The Battle Trotskyism
Socialist Press1980 1980-02-13Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 7 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
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Second edition of the opposition documents presented inside the WRP by the present leadership of the Workers Socialist League Price £2.50 plus 20p postage and package from Workers Socialist League; 31 Dartmouth Park Hill
Baudelaire
In his breath-taking study of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin finds behind Baudelaire's poetry the very rhythms of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.
It is a typically urban experience of 'shock' and disconnected sensations, where experience is no longer something to be absorbed and ritually savoured (as it is, for example, in the later French writer Proust), but becomes flood of conflicting stimuli with which consciousness must actively grapple.
Industrial capitalism, Benjamin recognises, has deeply altered our very sense-perceptions; but this crisis.
What must be cultivated, he claimed, was revolutionary 'nostalgia'-but not nostalgia in the sense of a sentimental ritualising of the dead.
It must be an active nostalgia: a ceaseless * .reappropriation of the revolutionary past, which would blast through the empty time' of the present and fill it with new meaning.
Remembrance
Benjamin found an image for this in the Jewish tradition of 'remembrance'-that perpetual renewal of the past, through tradition, which in Jewish belief brings forward the time of the Messianic coming.
The religious idealism of Benjamin's philosophy of history must obviously be Lukacs With a new introduction London NW5 1HR
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THEY GAIN THE SUPPORT OF THE! --BUT MY DEPARTMENT HAS DARK STREETS OF HARLEM HAVE BECOME GULLIBLE, THE HATEFLIL, AND BEEN HANDCUFFED! WORDCAME DOWN FROM "UPSTAIRS! TO LAY WITH CAPTAIN AMERICA CAUGHT BETWEEN A MOB OF MORGANS UINDERWORLD THUGS AND AN ATTACK SQUAD OF THE FANATICAL THEY MUST HAVE SOMEBODY NATIONAL FORCE-LED BY THE WOMAN ROGER NO WAY!
SCRIFT OR WE'LL BAL ВЗСЕМА - ART DROP YOU THE FEARFUL... AND PARLAY THAT INTO POWER ON A WIDE SCALE!
I'D LIKE TO HELP YOu, SON-. OFF THE NATIONAL FORCE!
BIG ON THEIR PAYROLL! SOCIALIST PRESS, AN ASPHALT BATTLEGROUNO an HE LOVES, LET THIS BE AN EXAMPLE FOR LOYAL AMERICANS EVERYWHERE / NOTHING SHALL STOP THE NATIONAL FORCE NOT EVEN CAPTAIN AMERIA! Wednesday 13 THIS COLD AND WINDSWEPT NIGHT, THE NO: LISTEN TO ME! PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS!
THERES BEEN ENOUGH BLOODSHED!