politics
"The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."
(Epilogue)
Question: In what ways can the politics of the essay be of use now?
"I think that the significance is to look at technology as something which has a politics. Politics is not automatic. It matters how people use a technology but they surely should take it up as something that has potential for good, and good in this political sense would mean for a more democratic society and, I would even say, a more socialist society in the best sense of the word. The debates around contemporary computer use would have to be seen not as totally unprecedented. For instance, there's a lot in the Internet or in E.mail which reminds one of the telephone. When it first came into use it began to hook up people in this individual way - totally unrelated to each other in space, if not time. So there is something that is repeated here; that is not new and there are other elements of it which are new. There is always the way politics (in the sense of those who want to control it for particular reasons) use it and I think there is always a need to be resistant to those controls and what it means in the larger sense is a totally open question because what it means for a political space - what kinds of political spaces might emerge out of new technologies? We know, for instance, that the Iranian revolution made very, very effective use of video cassettes, video tapes. Newt Gingridge, in my country, makes totally effective use of this. This is again from a populist right wing political movement. So you see how that's working again. There is this populist potential, democratic potential and then there is a manipulative leadership which is very dangerous. But it's dangerous precisely because this is popular, this is democratic, and that part of even fascism is something that, because of the horrendous results of the fascist movement, no one has been able to touch the other side of fascism which is that it was popular and it was potentially participatory (in terrible ways), to participate in war, in death (in terrible ways), but it had some elements which we have to come to terms with. So there are always two sides and you can't count on technology to take you to the good side, but you know the problem with these kinds of things is it's usually the Right that takes advantage of them rather than the Left, because the Left will tend (in the name of some pure socialism) to build in the critique of mass culture as Adorno did, for instance, which is too dismissive of the whole thing and seems to want to hearken back to an older day of good bourgeois high culture, and that also has to be resisted. Benjamin put himself in the very unpopular position of being right in-between, but being right (not in the political sense but in the sense of being correct). There has to be a kind of politics of media that the left would adopt, that is taking advantage of everything that the new technology offers but, at the same time, being aware that you can't rely on the technology to take you to a progressive result - that takes politics.
(Susan Buck-Morss, interview)