Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Utterly implausible, indefensible, to hold on to a more traditional Enlightenment-style Marxism that we could say, Benjamin doesn't use this phrase, but the unstated complement to or polar opposite of weak messianism would be strong messianism.
And one could say that insofar as Marx and Engels were in certain respects children of the Enlightenment, and then certainly of some of their interpreters, like in the turn of the last century, the German-speaking Marxist theoreticians of the Second International,
but also on another end of that political spectrum, Stalin, that there were a number of Marxists in the 19th and early 20th centuries who held to the idea of a kind of historical necessitation and who thought, all right, whereas Hegel claims we have no power of foresight into the future, no, Marx's breakthrough in terms of historical materialism allows us to
in looking at the past and the present, to also be able to predict at least the rough outlines of what lies ahead in the future.
And that if this version of Marxism claims that, look, the eventual self-destruction of capitalism and out of those ashes, the rise of the phoenix of socialism and the eventual arrival of full-fledged communism,
that we can know that this is guaranteed to happen, that sooner or later it is historically inevitable down the road into the future that this will all come to pass.
And, you know, of course, for observers of the first half of the 20th century like Benjamin, there's the registration of, well, no, I mean, Marx is, you know, or even if you don't attribute them to Marx, that this kind of classical enlightenment style Marxist historical materialism was predicting that
all right, you would have the outbreak relatively soon of proletarian revolutions in the most advanced capitalist industrial countries.
That didn't happen.
Instead, the revolutions happened in, you know, what we would now call the developing world, you know, in agrarian czarist Russia, you know, then in peasant China, et cetera.
And that moreover, not only did, you
You know, socialist or communist revolutions failed to erupt in Western Europe.
Instead, you got the opposite.
You had, you know, the triumphant rise of fascism, you know, in Europe.
And, you know, so you had a situation of two world wars with a Great Depression sandwiched in between.
And, you know, and all of that, and of course, the Great Depression, that seemed to fit the bill of, you know, for a classical Marxist, the mother of all economic crises.
And yet, the arrival of that economic crisis did not, you know, did not result in social revolutions and capitalist countries hit hard by it.
You know, in the United States, you have 25% unemployment rate, you know, people in soup kitchen lines, etc.
But
Still, you didn't have a proletarian revolution.
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