A Historical Materialism with Romantic Splinters: Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx

Abstract

Walter Benjamin first became interested in Marxism in 1923, when he read György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and met the beautiful Latvian communist Asja Lacis. From that moment on, the basic concepts of historical materialism become central to his writings but only in association with his radical romantic Zivilisationskritik and his interest in Jewish messianism. As a consequence, Benjamin rejected the ideology of progress and, in his 1929 article on surrealism, identified communism with revolutionary pessimism. The struggle to emancipate historical materialism from the (bourgeois) idea of progress, as well as from positivism, is one of the main topics of his unfinished project on the Paris Arcades (Das Passagen-Werk) from the 1930s. While in the early 1930s Benjamin emphasised the Marxian concept of production, in his later writings class struggle and revolution appear as the key aspects of the Marxian heritage. In his last writing, an essay of 18 theses and two supplements called ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), messianism and historical materialism are brought together in a unique revolutionary synthesis.