Fire Alarm by Michael Lowy

Author:Michael Lowy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The last part of Thesis XI is extraordinarily topical: it involves a radical critique of the capitalist exploitation of nature and the glorification of that exploitation by vulgar Marxism, which is positivist and technocratic in inspiration. In this field, too, Benjamin occupies a unique place in the panorama of Marxist thinking in the first half of the century. Anticipating the ecological preoccupations of the late twentieth century, he dreams of a new pact between humans and their environment.

Benjamin opposes the ‘progressive’ ideology of a certain ‘scientific’ socialism – represented here by the German social positivist Joseph Dietzgen, long forgotten today, but immensely popular in German Social Democracy at the turn of the century (and often quoted by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, his most ‘orthodox’ work) – which reduces nature to an industrial raw material, to a commodity that ‘exists gratis’, an object for unlimited domination and exploitation. Against this approach, Benjamin does not hesitate to appeal to the utopias of the first socialists – Vormärz, before the Revolution of March 1848 – and, in particular, the fantastical dreams of Fourier (to which André Breton will pay enthusiastic tribute some ten years later). Benjamin, who is sensitive to the poetry and enchantment of these dreams, interprets them as the intuiting of a different – non-destructive – relation to nature, leading both to new scientific discoveries – electricity might be an example of the virtual energy ‘that now lie[s] dormant in … [nature’s] bosom’ – and to the re-establishment of the lost harmony between society and the natural environment.

Benjamin’s interest in, and admiration for, Fourier grew steadily throughout the 1930s. The Arcades Project casts light on the points made in Thesis XI: Benjamin does not counterpoise Fourier to Marx – he carefully records all the instances when Marx or Engels praise the ‘colossal conception of man’ of the inventor of the phalansteries and his brilliant ‘intuitions of a new world’ – but to the vulgar Marxism shared by the main currents of the Left.107 Linking the abolition of the exploitation of human labour closely with that of the exploitation of nature, Benjamin saw the ‘ “impassioned work” of the Harmonians’, inspired by ‘children’s play’, as the utopian model for emancipated activity. ‘To have instituted play as the canon of a labour no longer rooted in exploitation,’ he wrote, ‘is one of the great merits of Fourier. Such work inspired by play aims not at the propagation of values, but at the amelioration of nature … An earth that was cultivated according to such an image would cease to be part of “a world where action is never the sister of the dream.” ’108

In The Arcades Project the name of Fourier is associated with that of Bachofen, who had discovered the ancestral image of this reconciliation in matriarchal society in the form of the cult of nature as bountiful mother – in radical opposition to the lethal (mörderisch) conception of the exploitation of nature, dominant since the nineteenth century. In the ideal

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