All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Ah, small victories. I’ve managed to appropriate Karl Marx’s beautiful hymn to postmodernity, All that is solid melts into air, from his 1848 Communist Manifesto.

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.

Probably the greatest economist to have ever lived, he concerned himself not only with the feeble homo economicus of latter-day compliant economists, but the broader scope of people as both historical flotsam and psychsocial beings.

I find it extraordinary that he foresaw the “New Economy”, globalization, the elegantly and deliberately destructive effects of new technologies on both the established means of production and social relations, and the postmodern economy of fleeting symbology.