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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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Faust now has a vision to transform the entire landscape around him into a great series of projects and developments to harness nature and turn civilization into the master of nature. Marshall writes, "We suddenly find ourselves at a nodal point in the history of modern self-awareness. We are witnessing the birth of a new social division of labor, a new vocation, a new relationship between ideas and practical life. Two radically different historical movements are converging and beginning to flow together. A great spiritual and cultural ideal is merging into an emerging material and social reality. [8]" An alumnus of Columbia University, Berman completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968. He is on the editorial board of Dissent and a regular contributor to The Nation, The New Y 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:

This text is a non-fiction book, concerned with the experience of Modernity. "Modernity" is defined as a shared experience of behaving, thinking and working in the modern world. Oh...my...goodness... I am utterly shattered by this book. I cannot even put into words how haunting and heartbreaking it is... and yet, one of the most beautiful things I've ever read.Faust here represents the Modern Humanist who is trying to break away from the stagnant traditions of the feudal society he comes from. "As the bearer of a dynamic culture within a stagnant society, he is torn between inner and outer life. [5]" 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]" 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. 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. 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 ]

Berman finishes this section in a sort of deflated way, stating that it's most likely that humanity within Modernity will not have a clear view of its nature, similar to prior epochs. I would recommend this novel to anyone (16 and up) who wants a satisfying read. The novel isn't difficult, but I think younger readers won't fully get the impact of this story. It is not the lightest in tone, but it is beautiful all the same. The main focus which Berman wishes us to glean from this Part I (which will set the tone for the rest of the book), is that Faust is the epitome of Modernity in that he is like a "sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells. [4]" In the Communist Manifesto, Berman states that Marx believed that Modernity itself and the Bourgeois revolution will reveal the cold truth of reality and leave men naked. [10] While Marx has somewhat rosy visions of the great emancipation that will occur when the proletariat understand what it means to be cold and naked in the storm of the world, Berman questions this affirming that there are many other pathways Modernity might take, citing the pessimism of British Conservativism via Burke, and also the positivity of the " philosophes" via Rousseau& Montesquieu. 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.In this section Marshall Berman assesses that the Communist Manifesto while at once prophesizing the end of the bourgeois rule is at the same time rejoicing the developments of the bourgeois revolution and the age of Modernity. Berman in fact claims that "he [Karl Marx] hopes to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller and deeper modernity". 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". In All That is Solid Danny Dorling offers an agenda-shaping look at the UK's dangerous relationship with housing - and how it's all going to come crashing down The "solutions" that have been offered by politicians are staggeringly flimsy: he quotes Theresa May's claim that "house prices could be 10% lower over 20 years if the government cut net migration to zero", and curtly points out that "she assumes that the electorate she wants to appeal to is innumerate as well as prejudiced. A reduction of 10% over 20 years, or much less than 0.5% a year, is negligible". Dorling also gives a lot of attention to the idiocy of the Help to Buy scheme. One passage on this shows his strengths as a populist writer. Defenders of the status quo like their household metaphors (the financial crisis as a result of a "maxed-out credit card" and so on), and Dorling is fine at upending them. Help to Buy "has been described as the equivalent of a rich dad giving his children money to help with their deposit", but "no one gives the mortgagor any money; instead they have to take out a bigger mortgage. The scheme is better characterised as a rich dad, the government, going to the bank manager and giving him or her a financial inducement to approve a mortgage that the bank manager considered risky." It also practically guarantees more house price inflation, making the whole problem worse. a b Berman, Marshall. "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air — Afterword 2010". Globality Studies Journal. 21: 1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-05.

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.I can't really blame Braverman for not understanding why she was appointed, seeing as the Very Smart People paid to comment on politics don't either. Her purpose was to say racist things, be outrageous, wind up the public, and ram home new wedges the Tories might profit from. In search of some post-Brexit condiment to make the Conservative dish more appetising before the next election, Braverman was the woman to administer it. Would you like some xenophobic, anti-immigrant sauce on your chips sir? But the actual implementation of the policy didn't matter. Sunak was unconcerned about delays to the Rwanda plan because he only believed in it as a means of creating new opportunities for friction and grandstanding. He doesn't want to be known as leading the most authoritarian and racist government of recent times, especially with the glamorous thrum of Silicon Valley in his near future. And, to be fair to Sunak, he learned the importance of appearing to do something while doing nothing from Boris Johnson.

Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world ( www.worldmapper.org).

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Grigory, the surgeon, was amazing. Brave and compassionate, he was my personal hero through the whole thing. Housing was at the heart of the financial collapse, and our economy is now precariously reliant on the housing market. In this ground-breaking book, Danny Dorling argues that housing is the defining issue of our times. Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, All That Is Solid shows that the solution to our problems - rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership - is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome. I received this ARC from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. The expected publication is March 11th 2014.

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