Groups, Blogs, Web Sites, Multi-Media and the Universal Device

Agitprop, Part 4

Groups, Blogs, Web Sites, Multi-Media and the Universal Device

Agitprop, Part 4

 Communist University Mash, 2005

Google Groups, Blogs, Web sites

The above diagram was done in 2005 to help its maker to understand what we were doing in those days. This was when many new and free-to-use facilities became available in very usable and connectable forms. Many of these came from Google. They were technically stable and reliable.

The term “mash”, we discovered later. It means a combination of different services, connected together to produce a very powerful “ensemble”, essentially allowing all the powers of the Internet to be mobilised by individuals. These services were e-mail distribution groups/forums; blogs; free web sites; and wikis.

It is not correct to say that the services upon which the “mash” combinations were based were “free”, or are “free” now. The value that goes in to them is created by the users, in hundreds and thousands of hours of work. This value can be taken away at any time, and this has happened to parts of the CU system. Google services are technically stable but are ultimately not reliable, because they can be withdrawn at any time, at the whim of Google.

There have been some changes to our CU arrangements, but the main outline has not changed. The Communist University is still a combination of e-mail; archiving including web site and blog; extending out to hard copy; and to live sessions.

E-mail distribution groups and forums (Listserves; Electronic mailing lists) Familiar ones are Google Groups and Yahoo Groups. This message came to you through a Google Group. E-mail can be distributed in bulk with one message. Groups can be set to allow all subscribers to post, in which case they become discussion forums, like this one.

Blogs “Blog” is short for “Web log”, meaning a web site that records text in a vertical, scrolling log, or diary. The CU uses blogs to archive these introductory e-mails. Blogs have facility for comments. But the comments do not work for the CU. What works for us is e-mail.

Web sites Free web sites became available that were easy to operate, in a similar way to using a word processor. Google Sites is one. These are good for archiving.

Wikis Wikis are web sites that are optimised for collaborative working between two or more members of the site. Each member is jointly and severally the master of the site and can edit it at will. There are checks. The principal one is that all edits can be reversed to the previous condition. Wikis work extremely well when people want to do it. Wikipedia is the best-known example of a successful Wiki. But the Communist University has not been able to get people working together in this way. What works for us is e-mail.

The Rise and Fall of Web 2.0

The growth of “mashing” and the use of “wikis” gave rise to a feeling that something new was going on, and this led to the increased use of the term “Web 2.0”. The idea that Web 2.0 is substantively different from prior web technologies has been challenged. Wikipedia quotes World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as “jargon”. His original vision of the Web, he says was "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write".

It must be true that “Web 2.0” did not represent a change in the nature of the Internet, but by the same argument, if there has been a subsequent decline in Web 2.0, then it represents a degradation of the Internet, because the two are essentially the same.

One part of the decline in Web 2.0 is the adjustment of the services by the service providers, such as Google. They can do this unilaterally, because the user has no contract, so long as the user is getting the service free.

The Communist University lost a lot of value when the Google Groups dropped “Pages” and “Files”, about two years ago. Google Groups have become even more “funky” again this year.

It is possible to make your own “listserve” to send out mass e-mail, but it is not free. Likewise with your own web sites.

So the days when it was easy are over for the moment. This means that the huge mass of people that were, around the year 2005, surging on to the content-producer side of the web, have been diverted.

Where did they go?

Facebook and Twitter

We will come back to the so-called “social networking” phenomenon later in this part, to consider whether it can be used for Agitprop, or whether, on the contrary, it is designed to prevent Agitprop from happening.

What we can note at this point is that Facebook and Twitter, and a few rather less successful “social networking” facilities, did in fact reverse the growth of creative self-publishing, and what we could call in a political sense, agency, on the World Wide Web.

Using Facebook or Twitter is qualitatively different from “mashing” your own communications. Marshall McLuhan’s famous saying, “The medium is the message,” applies. These social networks impose a uniformity of social communication that is massive, and never revolutionary, or even non-conformist.

PRISM

The latest revelations coming from the USA, as this post is being drafted for the first time, about the collection of data from all sources, and including the “social networking” services, are shicking but not surprising. They show that the idea of the World Wide Web in particular becoming an executive vehicle for revolutionary agitation is practically inconceivable. Even the extent to which it can continue as a vehicle for propaganda, in the political-education sense that is the subject-matter of this course, is uncertain.

We have to go on, and to continue to use all possible means, but we should also preserve things in the form that they have been preserved for centuries, which is the way that we now refer to as “hard copy”, meaning books and other print-on-paper media.

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Agitprop, Part 4a

“Multi-media”

Electronic publishing, photos, sound, video

The previous item was to understand at a simple level, and then at a broad policy level, how the Internet, as we call it, meaning the World Wide Web, has been developing in recent years.

In this item we can consider, or discuss, the growth of multi-media “ICT”, where ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology.

Cameras are digital these days. They record images in the form of files, that are computer files and can be saved in computers and opened in computer programmes for manipulation, cropping, and “photo-shopping”.

Sound is recorded in digital files, and so is video.

All this means that text, sound, pictures and moving pictures can all be handled, edited, and combined using an ordinary computer, and even with a laptop or a tablet.

Integrated software that can do all of these tasks is available. The Adobe “Creative Suite” is one of them.

The potential is great and the means are available. What remains is the human factor.

The Human Factor, Politics and Monopoly

The history of computing, or (ICT) is one of mass creativity, periodically commodified, and then quickly monopolised. This is what happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when there was huge innovation led by unpaid “amateurs” and by small companies, until it was nearly all captured by the twin and mutually-supporting monopolies of IBM and Microsoft. This cycle has repeated itself many times, and it provides a good example of how capitalism evolves through one technology and towards the next, and how one monopoly can give way to another in the process.

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Agitprop, Part 4b

Convergence: Smart Phone

Cell Phone, SMS and Social Media

The hand-held “device”, or “gadget”, such as the one illustrated above, is more than a cell phone. It delivers Internet, e-Mail, other kinds of instant messaging including SMS, plus GPS, still and video camera, sound recording, spreadsheet, word processing, and hundreds or even thousands of other “applications”. It probably delivers live television efficiently as well.

The long-predicted “convergence” has arrived. We cannot say that this is the end of the road. There may be more surprising things coming along. But what we can already say is that the technical ease of doing any kind of communication has only exposed the social and human nature of such communication.

The barriers to communication are now revealed principally human ones, starting with the time it takes to do things. We all have the power, but we do not have time to do more than a fraction of what is possible.

Working together, we could do more. But working together requires organisation. We do organise, and we do succeed to work together to a large extent, in politics.

But when it comes to ICT (Information and Communication Technology), we now have the solo device, like the one shown above, and rather limited collaboration.

Collaboration on monopoly’s terms is not collaboration for revolution

Instead of the widespread mass creativity that caused the very rapid advance of ICT, what monopoly brings is widespread mass conformity.

The phone and the SMS allow certain patterns of communication, but not others. The one that is conducive to political dialogue, it does not allow. The model for such a dialogue is “many-to-many”. It is neither “one-to-one”, like a telephone call, and it is not “one-to-many”, like a radio or television broadcast.

“Many-to-many” is the revolutionary possibility that the new devices make technically possible. In this relationship, it is possible for all the participants to be equally as much producers as they are consumers. This is the model of communism. It is a model of post-capitalist relations of production.

What is the response of bourgeois society to this possibility of its own creation? It is a combination of paternalism and filialism. It is the creation of Facebook, Twitter, and the minor “social networking” platforms.

The characteristic of Facebook and Twitter and the so-called “social networking” idea is the opposite of what it holds itself out to be. This is precisely not the model of communism. In the world of “social networking” all revolutionary possibilities are neutralised and frustrated.

This is so, regardless of the existence of a US Imperialism “PRISM” system that is collecting all communications, including the “social networking” interactions. With or without the intruding “PRISM”, social networking is counter-revolutionary. It is a dummy. It is sterile and cannot bear fruit.

Our Agitprop has to be the intentional antagonist of bourgeois, counter-revolutionary ICT. Our job is to produce as many creators as we can, meaning not only writers, but also visual artists, makers and performers of all kinds, and people who can master the more difficult parts of ICT.

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Paint, Posters and Graphic Art

Agitprop, Part 3

Paint, Posters and Graphic Art

Agitprop, Part 3

“Paint” Logo (from Windows 7)

“Paint”

A programme for managing image files

There are many programmes that help people to do things with image files. The most available one is “Paint”, which comes as part of the Microsoft Windows operating system package. So “Paint” is a good example to use, because most people will already have it, on their computers.

What is an image, or graphics, file? It is an electronic file that stores an image. Using such files, it becomes possible to insert images into your text documents and into your e-mails, in just the same way as the “Paint” logo has been used in this document (see above).

The ability to use images as well as text makes you into a much better communicator. It also opens the door to graphic design for you. Photographs are also stored in image files, so this item applies to photos as well as to graphics such as logos.

File formats

Graphic images are stored by computer programs into files with extensions like .BMP (“Bitmap”), .JPG (“J-peg”), .PNG, .GIF, and .TIF (“Tiff”). Paint will open all these formats, and it can also save a file in a different format to what it was originally. This is a useful thing to be able to do.

The reason is that files have different characteristics. The first consideration is file size. Bitmap files are usually very large. Hence they are usually converted to one of the other formats before use, such as JPEG.

The J-peg, or JPEG, is the most economical format. The file sizes are very small, such that one may be able to insert several J-pegs in one document, before the document becomes too large.

But the quality of the JPEG image is not always good. A good compromise is PNG, which saves colours very well, but is not too large, although usually larger than a JPEG.

Saving an image file is the same as saving any other kind of file. It must have a name, and it goes in a folder, where it can be found again when it is needed.

Cropping and re-sizing

In “Paint”, you can crop an image, and you can re-size it. The largest size you are likely to need for e-mails is 850 pixels across. Cropping and re-sizing can produce a smaller file, which may be a better image, as well. In Paint, to crop all four sides of an image, you will have to “Rotate” it.

Inserting an image into an e-mail

To be able to insert an image into a document or an e-mail, and to be able to control its position there, is a giant step forward in your computing life.  In “Word” and in “Outlook” you use the “Insert” tab and then the “Picture” icon. In Thunderbird you use the “Insert” drop-down menu or icon, and select “Image”.  In Gmail you click first the “+” sign at the bottom of your e-mail box and then the little camera icon. Follow the procedure to find the file you want to insert, in your hard drive.

Your image will go in where you left your cursor. If you want to centre the image, select it and then click on the centre (text) icon. You will be able to adjust the size of your image.

Getting and creating more images

One way to get images is to use the “PrtSc” (“Print Screen”) key on the keyboard. This causes the contents of the open screen to be held in the “Clipboard”, from where it can be pasted into the screen of “Paint”, and then saved as an image file.

This provides a way of reducing a poster, say, to an image equivalent to an electronic flier that you could paste into an e-mail. The CU relies on this technique, a lot.

Among other things, use of “PrtSc” gives you way to put together a new composite image from existing images. You can use “Table” in Word, and open images in different cells. This allows you to control the whole “ensemble”. You can remove the cell borders. Then you can to a “PrtSC” and paste the composite image in to “Paint”, and save.

Big sources of images are Google Images and Yahoo Images. Don’t use other people’s images if they don’t want you to.

More tools in “Paint”

In “Paint” you can draw freehand, or use the given shapes and lines. You can fill with colour. If you want to extend or reproduce a colour, you can use the “Colour Picker” tool, and then the “Fill” thing.

You can open “Paint” more than once, i.e. you can have different images open and you can select, copy and paste from one window to another.

That’s about it. Paint does not have a lot of tools, but you can do nearly everything you would normally want to do, with this useful little programme that everybody has.

Agitprop, Part 3a

“Women Workers, Take Up Your Rifles!”, 1920

Posters

The first thing to say about posters is that simplicity is what makes them good.

Hence the quality and impact of posters has gone down since it became possible to print photographs in polychrome. Posters have come to all look the same, without distinction and without a clear message.

Posters should have a simple, strong image and a few words, printed large so that they can be read from far away.

The above image is a one of the famous Soviet revolutionary posters that were made with paper and only two colours of ink (black and red).

Agitprop, Part 3b

Ocean Waves, Hokusai, 1760-1849

Graphic Art

The staggering image by Hokusai, above, demonstrates that impact is not a function of complexity, but of simplicity.

Hokusai’s art, like our Agitprop, was made for mass reproduction. In those days, there was no polychrome printing. Only one or two colours would be available, apart from black ink and white paper. The blocks were hand-carved out of wood, and printed “in register”, one colour after another.

A modern equivalent of this kind of serial colour printing is the digital duplicator, also called a CopyPrinter. This machine is a development of the stencil process, now fully automatic and computerised. It rolls the paper flat and cold passed rotating drums from which ink is expressed through the stencil image. Different colour drums can be used to create multi-colour effects, similar to the process used by Hokusai. The top of the range model can print on both sides of the paper at a rate of up to 240 sheets per minute, although it is a small machine. This is the cheapest, fastest method of printing at the scale required by political organisations, and it allows full control.

In the years after the Great October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia, the only available colour, other than black and white, was red. Yet the posters produced in the Soviet Union in those days are legendary and they are still studied everywhere.

Have you volunteered for the Red Army?, Dmitry Moor, 1920

SACP Poster 75th Anniversary Poster, 1986

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Layout, Fliers, Pamphlets, and Copy-shop Agitprop

Agitprop, Part 2

Layout, Fliers, Pamphlets, and Copy-shop Agitprop

Agitprop, Part 2

Van de Graaf Page Construction

Layout

Making your material look good is not a waste. Material that looks good will be read by many more people. The waste is to lose readers because of not making your text look good. So here are some ways to control the look of your output:

White space

If at all possible, surround your print with white space. See the above illustration for an idea of the classic look of book pages. White space makes your material readable.

Bold, Italic, Underline, and BLOCK CAPITALS

Be careful with Block Capitals. They can make your material look as if you are shouting. But otherwise, all of these devices can help you to create a hierarchy of meaning that will help your readers to understand you better.

Fonts

There are many. They are either serif (like “Times”), or they are sans-serif (like “Calibri”).

Justify

Justify is used for columns. Columns are used for newspaper articles, and magazines. Columns allow more words on the page.

Numbering (footer)

Always number documents that have more than two pages. The most versatile numbering format is the one that goes at the bottom and in the middle. It works for left-hand (verso) and right-hand (recto) pages equally well.

Headlines

Try to keep headlines on one line. Less is more. Five words is a lot, for a headline.

Logos

Use logos when you can. They create an impression of authenticity.

Break up slabs

Use all kinds of ways to break up large slabs of text, so as to give your readers resting points, and landmarks in the text.

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Agitprop, Part 2a

A Typical South African Event Flyer

Fliers and Pamphlets

Fliers (Flyers) and Leaflets

These are handed out free, as advertising. Usually they only have text on one side. Sometimes they are miniature versions of a poster. In South Africa, most political fliers are A5 (half an A4) in size.

Fliers need to project the message that they are supposed to convey, very simply and clearly. People who take fliers do not, on average, spend more than a few seconds looking at them. Very few of them will keep the flier or look at it twice. Therefore the main information must be the most prominent information.

If the flier is to advertise an event, then the main information is Date, Time and Venue. The nature of the event comes after these in importance, even if it is put at the top of the flier. But of course it must also be there.

As with posters, it is important to avoid the kind of “clutter” that obscures the simplicity of the message.

Text in sentences and paragraphs is unlikely to be read. Text in slogan form, and as announcement, is what goes on fliers. In other words, less is more. The graphics, layout and illustration should support and not compete with the text.

Logos can be used, but what gets most attention on any page is always the same thing: A human face or a human figure. In text, what gets most attention is names of people. Polychrome is not necessary in a flier design, just as it is not necessary in a poster.

Pamphlets

A pamphlet is a text publication. It is usually like an essay, or what is sometimes called a tract. It is similar to writing for periodicals like theoretical magazines, or as part of a book. The difference from these is that the pamphlet is an occasional and not a regular publication, and it is shorter than a book.

In South Africa, a pamphlet might typically be A5 in size, several thousand words in length, and anything from 4 to 32 pages, or sometimes even more than that. Pamphlets are often printed professionally. Sometimes they have a cover, sometimes not. A recent SACP pamphlet was “Deepen the Historical Ties between the ANC and SACP”, printed for the Party by Shereno printers. It was a print version of a lecture given on 23 November 2012 as part of the ANC’s Centenary celebrations.

Pamphlets have a long history in politics. The one of the most famous pamphleteers in the English language is Tom Paine. The 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels is a pamphlet, maybe the most successful one ever. Joe Slovo’s “The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution” is a pamphlet-length work.

A pamphlet is always an option when an occasional response or publication is needed. The Communist University’s booklet format is not different from the historic pamphlet form.

Bua Komanisi

The South African Communist Party keeps a title that is a hybrid between a regular publication and a pamphlet, called Bua Komanisi. It does not come out at regular intervals, but it is numbered in series. It is used for occasional publication of important documents, such as discussion documents. The most recent one, published in May, 2013, is “Let’s not Monumentalise the National Development Plan,” a discussion of the NDP.

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Agitprop, Part 2b

Jetline, a South African franchise chain of copy-shops

Copy Shops, Distribution and Markup

Copy-shops allow people access to printing on demand in urban centres and in some small rural towns.

Copy-shops are usually based on the use of photocopiers (Xerox process). Nowadays, these machines can print direct from an electronic file, which can be sent to the print-shop by e-mail, or brought to the shop on a thumb-drive (flash drive) or on a CD, or downloaded by the shop from a web site.

Customers pay per copy. It means that they can order and get what they can afford.

Copy-shop Agitprop

Copy-shops open the door for small, local organisations to get into print and become autonomous producers of agitprop material. This may include pamphlets, political education booklets, and publicity fliers.

Distribution and Markup

You may be limited to what you can pay for, and you may have to give out your material to the public free. A proportion of your output, and maybe most of it, will always be of this kind. It is one among many ways to project your agitational propaganda.

But what you can also do is to produce for sale to other sellers. That is to say, you can get hawkers to sell your material, if you give them the possibility of making a profit. This is where you have to use the principle of “Mark-up”. In business, most commodities are “marked up” from the purchase price to the sale price by at least 50%, which will give the business a gross profit before expenses of 33%. Sometimes the markup is 100%, giving a gross profit of 50%.

It is no good to give a hawker a 10% markup. That is not enough.

18^th Century girl selling pamphlets from a basket

You, too, need a markup, to make the business swing. There is no such thing as “break even”. If you aim for “break even” you will lose money.

Let’s say an 8-page document, printed in booklet form, costs R2 from the copy-shop. You can mark it up by 50% for yourself and sell it to a hawker for R3. The hawker can mark it up by 67% and sell it for R5.

Remember that the hawker must travel, eat, and find the customers. At the above rates of return, it is possible that a hawker could survive, if the material sells.

The advantage of this is that everything is paid for and it spreads by itself.

Don’t forget that the value of the material in the product was also made by labour, as much as the physical object was. So it is up to you to give value by making sure that the content is good.

Paperight

Paperight is a South African web site that promotes the idea of using copy-shops as publishers. It is not yet fully successful, mainly because its catalogue is difficult to browse.

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Writing, Editing and Press Releases

Communist University

2013

Agitprop

Part 1

Writing, Editing

and Press Releases

  

Lenin, Writing

Agitprop, Part 1

Writing

Writing comes first because it is the ordering art of so many other arts.

In politics, writing is indispensable. Most of our cadres need to be able to write. By being able to write is meant more than to be literate, just as being literate means more than to be able to read.

The question of language will mainly be left to the final CU course, which will just be on Languages. Suffice it to say that we need writers in all languages used in South Africa, and not just in the 11 official ones. We need people who can at least handle text in French, Portuguese, Swahili, and Arabic, too.

But in this item, we are talking about writing in general. What advice can we give?

The purpose of writing is to be understood. Political writing is better when it is shorter. To compose your thoughts, use “Mind Maps”, as described in the attached text. To organise your research, follow the “Organic Study Guide” contained in the document, and similar advice.

Write in Prose. Prose is in paragraphs, and it has a beginning, middle and end. Prose does not rely on bullets, numbers, letters or other listing mechanisms.

A good way to start writing is to write in a way that is adapted from the way you speak. If you can make yourself understood in speech, then you should be able to make yourself as well understood with the same words on paper. Then you can improve. There is no requirement for you to be pompous. Simplicity is best.

Political writing is better when shorter. Nearly all kinds of writing are limited as to length. Therefore make a habit of watching the number of words in any piece of writing (your own, and whenever possible, other people’s.

On the next page is a rough indication of the kinds of length required for different kinds of writing. From this chart it can be seen that each succeeding kind of project can be built up by repeating elements like the preceding, smaller ones. Writing is modular, like bricklaying. The modules are small. Short sentences and short paragraphs are best in political writing, and in journalism. If you can write a sentence, then you can write a book.

  

Item	Length (+/-)
Sentence	10 words
Paragraph	50 words
Letter to the Editor	300 words
Press Release/Newspaper Report	300 words
Article (“op ed” or “feature”)	750 words
Speech (100 words per minute)	1 500 words
Essay	2 500 words
Chapter of a book	5 000 words
Book of ten chapters	50 000 words

Reading goes with writing. Both are habits. Keep reading, and keep writing, like breathing in and breathing out. Try to write for people. Any readers are good readers. Even a small amount of feedback is extremely instructive.

Lenin described himself as a writer. Lenin’s style became clearer and clearer and he became more experienced. Lenin’s style is a good model of shortness combined with clarity.

Writing is a pleasure. The Chilean communist writer Volodia Teitelboim used to say that writing was the easiest way he knew of being happy.

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Agitprop, Part 1a

Additive and Subtractive

Editing

All writing is edited. If it was not, it could not be constrained to fit the space available, which is always limited. The time that readers have for reading, is also limited.

Editing is done in all sorts of ways.

Usually it means, in the first place, selection. Editors pick, from a very wide field, a much smaller, limited amount of material. The criteria for selection may be political, or some other quality, like a special interest of a group of readers, or a sectional appeal such as to women, youth, educators.

Editing can also mean removal of excess and repetition from a text. This is often referred to a “redaction”, from the French word for “editor”, which is “redacteur”. Redaction that takes out whole passages, paragraphs and sentences is a quick way to reduce length

The Communist University is a product of editing. It has been constructed by a combined process of selection and redaction; while the openings to discussion of the short texts, are equivalent to the “Editorials” in a newspaper, which are the editor’s own voice.

Sub-editing

Sub-editing is also called (in USA English) copy-editing. Sub-editing is the writing of articles as they are going to be printed, as opposed to reporting, which is the gathering of stories. Reporters may sub-edit their own material to an extent, but the sub-editor is the one who must adjust the material to fit the space available. Sub-editors are the real writers of newspapers. Their techniques are the best.

Length per Page

This varies widely and is affected by all other variables. In a broadsheet newspaper page there can be thousands of words on one page. On a booklet page there might be 300 words. On an A4 page there may be as many as 500, or in a print-magazine page with graphics and in columns, more than 600 words.

Headlines

Headlines in newspapers and magazines are added by sub-editors, and not by the writers of articles. Headlines need to be short, so that they can be fat. Sub-headings, like the ones used on this page, help to break up slabs of text and make it easier to read.

Web sites

Web sites are not limited in the way that hard-copy printed material is limited. Hence the natural discipline of the print medium is not felt, with the result that there is enormous length used sometimes on the Internet, which is never likely to be read. Hence attention to word-count is very important when writing and editing for the Internet or e-mail.

Illustration

An illustration that would express the nature of subtraction might be one of stone-carving, where the waste or surplus is chiselled away so as to reduce and shape the initial block down to what is wanted. Addition could be illustrated by an image of bricklaying, or of “3D Printing”. But suitable images were hard to find, so we have used the illustration of Additive and Subtractive colour.

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Agitprop, Part 1b

Press releases

A press release (media release) is a pre-written story, given by an interested party to a journalist for the journalist to publish. These press releases, nowadays, go out by e-mail.

If you define it like that, then everything else about a press release will follow logically. Everything is done in a way that is designed to save the journalist work, and time.

The press release must be short. It should not be longer than the space that the newspaper or radio programme will have available. This is because anything that is longer will have to be cut, and cutting down a text is work, that takes time. The journalists don’t have any spare time.

The press release must be written in a style that is usable, or easily adjustable for use, in a newspaper or a radio bulletin. This means short sentences.

The press release should be on one topic only. For another topic, send another press release. If it is not possible to do this (e.g. after an executive meeting covering many topics), the press release should be clearly divided, with sub-headings.

The press release must be immediately verifiable. This means that the journalist must be able to confirm, usually by telephone, that you are the source of the press release. If the journalist cannot do this, then the story will be dropped at once.

At the bottom of your press release you should put “Issued by:” and follow that with the organisation that is issuing the statement.

Immediately after that, you should put “Contact:” and follow it with your name and cell phone number. You can also put your land-line number and e-mail address, and all details including your physical whereabouts; but the cell number is the crucial one.

Logo and Date

If you have a logo, use it at the top and centre. Under it, you can put the name of the organisation in text, even if it is clear in the logo. The reason is that your recipient’s system may strip off the logo and leave only text. Put the date there at the top, as well.

A Good “Subject” line

Your message needs a good “Subject” line. This is not exactly like a newspaper headline, but it must tell the journalist plainly what the statement is about. It goes in the “Subject” field of the e-mail, and it goes above the text of the message. Shorter is better.

Some people like to make a quotation that the journalist can use, like, say: President Zuma said: “The National Development Plan will help us to work together.” The words in quotation marks are supposed to be the original words of the person, which the journalist can then use in the article. This point is made in the graphic below. By the way, there is no shortage of advice on press releases on the Internet.

What is also possible to do, but is hardly ever done, is to record a quotation, or a portion of a speech, and attach it to your press release as a sound file. This will help with radio, especially.

But as a rule, don’t use attachments when sending out press releases. Paste your text in the body of the message.

Press Releases as a news medium

Where there is a reception for it, your press release can go, and it is better for you that your full original message is read by those you wish to reach, as opposed to the edited one with contradictory statements added, that the newspaper may actually print.

For this reason, in South Africa, it has become normal to send press releases out as widely as possible. Press releases have the potential to by-pass the newspaper and broadcast media to a significant extent, and so to become a medium themselves.

Distribution list

E-mail distribution lists can be Google or Yahoo Groups, or they can be your own home-made list-serve, but you need them to be sending e-mail to addresses that are in use and not defunct.

E-mail that goes direct is what you want, and not a system that sends a message just to say there is a message. You want your message to appear in the in-box of your recipient, in such a way that the recipient can read the “Subject” line, and maybe the first few words of the message. You want it to be that if the journalist clicks on the message, he or she will immediately get the message, open, in full.

Distribution lists require a lot of maintenance. You need to be adding subscribers all the time. This is labour-intensive work. Therefore think twice before opening too many such lists.

On the other hand, get yourself on to as many as possible of other people’s lists so as to read their media releases, contrast and compare them with each other and with yours, and learn from how they do it.

Embargo?

Most people don’t bother with the “embargo” and “for immediate release” tags. Most of the time, they are superfluous. It is better to save “embargo” for the very occasional and rare times that it is really needed.

  

Course: Agitprop

25013, Writing, Editing and Press Releases, 2013

1887 words

Agitprop

Agitprop, Part 0

“Lendiz: The books on all spheres of knowledge”, Alexander Rodchenko, 1925

Agitprop

The SACP by its Constitution is supposed to “educate, organise and mobilise”. These three terms can be put together into one: “Agitate”.

The word “Propaganda” came into wide use after the “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide” (Latin for “congregation for the propagation of the faith”) was set up by the Catholic Church in Rome in 1622. Its business was to “propagate”, and what that means is:

“Cause to grow in numbers or amount; extend the bounds of; spread (especially an idea, practice, etc.) from place to place. Grow more widespread or numerous, increase, spread.

“Extend the action or operation of; transmit (motion, light, sound, etc.) in some direction or through some medium. Be transmitted, travel.”

These words quoted from the big (“New Shorter”, 2-Volume) Oxford Dictionary can help to describe what we mean by Propaganda, for the purposes of this course.

Agitational Propaganda (Agitprop for short) is what this course is about. It is a practical course. It is about means, and arts. It starts with writing, but the course is saying that human expression and communication take many forms, and we use all of them, and try to use them well.

The ten parts of the course are conceived around the following categories:

1	Writing
2	Print on Paper
3	Graphic
4	Information Technology
5	Performance
6	Fabric
7	Public
8	Industrial
9	Broadcast
10	Installation

Original texts

The practice of the Communist University is, as a rule, to use the best available existing material, together with a short introduction. But in this course we have so far found a lot fewer “original texts” than has been the case in other CU courses. The introductions have consequently been prepared from organic experience of struggle. Until we accumulate more outside documents, these introductions have by default to constitute the body of the course.

Therefore, in this Agitprop course only, the “Openings to Discussion” are compiled into a separate booklet for each of the ten parts. This weekly booklet can be used as the hard-copy document for discussion in live sessions. But where there are original texts, they will also be sent.

  

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Marx of the East, Marx of the South

Pieces of Samir Amin, 2011, Marxism’s Tricontinental Vocation

Dedan Kimathi

Marx of the East, Marx of the South

My interpretation of historical capitalism stresses the polarization of the world (the contrast of center/periphery) produced by the historical form of the accumulation of capital. This perspective questions the visions of the “socialist revolution,” and, more broadly, the transition to socialism, that the historical Marxisms have developed. The “revolution”—or the transition—before us is not necessarily the one on which these historical visions were based. Nor are the strategies for surmounting capitalism the same.

It has to be recognized that what the most important social and political struggles of the twentieth century tried to challenge was not so much capitalism in itself as the permanent imperialist dimension of actually existing capitalism. The issue is therefore whether this transfer of the center of gravity of the struggles necessarily calls capitalism into question, at least potentially.

Marx’s thinking associates “scientific” clarity in the analysis of reality with social and political action (the class struggle in its broadest sense) aimed at “changing the world.” Confronting the basics—i.e., the discovery of the real source of surplus value produced by the exploitation of social labor by capital—is indispensable to this struggle. If this fundamental and lucid contribution of Marx is abandoned, a double failure is inevitably the result. Any such abandonment of the theory of exploitation (law of value) reduces the analysis of reality to that of appearances only, a way of thinking that is limited by its abject submission to the requirements of commodification, itself engendered by the system. Similarly, such abandonment of the labor value-based critique of the system annihilates the effectiveness of strategies and struggles to change the world, which are thereby conceived within this alienating framework, the “scientific” claims of which have no real basis.

Nevertheless, it is not enough just to cling to the lucid analysis formulated by Marx. This is not only because “reality” itself changes, and there are always “new” things to be taken into account in the development of the critique of the real world that started with Marx. But more fundamentally, it is because, as we know, the analysis that Marx put forward in Capital was left incomplete. In the planned sixth volume of this work (which was never written), Marx proposed treating the globalization of capitalism. This now has to be done by others, which is why I have dared to advocate the formulation of the “law of globalized value,” restoring the place of the unequal development (through the center/periphery polarization) that is inseparable from the global expansion of historical capitalism. In this formulation, “imperialist rent” is integrated into the whole process of the production and circulation of capital and the distribution of the surplus value. This rent is at the origin of the challenge: it accounts for why the struggles for socialism in the imperialist centers have faded, and it highlights the anti-imperialist dimensions of the struggles in the peripheries against the system of capitalist/imperialist globalization.

I shall not return here to discuss what an exegesis of Marx’s texts on this question would suggest. Marx, who is nothing less than a giant, with his critical acumen and the incredible subtlety of his thought, must have had at least an intuition that he was coming up against a serious question here. This is suggested by his observations on the disastrous effects of the alignment of the English working class with the chauvinism associated with the colonial exploitation of Ireland. Marx was therefore not surprised that it was in France—less developed than England economically, but more advanced in political consciousness—that the first socialist revolution took place. He, like Engels, also hoped that the “backwardness” of Germany would enable an original form of advance to develop, fusing together both the bourgeois and the socialist revolutions.

Lenin went still further. He emphasized the qualitative transformation that was involved in the passage to monopoly capitalism, and he drew the necessary conclusions: that capitalism had ceased to be a necessary progressive stage in history and that it was now “putrefied” (Lenin’s own term). In other words, it had become “obsolete” and “senile” (my terms), so that the passing to socialism was on the agenda, which was both necessary and possible. He conceived and implemented, in this framework, a revolution that began in the periphery (Russia, the “weak link”). Then, seeing the failure of his hopes in a European revolution, he conceived of the transfer of the revolution to the East, where he saw that the fusion of the objectives of the anti-imperialist struggle with those of the struggle against capitalism had become possible.

But it was Mao who rigorously formulated the complex and contradictory nature of the objectives in the transition to the socialism that were to be pursued in these conditions. “Marxism” (or, more exactly, the historical Marxisms) was confronted by a new challenge—one which did not exist in the most lucid political consciousness of the nineteenth century, but which arose because of the transfer of the initiative to transform the world to the peoples, nations, and states of the periphery.

Imperialist rent not “only” benefited the monopolies of the dominant center (in the form of super profits), it was also the basis of the reproduction of society as a whole, in spite of its evident class structure and the exploitation of its workers. This is what Perry Anderson analyzed so clearly as “Western Marxism,” which he described as “the product of defeat” (the abandonment of the socialist perspective)—and which is relevant here. This Marxism was then condemned, having renounced “changing the world” and committing itself to “academic” studies, without political impact. The liberal drift of social democracy—and its rallying both to the U.S. ideology of “consensus” and to Atlanticism at the service of the imperialist domination of the world—were the consequences.

“Another world” (a very vague phrase to indicate a world committed to the long road toward socialism) is obviously impossible unless it provides a solution to the problems of the peoples in the periphery—only 80 percent of the world population! “Changing the world” therefore means changing the living conditions of this majority. Marxism, which analyzes the reality of the world in order to make the forces acting for change as effective as possible, necessarily acquires a decisive tricontinental (Africa, Asia, Latin America) vocation.

From: http://monthlyreview.org/2011/02/01/the-trajectory-of-historical-capitalism-and-marxisms-tricontinental-vocation