We must combat the counter-revolutionary talk of a "movement of riffraff" and a "movement of lazy peasants" and must be especially careful not to commit the error of helping the local tyrants and evil gentry in their attacks on the poor peasant class. Though a few of the poor peasants leaders undoubtedly did have shortcomings, most of them have changed by now. They themselvesd are energetically prohibiting gambling and suppressing banditry. Where the peasant association is powerful, gambling has stopped altogether and banditry has vanished. In some places it is literally true that people do not take any articles left by the wayside and that doors are not bolted at night.
According to the Hengshan survey, 85 per cent of the poor peasant leaders have made great progresds and have proved themselvesd capable and hard working. Only 15 per cent retain some bad habits. The most one can call these is "an unhealthy minority," and we must not echo the local tyrants and evil gentry in undiscriminately condemning them as "riffraff." This problem of the "unhealthy minority" can be tackled only under the peasant associations' own slogan of "strengthen discipline," by carrying on propaganda among the masses, by educating the "unhealthy minority," and by tightening the associations' discipline; in no circumstances should soldiers be arbitrarily sent to make such arrests as would damage the prestige of the poor peasants and feed the arrogance of the local tyrants and evil gentry. This point requires particular attention.
*Selected Works*, Vol. I, pp. 23-24.
Kelley merely despises democracy and therefore sneers at all the methods by which democracy can be made an actuality rather than of leaders swaying through advertising and *her* kind of manipulative slogans rather than the leninist slogan which summarizes and gives focus to the practice of the people themselves. Her boorish sneering at slogans while utterly ignorant of the history of their political use gives the lie to her claims of extensive political practice. She has rather engaged in bureaucratic dominance based on intellectual charisma.
The comparison of political slogans to tv advertising or to the campaign
slogans of a political party is mere historical ignorance. Slogans *summarize* practice, and cannot be formed except in the context of a particular practice at a particular time and place. They are the polar opposite of naive attempts to "reach people" who aren't listening through the brilliance of one's individual command of smart rhetoric. They express in corrigible form the practice of those already to some extent involved in the struggle.
U.S. slogans are apt to be poisoned by the spontaneous identification of
slogans with advertising. Fore example, the proto-slogan, "Nix don't fix" is clever, but it does not even contain a gesture towards formulating the experience of those whose practice generated it. If the movement it sort of summarizes continues to grow, growth will both come through the debate over reformulating that slogan and in the forging of more complex slogans in the course of expanded practice. But even this primitive slogan, with its rhyming echo of the ad jingle, can serve to remind people acting on their own intiative in this or that particular locality and context of what can connect their action with that of unknown thousands around the nation or the world.
Carrol