Is Romantic Anti-Capitalism Proletarian? 'The Poetry of Class' with Patrick Eiden-Offe & Jacob Blumenfeld

Workers of the world unite, we have nothing to lose but our chains! But just who is this ‘we’? How do we identify the proletariat, the revolutionary subject, and how does the proletariat identify itself in the midst of an intensifying threat of economic precarity and capitalist immiseration. This ‘we’, to quote Wilhelm Weitling, is a tricky question. Today we’re taking a dive into Historical Materialism with the latest book in the series “The Poetry of Class: Romantic Anti-Capitalism and the Invention of the Proletariat”, with author Patrick Eiden-Offe and translator Jacob Blumenfeld. We discuss the work of Weitling, Marx, Engels, Hess, Tieck, and Lukacs in exploring re-evaluations of Romantic Anti-Capitalism, and the leftist literary scene today.