The Memory of Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s Cigarette Smoke

Graf Oderland pointed to a Guardian article by Natasha Chart, in which I felt a strong need for my "mediated reminder" in what I consider to be a drastic decline in the aesthetic of the language of the Left over the years. Commemorating the death of German student movement spokesperson Rudi Dutschke this day thirty years ago, I feel compelled to find a reminder of the once great and clear language of the Left.

Chart describes her disagreement at COP15 summit in Copenhagen with Naomi Klein’s use of term “reparations” as a damaging word because it calls up the idea of reparations for slavery in the US, which makes it impossible for the US to do anything referred to in that way. The word, as Chart points out, has become popular in some circles to mean getting wealthy nations to pay a responsible share of adaptation and mitigation support and to cut emissions, also referred to more neutrally as climate debt. What is a problem here is not so much the use of the word itself, but the environment in which Klein is using it, justifying it with a silly argument of “possibility” (“… you Americans have such a limited sense of the possible…”), as if the whole point is to test the possibility through words themselves. If the word makes an actual barrier in reality that is hard to overcome, is it then just too bad for the reality? But why are we at the summit then? To test the words? To test the language? Looking at how much was actually agreed to be done in reality, it could really be the case. I sense a barrier of a different kind than that which is usually used to describe global environmental policies. The barrier of language.

This is where I need the reminder:


Rudi Dutschke born Alfred Willi Rudi Dutschke (March 7, 1940 Schönefeld – December 24, 1979, Århus, Denmark) was the most prominent spokesperson of the German student movement of the 1960s. He advocated 'a long march through the institutions' of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery. This was an idea he took up from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt school of Cultural Marxism. In the 1970s he followed through on this idea by joining the nascent Green movement. In 1968, he survived an assassination attempt, living for another 12 years until related health problems caused his death. Radical students blamed an anti-student campaign in the papers of the Axel Springer publishing empire for the assassination attempt. This led to attempts to blockade the distribution of Springer newspapers all over Germany, which in turn led to major street battles in many German cities. (Wikipedia)

The language of Dutschke was not the language that is testing itself. It’s the language coming from the structure of reality, from the scaffolding of the world in the need of change. The readiness of the language to act, to extend in the world like a limb, like an arm - the most important proof of its evolutionary nature, described by Levi-Strauss. Not the readiness to engage in a bickering in which you will deny somebody the sense of the possible - the possibility to extend. The true Left never denied the sense of the possible to anybody. It is a class sense! Part of the class awareness. The class is not defined nationally, unless we want the term to “slip” into an entirely different meaning in which we will divide the class into those who correspond with that?

Listen to Dutschke through the televised cigarette smoke! Inhale and exhale while the language develops. Reminiscent of the times in which words were used to connect, not to divide. Not the words of the Red, but the words of the Green - understood by the Global South and the Global North.