Connexions Quotations
Marshall Berman
Quotes
|
How sour and bitter most left writing on culture has become.
Sometimes it sounds as if culture were just one more Department of Exploitation and Oppression,
containing nothing luminous or valuable in itself. At other times,
it sounds as if people’s minds were empty vessels with nothing inside except what Capital put there.
Read, or try to read, a few articles on “hegemonic/counterhegemonic discourse.”
The way these guys write, it’s as if the world has passed them by.
- Marshall Berman
Adventures in Marxism
|
|
What makes Capital so exciting is that, more than anything else Marx wrote, it brings to life his vision of modern life as a totality. This vision is spread out on an immense canvas: more than a thousand pages in the first volume alone; hundreds of characters – shopkeepers and sharecroppers, miners and millowners, poets and publicists, doctors and divines, philosophers and politicians, the world-famous and the anonymous – speaking in their own voices. The amazing multiplicity of real voices that Marx brings forth, and the skill with which he propels and deploys them, carry us back to the glorious days of the nineteenth-century novel, back to Lost Illusions and Bleak House and War and Peace. Some of the most vivid characters appear for only a moment; others stay with us for long stretches and engage Marx in long passionate argument; others disappear for hundreds of pages, only to return transformed. The people in Capital have a life that will outlive
capitalism itself.
- Marshall Berman
Adventures in Marxism
|
Read more about Marshall Berman.
