Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History
What can I even say about this, it's incredible. Composted in early 1940 before fleeing Vichy France, it was his last major writing. He took his own life later that year in Spain, fearing capture by Nazi collaborators.
We still see today many attitudes that we could describe as "vulgar Marxism" because so many (probably most) on Left still hold to fundamentally bourgeois conceptions of history and progress.
A key image is the Angel of History, explained in Thesis IX:
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while that pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
He goes on to say this, from the end of Thesis XII:
Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
It's a powerful piece of writing that I could hardly attempt to summarize. I hope that if you are not familiar with this to give it a read some time. You can find versions of it here and here.
thinking about this again
