gee carrol, i'm cleaning out all the unread trash in my lbo mailbox and i read this. nice. but you give not one single example of what pass the cox test for RightGoodTrueSlogans
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Charles Brown wrote:
> But this advertising
> approach to revolution, that's what I find truly offensive. Yeah, like the
> "average guy" is too stupid to comprehend dialectics so we need to default to
> something sloganistic.
I don't know who wrote this -- not Charles, who is quoting it. I too find an "advertising approach to revolution" profoundly -- not so much offensive as wrong wrong wrong. It is precisely what I have been accusing Doug of for many years now: all the sloganizing about how we have to figure out ways of "reaching people." Over and over again I have proclaimed that it is futile to write for someone else besides the choir -- because those outside the choir will never learn that the documents you produce exist, and if someone doesn't know a document exists they clearly won't read it. And if they don't read it (or watch the video, or come to the forum) it doesn't matter how it's written or what it says. Most left writing designed to "reach people" has exactly the fate of Berkeley's tree falling in the forest. It makes no sound because there is no one there to hear it.
Now "X" (author of statement at the beginning of this post) clearly is totally innocent of what "slogan" means in the history of mass struggle around the world, because if he/she had the slightest idea of how slogans are used (and what slogans are) in the mass movement he/she would never confuse a political slogan with an advertising slogan. But the Advertising State of Mind is so firmly established on this maillist that everyone immediately assumes that the advertising state of mind is the state of mind of humanity as a whole -- and interprets posts accordingly.
A slogan is a way of coordinating the actions of thousands/millions of people operating over vast regions of space. It is not a pithy statement cast out to attract attention. (That is why the New Yorker's wonderful fillers about "shouts we doubt ever got shouted" etc are irrelevant to slogans in this sense. Good slogans are usually too long, too complex ("complexity" does not equal "ambiguity") to even come at the head of a leaflet or a pamphlet or a news article. They can only (usually) be listed at the end as a way of summarizing the discussion that has preceded.
Thus slogans would be wholly inappropriate for this maillist, for example, because the subscribers of the list do not have *either* the shared practice *or* the shared knowledge and principles, that would make slogans intelligible.
The use of slogans (by the Bolsheviks, by the Second International at its best, by the Chinese or Vietnamese or Cubans) depends not on the stupidity or ignorance of the readership but on the knowledge and intelligence of that readership. The slogan always presupposes a period of disparate struggles through which the unifying focus for those struggles can began to be clarified. The slogan will in the first instance, then, be a bit vague. "Nix don't fix the WTO." That is meaningless in itself, but it begins to focus the direction of innumerable activists around the world. It isn't an acceptable slogan yet -- because it hasn't been debated out enough, yet, to become a clear basis for cooperative action by many different groups around the world. It is certainly not an advertising pitch. It probably needs, however, to incorporate a bit more political experience and debate to become fully satisfactory.
X owes an apology to the millions dead and to die whose struggles made sense to them or others -- whose struggles were coordinated -- through the forging of struggles that unified disparate activities. I suspect that X, however, is too ignorant of history, too contemptuous of mass struggle, to make that apology, however. Incidentally, slogans of this sort are, I suspect, while important to *all* mass political struggles, are even more important to struggles by those who, in principle, deny the need for a political center. Only slogans can unite them at all.
Carrol