On Jan 24, 2016, at 1:11 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2016, at 9:33 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Jan 23, 2016, at 9:07 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>>>> On Jan 23, 2016, at 5:52 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>> Land, Peace, Bread!
>>>
>>> That has obvious appeal. Ending prisons is a rare taste.
>>
>> Compared to “All Power to the Soviets of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies?"
>
I was comparing slogans, not advocating sloganeering. The slogan "Land, Peace, Bread" emerged in exactly the same circumstances as the slogan "All Power to the Soviets of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies." The former had much more "obvious appeal" than the latter--which, in fact was widely condemned (for example, by Stalin and many genuine "old" Bolsheviks). But which slogan--the one with obvious appeal or the one which would get no votes in Brooklyn--was capable of carrying the Revolution to victory?
> “every slogan has a context, circumstances that give rise to the words and make them effective…”
>
> ...The breakdown of social order and provision of essential goods and services, the relationship of forces between the classes, and the level of mass revolutionary consciousness and militancy in the fall of 1917 favoured the Bolsheviks...
The slogan ""All Power to the Soviets of Workers', Peasants', and Soldiers' Deputies" was advanced at the very outset of the revolution (before Stalin got back to Petrograd and restored order to the pages of Pravda) by the worker-Bolsheviks, even before Lenin had enunciated his April Theses, even before Trotsky had set sail from New York!
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64