Capitalist Progress Threatens Human Survival
Marxist scholar Michael Löwy, responding to Samuel Farber’s “In Defense of Progress” from the new issue of Jacobin, defends philosopher Walter Benjamin and argues that “progress,” as defined under capitalism, has come to threaten humanity’s very survival.
German philosopher and writer Walter Benjamin. (ullstein bild / Getty Images)
Samuel Farber’s article “In Defense of Progress” is very sensible and rational. We agree on many points, but I have some important disagreements. I’ll try to present them briefly.
Walter Benjamin
Is Walter Benjamin, like other Western Marxists, really a thinker who tried to “shy away from politics” as Farber claims? Many criticisms can be leveled at Benjamin, but I find it difficult to deny the political character of his writings. It’s true that he didn’t belong to any political party, but that doesn’t mean he shied away from politics. Karl Marx, in the years he was writing Capital, didn’t belong to any party. Does that mean he wasn’t at that time a political thinker?
According to Farber, Benjamin “conceived of revolution as a sudden cataclysmic, messianic event that would put the brakes on the ‘locomotives of world history,’ avoiding new disasters rather than opening up a brighter future.” Yet Benjamin’s notion is defined by a dialectical vision that unifies these two aspects: avoiding disasters — a product of historical progress under the ruling classes — and opening up new futures.
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