ENGLISH

Understanding The Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz (IIRE (The International Institute for Research and Education))

By Enzo Traverso

Book information

Year
1999
ISBN
0745313582, 9780745313580, 0745313531, 9780745313535
LCC
D804.348 .T73 1999
Open Library ID
OL10729251M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
933 kB (955443 bytes)
Pages
176\159
Topic
Education
Time added
2011-06-04 19:45:58

Description

In Understanding the Nazi Genocide Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen by drawing on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism’s pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced technology. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan - socialism or barbarism - formulated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously ‘revised’. The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilisation and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilisation and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.

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