by BOAVENTURA De SOUSA SANTOS
Introduction
History teaches us that major social transformations have always occurred in the wake of two types of traumatic social upheavals: war and revolution. Although the sequence between war and revolution varies, the two social upheavals tend to occur in the same historical process of major social transformation, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the historical process, it will be clear that neither war nor revolution alone could have explained the transformation that took place. Both war and revolution are human products and, as such, subject to risk and uncertainty, to the possibility and ambiguity of both success and failure, to a mixture of passion and reason, animality and spirituality, the desire to be and not to be, experiences of despair and hope. In both war and revolution, the meaning of history runs parallel to the absurdity of history, and its failures always circulate in the underground of its successes.
War and revolution are so complex and take so many forms that those who want to promote them rarely achieve what they set out to do, and those who want to prevent them are rarely able to do so effectively or without self-destruction. The social trauma they cause stems from the abrupt violence they involve, which can be destructive to lives and institutions, and often to both. The difference between war and revolution is most visible in their antidotes. The antidote to war in the contemporary era is peace, while the antidote to revolution is counter-revolution. The antidotes reveal the character of the social forces involved in both war and revolution. Those who want peace are the social classes that suffer most from war. Those who die in wars are soldiers and innocent citizens, not the politicians who decide them or the generals who command them. Both the soldiers who choose war or are forced to fight it and the innocent citizens most vulnerable to the risk of death belong to the historically less privileged social classes, members of the working classes, such as peasants and factory workers. On the contrary, those who want war are the social classes that run the least risk from the destruction it can cause and stand to gain the most from what follows destruction. Those who promote counterrevolution are the powerful minority social classes that benefit most from the status quo that revolution seeks to destroy. On the contrary, those who promote revolution are the exploited, oppressed, and discriminated social groups and classes who, despite being in the majority, find no other means than revolution to end the injustice of which they are victims.
Both war and revolution are extreme forms of class struggle, constituting an open struggle between life and death. But while war involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority, revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority. The social and political forces that promote war are the same ones that promote counterrevolution. On the contrary, the social and political forces that promote revolution also promote peace, even if this may imply war against minorities (the so-called revolutionary war that marks many of the political trajectories of liberation in the global South).
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