“The angel of history. His face is turned towards 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.”
Walter Benjamin
“Even the Dead Won’t Be Safe”: Walter Benjamin
“Influential individuals can change the individual features of events and some of their particular consequences, but they cannot change their general trend, which is determined by other forces”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others”.
Georgi Plekhanov
“A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself.”
Bertolt Brecht
In 1931, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary that Bertolt Brecht “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[1]
Benjamin never met Trotsky but was clearly influenced by him, as these essays in One-Way Street show. The book is indispensable for readers of culture and politics. They combine literary form, philosophical insight and social diagnosis. Benjamin treats commodity society, urban life and mass culture as problems of cognition and political practice. Benjamin’s work is so contemporary that a systematic study of it prepares the reader to understand the crisis of culture under capitalism and what to do about it. Benjamin’s account of the commodification of experience, the loss of aura, and media’s role in shaping perception speaks directly to the age of digital capitalism: social media, algorithmic spectacle and the mass reproduction of imagery.
Born into a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin, Benjamin’s formative years were spent in the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the crisis of European reformism and the rise of fascism.
As Leon Trotsky describes so beautifully, “The political situation in Germany is not only difficult but also educational, like when a bone breaks, the rupture in the life of the nation cuts through all tissue. The interrelationship between classes and parties—between social anatomy and political physiology—has rarely in any country come to light so vividly as today in Germany.
The social crisis tears away the conventional and exposes the real. Those who are in power today could have seemed to be nothing but ghosts not so long ago. Was the rule of monarchy and aristocracy not swept away in 1918? Obviously, the November Revolution did not do its work thoroughly enough. German Junkertum itself does not feel like a ghost. On the contrary, it is working to turn the German republic into a ghost.”[2]
Walter Benjamin’s work, especially the fragments gathered in One‑Way Street, his essays on mechanical reproduction, the Arcades Project and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, cannot be properly understood apart from the social and class dynamics of the Weimar Republic. A reader approaching Benjamin for the first time should see him as not an isolated intellectual or “aura‑minded” aesthete, but as a product of the crisis of German capitalism between the world wars: inflation, mass unemployment, the decomposition of bourgeois liberalism, the growth of mass culture and the political crisis that produced fascism.
The Weimar Republic (1918–1933) was a political shell overlying profound economic dislocations: wartime devastation, the burdens of imperialist indemnities, the crisis of international capitalism and the breakdown of pre‑war class compromises. These objective conditions shaped mass consciousness, German party politics and intellectual life.
As Plekhanov argued in his discussion of the role of the individual, historical circumstances give individuals their range of action—yet within those constraints, choices matter; neither voluntarism nor fatalism suffices. He writes, “Until the individual has won this freedom by heroic effort in philosophical thinking, he does not fully belong to himself, and his mental tortures are the shameful tribute he pays to external necessity that stands opposed to him”.[3]
Benjamin’s perceptive fragments register both the objective sweep of history and the uncertain agency of cultural actors in that sweep. Benjamin’s analyses are a study of how capitalist social relations transform perception, memory and experience. His discussion of the “loss of aura” under mechanical reproduction and his montage‑style aphorisms in One‑Way Street register the ways commodity forms permeate everyday life—reducing experience to exchange, fragmenting historical consciousness, and producing the atomised subject susceptible to mass demagogy. Benjamin’s arcades and his attention to commodities are not mere literary motifs but critical categories for understanding how capitalist social relations shape consciousness and political possibility.
Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky
At the level of ideas and political practice, Walter Benjamin and Leon Trotsky represent two very different responses to the convulsions of early 20th-century capitalism. Placed within the materialist conception of history, their approaches flow from distinct social positions, class relations and political perspectives.
To understand their difference is to grasp how material conditions and class struggle shape theory, not merely by individual brilliance, which both of course had. The material conditions that produced both figures matter. Benjamin wrote amid the collapse of European democracies and the rise of fascism, a context that informed his aphoristic, crisis-lit reflections. Trotsky’s analysis emerged from active leadership in revolutionary struggle and the bitter experience of Stalinist counterrevolution—hence his sustained emphasis on the need for an international revolutionary party and the critique of bureaucratic degeneration.
Trotsky’s writings epitomise Marxist historical materialism and the dialectical method: theory as a scientific instrument for analysing capitalist contradictions and guiding revolutionary practice. His essays on culture—most famously Literature and Revolution and Culture and Socialism—argue that the working class must appropriate the accumulated achievements of past culture, master technique, and subordinate aesthetics to the objective task of socialist transformation while resisting crude reductionism.
Trotsky’s approach to technology was groundbreaking; writing in Culture and Socialism, one of the notes lying before me asks, “Does culture drive technology, or technology culture?” This is the wrong way to pose the question. Technology cannot be counterposed to culture, for it is culture’s mainspring. Without technology, there is no culture. The growth of technology drives culture forward. But the science and broader culture that arise from technology give powerful impetus to its growth. Here, there is a dialectical interaction.”[4]
Benjamin, by contrast, was a philosophically rich and often melancholic critic whose writings—flashing with literary insight—tend toward allegory, aesthetics and a messianic conception of history. In works such as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which is not in this book, he wrote The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. [5]
Benjamin emphasises interruption, memory and a theological-materialist image of history that foregrounds the ruins and suffering of the past. His thought is dense with literary metaphor and emphasises the ethical task of remembrance rather than programmatic political strategy. Crucially, Benjamin does not treat culture as epiphenomenal in a trivial sense. Cultural forms mediate class struggle; they can both mask and reveal social contradictions. But from a Marxist standpoint, these cultural phenomena are rooted in the material base. They must be understood as follows: changes in production, mass media, and social organisation produce new forms of ideology and temperament. This dialectical relation—base shaping the superstructure, and superstructural forms feeding back into class politics—must guide our reading of Benjamin.
Benjamin’s Attitude Towards Fascism
Benjamin’s writings were composed amid the disintegration of democratic institutions and the rise of fascist movements that exploited cultural resentment, myth and a politics of destiny. A political materialist account links cultural shifts to the left’s organisational weaknesses. Trotsky’s warning that revolutions and counter‑revolutions hinge on party preparedness and leadership is instructive: cultural critique without programmatic and organisational content cannot substitute for political intervention. Benjamin’s diagnosis of the cultural terrain is thus necessary but insufficient on its own. It needs to be welded to a program that organises the working class to resist and seize power.
Benjamin had a fatalistic attitude towards the rise of fascism, expressed in this quote: “The angel of history. His face is turned towards 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.”
Some time after writing these lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His personal situation was desperate; stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his own immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under Stalinism.
Benjamin, who was familiar with Trotsky’s writings, knew that Stalin had murdered almost all his left-wing opponents and had formed an alliance with Hitler. Nevertheless, among broad circles of intellectuals, some supported Stalin as the only way to avert the emergence of a fascist Europe. The extension of Stalinism into Eastern Europe after the war helped thwart layers of the intelligentsia from coming to grips with this issue. Benjamin did not end his life a supporter of Stalin. But his friends in the Frankfurt School certainly, and like Benjamin, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the international working class.
Benjamin’s work remains valuable for understanding ideology, media and memory in the age of social media, targeted advertising and spectacle. He offers the reader an indispensable tool for understanding how capitalist modernity shapes thought and feeling. It will take a classical Marxist to synthesise these insights with a rigorous, materialist account of capitalism’s laws and with a program for proletarian organisation and struggle.
NOTES
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999)
The IIRE is working on a new collection of Trotsky’s writings on fascism. This new translation of a 1932 article by Trotsky is part of this project. This article was originally published in the journal Die Weltbühne (‘The World Stage’). Die Weltbühne was an important journal of the Independent intellectual left during the Weimar Republic. Cooperators and contributors included Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Hiller, Erich Mühsam, Fritz Sternberg, Heinrich Ströbel, Kurt Tucholsky and others.
[1] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.
[2] Leon Trotsky: The German Enigma-https://www.iire.org/node/1003
[3] On the Role of the Individual in History-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
[4] Culture and Socialism – 1927-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/cult-o23.html
[5] Theses on the Philosophy of History-
A Trumpet of Sedition 