Adventures in Marxism

When Verso published its new edition of The Communist Manifesto last year, intellectuals of all stripes vied with one another to sing its praises. As this unusual collection of essays shows, however, Berman was there way before most of them. Berman (All That Is Solid Melts into Air), who teaches at the City University of New York, has been a fixture of the New Left for so long he's started calling it the ""Used Left."" The pieces included here, many of which were first published in journals such as the Nation and the New York Times Book Review, form a rich inquiry into the ambiguities of Marxist thought, attending to the skeptical and self-critical tendencies of Marx himself. Reviews of books from the likes of Studs Terkel and Edmund Wilson argue for a vibrant leftist politics that embraces the sexy, exuberant side of intellectual activity. Appraisals of the lives and works of Marx, Luk cs and Walter Benjamin flesh out Berman's critical but affirmative history of the New Left. Avoiding the didactic voice often associated with Marxist writings, Berman rustles joyfully through the ideas and texts that constitute the core literature of Marxist humanism (Marxism without tanks). Still, readers should be advised that close readings of Capital abound, notably in a chapter taken from Berman's 1963 Oxford thesis, written under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin. Ultimately, Berman advocates what Marx called ""practical-critical activity,"" or the act of continually striving to improve upon one's life and, by extension, the world. This collection--though unfortunately a piecemeal collection rather than a sustained argument--could easily qualify as just such an enterprise. (Oct.)