Words and Lesions: Epistemological Reflections on Violence and Lessons
Darko Suvin Words and lesions: epistemological reflections on violence and lessons of the 1968 moment (with particular reference to Japan) Presuppositions 0.1 The question for our conference fifty years after the 1968 youth protest wave is how to contribute to its evaluation today. First, I assume that the revolted young people – and at least in Japan, USA, and France many citizens – were right in what they were against: to begin with, the US war in Vietnam, a catalyst for all else. If so, what else were they precisely against and how? Moreover, what kind of revolution in which fields were they for, how clearly? And while honouring their important contribution to ending the war in Vietnam, which led to a number of par- tial improvements, how do we evaluate the undoubted pragmatic failure of other main objectives? My approach is necessarily tentative, itself im- mersed into a history that flows; it is a hypothetical imperative and ep- istemic method for better understanding.1 0.2 To get at some useful presuppositions, I begin with two of the best en- capsulations I know, from two of the best minds of the twentieth century Left, which could provide criteria for situations such as those in 1968. The first is Lenin’s characterisation of what is a revolutionary situation: its necessary factors are that the ruled classes no longer want the existing order and the ruling class/es are no longer able to maintain it. The second is Gramsci’s distinction between a revolutionary war of posi- tion (as in World War I trenches) and a war of manoeuvre (as in Napole- onic wars or Trotsky’s leading the Red Army) (Gramsci, 237).
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