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“The notion of the class war can be misleading. It does not refer to a trial of strength to decide the question "Who shall win, who be defeated?" or to a struggle whose outcome is good for the victor and bad for the vanquished. To think in this way is to romanticize and obscure the facts. For whether the bourgeoisie wins or loses the fight, it remains doomed by the inner contradictions that in the course of development will become deadly. The only question is whether its downfall will come through itself or through the proletariat. The continuance or the end of three thousand years of cultural development will be decided by the answer. History knows nothing of the evil infinity contained in the image of the two wrestlers locked in eternal combat. The true politician reckons only in dates. And if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not completed by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signaled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut. The interventions, dangers, and tempi of politicians are technical — not chivalrous.”

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street

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From "To A Friend" (preface to Maintenant, il faut des arms, a collection of Blanqui's writings, signed "Some Agents of the Imaginary Party")

We are still afflicted by many superstitions. We have our collective hallucinations that are only doubted by the crazy, and our images of ourselves that are only distinguishable from those of yesteryear by being more secular. We meet our equals and we sincerely believe we see persons and people. We love someone, and we speak of "the Other." A century separates us from a certain life and we postulate it as being faraway. Dissimilar customs or a few variations in vocabulary are sufficient to convince us of an uncrossable distance. But what we understand can only be a part of ourselves; what we understand cannot go much further [than that]. Enlighten yourself: Blanqui[1] is not a historical person. He does not return to us as a phantom from the 19th century, though a century can traverse the ages. Blanqui is from yesterday, tomorrow, today. Blanqui did indeed exist, the facts attest to it, but the facts also attest to the fact he existed, above all, as a conceptual persona, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Bataille's Gilles de Rai or Artaud's Heliogabale.[2] From whence comes Blanqui's proper eternity. Gustave Lefrancais notes in his Souvenirs: "For the 400,000 voters of la Seine, 'Blanqui' is a revolutionary expression."[3] The name 'Blanqui' relates, not to a person, but to an existential possibility, to a manner of being-there, to a power of affirmation. If Blanqui was named "the Imprisoned One," this was in part due to his three decades in jail, but also due to the stubbornness with which this power remained in the historical figure of Blanqui. Prison, glory and calumny are the means that opportunely command the necessity of isolating [human] existences that are too ardent.

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Who was it, maybe Raoul Vaneigem, who wrote something about how we are trapped between two worlds, one that we do not accept, and one that does not exist. It’s exactly right. One way I’ve been thinking about it is this: the calendar, as map, has been split down the middle, into two chronologies, two orbits, and they are locked in an endless spinning antagonism, where the dead are what tend to come to life, and the living are, well you get the picture. Obviously, only one of these orbits is visible at any one time and, equally obviously, the opposite is also true. It’s as if there were two parallel time tracks, or maybe not so much parallel as actually superimposed on each other. You’ve got one track, call it antagonistic time, revolutionary time, the time of the dead, whatever, and it’s packed with unfinished events: the Paris Commune, Orgreave, the Mau Mau rebellion. There are any number of examples, counter-earths, clusters of ideas and energies and metaphors that refuse to die, but are alive precisely nowhere. And then there is standard time, normative time, a chain of completed triumphs, a net of monuments, dead labour, capital. The TV schedules, basically. And when a sub-rhythmic jolt, call it anything, misalignment of the planets, radioactive catastrophe, even a particularly brutal piece of legislation, brings about a sudden alignment of revolutionary and normative time, as in the brute emergence of unfinished time into their world, it creates a buckling in its grounding metaphor, wherein that metaphor, to again misuse Hölderlin, becomes a network of forces, places of intersection, places of divergence, moments when everything is up for grabs. Well, that’s the theory. (L 116-117)

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The Action of Non-Action: Walter Benjamin, Wu Wei and the Nature of Capitalism--Julia Ng

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Pavel Pepperstein (Russian, b. 1966) - The Upside Down Piramide in the Desert Victoria (Australia) in the Year 3019, Acrylic on canvas, 160.0 × 220.0 × 2.5 cm (2015)

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“The whole business of man is the arts and all things common”

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“Western utopianism, in the ultimate sense of the word, consists of a certain way of being in the world in which we live; of living it as a world that is normally or effectively imperfect, incomplete, "inauthentic," but which has within itself, coexisting with it, a perfect, finished or "authentic" version of itself; a version, moreover, that should always be in the place or dimension of the real, but which is not there, it only takes place in those moments when the human being deserves his exceptional ontological status, that is, he is equal to his destiny. This perfect world which is there as a possibility of the present world, and which is coextensive with it, constitutes the foundation of a spontaneous critique of the established; it is to a certain extent a kind of objective demand, which asks it to radically transform itself or to remove itself from the place of what really exists in order to put itself there. The perception of the world as essentially perfectible is characteristic of Western utopianism. The perception of the world as a reality which has within itself another dimension, virtual; a better dimension, which "would like" to be real but which cannot be so because the plane of the effectively real is occupied - although defectively.”

Bolivar Echeverria, Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Utopia

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