
Hannah Arendt: Remembering W.H. Auden (1975) - hprotagonist
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/01/20/remembering-wystan-h-auden-who-died-in-the-night-of-the-twenty-eighth-of-september-1973
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B1FF_PSUVM
_" Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History
altogether."_

That is particularly insightful. All the hoopla about historical progress is a
rather recent addition (and addiction ...) to our worldview, and not really
part of perspectives with more than a handful of centuries tradition.

~~~
nik61
I guess she means he left communism. A belief in history, almost as a god, is
inherent in communism as I understand it. The changes they believe in are pre-
ordained, they need only to join the stream.

~~~
peisistratos
Communism does not have the pretensions to divinity and supernatural aspects
that we see manifested during elections in the USA.

It has a recognition that the forces of production change. That relations of
production change, and this base changes superstructure in the society. Hunter
gatherer tribes make way for Sumerian and Greek slave empires, make way for
feudal Europe, which make way for capitalism and bourgeois republics.

The Paris commune, the Russian revolution, the 1936 Spanish republic etc. are
seen in this light as nascent proto-steps toward the next superstructure
coming out of changed forces of production and relations of production.

History has already seen four major changes from one system to another, but
not by means of divinity. Marx's pointed to contradictions inherent to
capitalism. I think the 2008 bailout and crisis would be a sign of the
eventual end in Marx's view - US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson said GE CEO
Jeff Immelt visited him on September 15, 2008 and said GE was having trouble
financing day-to-day operations. Events like that are harbingers of the
eventual collapse of the capitalist economic system, in Marx's view. For now,
the government and taxpayer bailing out the capitalists and corporations work,
in Marx's view, one day it will not work. But the collapses are only part of
the collapse, advances had to have happened to shift the system as well. It is
not divinity, it is history continuing to be dialectic.

~~~
person_of_color
How does communism change the knee jerk negative response it receives in the
West?

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jfk13
That should surely be "Remembering", not "Rembering".

~~~
hprotagonist
mm, macbook keyboards. My mistake.

