January 11, 2023 marks the 45th anniversary of the assassinations of Xefe and Txintxo. Despite the passage of time, its historical memory remains. Txintxo and Xefe lived in the 1970s, when existentialism had a great influence on the Basque Country. On his apartment in the Pamplona neighborhood of San Jorge had several books on existentialism: Sartre (The Being and Nothing, Nausea, Existentialism is a Humanism), Txillardegi (Peru Leartza) and Kierkegaard. They also had the book Le procès de Burgos (in French) by Giselle Halimi and others on Marxism and nationalism. In Txintxo and Xef, the existentialist background was evident, which, among other things, moves them to work in militancy. For them, man exists only by his acts. Hence his responsibility (the human being is responsible for his actions), his freedom (the human being is free, therefore the human being decides according to his feeling) and his commitment to action (the reality is only in action, and the human being, as it exists only to the extent that it is carried out, is only the sum of his acts).

But it's Walter Benjamin's thought, especially the one that constantly reminds me of the moments of conversations with Txintxo and Xef. Walter Benjamin (1992-1940), German, originally Jewish, persecuted by Nazism, tried to flee to the United States, but when crossing the border between France and Spain, the police arrested Portbou and decided to commit suicide. Benjamin was a special, uprooted person. As a result of this uprooting, the Germans considered it a Jew, the Jews the German, the Zionists the Communist and the Communists the Zionist. This requirement of strangeness enabled him to be original and to make very innovative political and philosophical proposals. Unclassifiable and paradoxical thinker, radical critic of progress, Marxist revolutionary, nostalgic of the past and materialist of theology. Benjamin thought was not well received in the post-war period in Europe, as it was seen with skepticism. Only from the 1980s did it begin to have a known and recognized thought. Txintxo and Xef couldn't know their thinking, but I'm sure if they had read it, the German philosopher would agree.

Benjamin emphasizes the importance of culture in the formation of mentalities, which will ultimately be a key factor in the emancipation and liberation process. Moving from a society of oppression and domination to a more just society requires a new kind of thinking. Therefore, if we cannot transform the mentality, there is no real change, but a mere reproduction of it. And this process of building a radical mindset is going to be done from a radical critique of the current culture. All that is considered a cultural heritage for Benjamin (libraries, monuments, museums) is a prey to the war of oppressors. In fact, in museums in European capitals you can see Egyptian and Iraqi pieces that have been stolen during the invasive wars, as well as monuments (triumphant arches, equestrian sculptures, pantheons) that evoke war events or famous ancestors of homeland. For some, these monuments are witnesses of barbarism and for others of vanity. Hence the importance of the locus enuntiationis or hermeneutics; thus, while some only see death, others feel glory and joy. It is therefore a question of placing ourselves in the position of the poor and the oppressed to make appropriate criticism, and from that point on making a diagnosis of the pathology of the State (Martin Buber). Therefore, the method is not to place it on the central streets of the European capitals, but on the periphery, in some slum, in negativity.

For all this, Benjamin prefers to study the small, the everyday, the popular and what elites despise, because, as with humble people, they are out of history and do not appear in great events or textbooks. Benjamin shows a special adhesion to all these cultural expressions that are outside the hegemonic culture of oppressors, and particularly to the victims of history, who believe that they are in the critical place of enunciation, in the right position to transform and create critical mentalities. In those small, unimportant things is the really profound thing. That's the mindset shift. In short, Benjamin’s thought deals with marginality.

According to the traditional conception of history, great characters, kings, presidents, governors, generals and magnates are the protagonists of history and real subjects. This conception of history is only interested in the past as something fixed and immobile, from where the present is judged and justified. But in a dominated and dominated society, admitting this linear conception of history, the dominance of the present is justified by what happened in the past, since the winners of the present are the descendants of the winners of the past. Therefore, the culture of the victors of the past is accepted and inherited by the current dominators as prey to war. That is why we need to change the conception of history if we want to transform culture. If not, the individual will be assimilated by the dominant hegemonic culture, may feel more cultured, yes, but the final result will be a mere reproduction, will not alter the systemic reality.

History and progress are, in general, terms that are identified. Thus, history is conceived as a progressive, evolutionary continuity, always looking to the future with small expectations. It is the idea that the history of mankind has been a constant progress: greater freedom and argumentation (as Hegel says), greater democracy and equality (as the left claim), greater economic and technical development (as bourgeois liberals believe). For Benjamin, time is a construction with profound political implications; it is not natural, a linear succession of equal and empty moments, which as it advances produces an automatic improvement. This is the misleading dynamic of the myth of progress, which blends technological development and social development. But in all situations of social domination, technological development does not correspond to social development. In today's capitalist society, workers' rights can not only be restricted, but even excluded. Therefore, this myth of progress allows us to make oppression more effective and eliminate the ability to represent a different society in the oppressed. And thus, the phrases that are most naturally spoken about corruption, fraud and social injustice become pathetically understandable: “that is what is there”, “it has always been so”, “all politicians are equal”.

Benjamin gave up this homogeneous, empty, mechanical, linear and quantitative conception of historical time. And it affirms the qualitative perception of temporality, based on memory and the mesi-revolutionary rupture of continuity. The revolution would be a messianic pause in history, a messianic stop to the event. It also rejects the conceptions of dominant hegemonic history and proclaims that the history of progress is the history of barbarism. Progress, in its different names (progress, development, evolution, first world), is home to the other party (regression, disasters, underdevelopment, involution, third world). This pessimistic view of history distinguishes Benjamin as the only one who claimed this view in the Marxist-revolutionary realm.

Therefore, for Benjamin, time is not a continuum, nor something natural, but a construct with profound political consequences. Social injustice is also not a natural thing, because if it grows more and more it is a sign that it can be changed and, therefore, that it can be changed in another direction. Therefore, Benjamin proposes a new conception of time that would allow a social improvement: the Angel of History. Angelus Novus is the spirit of time of painter Paul Klee for Benjamin. It is not a homogeneous time or Kronos (which has been given, the same), but time now (Jetztzeit) or Kairós (the diffuse interval in which something important happens) is the right time that is associated in Christian theology with the time of God or the funny time. At Jetztzeit, it is the ideal moment to carry out an action, the fleeting moment, in which an opening that is indispensable to go through to achieve the proposed objective, the unique and unrepeatable moment/place that accompanies us, which is not the present, but the one that is always coming and that has always passed. In short, it is the time of our important moments, of the facts that reinforce the personal trajectory of each of us, which some call a goal, and which pushed us to make important decisions at certain times. Well, in history this grace or time of God (understood as the transformative messianic force of each of us) is a propitious moment to introduce that force and transform reality into something else.

Angelus Novus is the spirit of that other era that struggles to return to the past, not only to justify the present, but to do justice to that past; the Angel faces a radical change to reconstruct what was destroyed, to resurrect the dead, to do justice fundamentally to the past. But there is a force that impedes progress: it is Progress, that does not want to do justice and transform the past. For Benjamin, the past is not far away, but here and now, and the future is also here. The Angel struggles to return to the past to make a radical change that would be the basis of a true transformation. Benjamin insists that true change can only come from the past. This past is not in the past, it is here, in the present, and therefore, we must be attentive to a critical mentality, waiting for the right moment that enters the subjects.

But who are these guys? Historical materialism will say that the historical subject is the proletariat, which will transform the reality that will lead to communism. Benjamin tries to liberate the historical materialism from the soils of bourgeois ideology, to rescue from the bourgeois idea of progress. For Benjamin, revolution is not the natural and inevitable result of economic and technical progress, but the disruption of development driven by that idea of progress that leads to economic catastrophe and war. Benjamin proposes to intervene in the present with an image that challenges and interrupts mentalities. This image is always from the past, which gives new meaning to the present. The real change comes from something that already exists and that serves to build a more just society; there is no need to invent new things, because, critically reviewing our history and faithfully valuing our struggles, even if they are small and banal, in them we will find the seed and the yeast that will bring the true transformation of the mass. So here are the subjects of history, who are very small but who work in different kinds of struggle.

Benjamin's thought is a thought of hope, but not of the future, but of the present. In other words, the hope that what has already been or is being done will become a whole for the benefit of the greatest number of people. Basically, the hope of the present. Therefore, according to this thought of hope of Benjamin, Txintxo and Xefe, as well as the rest of the dead friends, expect justice to be done. The time of the cairos will come and they will be recognized for all. Let us help the angel of history to come to this age of justice as soon as possible.