Of all socialist artists, Berger is the most powerfully engaging. He recognizes, as few others have, how generative and dramatic dialectic can be…. A Seventh Man is a collage, a total environment, which mixes theory, praxis and the inescapable documentation of the photograph. Berger is the best of believers: his commitment to Marxism admits a minimum of dogma. He is too intent on his purposes to argue poorly. His untiring willingness to articulate helps dispel many of those old fogs which blur our perceptions of the nature of political arrangements. In A Seventh Man we begin to understand the power of the myth of the city to the immigrant—the ways in which the city promises openness and change, escape, "an opportunity to earn enough money to act." (p. 26)

Berger's reach is global here. He describes the interrelation between the poverty to which the migrants are condemned and...