FDR and the origins of State Capitalism

As I have written before state capitalism is a historic epoch. It saved capitalism from self destruction and from workers revolution. A revolution which was aborted and beccae a model for historic shift in the thirties to State Capitalism. It resulted from the shift from post WWI production to finance capital. The roaring twenties was a period of both Fordist expansion and expansion of finance capital. And that led to the crash of 1929.

It follows, therefore, that during a crisis the decline in commodity prices is always accompanied by a contraction in the volume of credit money. Since credit money consists of obligations assumed during a period of higher prices, this contraction is tantamount to a depreciation of credit money. As prices fall sales become increasingly difficult, and the obligations fall due at a time when the commodities remain unsold. Their payment becomes doubtful. The decline in prices and the stagnation of the market mean a reduction in the value of the credit money drawn against these commodities. This depreciation of credit instruments is always the essential element of the credit crisis which accompanies every business crisis.
Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development


In response to the crash of '29 Keyenes suggested that since the State creates capital in the form of money that it should intervene as the producer of credit and save the market. Just as it is now saving International Financial Capitalism from itself;

“The government intervention is not a government takeover,” Mr. Bush said. “Its purpose is not to weaken the free market. It is to preserve the free market.”

Which is exactly what FDR did after three years of Depression in the U.S. And which Republicans have spent the last sixty years denouncing, mistakenly, as Socialism. George W. Bush has ended his romance with Ronald Reagan to embrace the real politicks of FDR.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out;This new type of capitalism--properly called state-capitalism--persists to the present day in the ideological dress of 'socialism."


In fact it was a historic moment in Capitalism, when the financial exuberance of the market collapsed internationally, and the capitalist State came to the rescue, changing the nature of capitalism forever.

To sum up: the development of the productive forces of world capitalism has made gigantic strides in the last decades. The upper hand in the competitive struggle has everywhere been gained by large-scale production; it has consolidated the "magnates of capital" into an ironclad organisation, which has taken possession of the entire economic life. State power has become the domain of a financial oligarchy; the latter manages production which is tied up by the banks into one knot. This process of the organisation of production has proceeded from below; it has fortified itself within the framework of modern states, which have become an exact expression of the interests of finance capital. Every one of the capitalistically advanced "national economies" has turned into some kind of a "national" trust.N.I. Bukharin: Imperialism and World Economy Chapter VIII


State Capitalism in the thirties took on various forms, including Fascism, which itself is a form of nationalized corpratist state. Which once again right wing American politicos deliberatly confuse with Socialism. Whether it was FDR, or the populist movements of Prairie Socialism or Social Credit, state capitalism originated as a form of Distributionism, and is not socialism.At best it is about 'sharing the wealth', but not changing the fundametal nature of capitalism.

With the end of WWII the modern form of State Capitalism was born. It was internationalist and imperialist, reliant upon the Cold War to continue the prosperity of War Production. Both East and West were mutating into new forms of State Monopoly Capitalism; Stalinism in the East and the Military Industrial Complex in the West.

Contrary to pundits on the right, it is the historic mission of the capitalist state to save capitalism from itself, from its excesses. A lesson learned in the thirties. Socialism is not merely the state nationalizing or owning private assets, it is workers owning the means of production, not as taxpayers or consumers, but as producers. Anything less is merely another face of capitalism.

And capitalism is not a 'free' market, but the historic movement towards global expansion and the increasing development of large monopolies, whether they are private corportations or state controled ones. Thus China's development as evolving from State Capitalism into a form of Monopoly Capitalism can be explained in light of both Schumpter and Hilferding .

Lenin and Bukharin influenced by Hilferding saw Capitalism of their day evolving as a new form of Imperialism, which today we call Globalization. They also saw the beginings of a new form of Capitalism; Fordist rproduction financed by Banks which we call Monopoly Capitalism. However their view that socialism was public ownership of Monopoly Capitialism was coloured by their view of the State.

As Social Democrats they viewed control of the State as the essence of Socialism. When in reality, as the Russian Revolution, and later Revolutionary periods of workers uprisings; Spaing 1936-39, post WWII revolts in Poland/East Germany and Hungary, France in 1968 and Italy in 1973 would show, workers recolution was about direct workers control of production, workers self management, not state ownership or state management.

Which is why stripped of the rhetoric, the so called Socialism of China is simply another face of Monopoly capitalism. And the current financial crisis is a crisis of competing capitals, which may result in rebalancing the Imperialist powers globally. America is in debt to the Asian Tigers and the current economic crisis harkens us back to the crisis and reshaping of the world after 1914.

And like that period the elephant in the room is actually not the fiscal crisis at all but the solution to this crisis which is either Inter-Imperialist War or workers revolution. Already the sabre rattling and small wars and war like crisises are part of the background noise we read and hear everyday, despite the rollercoaster that is Wall Street.

Around the world food production is down, costs are up and last year there were thirty major revolts world wide around food. In China and around the developing capitalist economies the proletariat are revolting, each new product failure, collapsing mine, or major capitalist disaster is met with increasing distrust of the 'system', the 'estalishment'. The falling rate of profit that so called Marxist myth, has once again reared its ugly head.

And if the pending crash and recession are serious and deep enough even American Idol besotted American Consumers may suddenly realize they are actually proletarians, facing the imminant collapse of not only their Empire, but of their very livlihoods, and revolution will be on the agenda once again.

It was exactly this threat of world revolution that spurned FDR and the American capitalist establisment to try and stablize capitalism last time around. And for sixty years it succeeded, until the predictable happened again; capitalism melted down.

--------------------The Origins of State Capitalism-------------------------

"H.G. Wells was one of the few socialists who claimed to see big business, and multinational corporations, in particular, as the forerunners of a World Socialist State"

John Maynard Keynes wanted a global system of fair trade and fair development free of debt bondage and unemployment. His greatest ideas came up against a USA determined to rule the world, to hold off trade competitors at any cost, and to wring from the Third and Fourth worlds every ounce of wealth it could squeeze at whatever cost in human suffering.

Keynes was an enlightened capitalist. His life’s work is adequate proof of that. He was also an anti-Communist, quite openly. Nonetheless, his total defeat on international trade and monetary policy by the US demonstrates the fate of the enlightened, even of enlightened capitalists – even ones of outstanding genius up against corporate capitalist imperialism.

He was a member of the justly famous Bloomsbury group: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and a host of other luminous, talented, gifted people. Keynes connected as well with W.H. Auden, Rupert Brooke, Serge Diagilev, Nijinsky, Ottoline Morrell, G.B. Shaw, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as well as every major economist and many of the most powerful politicians of his time.

Franklin Roosevelt Studied in Post-Soviet Russia

Primakov, now functioning as a senior figure in Russian policy circles, and an informal advisor to Putin, made a high-profile television appearance on an NTV Sunday evening program, Jan. 28. He said that Russia is being criticized today more sharply than at any time since the end of the Cold War, because of "subjective factors on the other side": expectations that Russia would be a towel boy for Western institutions, beginning in the early 1990s.

Primakov recalled how, when he was Prime Minister, "a representative of the International Monetary Fund came over and tried to impose certain models of development on us. They were trying to impose on us a system whereby the state was not to be involved in anything, everything was to be left at the mercy of the market, and the market was supposed to take care of everything."

As against the fallacies of the IMF, Primakov cited Franklin Roosevelt, saying: "No country has ever managed to extricate itself from an economic crisis situation without decisive interference of the state. This is what Roosevelt said, and this is what [Ludwig] Erhard in West Germany after the Second World War said, and he acted accordingly.... We have seen a turning point; at long last we have rejected the views of the people I would describe as dogmatic liberals who thought that the market would provide all the answers.... At present the state is increasingly involved in the economy. It does not mean that the state will revert to [the Soviet central planning agency] Gosplan, to issuing directives. But indicative planning and even industrial policy as such were also denied. Now, thank God, we have abandoned this, and this is not liked."

The current Russian deliberations about Roosevelt go far beyond any opportunistic considerations that might be involved, having to do with Putin's team seeking a third term for him. They bring to the front of the agenda, where they should be, three things.

First, a reminder of what a difference for the world, the quality of leadership in the United States of America makes.

Second, an understanding of how the collaboration of the United States and Russia, as two of the world's great nations, has shifted the course of history for the better, in the past, and could do so again. MGIMO, the venue for the Feb. 8 "New Deal" conference, recently issued an in-depth study of what a multipolar world could look like, and it by no means excluded the U.S.A. (See "Moscow Discussion: Can U.S.-Russian Relations Improve?" in EIR, Dec. 8, 2006.) And when his NTV interviewer asked if Russia should form a bloc with countries that have been ostracized, e.g., for seeking nuclear weapons, Yevgeni Primakov strongly condemned any notion of turning anti-American: "To form a bloc against America? I am against it.... There should be no anti-Americanism in our policy. We should look for ways to uphold our national interests without confrontation. This is Putin's course and I support him on that to the hilt."

Lastly, the American System economics of the Roosevelt period in the U.S.A., with all it implies for basing relations among nations on their mutual interest in the improvement of life for their populations, is exactly what needs to be brought into action in Russia, in the United States itself, and throughout the world.

'A new deal'

In his Presidential acceptance speech in 1932, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people." The term was taken from a 1932 book by the same name, "A New Deal," written by Stuart Chase. That book rapidly disappeared from the shelves after Roosevelt's election. Its contents were the currency of White House economic policy discussion by Tugwell and other central planners around the new President.

Chase, along with Tugwell and Robert Williams Dunn, had jointly written a report, "Soviet Russia in the Second Decade," following their 1927 travel to Stalin's Russia.

In his 1932 book, "A New Deal," Chase argued that the earlier transition out of feudalism into what he called laissez-faire capitalism, was essentially over. The era of Trusts, monopolies, capital concentration by large banks, must now give way to central or collective planning. Chase wrote, "modern industrialism, because of its delicate specialization and interdependence, increasingly demands the collectivism of social control to keep its several parts from jamming. We find a government meeting that demand by continually widening the collective sector through direct ownership, operation and regulation of economic functions." He adds, "Competition is perhaps a good thing—in its proper place. Where is its proper place? Collectivism is beyond peradventure on the march."

Much of Chase's book was filled with fulsome praise for Stalin’s Russian model of central planning and its achievements, reflecting the fascination of numerous younger American intellectuals in the early 1930's.

In his "A New Deal," intended as a kind of blueprint for the Roosevelt campaign, Chase advocated what he called, "The Third Road, a road which runs neither to red dictatorship nor to black (business)." Chase proclaimed that under the Third Road, "private profit will not furnish the happy hunting ground it used to. State trusts, investment control, the curbing of speculation, will choke the muzzle of the more devastating forms." He also proposed drastic economic controls, an eerie harbinger of what would come to pass under the Federal Reserve of Alan Greenspan: "The Federal Reserve will take over the control of currency, the stock exchanges, banks and domestic investment... A new Foreign Trade Corporation will supervise exports, imports and foreign loans. Public works will undoubtedly be centralized in one department..."

Leaving no doubt that his sentiments were not market-oriented in any way, Chase concluded his tract by stating, "We can go on, however...without violent revolution...if we are willing to halt expansion, and organize industry on the basis of using to the full the equipment we now possess. This is the program of the third road. It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion. The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, and the control of new investment are all designed to that end." Little wonder that Chase was given a very discreet background policy role in FDR's inner circle. This was explosive stuff for the American public, even in an economic depression.

After leaving Harvard in 1910, Chase had joined the Boston Fabian Club and went to Chicago to work in Jane Addams' Hull House. As a young bureaucrat with the Federal Trade Commission in 1917, Chase investigated charges against Armour & Co. meatpackers. This all shaped his social outlook, and the Soviet model gave it justification in terms of national planning. Chase first met Roosevelt in 1932, but his role was more as a writer than as a policy administrator in the New Deal. He held several official consulting posts in the New Deal, but was mainly influential through his good friend, Rexford Tugwell, and through his writings.

Rexford Guy Tugwell, the Columbia University economics professor who traveled with Chase in 1927 to the Soviet Union, was the central person of this collectivist group around FDR. Indeed, when it emerged that Tugwell was one of the inner circle of the new President, business leaders and newspapers began to research Tugwell's economic writings, and came away shocked, leading some to nickname him, "Rexford the Red."

As newspaper journalists began digging into Tugwell's published writings for clues as to what policies the new President Roosevelt was being given by his top advisers, they became alarmed.

In a paper in the American Economic Review March 1932, Tugwell wrote, that the quest for profit no longer motivated business, but that instead it produced "insecurity" because profits were, "used for creating over-capacity in every profitable line; they are injected into money market operations in such ways as to contribute to inflation; they are used, most absurdly of all, as investments in the securities of other industries." Tugwell proceeded further in his frontal assault on the core of the market private enterprise system which had created such extraordinary wealth and improvement of general living standards over the previous decade: "Industry is thought of as rather a field for adventure...The truth is profits persuade us to speculate." When such comments were widely reported in the Nation's media, they did little to bolster businessmen's confidence in the new Administration.

In discussing a proposal to introduce national economic planning, Tugwell wrote in 1932, "it seems altogether likely that we shall set up, and soon, such a consultative body...The day on which it comes into existence will be a dangerous one for business...There may be a long and lingering death (of the private profit enterprise—w.e.), but it must be regarded as inevitable." Private business, Tugwell added, "would logically be required to disappear. This is not an overstatement for the sake of emphasis; it is literally meant."

In October 1932, that is, one month before FDR's election, Rexford Guy Tugwell went on to formulate a six-point program for dealing with the depression crisis. Tugwell opposed wage cuts, then a common method of corporate cost cutting. He insisted, however, on reducing retail prices, and called for "drastic income and inheritance taxes," as well as "avoidance of budgetary deficits and monetary inflation." Obviously businesses could not possibly simultaneously maintain wage levels, reduce prices, and pay increased taxes, without risking bankruptcy in such crisis times. To this, Tugwell advocated, "the taking over by the government of any necessary enterprises which refuse to function when their profits are absorbed by taxation."

In brief, Tugwell's program, and this was planed, would first make it impossible for business to function, then bring those failed businesses under nationalization or state ownership. Tugwell concluded his 1932 program, "So long as prices, profits and individual production programs are at the disposal of independent business executives, our system will continue to show much the same faults as it displays at present." Tugwell endorsed Norman Thomas' League for Industrial Democracy program which called for a, "new social order based on production for use, not for profit."

Tugwell was strategically placed in 1933 as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, just under his recommended choice of Secretary of Agriculture, Iowa farm editor, Henry A. Wallace. Tugwell continued in the early months to have regular access to his old friend, FDR as well.

Rudolf Hilferding and the total state.

Before World War I, Hilferding followed the traditional Marxist view that identified the executive branch of the modern state as a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." He regarded the state as the "conscious organ of [a] commodity producing society" which reached the height of its power in the era of finance capital. For Hilferding the most important features of "modern capitalism" were "those processes of concentration which, on the one hand eliminate free competition' through the formation of cartels and trust, and on the other bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship." Through this relationship, he argued, capital assumed the form of finance capital which, "in its maturity, is the highest stage of concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy."(3) Hilferding also thought that the development of finance capital created the economic preconditions for socialism, which could be achieved only through the seizure of political power. Workers, organized in trade unions and in the SPD, could use the state to wrest large-scale industry from the control of finance capital and transform it into public property. He thought that it was possible for the working class to win state power through electoral means, but that capitalist suppression of workers' rights or a major war between rival capitalist powers could lead to violent revolution. Nevertheless, he did not argue that the SPD itself should "make" the workers' revolution.(4) World War I and its aftermath forced Hilferding to revise his views on the relationship between Social Democracy and the state. In 1918 he joined the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), in which he supported the socialization of key industrial sectors, the dismantling of the army and bureaucracy, and the democratization of German politics. By 1921, however, he was convinced that the socialist revolution had failed. The splintering of the workers' parties, the SPDs counterrevolutionary actions, and the political "immaturity" of the working class combined to halt Germany's social and economic tranformation. For Hilferding defending whatever democratic gains the revolution had made against the growing strength of Germany's reactionary right wing became the socialist movement's main task and he strongly supported the USPD's reunification with the SPD in 1922.(5) Hilferding steadfastly advocated the parliamentary road to socialism after 1922, and he justified this strategy with an analysis of contemporary changes in the economic and political situation both at home and abroad. He asserted that the war had accelerated the economic processes he had identified prior to 1914. The expansion and further concentration of capital, the formation of cartels and trusts, the increasing influence of finance capital, and the state's intervention in the economy were bringing the era of capital competition to a close. A new system, characterized by economic regulation and planned production, was developing. If left undisturbed, this process would result in a hierarchical social order in which the economy was organized, but the ownership of the means of production remained in private hands. Hilferding called this system "organized capitalism." He saw in its stability and its enhanced use of planning the potential for a socialist planned economy.(6) Social Democracy's task, Hilferding believed, was to educate workers and to fight for the democratization of production. In his view, the republic gave the working class real access to political power because its institutions were subject to the will of the voters.

Permanent Revolution 08 Revolutionary theory and imperialism

In his 1910 book, Finance Capital,4 Hilferding examined the latest developments in the capitalist mode of production. He explained how the process of concentration and centralisation of capital, which Marx outlined, had grown apace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This had given rise to the domination of the economy by huge cartels or trusts rather than small scale enterprises so typical of the era of “free competition capitalism”. This he called monopoly capitalism, a new stage in the development of capitalism.The reason that the banks had come to dominate in this way was due in the first instance to changes within capitalist production itself. The rise in the organic composition of capital had lengthened turnover time (i.e. the length of time it takes for machinery and plant to wear out and transfer its value completely through several cycles of production) and so reduced the adaptability of firms to short-run cyclical ups and downs. To get over the effects of short term fluctuations in demand the firms turned more and more to the banks and the provision of credit; they also needed credit to finance the ever larger sums necessary for new investment in machinery. As a result of this development the banks themselves began to commit huge sums to industry for ever longer periods of time. As a consequence they could not move capital about freely to take advantage of every short term fluctuation in the rate of profit between sectors. This meant, in turn, that the banks had an interest in the formation of cartels and trusts so as to prevent as far as possible fluctuations in output and demand putting their huge credits at risk. Hilferding summarised the process thus:“The most characteristic features of ‘modern’ capitalism are those processes of concentration which, on the one hand, ‘eliminate free competition’ through the formation of cartels and trusts, and on the other, bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship. Through this relationship . . . capital assumes the form of finance capital, its supreme and most abstract expression.” 5Thus a central feature of this new stage was the growth of banking monopolies which in the course of their development had come to dominate, and even fuse with, the key sectors of industrial capitalism to form “finance capitalism”.A natural consequence of the concentration of capital in this way was that huge amounts of machinery and plant (constant capital) more and more outweighed the growth of variable capital (i.e. the amount advanced to buy wages). This growth in the “organic composition of capital” led inexorably to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), as Marx had explained in Capital.On the basis of this law he explained how finance capital uses its power to offset this law. The huge monopolies can cut output within certain limits in order to maintain prices and profits; they can influence the national governments to erect tariffs preventing foreign monopoly capital entering their markets to compete with and undercut them; they can even keep prices in the internal market high and practise “dumping” at lower prices in colonial or semi-colonial markets.But for Hilferding the key factor which explained the relatively crisis-free expansion of monopoly capital which marked the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth was the export of capital to foreign countries. This, for Hilferding, was the root of the explanation of the long boom of 1895-1913. Following Marx in Capital he illustrated the way in which the export of capital to countries with a lower organic composition of capital and higher rate of profit overcomes the effect of crises due to the operation of the law of the TRPF:“The precondition for the export of capital is the variation in the rate of profit, and the export of capital is the means of equalising regional rates of profit. The level of profit depends upon the organic composition of capital, that is to say upon the degree of capitalist development.” 6Hilferding explained that the policy of finance capital which it pursues to secure external markets for sales, capital investment, access to raw materials and so on is the policy of imperialism. Moreover, on the basis of the recent developments in the growth of monopoly capital and faced with the internal contradictions of this growth, “capital can pursue no other policy than that of imperialism”

.7Rudolf Hilferding and 'the stability of capitalism' --

The real danger comes from WITHIN scientific socialism--Rudolf Hilferding the orthodox [Marxist], not Eduard Bernstein(4), the revisionist. Hilferding sees the new stage of capitalism in its financial razzle-dazzle appearance and becomes enamored of its capacity to “unify” commercial, industrial, and financial interests [instead of being] concretely aware of the greater contradictions and antagonisms of the new monopoly stage of capitalism.
I wish to stress the seeming orthodoxy of Hilferding. No one, absolutely no one--not the firebrand Rosa Luxemburg, nor the strict realist V.I. Lenin, and I dare say not Hilferding himself--knew that what he was doing with his theory of finance capitalism was bringing in the first theory of retrogressionism [into Marxism]....Even with over four decades of hindsight, and much, hard thinking on the subject, I have first now realized that what Hilferding was SEEING and analyzing (and it took Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of the transition period to bring it home to me)(5) was the STABILITY OF CAPITALISM.
Watch the orthodoxy though: Hilferding is proposing no revisionism. The automatic fall of capitalism is still expected and the inevitability of socialism in a mechanistic sort of way is also held to tightly. BUT rather than seeing monopoly as a transition into opposite of a previous stage, monopoly is treated more like simple large-scale production. THAT IS THE KEY. For if it is not a transition into opposite of a fundamental attribute of capitalism, then CAPITALISM’S ORGANIZATION and centralization, monopolization’s appearance as the “emergence of SOCIAL control”...is in fact superseded socialism. Or more precisely, [Hilferding] retrogresses back to home base: the equilibrium of capitalist production.
By viewing the whole development of trusts and cartels not from within the factory, but from “society,” that is, the market, Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation--the DEGRADATION of the proletariat along with capitalist accumulation--has no meaning for Hilferding. Neither does Marx’s postulate “private production without the control of private property” make any imprint on Hilferding.(6) And of course labor remains a unity; there is not any inkling of an aristocracy of labor arising out of the monopolization and degradation and imperialism.
You must remember that even with the outbreak of World War I, but before Lenin did his own analysis [of imperialism in 1915], he introduced Bukharin’s WORLD ECONOMY AND IMPERIALISM which said pretty much the same thing as Hilferding. All this I want to repeat again and again in order to emphasize the orthodoxy, in order to show that [even when] all the formulae are adhered to the loss of revolutionary perspective not yet in a positive way but in the negative of awe before the EXISTENT, continued capitalism can be very, very deceiving. If it was [deceiving] to Lenin we better watch it all the time.
What in truth emerges from a close study of Hilferding...is that the new generation of Marxists following Engels’ death [in 1895], placed within growing, centralized production, SAW MONOPOLY NOT AS A FETER BUT RATHER AS AN ORGANIZING FORCE OF PRODUCTION. So that the Second International, which had openly rejected Bernsteinism and gradualness, accepted Hilferdingism. That meant tacit acceptance of the capacity of capital to gain a certain “stability,” to modify its anarchism as a “constant” feature. They saw in [this] new stage not a TRANSITION to a higher form, but something in itself already higher, although “bad.”
Now the person who made this all clear to me was Bukharin, that logical extension of Hilferding, blown into the THEORY of counter-revolution right within the first workers’ state. It is to him that we must turn. Here too for our generation it is correct to view him with hindsight, precisely because his is “only” theory that will become full-blown actual counter-revolution with Stalin supplying it an objective base.
Keep in mind therefore the three actual stages of capitalist production for the three decades since the publication of Bukharin’s ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD:
l) 1920-30: Taylorism plus Fordism, that is, the discovery of the [assembly] belt line and with it the necessity for a fascistic order in the factory. It may be “vulgar” to call gangsters part of the intelligentsia, but that is the genuine face of “social control” when the masses themselves do not control [production]. Marx’s view of the planned despotism plus the industrial ARMY of managers, foreman, etc. has moved from theory to such EVERYDAY practice that every worker knows it in his bones; he needs no ghost come from the grave to tell him THAT....
2) 1930-40: General crisis; New Dealism where “everybody” allegedly administers, and fascism where openly only the elite do, both in mortal combat with the CIO and the general sit-down strikes (which made a true joke of private property) for “social control.” Plan, plan, plans: National Five-Year Plans in Russia, Germany, Japan; John Maynard Keynes, the New Deal, technocracy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, public works.
3) 1940-50: Monopolization has been transformed into its opposite, statification. (What greater scope for a modern Moliere, to take those weighty volumes of the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC)(7) proving monopolization and how strangling it is, and then on the eve of World War II they are finally published in full, prefaced by a call for full mobilization which shows that monopolization plus Hitlerism is child’s play as compared to American statification.)
End of World War II, “end” of fascism and state-private-monopoly rule. Complete state-capitalism reaching its tentacles from Russia into Eastern Europe, engulfing Britain, seeping into Western Europe and peering out of the U.S. TOTAL, GLOBAL PLANS: Marshall, Molotov, Monnet, Schumann, Truman’s Point 4.(8) Keynes is dead; long live the state plan. The intelligentsia in Russia, the Social Democratic labor bureaucracy elsewhere, all in mortal combat with the Resistance, with the Warsaw [uprising](9), with general strikes and colonial revolutions. One strangles the revolution “for” the masses’ own good, and the other for “democracy’s” shadow.

Did Hilferding Influence Schumpeter?

The thesis regarding the limited ability of free competition to promote
technological progress is supposed, for both theoreticians, to be a conclusion drawn
from past historical experience. More precisely, Schumpeter argued that the
capitalist era could be divided into two distinct periods (Screpanti and Zamagni
1993, pp. 243ff.): (a) The era of ‘competitive capitalism’ when small enterprises
dominated, an era which declines in the 1880s and (b), the era of monopolistic or
‘big-business capitalism’, during which large enterprises, trusts and cartels
dominated, starting roughly from the 1880s and having consolidated its fully
fledged form by the time Schumpeter’s book was written.
For Hilferding, too, the elimination of free competition and monopolies
came, historically, in a similar way: ‘Finance capital signifies the unification of
capital. The previously separate spheres of industrial, commercial and bank capital
are brought under the common direction of high finance, in which the masters of
industry and of the banks are united in a close personal association’, and
consequently: ‘The basis of this association is the elimination of free competition
among individual capitalists by the large monopolistic combines’ (Hilferding 1910,
p. 301, emphasis added). Thus, ‘it is also clear that monopolistic combines will
control the market’ (ibid., p. 193).
We have seen, so far, that for both theoreticians the real incentive for
innovation was the ability of monopolistic formations – deriving from their noncompetitive
nature – to create extra profits. Also, the elimination of free
competition was regarded, by both economists, as the main characteristic of an era
during which large enterprises, trusts and cartels dominated, and which attained its
typical characteristics around 1900.

As far as the other aspect of the Schumpeterian hypothesis is concerned,
namely that perfect competition is an unstable market structure where only large
enterprises can push technological progress forward, the views of both theoreticians
are strikingly similar. For Schumpeter, once big corporations are formed, the
imperfectly competitive market structure becomes stable, as large firms become
increasingly conducive to technological progress and change:9 ‘There are superior
methods available to the monopolist which either are not available at all to a crowd
of competitors or are not available to them so readily’ (Schumpeter 1942, p. 101).
‘The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit .… ousts the small or mediumsized
firm’ (ibid., p. 134). On the same line of argument, the large firm is
considered to possess the ability to attract superior ‘brains’, to secure a high
financial standing (ibid., p. 110), and to deploy an array of practices to protect its
risk-bearing investments.
In his Finance Capital, Hilferding had developed a similar approach:
The expansion of the capitalist enterprise which has been converted into
a corporation .… can now conform simply with the demands of
technology. The introduction of new machinery, the assimilation of
related branches of production, the exploitation of patents, now takes
place …. from the standpoint of their technical and economic suitability
.… Business opportunities can be exploited more effectively, more
thoroughly, and more quickly .… A corporation .… is able, therefore,
to organize its plant according to purely technical considerations,
whereas the individual entrepreneur is always restricted .… The
corporation can thus be equipped in a technically superior fashion, and
what is just as important, can maintain this technical superiority. This
also means that the corporation can install new technology and labour
saving processes before they come into general use, and hence produce
on a large scale, and with improved, modern techniques, thus gaining
an extra profit, as compared with the individually owned enterprise.
(ibid., pp.123-4)
Consequently, ‘The introduction of improved techniques .… [benefits] the
tightly organized cartels and trusts. [T]he largest concerns introduce the
improvements and expand their production’ (ibid., p. 233).
Hilferding repeatedly affirmed the position that the big corporation is able
to create the conditions which may assure its market supremacy as well as its extra
profits for a long period: ‘An industrial enterprise which enjoys technical and
economic superiority can count upon dominating the market after a successful
competitive struggle, can increase its sales, and after eliminating its competitors,
rake in extra profits over a long period’ (ibid., p. 191).
Thus Hilferding expressed what we could codify as ‘Hilferding’s
hypothesis’, namely the thesis that ‘the size and technical equipment of the
monopolistic combination ensure its superiority’ (ibid., p. 201), which is, in general
terms, very similar to ‘Schumpeter’s hypothesis’, written thirty-two years after
Hilferding: ‘large firms with considerable market power, rather than perfectly
competitive firms were the “most powerful engine of technological progress”’
(Schumpeter 1942, p. 106). The obvious similarity of ideas of both theoreticians on
this specific issue needs no further comment.
Further to the above, Hilferding introduced, in his Finance Capital, the
notion of a ‘latest phase’ of capitalism, which is characterised by the following
main features: the formation of monopolistic enterprises, which put aside capitalist

competition; the fusion of bank and industrial capital, leading to the formation of
finance capital, which is considered to be the ultimate form of capital; the
subordination of the state to monopolies and to finance capital; and, finally, the
formation of an expansionist policy of colonial annexations and war.10
Hilferding regarded capital exports as an inherent characteristic of
capitalism in its ‘latest’, monopolistic, stage, rooted in the ‘cartelisation and
trustification’ of the economy and the need ‘to annex neutral foreign markets ....
above all overseas colonial territories’ (Hilferding 1910, pp. 326, 328).
Finance capital, as Hilferding defined it, is advanced to industrial
capitalists who use it. This ‘new’ concept is also seen as the linking between
capitalism’s ‘latest’ stage and imperialism (Winslow 1931, p. 727). The colonies
were regarded as the outlets for the export of finance capital. In this sense, finance
capital was considered to be helpless without political and military support: ‘capital
export works for an imperialistic policy’ (Hilferding 1910, p. 406) since it ‘does not
want freedom, but domination’ (ibid., p. 426). Imperialism is, thus, a tendency to
expansion of a developed capitalist power, a tendency created, in the last instance,
by economic processes, but also supported by political processes. It is argued,
therefore, that imperialism, which is capitalist rivalry at its highest level, leads to
war and mutual destruction of the capitalist powers.

SEE:

No Austrians In Foxholes

State Capitalism in the USSR

China: The Truimph of State Capitalism

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:

Smoot-Hawley, protectionism, tariffs, Herbert Hoover, U.S., U.S. economy, Great Depression, market crash, free trade, Republicans, recession,

Kabbalistic Kommunism

Before Madonna discovered the Kabbalah, Jewish German Marxist literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin viewed the cosmology of the Kabbalah as the out growth of both dialectics and historical materialism. For Benjamin it was a natural gnosis to combine the Kabbalah with a world historical view of the world.

Creative negation, wisdom, understanding, love, power, beauty, endurance, splendor, foundation, sovereignty - the ten dimensions of the Kabbalists' universe form a guide not only to the godhead's inner nature but to the psychological development of the human personality.

I have been influenced by his works and referred to them in my articles on Gothic Capitalism, and magick, modernism;1666 The Creation Of The World as well as my recent post on the Song of Songs.

If the Frankfurt School which he belonged to attempted to return to Marx's Hegelian roots, Benjamin returned dialectics and historical materialism to its pre-Marx pantheistic roots in the theory of the monad of Cosmic Dialectics and its originator Joseph Dietzgen

Benjamin's thought was more that of a Libertarian Socialist philosophy than that of traditional Marxism. See my; Antinominalist Anarchism and Marxism and Religion

And the revival of interest in his work corresponds with the growth of Libertarian Socialism in the New Left in the sixties and seventies.

His work on the mechanical reproduction of art, emphasizing the importance of photography and movies, would underpin later dialectical analysis of underground and avante garde film.

While using the Jewish Kabbalah and Messianic tradition to describe history not as Hegel's Owl of Minerva, but as a process of looking to the past for the possibilities of the future he articulates as well the whole reasoning behind Occult thinking that was so current in his time and popular today. A collective need for Utopian dreams of a golden age past and bright future tomorrow. Thus revolutionary and occult movements historically have coexisted as messianic movements in a particular moment in our history. They did so in his time and do so again now in the movements against Globalization.

This is how one pictures the angel of history:
Where we perceive a chain of events,
He sees one single catastophe which keeps piling
Wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay...and
make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise;
This storm irresistably propels him into the
future to which his back is turned.
This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin, 1940

 Walter Benjamin

...the unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.
...To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.
...but the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.

La Violencia

 In his famous essay on the The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin discusses the increasing interrelation between politics
and aesthetics in the modern world. Mankind, he says, has become so
alienated from itself that "it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order".

Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and the Jewish mysticism of Gershom Scholem.

As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated essays written by Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust's famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays The Task of the Translator and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.

Benjamin, Walter (1892 - 1940)

German Marxist literary critic. Born into a prosperous Jewish family, Benjamin studied philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Munich, and Bern. He settled in Berlin in 1920 and worked thereafter as a literary critic and translator. His half-hearted pursuit of an academic career was cut short when the University of Frankfurt rejected his brilliant but unconventional doctoral thesis, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928). Benjamin eventually settled in Paris after leaving Germany in 1933 after Hitler came to power. He continued to write essays and reviews for literary journals, but when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940 he fled south with the hope of escaping to the US via Spain. Informed by the chief of police at the Franco-Spanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo, Benjamin committed suicide.

The posthumous publication of Benjamin’s prolific output won him a growing reputation in the later 20th century. The essays containing his philosophical reflections on literature are written in a dense and concentrated style that contains a strong poetic strain. He mixes social criticism and linguistic analysis with historical nostalgia while communicating an underlying sense of pathos and pessimism. The metaphysical quality of his early critical thought gave way to a Marxist inclination in the 1930s. Benjamin’s pronounced intellectual independence and originality are evident in the extended essay Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the essays collected in Illuminations.

The approach to art of the USSR under Stalin was typified, first, by the persecution of all those who expressed any independent thought, and, second, by the adoption of Socialist Realism - the view that art is dedicated to the "realistic" representation of - simplistic, optimistic - "proletarian values" and proletarian life. Subsequent Marxist thinking about art has been largely influenced by Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács however. Both were exponents of Marxist humanism who saw the important contribution of Marxist theory to aesthetics in the analysis of the condition of labour and in the critique of the alienated and "reified" consciousness of man under capitalism. Benjamin’s collection of essays The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) attempts to describe the changed experience of art in the modern world and sees the rise of Fascism and mass society as the culmination of a process of debasement, whereby art ceases to be a means of instruction and becomes instead a mere gratification, a matter of taste alone. "Communism responds by politicising art" - that is, by making art into the instrument by which the false consciousness of the mass man is to be overthrown.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Benjamin was born in Berlin on July 15, 1892. He was an unusual figure in 20th century thought, considering himself a "Man of Letters" and a literary critic rather than taking the more illustrious title of philosopher. His short career carried him through the ten years leading up to WWII, publishing an essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities in 1924 that earned him swift recognition. He had received his doctorate in Switzerland in 1919, but failed to acquire his Habilitation, making it difficult for him to find work well suited to his abilities. The work he had submitted in 1928 was the only full-length study that he published, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, and it was likely misunderstood by its jurors, for it prominently contained a complex network of appropriated quotations. In the period between 1925 and 1933 Benjamin eked out a living as a literary critic and translator, as a freelance writer for journals and magazines, meeting a number of left-wing intellectuals. He befriended Bertolt Brecht, an ally who shared with Benjamin both an affinity with the Left, and a suspicion of dialectics (the dominant concept in use at the time). When the Nazi's took office in 1933, Benjamin fled to Paris, maintaining work as a writer for the Institute for Social Research based in Frankfurt. Paris was an inspiration for Benjamin, and it was during this period that he wrote some of his most influential essays and articles for literary journals, including an ambitious (and hence, unfinished) reading of Baudelaire's Arcades Project in the context of nineteenth-century capitalism

History, modernity, the rise of mass culture in an interrelation of art and technology, as well as nineteenth and twentieth-century literature were particular interests for Benjamin. Due to his philosophies on history and the nature of translation and its effects on languages, time and literature, Benjamin's writings often shocked his contemporaries. Of note is his criticism of linear, causal notions of history preferring the metaphor of a constellation to describe a spatial relation of events/contexts in which the historian should relate the present to the past. Noting further on the relationship of life to history, it is for Benjamin significant that each individual being have a history of its own, therefore having a life of its own, as opposed to each being merely a setting for history. The afterlife of each being is incumbent upon its own striving against its normalization in modern life. That which attests to the confines, the potentialities and possible futuricity of its own status as an historic being experiences something of its life, an imaginary not formed in an image of the "natural" or "nature". Such testimonies of living beings open the possibility of translation, identification, and recognition as historical beings in an undetermined future — they have an afterlife.

Walter Benjamin

In the collection of his works, Walter Benjamin demonstrates complete adherence to the notion of history moving through the necessary epochs set forth by Marx; to human material desire being the prime mover of mankind; to the notions of alienation; and to the proletariat being the class with the ability to move mankind (through revolution) from the current epoch of capitalism, to the next epoch, communism. Benjamin challenges orthodox Marxism, with the notion that the individual participant in the bourgeoisie can come to a full awareness of his of his part in the current disintegration of man, by the structure of his method, and by questioning the deterministic element of Marxism. Benjamin’s method is a combination of an artful use of literary tools, empirical observation, and "transcendent" experience.

Benjamin illustrates historical materialism through comparing the imagery of ancient man demonstrating his regard for nature by pouring out libation, with modern man’s use of technology to strip nature of "her" products prematurely. (76) Benjamin’s essays on the cities, particularly Moscow (98), and his essay One Way(75) present in-depth illustrations of alienation. Moscow alludes to alienation through Benjamin comparing it to Berlin. Moscow is full of almost communist life. Men, and women create and sell their own products, they interact with one another. Whereas Benjamin refers to Berlin in that aspect as an empty city, and a reflection of the bourgeoisie attempt to master nature. (98) Benjamin used the great cities in general as a metaphor for humankind’s alienation, from nature, and from one another. (75) He also used cities to depict the bourgeoisie mind, and its perpetuation of its own illusion. (146)

The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor
W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute

The   Benjamin Papers

Walter Benjamin -- Philosophy Books and Online Resources

Material
on

Walter
Benjamin 

by Lloyd Spencer
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Media
Trinity and All Saints College

Other Voices 1.1 (March 1997), Walter Benjamin's, The Arcades Project

Readings from some elements of Benjamin's exploration of the history of modernity in 19th century Paris.

Walter Benjamin and the "dialectic of awakening"

Benjamin’s writing flashes between poles of revolution and revelation. A scholar of threshold experiences, states of intoxication, and failed philosophies, he is brilliant on the subject of drugs: "The most passionate examination of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance," he wrote. "The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. … Not to mention that most terrible drug — ourselves — which we take in solitude."

He saw thinking as a form of intoxication. He recognized that drug-exploration, the pursuit of visionary experience, could be an extension of a rational and intellectual quest: "The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious," he wrote. "Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?"

Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, Benjamin smoked hash, tried mescaline, and enjoyed his own trips: "I thought with intense pride of sitting here in Marseilles in a hashish trance; of who else might be sharing my intoxication this evening, how few." Thinking under the influence of hashish was like unrolling a ball of thread through a maze: "We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy the pleasure of this discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread."

Words Made Flesh

This booklet attempts to show that algorithmic code and computations
can’t be separated from an often utopian cultural imagination
that reaches from magic spells to contemporary computer operating
systems.

The flip-side of this critique was hostility of the Situationists to
both artistic experimentation with new technology and philosophical
reflection on computation. This hostility manifested itself particularly
in the repeated Situationist attacks on communication theorist Abraham
Moles (see p. 92). With their polemics against formalism and
for “imagination,” the S.I. clearly continued the ideas of the French
Surrealists who in turn were heavily indebted to romanticism. In
his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton wrote that “We are
still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have
been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable
only to solving problems of secondary interest.”18 His surrealism
expresses laconic indifference to new technology: “Radios? Fine.
Syphilis? If you like. Photography? I don’t see any reason why not.
The cinema? Three cheers for darkened rooms. War? Gave us a good
laugh. The telephone? Hello.”19 Along the lines of this technological
scepticism, Surrealist “automatic writing” for example was not computational,
but a psychic automatism that took the unconscious as its
source code, not a calculus. It was still a foreign idea to Surrealism
that computational formalisms could themselves be highly subjective
and culturally coded, as the Pythagorean and Kabbalist tradition and
the “semantics” of, for example, Llull’s “alphabetum” suggest. The
Situationist concept of “psychogeography” had its roots in the aimless
Surrealist drifts through Paris described in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja
and in Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Le Paysan de Paris, and meant a
purely subjective, para-scientific exploration of (chiefly) urban spaces
through aimless drift. The surrealist drifts in turn were indebted to
the romanticist “flâneur,” a wanderer “botanising the asphalt” as cultural
theorist Walter Benjamin put it in his essay on 19th century poet
Charles Baudelaire.

Walter Benjamin and the Bible by Brian M. Britt

This lucid and accessible exploration of the category of sacred text in Walter Benjamin's work is an important addition to the already sizeable body of critical literature devoted to Benjamin's writing. Returning the subject of "sacred text" to view is itself a service to Biblical scholars and others in religious studies concerned with the scriptural function of texts-whether "sacred" or not. Britt sees Benjamin as an ally in moving beyond the dichotomy between externalist, historical-critical concepts of sacred texts and internalist, confessional ones. Beyond that dichotomy lies the real world task of regaining "pure language," not reducing language to an instrument for transferring information but encountering the world in every word. The idea of sacred text, Britt maintains, runs through Walter Benjamin's writings-and if Benjamin was right, it runs through the world. Readers unfamiliar with Benjamin will find this a delightfully clear introduction to his work; those who know his work will find a new appreciation for the theology with which it is saturated.

Symposium on Jewish Fundamentalism
Hosted by Esalen's Center for Theory and Research (CTR)

Taking his cue from early German Romantic thought, Fischer labels this entire vision expressivist. Expressivism takes spiritual ideals and clothes (i.e. 'expresses') them in material media (painting, architecture, poetry, or in the present case, society and the state). While the philosophy of expressivism was largely inaugurated by the German Romantics (poets such as Hölderlin and Novalis but also philosophers like Hegel and Schelling), it found its way into Jewish thought during the 19^th century when Romantic texts were translated into Hebrew. As Fischer noted, when Hegel, for example, was translated into Hebrew, the translators used Kabbalistic terms throughout as technical equivalents for Hegel's terms. This caused Hegel to appear rather closer to Kabbalistic thought than he may in fact have been, but also caused readers to think of the Kabbalah in Hegelian expressivist terms.

Politically, this alliance between expressivism and religion lends a supposedly divine justification to what are otherwise secular projects and so tends to inculcate a dangerous political extremism. Religiously, this alliance is also suspect, for it too often ends by making an idol of the individual or community's will. In modern Israel, this is most clearly seen in the way that the "will of the people" is regularly taken to express a sort of divine sanction. Here, especially, we can see the extent to which these supposedly conservative religious groups are in fact very modern. Radical religious Zionists should not be understood as regressive defenders of an idealized past, but as peculiarly modern religio-political movements. The absolutizing of the general will is an expression of secular nationalism more than of traditional religion. In modern Israel, the equation (what some what call the confusion) of national will with religious witness has given rise to the slogan: the voice of the people is the voice of God revealed to the prophets.

This Israeli version of the vox populi gets invoked constantly in contemporary Israeli politics and leads to one of two peculiarly modern political stances. On the one hand, a revolutionary populism identifies the vox populi with the discontented and disenfranchised voices of the nation and so calls for political revolution. This is a form of revolutionary modernism (think of Georg Lukacs, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, et al.) with a Zionist twist. On the other hand, a Statist party goes further and actually identifies the vox populi with state of Israel, as such, because the state is held to be the entity most representative of the Israeli people in all of their diversity (a position mirrored in secular politics by the Hegelian right). Statist rabbis and movements may vigorously disagree with the decisions of the secular government but will, nonetheless, finally cooperate because they believe that doing otherwise would be to disobey God's voice speaking through the nation-state. The recent disengagement from Gaza, which was opposed by almost all radical Zionist parties, went so smoothly because the settler rabbis were Statists and so faithfully acquiesced to the will of the government, despite their own serious objections to the policy.

As a final practical observation, Fischer noted how this attention to the vox populi explains why radical religious Zionists are eager to dialogue with their Israeli counterparts (whether secular or religious, liberal or conservative) but see little need to dialogue with Palestinians and Arabs. Both Statists and populists see the Israeli people as somehow organically expressing the will of God and so, even if they fiercely disagree, they have to pay attention to each other. Arabs, however, are excluded from this organic conception of the nation and are thus little more than bit players in a drama that centers on the relationship between God and the people/nation of Israel.

Epilogue: Dangerous Memories
Steven T. Ostovich

Walter Benjamin's understanding of memory is bound up with his philosophy of language and history and his theology, but it is based on an experience he characterizes as the "chaos of memories." There is a resistance to narrative ordering and control associated with memory for Benjamin. He specifies this resistance further: "I find in my memory rigidly fixed words, expressions, verses that, like a malleable mass which has later cooled and hardened, preserve in me the imprint of the collision between a larger collective and myself" in which "isolated words have remained in place as marks of catastrophic encounters." Catastrophe engenders memories whose rough and hardened edges preclude placement in smooth-flowing narratives as a form of coming to terms with the past. These memories are disturbing in a manner similar to dreams. Like dreams, these memories involve crossing a threshold and stepping outside the closed world of normalcy. They "arrest" thought: "Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad."(...)

Redemption and Utopia

Introduction

The following is an essay based upon Redemption and Utopia of
Michael Löwy published originally under the title Redemption et
Utopie in 1988 by Presses Universitaires de France. I read the
book in Gustaf Gimdal's  Swedish translation Frlossning och Utopi
published by Daidalos in 1990.  I intend to use some of
Löwy's themes as a springboard for a discussion of the concepts of time
and victimhood as they apply to progressive thought at the end of
the 20th century.

Nineteenth century German society as Löwy describes it was
characterized by the explosive growth of capitalism and a cultural
reaction against it on one hand and the partial emancipation and
assimilation of the Jews on the other hand. Industrialism spread
at a particularly rapid rate from 1870 until the First World War.
This period also represented the height of the influence of
Romanticism, the cultural reaction to industrialization.
Romanticism was characterized by a harsh critique of modern
society as dominated by rationalism, mechanization, and
secularism. By the end of the century it was the leading
intellectual current and united cultural and political thinkers
across ideological lines.

At the same time 70% of Germany's Jews had left the ghettos that
had been their home for so many centuries and had been granted
formal political equality. However, except for a privileged few,
cultural equality, acceptance into German society, remained as
elusive as ever. This contradiction was especially marked at the
universities, where Jews in 1885 constituted a whopping 10% of the
student population but were denied access to most regular teaching
positions. This partial assimilation made Jewish academics ripe
for the intellectual currents of their time. Though a majority of
them followed the liberal or respectable Marxist trends in German
thought, a number, including the men Löwy treats, became more
enamored of anti-modernist Romantic ideas.

On the one hand, their identification with Romanticism was a
result of their emancipation, their identification with German
society and even the nationalistic elements of Romanticism (for
many of them Zionism was a counterpart to German nationalism). On
the other hand, the contradictory nature of their assimilation was
the very precondition for their rejection of that assimilation,
particularly those aspects that represented acceptance of a
materialistic, secularized society. Thus, many of them identified
early in their careers with those trends within  Romanticism that
looked to previous historical periods, in particular the guild
structures in medieval Europe, as a model for a more
spiritualized, participatory society. This tendency often included
an admiration of Christian values and mystical tradition. But as
they, often as a result of exposure to the works of Martin Buber
concerning the Jewish mystical tradition, got in touch with their
Jewish roots, they began to identify with their own messianic
tradition.

This tradition's outstanding feature can be encapsulated in the
rich Kabbalistic concept of Tikkoun, the obligation of Jews to
work for the restitution of society to a harmoniously functioning
and just entity. The concept in itself is a radical one, among
other reasons because it implies a "return" to a situation that is
not first and foremost "good" or "merciful" as the Christian
mission is often interpreted, but to something holistic, "beyond
good and evil," something like the state of innocence in the
Garden of Eden. It is true that the form in which Jewish
messianism had been propagated through the rabbinical and
Talumudic tradition was rather more reactionary than radical: the
wished-for restitution was expected to occur outside of history in
an indeterminate future through the miraculous intervention of a
personal and charismatic Messiah.

What the men whom Löwy treats accomplished was to re-instate the
radical character of the Jewish messianic tradition through its
integration with 19th century libertarian anarchist ideas: the
restitution, though seen as a total transformation of human life
and its relationship to nature, was expected to occur within
history. Furthermore, its occurrence would be expedited, if not
wholly determined, by the concrete actions of human beings within
history. One of the common denominators of Jewish messianism and
libertarian anarchism that made for such a felicitous match was
the radically anti-authoritarian character of both traditions. The
state and all the forms of domination and control that it
represents were regarded as the chief enemy. Drawing on  their
messianic tradition, the anti-authoritarianism of Löwy's thinkers
often took the form of an the belief in an apparently oxymoronic
"theocratic anarchy," i.e. a society in which the very absence of
power relationships among people and of the abuse of nature would
be insured by their absolute obedience to God. This view dovetails
nicely with the most radical elements in Judaism, namely that
human beings through making proper choices can be God's co-workers
and compel her/him to establish a just order on earth.

Though Löwy focuses on the chemistry between Jewish messianism and
libertarian anarchism, he implies that the Enlightenment
influenced many of the thinkers he treats, and I would argue that
rationalism was an important term in the equation as well. L|wy
hints more than once that these men had a more ambivalent attitude
toward the Enlightenment than many of their non-Jewish Romanticist
or anarchist colleagues. One clearly historical reason for their
tendency to be more favorably disposed toward the Enlightenment
was that its ideas of human equality had led more or less directly
to the emancipation of the Jews. But in my view the more
fundamental relationship arose from the fact that the idea of a
just social order that is so central to the Jewish tradition has
strong rationalistic components. The concept of Jews as having a
special mission on earth as God's co-workers has always implied a
reasoned, educated knowledge of just what it is that God expects
people to do and what will work in realizing her/his expectations.
The Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment, though
satisfying to these Jewish intellectuals in its attempt to
re-infuse spiritual and cooperative values into society,
represented also a threat against significant elements of their
Jewish identity.

Analytic vs. Continental (yet again) (J. Stanley)

Here is a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. It’s an early essay, written in 1916, and it is not one of Benjamin’s influential works. But it nicely illustrates the distinction I’m trying to make:

It is therefore the linguistic being of man to name things…Why name them? To whom does man communicate himself?...Before this question can be answered we must again inquire: how does man communicate himself? A profound distinction is to be made, a choice presented, in face of which an intrinsically false understanding of language is certain to give itself away…Anyone who believes that man communicates his mental being by names cannot also assume that it is his mental being that he communicates, for this does not happen through the names of things, that is, through the words by which he denotes a thing. And, equally, the advocate of such a view can only assume that man is communicating factual subject matter to other men, for that does happen through the word by which he denotes a thing. This view is the bourgeois conception of language, the invalidity and emptiness of which will become increasingly clear in what follows. It holds that the means of communication is the word, its object factual, its addressee a human being. The other conception of language, in contrast, knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God.

The rest of the essay consists of Benjamin’s explanation of the last line of the quote. Benjamin argues that the first two chapters of Genesis are meditations on the creative power of language; in the second chapter of Genesis, Adam provides THE name for each thing; he is not just arbitrarily and conventionally linking up sounds with things (“The human word is the name of things. Hence it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things…agreed by some convention”). Benjamin is not silly enough to think that names are essential to things (“…the rejection of bourgeois by mystical linguistic theory equally rests on a misunderstanding. For according to mystical theory the word is simply the essence of the thing. That is incorrect, because the thing in itself has no word, being created from God’s word…”). He is clear that humans encounter objects, classify them according to their knowledge, and then give the objects names (only for God, or Adam before the Fall, is naming a creative act). The problem with the bourgeois picture of language is that it completely divorces naming from the creative act, thereby severing its connection to a certain kind of mystical power, which is reflected in our deepest myths.

So Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in Benjamin's Illuminations,

Allegoresis and collection are the twin foci around which the elliptical writings of Walter Benjamin orbit. The former, as a mode of criticism, transforms the latter practice into a version of materialist historicism:

The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership--for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to the magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object (60).

This sentence exemplifies Benjamin's tendencies as a writer, with its heterogeneity ("magic encyclopedia ... quintessence ... fate ... object"), its tendency to see in the specific object a grander narrative (just as the allegorist sees noumenal truths embodied in the phenomenal), and its attempt to distinguish "the true collector" from an ostensibly quite similar, but opposed, historical formulation: here, the false collector who is an investor. The grand narrative which the collector discerns in the object collected is not merely its immediate history, its period, region etc., but history itself as it spills out from history's most conservative vessel: the material object. A quotation which Benjamin borrows from Proust argues this position: "the past is 'somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object'"(158). This specific articulation creates for Benjamin a difficult task, as his criticism must strive to capture what is at once "beyond the intellect" and "unmistakable." That this criticism is most aptly embodied in the figure of the collector is not surprising, since he who collects has access to the "magic encyclopedia" afforded by objects and can therefore see "through them into their distant past as though inspired" (61). The magical, or prophet-like function of the collector, its "old-age" image (61), mediates the divide between what is unthinkable and what is self-evident.

Benjamin’s last piece of writing
This, Benjamin’s last piece of writing, echoes many of his early writings set down under the impact of the 1914-18 war. In Benjamin’s work theological insights and the urgent imperatives suggested by historical materialism are never at odds; in this last piece of writing they are crystallised in a series of extraordinarily suggestive meditations.
Many of the arguments of the theses were used by Benjamin in an important article, ‘Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian’ written in 1937 for the journal of the Institute of Social Research. In that essay Benjamin’s preoccupations were stated in more mundane, more historically concrete language. In the ‘theses’ they are set down with all the concentration of an incantation or prayer.
Benjamin’s 18 ‘theses’ are couched in the language of Messianism and invoke specifically Jewish themes such as that of remembrance. At the same time these ‘theses’ represent a condensed and encoded statement on the nature of the revolutionary experience of time and of history. The first thesis addresses the puzzle of the continued relevance of a theological perspective in his most materialist impulses.

Walter Benjamin 1940

On the Concept of History

---

Source: http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/Theses_on_History.html;
Translation: © 2005 Dennis Redmond;
CopyLeft: translation used with permission, Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike);
Original German: Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Translator’s Note: Jetztzeit was translated as “here-and-now,” in order to distinguish it from its polar opposite, the empty and homogenous time of positivism. Stillstellung was rendered as “zero-hour,” rather than the misleading “standstill”; the verb “stillstehen” means to come to a stop or standstill, but Stillstellung is Benjamin’s own unique invention, which connotes an objective interruption of a mechanical process, rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not).

---

I

It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

II

“Among the most noteworthy characteristics of human beings,” says Lotze, “belongs... next to so much self-seeking in individuals, the general absence of envy of each present in relation to the future.” This reflection shows us that the picture of happiness which we harbor is steeped through and through in the time which the course of our own existence has conferred on us. The happiness which could awaken envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, with people we could have spoken with, with women who might have been able to give themselves to us. The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably with that of resurrection [Erloesung: transfiguration, redemption]. It is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret protocol [Verabredung: also appointment] between the generations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled lightly. The historical materialist knows why.

III

The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.

IV

Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself. – Hegel, 1807

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turn, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed.

V

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

VI

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

VII

Think of the darkness and the great cold
In this valley, which resounds with misery.
– Brecht, Threepenny Opera

Fustel de Coulanges recommended to the historian, that if he wished to reexperience an epoch, he should remove everything he knows about the later course of history from his head. There is no better way of characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a procedure of empathy. Its origin is the heaviness at heart, the acedia, which despairs of mastering the genuine historical picture, which so fleetingly flashes by. The theologians of the Middle Ages considered it the primary cause of melancholy. Flaubert, who was acquainted with it, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” [Few people can guess how despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.] The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage [Abkunft: descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

VIII

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

IX

My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

X

The objects which the monastic rules assigned to monks for meditation had the task of making the world and its drives repugnant. The mode of thought which we pursue today comes from a similar determination. It has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes have been knocked supine, and have sealed their downfall by the betrayal of their own cause, of freeing the political child of the world from the nets in which they have ensnared it. The consideration starts from the assumption that the stubborn faith in progress of these politicians, their trust in their “mass basis” and finally their servile subordination into an uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing. It seeks to give an idea of how dearly it will cost our accustomed concept of history, to avoid any complicity with that which these politicians continue to hold fast to.

XI

The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its economic conceptions. It is a fundamental cause of the later collapse. There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological progress represented a political achievement. The old Protestant work ethic celebrated its resurrection among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress] already bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all wealth and all culture.” Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power, “must be the slave of other human beings, who... have made themselves into property-owners.” Oblivious to this, the confusion only increased, and soon afterwards Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of modern times... In the... improvement... of labor... consists the wealth, which can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism. Among these is a concept of nature which diverges in a worrisome manner from those in the socialist utopias of the Vormaerz period [pre-1848]. Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat with naïve self-satisfaction. Compared to this positivistic conception, the fantasies which provided so much ammunition for the ridicule of Fourier exhibit a surprisingly healthy sensibility. According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb. To the corrupted concept of labor belongs, as its logical complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, “is there gratis [for free].”

XII

We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.
– Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life

The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the “Spartacus” [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.

XIII

Yet every day our cause becomes clearer and the people more clever.
– Josef Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy

Social democratic theory, and still more the praxis, was determined by a concept of progress which did not hold to reality, but had a dogmatic claim. Progress, as it was painted in the minds of the social democrats, was once upon a time the progress of humanity itself (not only that of its abilities and knowledges). It was, secondly, something unending (something corresponding to an endless perfectibility of humanity). It counted, thirdly, as something essentially unstoppable (as something self-activating, pursuing a straight or spiral path). Each of these predicates is controversial, and critique could be applied to each of them. This latter must, however, when push comes to shove, go behind all these predicates and direct itself at what they all have in common. The concept of the progress of the human race in history is not to be separated from the concept of its progression through a homogenous and empty time. The critique of the concept of this progress must ground the basis of its critique on the concept of progress itself.

XIV

Origin is the goal [Ziel: terminus].
– Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I [Words in Verse]

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle [Dickicht: maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena in which the ruling classes are in control. The same leap into the open sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the revolution.

XV

The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:

Qui le croirait! on dit,
qu'irrités contre l'heure
De nouveaux Josués
au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans
pour arrêter le jour.

[Who would've thought! As though
Angered by time’s way
The new Joshuas
Beneath each tower, they say
Fired at the dials
To stop the day.]

XVI

The historical materialist cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the “eternal” picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the whore called “Once upon a time” in the bordello of historicism. He remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of history.

XVII

Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history. Nowhere does the materialist writing of history distance itself from it more clearly than in terms of method. The former has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time. The materialist writing of history for its part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but also their zero-hour [Stillstellung]. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work. The net gain of this procedure consists of this: that the life-work is preserved and sublated in the work, the epoch in the life-work, and the entire course of history in the epoch. The nourishing fruit of what is historically conceptualized has time as its core, its precious but flavorless seed.

XVIII

“In relation to the history of organic life on Earth,” notes a recent biologist, “the miserable fifty millennia of homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only one fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The here-and-now, which as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.

(Addendum)

A

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [erfasst] the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.

B

Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.

See:

Lest We Forget

100 years of the Avante Garde 1905 2005

Oriental Origins of Post modernism

Habermas

Censorship and Art

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Walter Benjamin,, Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, School,, Post Modernism, Modernism,, Enlightenment,, Modernism,, libertarian socialism,, Kabbala, gnostic,, Marxism,, philosophy,, literary criticism