TwentiethCentury Marxism

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Twentieth-Century Marxism

• Lecture Ten Benjamin on history

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On the Concept of History, X

• The themes which monastic discipline assigned to
  friars for meditation were designed to turn them
  away from the world and its affairs. The
  thoughts which we are developing here originate
  from similar considerations. At a moment when
  the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism
  had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm
  their defeat by betraying their own cause, these
  observations are intended to disentangle the
  political worldlings from the snares in which the
  traitors have entrapped them. continued...

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On the Concept of History, X

• Our consideration proceeds from the insight that
  the politicians stubborn faith in progress,
  their confidence in their mass basis, and,
  finally, their servile integration in an
  uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects
  of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of
  the high price our accustomed thinking will have
  to pay for a conception of history that avoids
  any complicity with the thinking to which these
  politicians continue to adhere.

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On the Concept of History, XI

• Nothing has corrupted the German working
  class so much as the notion that it was moving
  with the current. It regarded technological
  developments as the driving force of the stream
  with which it thought it was moving.

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moving with the current

• inevitability we will get to where we want to
  get to (political)
• continuity where we want to get to will look
  like what we have now (normative).

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On the Concept of History, XI

• a kind of labour which, far from exploiting
  nature, is capable of delivering her of the
  creations which lie dormant in her womb as
  potentials
• cf. the 19th century French utopian socialist,
  Charles Fourier

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Benjamin vs the idea of progress

• moving with the current

• Benjamin

• inevitability we will get to where we want to
  get to (political)
• continuity where we want to get to will look
  like what we have now (normative).
• futurity neglect of the past

• contingency we may well not get to where we want
  to get to
• transformation where we want to get to will be
  quite unlike what we have now.
• ?

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On the Concept of History, XII

• Social Democracy thought fit to assign to
  the working class the role of the redeemer of
  future generations, in this way cutting the
  sinews of its greatest strength. This training
  made the working class forget both its hatred and
  its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished
  by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than
  that of liberated grandchildren.

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On the Concept of History, IX

• There is a picture by Klee called Angelus
  Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to
  move away from something he stares at. His eyes
  are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are
  spread. This is how the angel of history must
  look. His face is turned toward the past. Where
  chain of events appears before us, he sees one
  single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage
  upon wreckage and hurls it at

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On the Concept of History, IX

• his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken
  the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
  But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got
  caught in his wings it is so strong that the
  angel can no longer close them. This storm
  drives him irresistibly into the future, to which
  his back is turned, while the pile of debris
  before him grows towards the sky. What we call
  progress is this storm.

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Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
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the idea of redemption

• to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has
  been smashed
• theology apocatastasis (Greek), tikkun
  (Hebrew) a Messianic restoration and repair
  which makes whole and mends the original being of
  things

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On the Concept of History, II

• The past carries with it a secret index by
  which it is referred to redemption there is a
  secret agreement between past generations and the
  present one our coming was expected on earth.
  Then, like every generation that preceded us, we
  have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a
  power on which the past has a claim. Such a
  claim cannot be settled cheaply. The historical
  materialist is aware of this.

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On the Concept of History, VI

• Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition
  away from the conformism that is working to
  overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the
  redeemer he comes as the victor over the
  Antichrist. The only historian capable of
  fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one
  who is firmly convinced that even the dead will
  not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
  And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.

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On the Concept of History, III

• The chronicler who narrates events without
  distinguishing between major and minor ones acts
  in accord with the following truth nothing that
  has ever happened should be regarded as lost to
  history. Of course only a redeemed mankind is
  granted the fullness of its past - which is to
  say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past
  become citable in all its moments. Each moment
  it has lived becomes a citation à l'ordre du
  jour. And that day is Judgment Day.

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• Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of
  world history. But perhaps it is quite
  otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by
  the passengers on this train namely, the human
  race to activate the emergency brake.
  (Paralipomena to On The Concept Of History,
  p. 402)
• Marx Revolutions are the locomotives of
  history (The Class Struggles in France, 1850)

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Marx

• When a great social revolution shall have
  mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the
  market of the world and the modern powers of
  production, and subjected them to the control of
  the most advanced peoples, then only will human
  progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan
  idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the
  skulls of the slain. (The Future Results of the
  British Rule in India (1853), KMSW 336/366-367)

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Primary reading

• Benjamin, Walter, On The Concept Of History
  written 1940 published by the IoSR 1942, SW4,
  pp. 389-400 I 10 as Theses On The Philosophy
  Of History
• Benjamin, Walter, Paralipomena to On The
  Concept Of History, SW4, pp. 401-411
• Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
  (1850), first eight paragraphs KMSW
  300-303/329-332

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Secondary texts

• Honneth, Axel, A Communicative Disclosure of the
  Past On the Relation between Anthropology and
  Philosophy of History in Walter Benjamin, New
  Formations 20 (1993), pp. 83-94 also in The
  Actuality of Walter Benjamin, eds Marcus and Nead
  (1998).
• Kittsteiner, H.-D., Walter Benjamins
  Historicism, New German Critique 39 (1986), pp.
  179-215.
• Tiedemann, Rolf, Historical Materialism or
  Political Messianism? 1983, in Benjamin
  Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. G. Smith
  (1989), pp. 175-209.
• Tiedemann, Rolf, Dialectics at a Standstill
  Approaches to the Passagen-Werk 1982, in On
  Walter Benjamin, ed. G. Smith (1988), pp. 260-291.