Reading as class struggle

The two authors of “Politically red” read Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Fredric Jameson, and others as chapters in the history of class struggle. Their book is compelling, written with precision and passion.

Sean Sheehan

Marx is read for the way he looked to Spanish colonialism when instancing the earliest form of what he calls “primitive accumulation”.

The theft of gold and silver in South America, he writes, characterized ‘the dawn of the era of capitalist production’ and the grief it imposed on the indigenous population marks its foundational violence.

The imposition of Christianity was its spiritual equivalent.

In Bartolomé de Las Casas’ “Brevísima relación de la destruction de las Indias” (“A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies”), cited more than once by Marx, there is a rare moment when an Amerindian speaks, linking the cruelty of the conquistadors to gold: “They have a God whom they worship and adore, and it is in order to get that God from us so that they can worship Him that they conquer us and kill us”.

The violence of racial capitalism through colonialism is a thread running through not only Marx but also Luxemburg and Benjamin. It is traced incisively in “Politically red” and the reading of Benjamin is particularly inspiring.

Benjamin met Luxemburg in 1915 when both were engaged in anti-war activities and his brother gave him a copy of her prison letters as a birthday present in 1920; the huge turnout for her funeral, after her murder by a right-wing force, would have been something he witnessed.

Her influence on his own red allegiances was profound and affected his resistance to party orthodoxy without diminishing his emancipatory spirit. This comes across strikingly in the book’s chapter, “Messianic Promises”, where messianism is shorn of its religious connotation and becomes a way of figuring an unpredictable future and a “temporality of waiting” wherein a revolutionary promise of interrupting history remains unbroken.

Benjamin’s image of the angel, from a painting by Paul Klee, deserves the close attention this book gives it. The angel, wings open, is moving away from something, his face turned towards the past.

It would like to stay but, in Benjamin’s words: “a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” The authors of “Politically red” hear what the angel says in its muteness: revolution cannot be scheduled or calculated, its political space cannot be anticipated and, as Benjamin puts it, we must take a “tiger’s leap” in “an arena where the ruling class gives the commands” but “in the open air of history”. The angel moves backward but into the future. The past, present and future are entwined.