I stopped reading Dissent when it came out in favor of the Iraq war, but Momo links to an interesting essay from it by Ellen Willis, on, let us say for short, the Revolution which is still to come. The validity of utopianism is the topic here.
I am perusing Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, and I want the books reviewed in Richard Wolin’s article on Benjamin: Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (Benjamin), The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin), On Hashish (Benjamin), and of course, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (Löwy; take a look at that cover art).
Here are some key words from Wolin’s article: scientism, theology, utopia, redemption, mystery, solidarity, warmth, disenchantment, re-enchantment, experience. Wolin says:
[W]hile orthodox Marxists prattled on about the prosaic ends of “scientific socialism,” “experience” (or Erlebnis) had become the exclusive province of the reactionary right–Lebensphilosophie, the German Youth Movement and literary Fascists like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin’s lifelong theoretical battle was to wrest the concept of experience from the right’s monopoly and turn it to the ends of the revolutionary left.
And:
Benjamin’s Berlin is an enchanted landscape where experience is defined by chance encounters, or what the Surrealist writer André Breton called ‘l’harsard objectif ‘ (objective chance). As Benjamin remarks appositely: “Not to find one’s way around in a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way around a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.” Thereby, losing oneself paradoxically becomes a consummate act of self-discovery.
These things are interesting, as was Benjamin’s thought and its contexts.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Thanks for reading; I will be checking you out.
Ernst Junger is an odd bag.
As he explains at the start of most of his books after 1944, he is an “Anarch” — what that really means is that he’s covering himself.
I think an awful lot of Walter Benjamin, he is a poet.
Yes, that is the thing about Benjamin: a poet! I have not read enough of Junger to really think anything about him on my own. His Nazi involvement is supposed to have been fleeting, but I tend to agree, he covered himself with that “Anarch” term. I’ve decided that Fascism is something people do not flirt with. It’s not a youthful folly, or a miscalculation, or a misunderstanding: it’s the expression of a serious tendency.