Walter Benjamin's Marxism

Abstract

This essay examines and exposes the uses of the notions of dialectic, materialism, and revolution in some passages of the works of Walter Benjamin. As a result, it is concluded that the thought of the Berlin author is, as some of his most attentive readers have argued, an original and powerful amalgam of critical thought in which elements of Marxism, Romanticism, Surrealism and Jewish mysticism concur in his messianic version, which, far from being nonsense, allows it to unveil and reveal the folds, cracks, defects and less recognized aspects of the development of Modernity and Capitalist Modernity, both throughout the 19th century and in the social-cultural configuration that he had to live during the first third of the 20th century; crossed by contradictions of all kinds between which the suffering, violence, and marginalization of the dispossessed are perpetuated and even consolidated. As can be seen from his interventions, from a very young age, Benjamin drew up a critical agenda that included problems related to language, violence, law, art, and critical thinking. It is in the attempt to recover and characterize the elements common to all these figures that Benjamin comes across dialectics as a theoretical-critical tool whose power will be manifestly increased with the adoption and reformulation of historical materialism as the appropriate method to dismantle, understand and eventually transform the world through revolution.