Tentative gas about Walter Benjamin

I have just finished reading a collection of pieces by Walter Benjamin. He is a very interesting character. Not a Bolshevik, he was an intellectual and jobbing journalist in life, a paid brain. A lot of what he wrote appears fragmentary to a modern reader. There are plenty of bits and pieces generally available, commentaries on Kafka, Baudelaire and somesuch. They are interesting but only really make sense if you have read such novelists, to my shame, I suppose, I haven't.

There is the piece, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It is an excellent work, worth everyone's while reading; Marxists, artists and art-lovers. It tries to lay down a basis for understanding art today and developing into the foreseeable capitalist future. Understanding art and culture means we can make demands of it, in the same way Marx's Critique of Political Economy did for politics and economics.

Last, and perhaps most interesting, are his theses on history. This is an example of what's often called his unique fusion of Marxism and Judaism. I'm not here to say it is or isn't. I don't think Marxists should fear to wield ideas like “messianic time”. Benjamin may not have been a Bolshevik but, intentionally or not, he was in tune with a powerful aspect of Russian revolutionary culture.

Lenin's model of socialist organisation, his continual struggle for doctrinal clarity, combined with his boundless faith in the capacity of the Russian working class (redeemer of Russian society, destined to triumph over the Tsarist Antichrist) inspired tens of thousands of young Russians, men and women, to risk all to bring the good word to the Russian people. Over the years millions of people round the world responded, and continue to respond Marxist ideas in the same way religious pioneers did in the ancient world. This is sometimes used to deride followers of a materialist philosophy, but if Marxism triumphs in the same way as monotheism has it'll be Marxists who have the last laugh.

The other aspect of messianic time is it's contrast to “homogenous, empty time”. This is a discussion of conceptions of history, progress. Every document of culture is also a document of barbarism. While mankind's mastery of nature has extended we are liable to forget our deepening subjection to man-made forces. Walter Benjamin is great at handling dialectical thought. But the notion of messianic time is useful at grasping the reality of revolution.

Revolution is not the piece by piece addition of this contradiction to that contradiction until, one fine day, they result in a strike, march on parliament, defection of the army, a new dawn for humanity. Revolutions run on messianic time. They alter reality so, what normally would take decades, can be achieved in days, even hours. The Egyptian revolution, so far, is a great example of this. Eighteen days of revolution, culminating in seven days of snowballing mass strikes (the messiah embodied as the Egyptian working class), were enough to blow a hole in thirty years of emergency, dictatorial rule.

Walter Benjamin's ideas may have been a broiling collision of Marxism and Judaism, but their mystical aspect can equally function as metaphor. They need be no more wacky, no more strange than Antonio Gramsci referring to the Modern Prince.