How do we stop Trump’s attack on us, on workers, students, and trans people?

This is the question on the lips of every leftist right now. It’s also part and parcel of a bigger issue. Capitalism is writhing in a political crisis. The Republican Party has lurched more openly toward brutal authoritarianism. The Democratic Party — which laid the groundwork for this over decades — is now doing a very convincing impression of a corpse. Ecocide continues apace. So does the genocide in Gaza. How do we not just fight back, but win a different future? How do we win real progress?

Sam Farber asks this in an article in Jacobin. He warns against a despair which he sees haunting many on the Left. He traces some of the roots of that despair to Marxists like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. Those thinkers, he tells us, are hopelessly backward-looking, marked by nostalgia and defeatism, snout to tail. That essay prompted a response from Michael Löwy, who defends Bloch and Benjamin.

Farber and Löwy agree on one major point, and I do too: that the Left needs a concept of real progress. We need to reject defeatism and fatalism. But Farber and Löwy raise the question of progress without its most important component. They don’t ask, How do we win a better future? What’s our strategy? Without this, how can we even talk of progress?

Here, I think, they miss the most important message that Benjamin’s ghost is murmuring. While he has his limits, Benjamin reminds us that real progress calls for concrete, revolutionary struggle. His work urges us to learn from the past — to understand what worked and what didn’t, and to do better this time.

Farber: Progress, but Whose? And How?

Farber’s argument in his article, titled “In Defense of Progress,” goes like this: we’re confronted with a brutal capitalism characterized by suffering and ecocide (though Löwy will point out Farber underplays the ecocide). We need another future. Yet, he notes, there’s a strain of defeatism on the Left, especially among intellectuals, that’s an obstacle to those in the streets. (And when we read people like Theodor Adorno, one of the residents of the Grand Hotel Abyss — it’s hard not to see some part of his point.)

Among the thinkers he targets, though, are Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. They were German Marxists who became influential (Benjamin more so than Bloch in the U.S.) in the philosophical tradition known as critical theory. Farber asserts that Benjamin rejects any notion of progress. He’s so focused on the past, says Farber, that the most Benjamin offers is the idea that we have to interrupt the chaos around us and hope to somehow avenge past wrongs. According to Farber, this perspective is not very helpful for reviving a sense of hope and progress.

Contra Benjamin, Farber gives us a definition of progress he says we need instead: “the elimination of needless human suffering caused by material scarcity, inequality, and the powerlessness of working people.”

But what does it actually mean to have progress, based on this definition? For example, what’s the relationship between progress in capitalism and the kind of progress we’d get by overthrowing capitalism for socialism?

The first kind of progress comes with door prizes like brutality, mass destruction, genocide, and ecocide. So how do we transition from that to the other kind? He offers no hints. His proposal becomes more unclear when we remember the beginning of the essay, where he talks about growing up in Cuba in the 1950s. He talks about progress there in terms of economic modernization — like building new roads — but then doesn’t mention the revolution that followed just a few years later. That is, he doesn’t mention that the revolution, despite its bureaucracy and shortcomings, was a concrete political struggle to overthrow capitalism on the island and build a new society. It was a revolution that expropriated the old ruling class, achieved mass literacy and built medical training programs that have sent doctors to serve the working class and poor across the globe. (For Farber, progress almost looks like like a homogeneous, abstract development — in other words, the kind of concept of progress that Benjamin is going to warn us against.)

What’s the relationship between these two kinds of progress? Is it a break? Is it seamless? It can’t be seamless, we’d have to say, given how quickly capitalism’s mask of “law and order” and “progress” slips off. Think of how the capitalist state resorts to naked brutality to protect the wealth of the rulers from those they extracted it from. I mean capitalism’s savage response to the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Paris Commune, and May ’68. Or look at the Vietnam War, the Algerian War, and the genocide against Palestinians. So, now what?

Farber’s idea of progress gets even murkier. “Economic growth and productive investment,” he says, “are requisites for a socialist vision of improving people’s well-being.” But — does this mean socialism, like capitalism, must pursue an unlimited drive for economic growth —one of the main reasons capitalism is destroying the planet? Shouldn’t we ask why he jumps to this conclusion?

In a sentence like that, the difference between progress in capitalism and a really socialist progress seems almost to vanish. An unasked question is grinning back at us from behind his essay. What exactly is the path from where we are — a capitalism thriving on brutality — to something better? This is nothing less than the basic question of progress itself, which must be asked.

To be fair, Farber writes, “It is necessary to step into the political arena and build the power to counteract the political economy of capitalism with an alternative political economy: an economically viable socialism beyond capitalism.”

This, however, seems like a way to avoid the question. What kind of politics, what kind of “alternative political economy,” would do this? This is the question of progress, which demands to be asked.

Löwy Turns Up the Heat

Then, Michael Löwy responded in the pages of Jacobin. He’s one of the main thinkers Farber was addressing in his article; Löwy has long been one of the main experts on, and defenders of, Marxist thinkers like Benjamin and Bloch, among others.

To put my cards on the table, I have a huge amount of respect for Löwy’s work. His book on the young Lukács (here) and his works on Benjamin (here and here, for example) changed my way of thinking about Marxism — probably permanently. He’s part of the reason I first picked up Trotsky, too. His Fire Alarm is still the best work on Benjamin by anyone not named Adorno.

Löwy shares important agreement with Farber: yes, capitalism needs to be stopped, we need a different future, we need real progress. But Löwy also pushes back against Farber’s idea that thinkers like Benjamin and Bloch are corrupting the minds of the youth. Benjamin’s notion of progress, says Löwy, “is defined by a dialectical vision that unifies these two aspects: avoiding disasters — a product of historical progress under the ruling classes — and opening up new futures.” I completely agree, though I think this misses an important point, which I think is the most crucial aspect of Benjamin here. Benjamin reminds us: real progress must be won through concrete revolutionary struggle, and can’t be won with the strategy of reformism (more on that in a minute).

Farber is painting with a thick, ungainly brush, Löwy points out. That’s worth lingering over for a minute. Farber says Benjamin looks only backward. But that means Farber overlooks major parts of Benjamin’s body of work — from the discussions on progress in The Arcades Project to seminal pieces like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Author as Producer.” And Farber says Ernst Bloch just wants to return us to the Middle Ages; almost exactly the opposite is true. Bloch isn’t just a philosopher who thinks the concept of progress is important. Progress is the focus of his entire project. His masterwork and best-known book, The Principle of Hope, and almost everything he wrote after at least 1935 (the vast majority of his work), is bent on creating a Marxist ontology of social progress.

Löwy also raises the stakes of the debate with a sharp and important riposte: Farber is too unconcerned about the climate crisis. In his article, Farber fails to convey just how existential the threat is that we’re facing. The ruling class and its politicians are cashing in on the impending death of the planet. The world is on fire; we don’t own the water, y’all. The question of “progress” now overlaps completely with the question of ecocide. How will it be stopped? How do we make a different future?

Löwy and Farber, though, share a more problematic commonality.

Progress Means Revolution …

What they share, I think, is that they’re missing the question: How do we win real progress? 

For Farber, we need to “step into the political arena” for an “alternative political economy.” Bu does “stepping into the arena” mean working in a capitalist party — the Democratic Party — that promises slow, steady reform (without delivering)? Does it mean the idea — advocated by AOC and Bernie — of gradually electing better people to the Democratic Party, which will supposedly give us better laws over time? And is this approach somehow supposed to control capitalism? Farber doesn’t say. Maybe! After all, it’s the prevailing answer on the Left today, especially among the leaders of the publication for which he wrote his essay.

(Right off the bat, doubts creep in. Weren’t AOC and Bernie the ones supporting Biden during a Democrat-backed genocide against Palestinians? Didn’t they back Biden even when he broke a major strike, and then pivot to support Harris? Didn’t they do all this even though climate change happening faster than we thought? And so on.)

This is where I think it’s interesting to pick up Benjamin again, to see how his ideas collide with our present crises, and what kind of sparks that throws off.

Benjamin was a Jewish intellectual at the peak of his career when the Third Reich rose to power. After the Nazis’ ascent in 1933, Benjamin had fled, connecting with and exchanging ideas with other refugees, including figures like Hannah Arendt (his friend and relative), who, along with Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and others, later made sure Benjamin would be remembered and read. In 1938 the Nazis stripped Jews of German citizenship, rendering Benjamin stateless. France fell to the Nazis. The fascists hunted him as both a Marxist and a Jew. On the brink of capture while trying to flee Nazi-occupied France, he took his own life, which ended alongside 6 million Jews and 6 million non-Jews in the genocide. The “Theses” were written soon after Benjamin’s months in prison in 1939. With his life hanging in the balance, he wrote Thesis VIII in “the tradition of the oppressed.” In those days, as the fascists were coming for him and all those like him, the concepts of progress appeared in tatters.

At this point, it’s important to highlight another element of Benjamin’s thinking. Benjamin’s “Theses” are a political attack. They have a specific target. Löwy notes in his 2005 Fire Alarm that the target is “Social Democratic Marxism, a mix of positivism, Darwinian evolutionism, and the cult of progress.” Throughout the “Theses,” Benjamin points his weapons at “Social Democracy” multiple times.

That term refers to the reformist Marxist parties in Europe and beyond that, by World War I or so, had abandoned the idea of revolution in favor of slow, steady legal and economic reforms within capitalism. The most important party in this tradition was the one in Benjamin’s backyard, the SPD, or the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Its leading figures included people like Bernstein and Kautsky. (This was the same SPD that Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky constantly critiqued.) For the SPD, like for Social Democracy writ large, the goal by the end of the First World War was to mobilize workers to support one reform after another — but never for revolution. The strategy was to work inside the capitalist state for gradual “progress.” That meant, during World War I, that the SPD opted for a “realistic” approach, meaning it aligned itself with the imperialist German state amid the slaughter of the war. When the war led to revolution led in part by Rosa Luxemburg, the SPD’s leaders helped crush it (Luxemburg was then murdered). Benjamin’s main target is this tradition

(But we should note that the vision of progress Benjamin criticizes was also baked into the ideology of the Communist Party [CP] in Germany and beyond in the 1930s. While the CP did not explicitly advocate gradual reforms, it saw itself as “swimming with the tide” of history, to use Benjamin’s words. We can see this in its brief, opportunistic support for the “democratic bourgeoisie,” which it thought would eventually create conditions favorable for working-class power. We can see it at work, too, in its sectarian “third period,” when the CP acted as if the revolutionary tide would inevitably sweep the working class to victory.)

Benjamin’s “Theses” aren’t rejecting progress entirely, as Farber suggests. Instead, they critique that misleading notion of progress.

That is, what Benjamin rejects is the idea — peddled by leaders of Social Democratic parties like the SPD — that history progresses through slow, steady, even reform. He writes that the SPD leaders’

stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their “base in the masses,” and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus are three aspects of the same thing. … Nothing has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving with the current. (“Theses on the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, Thesis X, XI)

Here we see a critique that echoes Luxemburg in its rejection of reformism. (We have to constantly be alert to these kinds of connections; at the heart of Benjamin’s project is the mission to develop the “art of citing without quotation marks” as a way of creating tension between the past and present (see The Arcades Project). Reformism serves to integrate the working class into the state, that capitalist “uncontrollable apparatus” that serves not the workers, but the rulers. This sweeps the working class along in the “flow” of history — a history dominated by the ruling class and its catastrophes, wars, mass brutalities.

Benjamin’s notes are deeply marked by Luxemburg, and even Trotsky, in their critique of reformism. While it’s true that Benjamin was not a revolutionary like Trotsky or Luxemburg. But as a philosopher, he was also thinking about their work and responded to it in various ways. For example, he cites the uprising led by the revolutionary Spartacist group headed by Luxemburg as a fight for the kind of real, nonreformist progress he champions. In fact, the “Theses” read like Benjamin is responding, in his idiosyncratic way, to pamphlets like Luxemburg’s “Social Reform or Revolution?” or “The Mass Strike.” Indeed, by 1940, as Löwy notes in Fire Alarm, Benjamin had become “consumed” with “breathtaking excitement” while reading Trotsky’s autobiography; his friend remarked that “he was in favour of a distinctly anti-Stalinistic’ Marxism and ‘was a great admirer of Trotsky’” (Fire Alarm, p. 15). By the end of the 1930s, Benjamin had developed a brand of Marxism that was deeply critical of both its Social Democratic and orthodox Stalinist variants.

For Benjamin, when reformism proclaims, “Work through the state! Slow and steady does the trick!” it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of history and politics. Benjamin warns us that history can advance, but it doesn’t happen like that. 

Benjamin , like Bloch, grew up in a Germany that was industrializing at neck-breaking speeds. The country went from an economic backwater to an economic powerhouse in just a few decades leading up to the First World War. That development radically disrupted society: it helped drive the slaughter of war, but also the impoverishment of many small business owners and workers; it led to the emergence of a new layer of middle-class, often disillusioned professionals; and all this jumbled together with remnants of medieval antisemitism and old myths of glorious a “Reich,” or kingdom. All this “progress” fueled the rise of fascism, which developed and took over state power to save capitalism during capitalism’s massive crises. In this milieu, Benjamin and Bloch realized that it wasn’t reform that would stop Hitler; faith in the slow, steady reform of the capitalist state meant being unable to oppose capitalism’s deadly machinery.

What reformism overlooks is that history does not move in a “homogeneous, empty time,” smoothly progressing from one reform to another within the capitalist framework. The present is unstable, filled with both opportunities for struggle and change for the working masses, but also huge dangers for them too. If the working class wants real change, that means real struggle in unevenly developing, concrete contexts, breaking with capitalism for something else.

In his unfinished masterwork, The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes,

Definitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe — to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment — the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress — the first revolutionary measure taken.

You see Benjamin here trying to reorient our understanding of “progress.” For him, like for Luxemburg in some ways, history’s true advance will stem from revolutionary overthrow from “revolutionary measures.” The agent — the “subject of historical knowledge” with the power to shape history — is not the reformist politician; it is “the struggling, oppressed class itself.”

In this reorientation, he wants us to see progress as a result of class clashes whose outcome is uncertain. Now and again, “critical moments” open up, in which the working class could recognize itself as the subject of history, able to move it through its collective power.

It might seem odd that Bemjamin writes, in “Theses on the Concept of History,” that “an awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” But he’s arguing that the struggle of the masses is not part of some abstract, smooth flow of time; rather, it ruptures the notion that history will inevitably lead to a better future. The future is something to be made.

Farber is correct in a sense. In Benjamin’s view, there is no such thing as “progress” — at least not in an abstract sense. That notion is an illusion. Real progress — beyond capitalist brutality — calls for concrete social and political clashes in concrete situations. Do we want real progress beyond capitalism? OK, then — that situating ourselves in our present, with all its contingent, messy conflicts, and planning a way forward.

In “The Author as Producer,” a speech from the 1930s, it becomes even clearer that for Benjamin, real progress means a revolutionary struggle by the working class. While progress is based on technical and economic factors, it is fundamentally a political task. The goal is to advance the power of the oppressed class to fight back, and it is to this task that Benjamin calls on leftist writers (himself included) to commit themselves.

How can writers do that? On one hand, technological advancements had made it easier — the mass dissemination of ideas through newspapers and magazines, for instance. But that’s hardly enough. “For we are faced with the fact — of which the past decade in Germany has furnished an abundance of examples — that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes — indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question.” Progress calls for political action. For writers, this means transforming the means of their work — the means of ideological production — into weapons for the working class (is this a kind of echo of Lenin’s ideas in What Is to Be Done?). In other words, Benjamin is saying, what’s needed is a struggle to use a section of the press to concretely connect, organize, and prepare the proletariat for mass struggle, beyond capitalism’s capacity to absorb and defuse revolutionary ideas inside itself. Quoting Aragon, Benjamin states: “It is not enough to weaken the bourgeoisie from within,” echoing his later critique of reformism. Instead, “it is necessary to fight them with the proletariat.” The fundamental task is to help build the fighting force needed for “the purposes of the proletarian revolution.”

How? Past is prologue. We study the victories and the defeats — especially the missed opportunities — of the past, in their own contingent clashes of social forces to inform our present actions. This is what he calls the “tiger’s leap into the past.” “Looking back rather than forward,” is Farber’s gloss on Benjamin. Right here is the mistake. It’s not a matter of either/or. We go forward by looking back — to the concrete, uneven struggles themselves, viewing ourselves as heirs to their failures and successes. We will need to see what worked and what didn’t — and do it better.

“Catastrophe — to Have Missed the Opportunity.”

So let’s sum up.

First, none of this is to say that Benjamin is without problems. He’s full of contradictions. Benjamin was a Marxist, but not a revolutionary. His Marxism was idiosyncratic and inconsistent. His worldview was shaped by post-Enlightenment German Romanticism, which comes through in the flavor of his writing. He was also marked in highly idiosyncratic ways by the tradition of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, though he constantly gives it his own twists and inversions, as seen in the reovlutionary messianism that infuses the “Theses.” (Benjamin’s spirituality and religious sense were often deeply materialist. If anything, they are ways for him to break through encrusted dogmas of philosophy, religion, and social theory. He especially tried to combat the reigning kinds of philosophical abstraction — from Heidegger to the neo-Kantians to Bergson — with his Kabbalist, almost obsessive focus on historical fragments.)

The value of Benjamin’s “Theses” lies in their approach to the problem of progress. He reminds us that real progress is possible only through concrete revolutionary struggle against the ruling class, echoing in his own way Luxemburg’s warning against reformism and its false and failing promises. What Benjamin does, in other words, is lead us up to and demand that we ask: How do we, today, struggle for real progress? What strategy will help us now, and how might we learn from the past?

This is where Benjamin leaves us — further than Löwy and Farber’s articles, but not far enough. His contradictions compel us to look beyond him toward the revolutionary tradition of Trotsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, and others. Benjamin is a signpost pointing in the right direction. Now the task lies before us incomplete: How can our class break our ties with the ruling class? How do we abandon the idea of slow, steady reform through a capitalist state that exists to crush us and prop up our masters? How do we build a revolutionary struggle independent of masters who would burn the planet to ashes rather than give up rule? How do we win?

The enemies hold the gates of the state; they pay its functionaries. No hope from the ruling apparatus. The path to progress cuts through us: the revolutionary, independent struggle of those who make the world run.