Can we move beyond the struggle mindset if we must continually look to its past to find meaning and justification for our own actions?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Trotsky foresaw the victory of fascism in a concrete analysis: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/311208.htm

Thank you, really interesting and well presented.

This podcast is an introduction to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History." It surveys some of the key concepts deployed by Benjamin in this text and provides an overview of the historical context. Underpinning theories from Marxism and Jewish Messianism are unpacked for non-experts. 

With the exception of a Satie piece, Berlioz's version of La Marseillaise and various versions of the Internationale, the soundtrack is all original compositions. 

Comments

Jon Gamble

Jon Gamble

Meryl Smith 2

Ian Mykel

martha_craig