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Dialectic Of/Or Agitation? Rethinking Argumentative Virtues In Proletarian Elocution, Satoru Aonuma

OSSA Conference Archive

This paper explores the possible rapprochement between Marxism and argumentation attempted in Proletarian Elocution, a 1930 Japanese publication. Against a Western Marxist commonplace that “[a]s far as rhetoric is concerned,… a Marxist must be in a certain sense a Platonist” (Eagleton, 1981), the paper discusses how this work seeks to takes advantage of the inquiry and advocacy dimensions of argumentation for the Marxian strategy of “agitprop” and rearticulate it as part of civic virtues.