Marshall Berman, 1940-2013

The political theorist Marshall Berman died yesterday at the age of 73 in New York, the city he lived in all his life (he was born in the South Bronx and would later write furiously yet lyrically about the near-destruction of great swathes of that part of the city in the 1970s and early 1980s; Berman, it's worth noting, was writing about urban ruins decades before people started noticing what had been done to Detroit in the same period).

His first book, The Politics of Authenticity, was published in 1970, but Berman is best known for All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, his magisterially digressive history of the "experience of modernity", which appeared in 1982 and was reissued by Verso in 2010. As befits a map of Berman's unusually well-stocked mind, All That Is Solid ... roams widely (from Goethe's Faust, via Baudelaire, to the depredations visited on New York by the city planner Robert Moses), but it is, first of all, a record of his love affair with Marx. Berman once described the experience of picking up a copy of Marx's Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844 in a bookshop when he was still an undergraduate at Columbia University: "Suddenly I was in a sweat, melting, shedding clothes and tears, flashing hot and cold. I rushed to the front. 'I've got to have this book!'"

The title of his masterpiece is taken from a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto:

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Berman called the Manifesto the "first great modernist work of art". Like Edmund Wilson before him—who was acutely attuned to the "Dickensian" cadences of Capital—he understood that the textures of Marx's prose are indissociable from its message. Here he is writing about the passage above in 1999:

"Marx is not the first communist to admire capitalism for its creativity; that attitude can be found in some of the great utopian socialists of the generation before him, like Saint-Simon and Robert Owen. But Marx is the first to invent a prose style that can bring that perilous creativity to life. His style in the Manifesto is a kind of Expressionist lyricism. Every paragraph breaks over us like a wave that leaves us shaking from the impact and wet with thought. This prose evokes breathless momentum, plunging ahead without guides or maps, breaking all boundaries, precarious piling and layering of things, ideas and experiences."

Berman's own prose frequently achieves similar effects as he strains simultaneously to honour and to anatomise the vertiginous experience of modernity ("To be modern ... is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintigration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction").

I met Berman once, three years ago, when he came to London to publicise the new edition of All That Is Solid. There was a great sadness in his eyes (the writer Benjamin Kunkel, who knew Berman from meetings of Dissent magazine's editorial board, described him on Twitter today as a "Marxist w/ sad eyes") which may just have been jet lag—he was straight off the plane from New York—but I prefer to think of it as the memory of a historic defeat that he expected one day soon to be avenged ("At the dawn of the twentieth century there were workers who were ready to die with the Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it"). We talked about Marx—"One of the interesting things about Marx [is] the contradictions. It was too bad there wasn't anyone else as smart as him around"—but also about New York, especially what had happened to it under what he would have called "late capitalism".

"Once a city is gentrified, the people who most love it can least afford it. And I don't know how to overcome that irony. Clearly the housing market has to be regulated, but the left hasn't figured out how to do that. All I would say is: please do it, before gentrification becomes total."

A nightmare of total gentrification—that's actually a pretty good description of Manhattan today. Berman, though, lived there until the very end.

"We live in a neighbourhood on the Upper West Side," he told me. "We got there at a time of 'white flight', in 1965 (that's when I found an apartment for my mother). Five years later it was a completely different ball game and there's no way that either my mother or I could have afforded it. When my mother left the Bronx, she didn't want to go to Long Island or New Jersey' she wanted to move to Manhattan."