Among progressive political initiatives concerned with climate breakdown, the narrative framing the urgency of the struggle often goes something like the following: we need to act now in order to preserve the planet for future generations. This future oriented politics is far from being limited only to anti-climate change initiatives, but can be also found in other progressive forces. As a rule, they barely refer to any past emancipatory projects; instead, they turn their gaze into the future. This intervention aims to re-actualize Walter Benjamin’s thesis, according to which the most powerful connection of a historical materialist subject in the present is not with generations to come, but with the past: saving the past emancipatory struggles by winning in the present is the task of historical materialism a la Benjamin. In this respect, the paper will seek to bring back some past lessons of political organisation that might serve us well in the present state of things. Specifically, if Benjamin claimed, contra mechanical dialecticians, that historical materialism should pull the emergency break on the train of history, the main question today (in the time of climate breakdown) is precisely not whether or not pull that break, but how. This brings us directly to the to the question of the relationship between (today’s disappearing) working class in the classical sense and the proletariat as a political subject: if the proletariat as the emancipatory political subject is the one to pull that break, its constitution depends not on the empirical existence of the working class, but on political organization.

moderated by: Ante Andabak