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

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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:

a b c Marshall, Berman (1982). "Part I. Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development; Epilogue: The Faustian and Pseudo-Faustian Age". All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Penguin Group Penguin Books USA Inc. ISBN 0-14-010962-5. This continuous drive to cause change, upheaval and impermanence by the Bourgeois elites is a part of the mechanics of Modernity. Second, you suggest that the “all solid” translation has misled commenters and readers into thinking that Marx and Engels were expressing wistfulness about “the world we have lost.” But has the translation actually misled people in this way? To put it perhaps too bluntly, can anyone with even a dim memory of having read The Communist Manifesto in school possibly think that Marx and Engels were nostalgic about the vanished pre-capitalist world? Doesn’t the Manifesto, in some passage or other, praise capitalism and bourgeois society for having swept away what Marx refers to as “medieval rubbish”? (Or is that in The 18th Brumaire or somewhere else?) Marshall Berman claims that while the true Faustian man is selfless and benevolent, there are many projects which may seem Faustian which are in fact "theaters of cruelty & absurdity". To cite some examples he brings up: (i) Stalin's White Sea Canal (ii) Failures of Soviet Collectivization (iii) Shah of Tehran (iv) Peking.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]

Marshall Berman begins this book by making a literary comparison between Goethe's Faust and the process and mode of Modernity claiming that "the whole movement of the work enacts the larger movement of Western society [4]". In Berman's view, the three 'metamorphoses' which Faust passes through (the Dreamer, the Lover, and the Developer) express the journey of Modernity. En la solapa dice que el autor la escribió a lo largo de 10 años, y creo que su único "pero", y de ahí la caída de la quinta estrella, es un pequeño bajón de ritmo y argumento alrededor de la página 200, y que dura unas 60 páginas, en las que al autor, puede que por ese dato de su escritura prolongada en el tiempo, deambula, y parece perdido, sin saber donde llevar la historia. Su prosa sigue siendo excelente pero la historia se le atasca un poco. El desastre de Chernóbil y la descomposición de la Unión Soviética le sirven al autor como excusa y escenario (nunca cómo protagonistas) para hablar de cómo las personas gestionamos la soledad, el individualismo, el abuso de poder, los sueños rotos, el sálvese quien pueda, el sacrificio redentor... 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.”Well, perhaps you’ll say, so what? No one has ever accused me of an allergy to pedantry, but I think this is not just a case of the quibbles. On the contrary, the common (“All that is solid…”) translation has, I want to argue, produced a quite serious misunderstanding of Marx and Engels’s meaning among English speakers, and that misunderstanding has radiated out well beyond self-identified Marxists and shaped broader conceptions of how capitalism has changed society and how capitalist societies differ from pre-capitalist societies. 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. 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]" If you are reading this book” professor Dorling tells us “[y]ou are very unlikely to be homeless, or even to have been homeless”. Even if that claim is factually true, it is disappointing that this is Dorling’s horizon. The book's argument chimes with what we’d expect a person who makes that sort of statement to say. In Part II, Marshall Berman tells us that he will reveal to us the way in which "the modern spiritual quest reaches its fulfillment". [11] He will do this by showing us how Karl Marx's work echoed and reflected the sense of wholeness which Goethe's Faust depicted of Modernity. The reason he believes it is necessary to show us the inherent wholeness of Modernity through Marx's work is because Berman believes a dualistic view of Modernity has prevailed in which "Current thinking has broken into two different compartments, hermetically sealed off from one another: "modernization" in economics and politics, "modernism" in art, culture and sensibility. Berman believes it is Karl Marx's work which most comprehensively captures the whole rather than the duality, claiming, "Specifically, he can clarify the relationship between modernist culture and the bourgeois economy and society - the world of "modernization"-from which it [modernism] has sprung. We will see that they have far more in common than either modernists or bourgeoisie would like to think". [11] 1. The Melting Vision and Its Dialectic [ edit ]

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. What is distinctive in Dorling's argument can be found in one of the clearer graphs included in the book, an image of "The value of property in Britain by urban area, 2012", where a wildly bloated London dwarfs the rest of the country, whose towns and cities resemble planets orbiting the sun. Here is the real problem, and the simple demand to "Build more!" comes with no guarantee of solving it – quite possibly the reverse, as "building more may result in the wealthy owning even more houses, more families renting some of those homes, but more being empty at any one time and in greater future inequality". tone of the book is in turn sinister, world-weary, and moving. It’s not pointy like an action or drama book would be — it’s smooth like water. This is fitting when you consider that the characters’ main antagonists are things that inhabit their or other’s bodies like a cancer. Much more interesting, to me, than Chernobyl was the sensitive and honest love story, accurate enough to strike a nerve. A new translation was offered in 2010 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Gray-t.html In what follows Faust and Mephisto clear land and develop the world by guiding an industrial labor force. Many die, land is destroyed, and the indigenous people removed, but at the end, Faust finds himself standing on an artificial hill, "He knows he has made people suffer (“Human sacrifices bled, / Tortured screams would pierce the night. .-.”). But he is convinced that it is the common people, the mass of workers and sufferers, who will benefit most from his great works. In a sense, for Goethe, Faust 'The Developer' is the hero of the tragedy of Modernity. And as the book comes to a close there is a final drama which tragedizes Goethe's work of art.The book follows the story of several characters: a kid deported after Chernobyl disaster, a doctor sent to the event, his ex-wife and her 9 years old nephew. They have to deal with the soviet life, the imposed silence and the threat of being imprisoned. While this is a strong character driven novel, it is not the personal but political transgressions that stood out for me. All that is Solid Melts into Air is set in a time where the Iron Curtain is beginning to collapse; things are drastically changing and then the disaster involving the Chernobyl Power Plant throws the people into civil unrest. While the book focuses on a few characters the overall theme is one of class struggles. The Russian people struggling against the Soviet government; the fear and repression rules stronger than the radioactive atmosphere. An interesting concept considering the communist society that Marx wrote about was nothing like the political government at the time. With the return of Dave to frontline politics and James Cleverly displacing the vengeful but weak Suella Braverman, there has been a sense among Westminster watchers that something has changed. The policy agenda hasn't. The new Home Secretary is apparently keen on making sure the Rwanda deal happens and the deportations begin as soon as possible. In time for May, perhaps? What we're seeing the return of is not "sensible politics", which have never really existed, but an attempted restoration of the pre-Brexit vibe economy.

Berman uses Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust as a literary interpretation of modernization, through the processes of dreaming, loving and developing. In the second section he uses Marxist texts to analyze the self-destructive nature of modernization. In the third section French poetry (especially Charles Baudelaire) is used as model of modernist writing, followed by a selection of Russian literature ( Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, Nikolai Gogol, and Osip Mandelstam) in the fourth section. The book concludes with some notes on modernism in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s. [3] New York City's subway map is said to have been designed in accordance with Berman's vision of modernity, presented in the book. Berman recalls: "It was a thrill when the man who had designed New York's marvelous Subway Map came up to me on Broadway, and said that all the time he was putting his map together, he had tried to keep my book in mind." [3] Part I. Goethe's Faust: The Tragedy of Development [ edit ] None of this answers the why question. The truth is, justifications change like the weather. Vanity. Making the case for critical loyalty to Labour and the labour movement. Promoting the sociological imagination. Challenging misconceptions, misrecognition and stupidity. Offering original takes you won't find elsewhere. All good reasons. But the real reason, ultimately, is I enjoy it.In the first metamorphosis, Marshall compares Faust to being in the phase of the Dreamer. Here, Faust is a successful and intellectually gifted man detached from the world. An esteemed doctor, lawyer, theologian, philosopher, scientist, professor and college administrator, Faust is an accomplished person. And yet, he feels that all his successes have been hollow and he talks endlessly about how he hasn't lived at all.

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