Todd Archer wrote:
>
> ... hasn't there been a message going out
> for a little while about the invasion of Iraq? Something like, "Wrong,
> wrong, wrong; this is wrong!"?
>
> Sloganeering's a great propaganda tool, but I think the technique bites when
> the Other Side has the money, manpower, and top-down organizations to push
> it their way.
I think it worth while making the 2d international discrimination here (handed down through Lenin, but he got it from Kautsky, et al) among theory, propaganda, & agitation. Slogans are important for both agitation and propaganda, but quite different slogans are called for in each area. The kind of slogan you are thinking of here, I believe, are agitational slogans which work by catching people's attention to something they already know (and usually have to know pretty strongly) but don't know others know or haven't formulated it for themselves in clear enough terms or don't know how to get together with others around the slogan or don't know whether anything can be done about it. Such slogans of course have no rhetorical (persuasive or argumentative) content.
"Long hours are killing us!" The conditions for it don't exist of course on lbo-talk right now; in fact I don't know any context right now to use it in, but clearly in the right context (distributed by enough people on a well enough printed handbill with a very short statement explaining it and giving needed logistical explanation) it could result in a mass march, and from the marchers one might very well recruit more agitators, who would also want to receive and discuss propaganda (in the 2d international sense). The slogans for _that_ would have be considerably more complicated (not the kind you can yell out at a rally or print at the top if a handbill). They would structure reading and discussion.
Incidentally, since we on lbo don't have organizational linkages nor are we engaged in any sort of joint practice, the only kind of discussion we can engage in is theoretical. (Perhaps very bad theory often, but theory nonetheless is the genre of every post submitted to this list. Yoshie's post calling for a rhetorical bombardment of the DP headquarters is an exception. That was an agitational leaflet.)
> This isn't mentioning our own side's relative lack of
> organizational power, poverty of funds, and tendency towards spinning off in
> our own directions (among other things).
My "Sandbox Politics" glanced at this characteristic of the terrain on which we are operating.
Carrol