just like the old guy said. The emancipatory potential of Marxism, with "its capacity to configure the world beyond the daily grind of selling one's labor to stay alive, needs," accordingly, "to be renewed." In an odd sense, globalization both closes down and opens up possibilities for labor, creating an expanded and more concentrated proletariat, as well as a whole new geopolitical terrain for collective action and cooperative power. Thus as a fitting finale to Adventures in Marxism, Berman propels the Manifesto into the next century. He returns to Marx's prophetic text 150 years after it first burst onto the scene. A lot that was then politically solid has since melted into Third Way air. But Marx's "melody," Berman believes, remains "unchained." And its refrain can still make people stand up and sing.

Berman sings three cheers for the demise of Marx's iconic status. Since 1989, he says, we've been presented with a new, ironic Marx, a mortal Marx, somebody who now stands at ground level, with real people, like you and me. This ironic voice takes on renewed vigor and rigor, helping us to see how the bad things and the good things in the world spring from the same place; it shows how radical thought can escape doldrums and dualisms and gather visions and energy for better times that may lie ahead. It can even help us make these better times for ourselves. As blue- and white-collar workers continue to get downsized, as intellectuals go on losing their reverent "halos" and join the ranks of the "modern working class," and as the spread-sheet guys and efficiency experts try to take over the world, more and more people must sell themselves piecemeal, as commodities, and feel the vicissitudes of competition and all the fluctuations of the market for their labor power. Berman laments "the need to carve up your personality," to look in the mirror and think, "What have I got that I can sell?"

Berman suggests that Marx had long-range faith in the working class because "lots of people in this class don't know it." Many "identify happily with the owners of capital," yet "have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are." Other workers, "lacking diplomas, not dressed so nicely, working in cubicles, not offices, may not get the fact that many of the people who boss them around are really in their class, and share their vulnerability." The big question, then, remains: "How can this reality be put across to people who don't get it, or can't bear it?" This, Berman admits, "is what organizing and organizers are for," to get to the point "where Raskolnikovs won't rot on Avenue D, and where Svidrigailovs won't possess thousands of bodies and souls." And should we ever get to that point and then "come to see that our inner bad guys will never go away," at least "our steady work will have given us experience, and taught us how to cooperate for our mutual self-defense."

Adventures in Marxism is a fine collection, a lovely addition to anybody's bookshelf. Marshall Berman is one of our liveliest and most generous interpreters of Marx. Vagabond and eclectic, to be sure, but always honest and brimming with ideas and romance. He can help us learn to create ourselves while we try to change the world.

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