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

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Finally, Berman closes the text on a personal note. He describes modernism in New York, the city in which he was raised. He describes the positives and negatives of modern innovations in the city, and how they impacted himself and others on a personal level. Update this section! 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 book is about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but there’s only one chapter about the accident itself. The rest is about its effects on a cluster of characters. There is a surgeon, his ex-wife, her sister, the sister’s son (Yevgeni), a boy who is one of the surgeon’s patients, and the boy’s family. In this section, Marshall Berman brings into question the possibility of there ever existing a permanent Communist Party. Berman makes the analysis that Marx is proposing that, "The worker's communal bonds, generated inadvertently by capitalist production, will generate militant political institutions, unions that will oppose and finally overthrow the private, atomistic framework of capitalist social relations." [11]

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.The end comes fast and tragedy strikes Gretchen placing her in a cell to be executed (her baby had died and she was blamed as a murderess). Faust tries to save her from the prison but she simply refuses, her Christian tradition and visions of her mother barring her way to escape. Introduction: Modernity – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow I. Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development Housing should be about the long term, about provision, not profit.” (Amen!) Among the solutions Dorling suggests are the following: increased wages, rent control, incremental council tax bands all the way up to Z, the decriminalization of squatting, and second homes being taxed at a much higher rate. But all of these practical changes imply a much greater societal shift: a change of heart and of focus for a government that is currently (as far as we can tell) by and for the rich. The second metamorphosis focuses on the relationship of love and separation between the new becoming world of the Faustian Bargain, and the old dying world of stagnancy. Marshall Berman here argues that Faust's passionate love and tragedy with Gretchen "will dramatize the tragic impact - at once explosive and implosive - of modern desires and sensibilities on a traditional world. [6]"

Which makes the selection shenanigans in Croydon all the more interesting. The Croydon East constituency has been resurrected following the Tories' boundary review, and is a dead cert win for Labour at the next election. The CLP for the new seat doesn't exist yet, and so London region - a notoriously factional structure - imposed interim officers to decide the long list and the short list. Party democracy, such as it is, was entirely circumvented. As a result, four candidates got the rubber stamp. These included one Joel Bodmer, who happens to be a close ally of Steve Reed, the Croydon North MP and Starmer's shadow for DEFRA. Like Reed, Bodmer has a chequered history with the local Labour Party who, you might recall, bankrupted the council after turning the local authority into a property speculator. The rest of Braverman's letter is a long complaint about how these unilaterally declared policies went nowhere. "I wrote you letters", she whinges, "but you never answered them!". She moans about how robust legislation wasn't in place that would put the disgusting Rwanda scheme on a firm footing, and how Sunak wasn't interested in pursuing this further/ He was seemingly content to leave it to the fates or good fortune. Instead, the government were thwarted in the courts. This should have been taken as a warning, but nothing more has been done to save the scheme ahead of the Supreme Court's imminent decision on Wednesday. As such, Braverman concludes that her former boss has "no appetite for doing what is necessary, and therefore no real intention of fulfilling your pledge to the British people". Ouch. Although I haven’t said much about the book, if you've waded through my rancor then I can safely recommend it to you. To conclude, here is a quote that sets the current housing crisis neatly in wider context:Sunak has won the day by keeping the fall out of Braverman from the main headlines, but is it going to make any difference to Tory prospects? No. Dave destroyed his cache with liberal-inclined Tory voters by delivering a Leave vote in the referendum, and then leaving others to clean up his mess. Nor are right wingers going to look at his return with favour. The never not ridiculous Andrea Jenkyns was hardly full of praise in her no confidence letter. And you can't imagine the Tory base being full of unalloyed enthusiasm, given it was he who "forced" many of them to support UKIP in 2015. He was woke before wokery was a glimmer in the Tory culture warrior's eye. Marx & Engels (1888). "I. Bourgeois and Proletarians". Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by Moore, Samuel. While Berman has reconstructed a perceptive, three-stage history of modernism, he has given few clues as to how modernism works. He has shown the character of modernisms past and present, but he has not shown why and how the worlds of Goethe and Marx led to the world of Robert Moses. Without knowing how one era led to another, one is still at the mercy of modernism. One becomes like an alcoholic who knows he has a problem but does not know why. He might be able to alter some of the symptoms by a sheer act of will, but without understanding how his mind works, he cannot channel his energies in a different, and perhaps more constructive, way. Berman has shown that modernism has taken certain forms in the past, but not how and why it has done so. Think about the difference between saying that an object is solid and saying that it is standing. Solidity is related to density—its antonym is hollow—and it evokes (in my mind) a connotative register of stability and weight, of imperturbability. What is solid is durable, is unlikely—apart from some extreme and unusual force—to be destroyed or transformed. It is, if not permanent, at least very unlikely to change. Berman further makes the point that this Faustian Model is shared by both Capitalist& Socialist, Developing& Developed models of development, underpinning them in a sense.

Die Bourgeoisie kann nicht existieren, ohne die Produktionsinstrumente, also die Produktionsverhältnisse, also sämtliche gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse fortwährend zu revolutionieren. Unveränderte Beibehaltung der alten Produktionsweise war dagegen die erste Existenzbedingung aller früheren industriellen Klassen. Die fortwährende Umwälzung der Produktion, die ununterbrochene Erschütterung aller gesellschaftlichen Zustände, die ewige Unsicherheit und Bewegung zeichnet die Bourgeoisepoche vor allen anderen [11] aus. Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. His main point here is that "many contemporary ruling classes, right-wing colonels and left-wing commissars alike, have shown a fatal weakness (more fatal to their subjects, alas, than to themselves) for grandiose projects and campaigns that incarnate all Faust’s gigantism and ruthlessness without any of his scientific and technical ability, organizational genius or political sensitivity to people’s real desires and needs. Millions of people have been victimized by disastrous development policies, megalomaniacally conceived, shoddily and insensitively executed, which in the end have developed little but the rulers’ own fortunes and powers."

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a b c d e Marshall, Berman (1982). "Part I. Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development; First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer". All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc. ISBN 0-14-010962-5.