Marshall Berman in Dissent:
Modern bourgeois society . . . a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells.
—Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Why is there always trouble when we sing this song?
—Mick Jagger, while singing “Sympathy for the Devil” at Altamont in 1969
A Trip to the Underworld
I can remember very vividly the time when the tragedy of Doctor Faust became real for me. It started the day before the great march on the Pentagon, when I ran into an old teacher of mine on upper Broadway. It was a lovely Indian summer day, and we stopped in front of the West End Bar for a dialectical chat. I was 26, just out of graduate school with a newly minted Ph.D., immersed in my first teaching job, finally out in the world and on my own, “a grown-up” at last. And yet, even as I felt newly grown, I was also enjoying a new youthfulness, for it was the annus mirabilis of 1967, and I was wonderfully drunk on the spirit of the times. As my big red flowery tie flapped in the wind, and my newly long hair blew back in my face, and all the wildlife of Broadway streamed around me, I felt happier than ever to be alive. My old teacher asked me how I liked being a professor; I said that while I loved teaching I didn’t take very well to the professorial role, but identified myself far more closely with “the kids”; he shook his head, smiled his famous ironic smile, said, “Oh, dear,” and we were off—off on one of those generational arguments about what “the kids” were up to, where they were leading our country and our culture, where it would all end. Who doesn’t remember those arguments? We can already feel nostalgia for them; they were the real sound of the ’60s.
More here.
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