On Messianic Time
By: Jakub Lejbowicz
Tags: Socialism, Dialectical Materialism, Communism, Politics, Walter Benjamin

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin argues against a conception of history that posits progress, justice, liberation or socialism are the inevitable terminus of history. Natasha Roth observes “[t]he crux of Benjamin’s argument lies in his rejection of the assumption that progress is inevitable. He calls on us to turn our attention to the past rather than bank on an unknowable future, and urges us not to accept the victors’ history[.]” The future remains important in this conception of history, but instead of being an inevitable destination it is a passage, “the narrow gate through which the Messiah might enter.” In Benjamin’s conception of history revolution always waits in the wings.

On its face this concept of Messianic time has the esoteric quality of a theological principle, but it is theology enlisted in the service of historical materialism. It is firmly rooted in the theory that historical transformations are driven by the “fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist,” spurred on by the ruling classes and the oppressed people whom they exploit, dominate and dispossess struggling to assert their contradictory interests. As a political concept, Messianic time is animated by and cannot exist in the world without class war.

“[E]ven the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious,” writes Benjamin. While the enemy has not ceased to be victorious, he cannot in truth declare victory. There cannot be an idle class whose wealth is derived from ownership of all the land, equipment and means of fulfilling our material needs without another class whose dispossession can be exploited to provide labor for a fraction of the value we produce, to whom everything we create can be sold back at inflated cost, and from whom rents can be extracted for a place to live or for access to medical care. There cannot be a class constituted by endless assault on another’s ability to feed and clothe itself, to care for its health, to find shelter, to live and work in safety and dignity — without producing in the parasitized class an intense desire to overcome the alienating conditions imposed upon it.

This is a paradoxical relationship, and the bourgeoisie is incapable of resolving it except in the most catastrophic and destructive ways. The bourgeoisie would sooner destroy the biosphere we all depend on for life than abdicate. They would rather place the means of sustaining life so far out of reach for the proletariat that they would destroy the supply of labor that generates all wealth, plunging the world (themselves with it) into a state of crisis. The ruling classes cannot force terms of surrender onto the oppressed which make it possible to cede human consciousness — the quilombo, palenque, and long history of slave uprisings on plantations and in modern prisons, one legacy of Black and Indigenous resistance to white settler colonialism, are a proof of this. The human capacity for labor cannot be split from human needs and desires.

The ultimately inviolable humanity of the oppressed, which manifests as “courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” in the struggle against domination even under the most horrific and dehumanizing conditions, “[has a] retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers.” There is no complete victory over the oppressed that can be achieved which the ruling classes can in fact survive. So long as the bourgeoisie prosecutes the class war, it demonstrates both its inability to desist from war and the existence of an opponent that must be constantly contended with on a frontline that stretches across the earth’s four corners, through factories and call centers and fields, into our apartments and houses, our friendships and families, our sexual and romantic relationships, across our flesh and through our bodies’ organs.

From our moment in the here and now we can look back on the the Ferguson Uprising, the Intifadas, the Stonewall Uprising, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the now long-reversed October Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and countless outpourings of rage and the will to be free from the oppressed people of the world and see, “[a]s flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.” The enemy does not cease to be victorious, however it also cannot cease to be victorious. The longer the bourgeoisie vanquishes and subjugates its challenger, the more it becomes necessary to escalate the war. And therein lies a vulnerability, the enemy may yet cease to be victorious.

We can look back at the history of our society, built around class domination, and see that “the past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” Every moment, this one and each that has and has yet to come, “is shot through with chips of Messianic time.” Under the circumstances of class war, revolution is a latent property of time.