Paul Valery
Benjamin opens his essay with a quote from Paul Valery's "The Conquest of Ubiquity." Valery provides Benjamin with a starting point for his own arguments, as Valery notes that the fine arts were developed in a markedly different time where men had little influence over the world around them. With changing times will come, he posits, a change in artistic production and likely a change in the very concept of art itself. This argument is a broader version of Benjamin's, in which he argues that those changes have already taken place through media like photography and film.
Karl Marx
Benjamin also cites the philosophy of Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto. Marx famously argued that societies are made up of two classes, the bourgeoisie (upper) and the proletariat (lower), the latter of which will eventually rise up and overthrow the former. Benjamin refers to Marx early in the essay to suggest that he will follow a similar structure in his analysis that Marx did, returning to a focus on means of production to predict political futures.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was an Italian poet associated with the Futurist movement in the early twentieth century. Benjamin quotes Marinetti at length at the end of the essay as he argues that the fascist attempts to aestheticize politics can only ever lead to war. In Marinetti's quotation, he argues that war is beautiful because of the various technologies associated with it and the aesthetics of death and destruction that that these technologies create. Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party in 1918, which merged the following year with the Fascist Party of Mussolini.
