The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History. Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century.
Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter. Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie. Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course.
Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
Origin is the goal. Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past.
This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans. The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.
The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance.
Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive.
On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:.
Who would have believed it! Qui le croirait! A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature.
Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. 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 cristallizes into a monad.
A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.
He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.
The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. So redemption is something like fulfilling those possibilities. Just as the messiah will have the strong messianic power of redeeming the world itself, we have the weak messianic power of trying to live up to the struggles of people who have come before us.
The past, therefor, is the key to all possible redemption for Benjamin, and we thus owe the past a great debt. Here Benjamin asserts that history is not, for him, an accurate account of the past. There seems to be a sense here that time presents moments when certain memories become vital and urge themselves on us. That first sentence is, of course, a direct reply to Schmitt. The more complex thought here is the attack on a particular conception of history, one that sees history as a process of progress or advancement through time.
It is an extremely enigmatic and difficult analogy, and we will just have to talk about it. Paul Klee was a modernist artist influenced by the surrealists who also influenced Benjamin himself. Google the painting. The list he constructs here describes one basic idea derived from humanism: that time is the field upon which human progress takes place. Many people have attempted to excavate exactly what he means, and Benjamin himself attempts to explain in the next aphorism. But clearly for Benjamin there is a link between the mistaken belief that history is the accurate recounting of past events and the equally mistaken belief in human progress.
Benjamin sees an analogy between the way particular clothing items from the past can refresh themselves in new mixtures in the present and his own view of the past as a collection of moments that may at any given time play a vital new role in a struggle.
And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history.
There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly.
Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them.
Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries.
There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. VIII The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical.
IX My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress. The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them.
Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians' stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their 'mass basis', and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.
It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere. The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well.
It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving.
From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement.
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