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Описание: What did I expect buying a book with a title taken from the Communist Manifesto of 1848? From previous writing by Marshall Berman I was sure it would be lively, informative, enjoyable, and probably relevant to me as a Londoner watching and experiencing similar changes in the UK. Until his death in 2013, Marshall Berman, taught political philosophy and urbanism at City College in New York. He also wrote: 'New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg' and 'On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square'. His 'Adventures in Marxism' has a tiny Karl Marx with cartoon arms and legs skipping across the cover. I didn't expect that Part 1 of All that is solid would be Berman's interpretation of the Faust legend, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Including a part where an elderly couple are in the way of Faust's property development. The part of London where my wife and I live is one of many areas targeted under the guise of "regeneration" and "gentrification". Property developer predators and their politician pals scheme the "social cleansing" of public housing in poorer areas. Here's how Marshall Berman tells part of the story. "As Faust surveys his work, the whole region around him has been renewed, and a whole new society created in his image. Only one small piece of ground along the coast remains as it was before. This is occupied by Philemon and Baucis, a sweet old couple who have been there from time out of mind. They have a little cottage on the dunes, a chapel with a little bell, a garden full of linden trees. They offer aid and hospitality to shipwrecked sailors and wanderers. Over the years they have become beloved as the one source of life and joy in this wretched land. "Goethe borrows their name and situation from Ovid's Metamorphoses. [...]. He gives them more individuality than they have in Ovid, and endows them with distinctively christian virtues: innocent generosity, selfless devotion, humility, resignation. Goethe invests them, too, with a distinctively modern pathos. They are the first embodiments in literature of a category of people that is going to be very large in modern history: people who are in the way — in the way of history, of progress, of development; people who are classified, and disposed of, as obsolete. "Faust becomes obsessed with this old couple and their little piece of land: 'That aged couple should have yielded, I want their lindens in my grip, Since these few trees that are denied me Undo my worldwide ownership .... Hence is our soul upon the rack, To feel, amid plenty, what we lack.' "They must go, to make room for what Faust comes to see as the culmination of his work: an observation tower from which he and his public can 'gaze out into the infinite' at the new world they have made. "He offers Philemon and Baucis a cash settlement, or else resettlement on a new estate. But what should they do with money at their age? And how, after living their whole long lives here, and approaching the end of life here, can they be expected to start new lives somewhere else? They refuse to move. 'Resistance and such stubbornness Thwart the most glorious success, Till in the end, to one's disgust, One soon grows tired of being just.' "At this point, Faust commits his first self-consciously evil act. He summons Mephisto and his 'mighty men' and orders them to get the old people out of the way. He does not want to see it, or to know the details of how it is done. All that interests him is the end result: he wants to see the land cleared next morning, so the new construction can start. This is a characteristically modern style of evil: indirect, impersonal, mediated by complex organizations and institutional roles. "Mephisto and his special unit return in 'deep night' with the good news that all has been taken care of. Faust suddenly concerned, asks where the old folks have been moved and learns that their house has been burned to the ground and they have been killed. Faust is aghast and outraged, [...] He protests that he didn't say anything about violence; he calls Mephisto a monster and sends him away. The prince of darkness departs gracefully, like the gentleman he is; but he laughs before he leaves. Faust has been pretending not only to others but to himself that he could create a new world with clean hands; he is still not ready to accept responsibility for the human suffering and death that clear the way. First he contracted out all the dirty work of development; now he washes his hands of the job, and disavows the jobber once the work is done. It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works." — Source: "All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity" Marshall Berman. Verso Books Edition 2010. pages 66-68.

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