Reading notes on Chapter 8 of The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate By Enzo Traverso

The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate 

By Enzo Traverso 

Translated by Bernard Gibbons

Brill, [2018]

The below are my underlinings/highlightings of Traverso. My own thoughts appear, if at all, as [N.B.].

Jay

Chapter 8: The Messianic Materialism of Walter Benjamin 

3 Critique of Progress

....his acceptance of Marxism was critical and, so to speak, selective. What interested him about Marxism was its subversive and revolutionary dimension, of which there no longer remained any trace in social democracy. Educated by Bernstein and Kautsky, the latter conceived Marxism as a theory of evolution, in which history was a linear path toward progress and technique, its fundamental tool. This historical evolutionism and technical fetishism took into account only the domination of man over nature, without considering the human and social regression that this implied.

.... in his acceptance of technique, he considered himself closer to Fourier (despite all his naïve limitations) than to German social democracy.

....Technical progress engendered destructive forces and became an instrument of domination that could only lead to war. 

....One of the tasks of the class struggle was then to break this negative dialectic and put technique back at the service of nature and humanity. 'If the abolition of the bourgeoisie', wrote Benjamin in another fragment of the collection, 

     'is not completed in an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signaled by inflation and chemical warfare), all is lost. 

[N.B. Miseducated and self-miseducated, like so many other radicalized young intellectuals trying to find their way to the working class vanguard and scientific socialism, Benjamin was satisfied with a caricature of Marxism bequeathed by the misleaders of the 2nd and 3rd international.  This fraudulent caricature of Marxism he rejected, preferring a subjective variety of idealism which Traverso also prizes above the works of revolutionary socialists of that time and ours. [JR]

....social democracy was not able to distinguish between the emancipatory potential of technique and its destructive application by capitalism. With its complacent optimism, it persisted in seeing each technical innovation as a new contribution to the advent of a liberated society. As he wrote in his essay on Eduard Fuchs (1937), social democracy was prisoner to the illusions of positivism, merely admiring the development of technology; its theorists 'misunderstood the destructive side of this development because they were alienated from the destructive side of dialectics'.

....he wrote that revolutionary action, like that carried out by Blanqui in the nineteenth century, did not 'presuppose any belief in progress' but rather the 'determination to do away with present injustice.'40 Thus, revolution would accomplish both a secular and a messianic function: by crushing fascism and the dominant class – the 'Antichrist' – it would permit the redemption ( Erlösung) of the past

....In his preparatory notes for the theses 'On the Concept of History', Benjamin wrote that Marx had 'secularized the idea of messianic time ( messianische Zeit)'

     in his conception of the 'classless society'.43 Revolution was the 'now-time' ( Jet-ztzeit) in which the oppressed past and the messianic future came together in an explosive encounter.44 On this point, the German sociologist Christoph Hering has pertinently pointed out the striking similarity that exists between this concept of revolution as a messianic interruption of the continuum  of history and Marx's theory – formulated in the introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) – which characterised the revolution as the end of the 'prehistory' 

[N.B. Again the caricature of Marx's work not as the generalization of the line of march of a class, but as a disguised version of "Jewish messianism."  Traverso seems more than a little in love with this formulation, as he is with several idealism rationalizations in this book which he counterposes to class struggle and independent working class political action.  Numerous formerly radicalized intellectuals, in retreating from scientific socialism, passed through, or ended-up, dismissing Marxism by saying it was either messianism or positivism as they registered their disgust at the wares peddled for Marxism by social democracy and Stalinism. JR]

4 Historical Materialism and Theology

In the theses 'On the Concept of History', Benjamin evokes this fusion of Marxism with Jewish theology through the allegorical image, drawn from Edgar Allan Poe and German romantic literature, of the 'hunchback dwarf' ( buckli-ger Zwerg). He described the legend of an 'automaton' that was always capable of defeating his adversaries at chess. In reality, this 'automaton', present in the form of a 'puppet wearing Turkish attire', concealed inside itself a 'hunchback dwarf' who was 'a master at chess', who directed the game and assured the victory....

....Theology – Jewish messianism – appears in this thesis as a weapon to be used in the class struggle, a powerful tool without which Marxism, reduced by social democracy and Stalinism to an empty shell and a sort of soulless machine (an

     'automaton') could not vanquish the historical enemy (fascism). 

...., he did not consider them as opposed or contradictory but as linked by a deep elective affinity. He did not conceive their union as an addition, rather as a dialectical synthesis.48 Without such a fusion, they were doomed to impotence: historical materialism became a fetish (the 'science' of Kautsky or the Stalinist 'diamat') 

....Benjamin's goal was precisely to eliminate any frontier between Marxism and messianism, in order to fuse them together in a new conception, simultaneously religious and secular, of the revolution. Influenced by Scholem and Brecht, most theological and Marxist interpretations of Benjamin share this refusal to see the unity of Marxism and theology. 

....To understand the theses 'On the Concept of History', it is necessary to adopt a new approach – that, for example, of the liberation theology in Latin America – founded on the idea that Marxism and religion are not two irreconcilable entities.