Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition by Walter Benjamin

Author:Walter Benjamin [Benjamin, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, social, Religion, General, Political
ISBN: 9781503627680
Google: YCA_EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-06-22T23:48:48.313812+00:00

KURT HILLER, “ANTI-CAIN: A POSTSCRIPT TO RUDOLF LEONHARD’S ‘OUR FINAL BATTLE AGAINST WEAPONS’”

Here especially, the skeptical smirk of “common sense” comes cheap. Of course, man is not good, but rather must become good;1 and against violence only violence can prevail [gegen Gewalt kommt nur Gewalt auf].2 But now that a few millennia have proven not that Cain is ineradicable but rather that Cain’s instrument has not eradicated him, perhaps the idea finally suggests itself to attempt to be Abel. An experiment? And these times are too serious, too challenging for experiments? Surely, however, an Abel experiment cannot fail any more unhappily than our age-old attempts with Cain’s methods. Abel would have to believe in it, you say, like the Abel of biblical myth? Myth creates an earthly state of being, the eternal validity of which we dispute, we who believe in becoming, we who devote our energy to the realization of a world we have seen in the mind [im Geiste], a not-yet-world.3 A phantom world? No, we can realize it, we can, difficult and complex though it may be—and if not us, then those who come after us. Without such assurance, anything that calls itself intellectual action would in fact be senseless and mere self-gratification, and I would rather till the fields. We can realize the good here, despite the bad people around us, and only in this way will they, who are always in the majority, be overcome—only then will their majority cease to be also a supremacy. But someone has to start. We must make a start.

We revolutionaries must make a start. Abhor Cain’s instrument unconditionally. Stand to the left of Spartacus, perhaps, in terms of policy—but stand there without the instruments of death. Opposition to the instruments of death is itself a policy, one to the left of any policy that continues to work by killing, and thus to the left of the Spartacists. The radical pacifist—whom I can only conceive as an opponent of injustice and power politics in the economic sense, as well, that is, of capitalism—sits to the left of the Bolshevik in the parliament of humanity. The Bolshevik wants war: not a war of nation against nation but an international war of class against class—another bloody war with the same terrible weapons. In his methods, the Bolshevik is just the inverse of the old Russian-Prussian militarist. The friends of Lenin are not concerned with the abolition of violence, only with “the class content of violence,” as it says in the tenth of their “Theses on Social Revolution.” And Radek, their Ultra, portrayed their ideal at the Communist Party Congress in Berlin: the allied armies of the German and Russian proletariat in a victorious battle on the Rhine against Franco–Anglo-Saxon imperialism.4 The only difference from Ludendorff: the ethos of the final goal.5 In fact, all our experience seems to indicate that intellect [Geist] cannot prevail by its own means; that it cannot renounce means that are contrary to it without forfeiting the realization

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