Doug Henwood wrote:
> a mock Smith Barney ad that had John
> Houseman standing in front of women working at a 19th century mill
> with the tagline, "We make money the old-fashioned way - *they* earn
> it." Make a complex point pretty pungently, no?
Yes, but of course but.
If the cartoon appears the day before an election, and the only goal of agitation is to generate assent for a candidate (or a referendum) during the brief period of deciding to vote, going to the polls, and then voting the right way. Then yes. Our only need is to make a complex point pungently and go home.
But that kind of passive support evaporates fairly quickly. And most left movements of significance only begin to build real momentum after three or four years or more. The pungent cartoon or a thousand pungent cartoons and one-paragraph leaflets will not do unless they are incorporated into something rather more complex. All that cartoon says, really, is Proudhon's Property is Theft. As an agitational slogan even that isn't bad. As propaganda both that slogan and your cartoon are toothless.
I want at least some of the people who see that cartoon to be writing leaflets of their own and distributing them door to door by next month or next year or the year after that. I'm beginning to see why there is so much argument over whether Seattle was a victory and if so what kind of a victory and so forth and so on. Too many of the people arguing about it (even when they call themselves anarchists or represent some far-out marxist group) think as though they were running an electoral campaign.
That cartoon had to go in a paper or a magazine. Someone had to sell the paper. Someone had to decide which issue to use the cartoon in and whether it should become a running issue, sort of a logo, or be used once and forgotten. Those who sell the paper (if we are building for the long run) can't just sell the paper. They must concentrate on getting into conversations with some of their customers with the intention of turning some of them into sellers of the paper and at least a few of them into writers for the paper.
And cut it how you want, this is going to take hours and hours and months and months of internal discussion, and though such discussion, tied to programmatic action, is not quite as far ranging as discussion on a maillist, which can't but be separated from practice in a radical way, still it won't be simple.
So I have had in mind as I wrote these posts primarily two contexts. The first one is the conversation with someone who has seen a dozen or so of those cartoons and read a few leaflets written in agitational style. (I notice you use the term agitprop, which I believe is misleading because it combines rather different modes of discourse.) She is now tentatively *one of us*, not a nameless faceless cipher reading the newspaper or looking at the cartoon. (You keep speaking of language that will attract people, but you never speak of how we get them within earshot to listen to or read that wonderful language.) She's convinced. That's how that capitalist makes his money. Do tell? Where do I go from here.
It's hard but not all that hard to master the "plain english" that one uses in a leaflet or a letter to a newspaper or in a news story in a movement paper. But there's a huge leap from such language -- which never gains more than a passive assent of "that's true," to the active mental and physical involvement in building internal unity and reaching even more people.
Experience as a journalist or experience as a teacher both tend to create a blindness to how and audience is generated through an exclusive focus on how one speaks or writes to that audience *after it is gathered.* If the auditorium is empty, the style of the speakers is fairly irrlevant.
But let me shift, now, to a related topic -- a terrible error which I have seen made over and over again the last 30 years (and which I myself have made more than once). And it is an error which the ability to speak clearly and simply and effectively not only will not help evade but may even contribute to.
I can best define the error through a description of several actual events.
One, over a year ago, is still fresh in my memory. A group working with a certain issue did a wonderful job of getting people to come out for a video and report on the issu. There was a large turnout (the crowd overflowing into the hallways.) It was a powerful video. The person who gave the report was a speaker after your own heart, Doug, clear, no jargon, powerful, with a passion that carried over to the audience. A tremendous success.
Then he talked some more. Still really good stuff. Then he talked some more. His heart was in it. He was outraged by the injustices he had witnessed. He wanted to reach people. He wanted to make them KNOW. And he really was successful. And the went on. And he went on.
Then he opened the discussion up for questions. And of course people asked questions, and they were mostly good questions, and the speaker answered them wonderfully -- all clearly and passionately and without jargon or other errors of style. And he answered them and he answered them. And some people had to leave. You could see they didn't want to. This really was one of the better such meetings that I had ever attended. And there were more questions. And more good answers. And a few more people had to leave. And a few more. And finally I had to leave, though I was aching to have informal discussion with some of the people there after the meeting.
It's awfully hard to learn the organizing lesson that all your good work and successful agitation is going to go to waste if you can't somehow get new people doing the talking themselves. And not abstract talking as in a classroom discussion or on a maillist -- but talking of a very specific kind: how can I get involved and how can I learn how to contribute to this struggle.
The most frustrating minutes of my life have been spent sitting in an audience and seeing that magic moment go by when it is time to break up for smaller discussion and the meeting begins to lose its potential recruits. And it is usually the better speakers (by Doug's standards) who are most apt to commit this error. Far better a lousy speaker who quit speaking soon enough.
Carrol
Carrol