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.

Thus, in an addendum to one of his theses On the Concept of History, he points to the realization of a classless society (the “new future” of Marxism) as the aim of revolution, but he doesn’t view it as the result of progress: “Classless society is not to be conceived as the endpoint of historical development but its interruption, so many times failed, finally accomplished.”

Revolutionary or “Left” Romanticism

Farber quotes our book here: “Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre identified various strands of left-wing romanticism in their study Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. ‘New Rousseauism,’ for example, looks at the dawn of human history as an idealized golden age.”

For us, however, what defines revolutionary romanticism — and this also applies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau — is that it doesn’t suggest a return to the past (to the “golden age”) but a detour via the past toward a utopian future. Rousseau admired the indigenous Carib people, but he didn’t propose living like them; he dreamed of a new, democratic society in which humanity’s past liberty and equality resurfaced in novel form.

The same goes for Ernst Bloch: Farber mentions his fascination with the Middle Ages, but Bloch was the great philosopher of utopia. Bloch references the past to critique capitalist “progress,” not to suggest a return to the Middle Ages! His goal was a future society, communist in the Marxist sense. Farber’s depiction of E. P. Thompson seems to me far more accurate: it’s not about restoring a lost community but creating a new one that breaks with the ruthless antisocial logic of capitalism.

According to Farber, the most influential author we speak of in our book is Ferdinand Tönnies. But Tönnies, as we say and Farber mentions, is a “resigned romantic” and, therefore, does not belong to the revolutionary romantic tradition.

Ecology and Economic Growth

I’m entirely in agreement with one of Farber’s arguments: we will have to “counteract the political economy of capitalism” with democratic planning that establishes priorities of production. But I don’t believe in the possibility of economic growth that’s not ecologically harmful.

It seems to me that Farber underestimates the gravity of the ecological crisis: capitalist “progress,” with its logic of limitless growth, is leading us to an unprecedented catastrophe in human history: climate change. This is a threat to humanity’s very survival. If we want to avoid such an outcome, we must reduce our energy consumption and material production, beginning with useless and superfluous commodities (which constitute the majority of what capitalism produces).

Certainly, under an alternative model of civilization that we call ecosocialism, it will be necessary to satisfy humanity’s fundamental social needs, but, as Marx laid out, the first step toward the realm of freedom is the reduction of the workday and the free time it allows for human self-realization.