"Marxism has been part of me for all my life," says Marshall Berman. "Late in my fifties, I'm still learning and sorting out how." The essays in Adventures in Marxism, which span from a portion of Berman's 1963 Oxford thesis (supervised by Isaiah Berlin) to a reconsideration of the Communist Manifesto on its sesquicentennial in 1998, are a splendid presentation of that "learning and sorting." The book's not only about Marx, mind you--Berman also considers those who have followed in Marx's footsteps, including Edmund Wilson, Georg Lukacs, Meyer Schapiro, and Walter Benjamin (as well as an interesting chapter on Studs Terkel's Working). And, too, there are marvelous passages in which Berman writes about the workers around him in the streets of New York. But none of this, perhaps, would have been possible if a young Berman hadn't tracked down a copy of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a collection of spirited essays that for years influenced him far more than the Manifesto or Capital. (Though he would eventually rediscover the power of the Manifesto, which "helped me see how the bad things and the good things in the world could spring from the same place, how suffering could be a source of growth and joy, how radical thought could escape doldrums and dualisms and gather vision and energy for better times.") Berman's essays show how the collapse of communist tyrannies does not negate the potential for "Marxist humanism" to offer a progressive response to globalization; his enthusiasm for such a project makes the essays as delightful to read as they are informative.

When Verso published its new edition of The Communist Manifesto recently, intellectuals of all stripes vied with one another to sing its praises. As this unusual collection of essays shows, however, Berman was there way before most of them. Berman (All That Is Solid Melts into Air), who teaches at the City University of New York, has been a fixture of the New Left for so long he's started calling it the "Used Left." The pieces included here, many of which were first published in journals such as the Nation and the New York Times Book Review, form a rich inquiry into the ambiguities of Marxist thought, attending to the skeptical and self-critical tendencies of Marx himself. Reviews of books from the likes of Studs Terkel and Edmund Wilson argue for a vibrant leftist politics that embraces the sexy, exuberant side of intellectual activity. Appraisals of the lives and works of Marx, Luk cs and Walter Benjamin flesh out Berman's critical but affirmative history of the New Left. Avoiding the didactic voice often associated with Marxist writings, Berman rustles joyfully through the ideas and texts that constitute the core literature of Marxist humanism (Marxism without tanks). Still, readers should be advised that close readings of Capital abound, notably in a chapter taken from Berman's 1963 Oxford thesis, written under the supervision of Isaiah Berlin. Ultimately, Berman advocates what Marx called "practical-critical activity," or the act of continually striving to improve upon one's life and, by extension, the world. This collection, though unfortunately a piecemeal collection rather than a sustained argument, could easily qualify as just such an enterprise.