“Burn a Flag” Campaign
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This is just a thought so take it or leave it as you so wish….
I'm minded of something that (I think) Alan suggested recently – about the need for situationist style publicity stunts to generate media (and other) interest in the WSM. Well, in the wake of the whole Charlie Hebdo affair , and the vomit-inducing spectacle of our hypocritical world leaders "standing up for freedom" in that oily display of solidarity with the slain journalists in Paris recently, followed almost immediately by Hollande's remarks about criminalising flag burning, why doesn't the WSM initiate a "Burn a Flag for Freedom" day?
You could announce to the general media – national and local – your intention to hold a Burn a Flag Day at a selected venue (Trafalgar Square? House of Commons? Head office?) in which you intend to burn a number of assorted flags including those of, say, the UK, Russia, Isis, USA, France etc etc (but preferably all 193!). This could be accompanied by a call for solidarity flag burning events throughout the UK – both as an expression of repugnance for the malign influence of nationalism and also to test the authenticity of the authorities' claim to support "freedom of expression" (in this case the freedom to express one's disgust for nationalism). Perhaps the other parties of the WSM could be involved in the exercise too in a coordinated fashion so as to draw attention to the world wide nature of the alternative to capitalism.
As I say, its just a thought but – you never know – it could catapult the SPGB into the headlines particularly if the Daily Mail got wind of all this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_desecrationAs Robbo suggests, i am in favour of any campaign or stunt that is original and imaginateive and which is reflective of our views and offers us an opening to espouse our case. Robbo's suggestion is such an initiative. It demonstrates our anti-nationalism, our anti-patriotism and we know how symbols such as national flags are overly poiliticalised and sentimentalised…and acts against them frequently criminalised. It should and would cause offence to many. But that according to the I AM CHARLIE campaign is acceptable expression of democracy. The financial outlay is minimum…price of several flags, a few hundred leaflets/press staements to explain the action and the whole event videoed for your tube. The actual numbers involved, always a crucial factor in our propaganda is not that many. i could be crude and suggest the title is "Jack Off Over the Union Jack"…very Class Warrish …but i think we could be better by being more temperate… "A United Working Class Not United Nation States"…or simply "Unflaggingly World Socialiststs" …again i am sure better titles of the campaign and appropriate leaflet text can be providedTo be honest…i think that making it an WSM affair is not possible…We have not many members in the US to buy matches much less burn the Stars and Stripes . I know the law in India of even flying their national flag is very strict…only a few designated days a year that people can even hang it outside their homes …Canada its an offence as it is in New Zealand,…While in the UK it may be an act likely to result in a breach of the peace …or another catch-all law…It may well result in fingers beingg burned, as well as flags ….but the risk is not too high. But it does exist and so all participants should be aware of it…and any resulting court case will put to rest the accusation we are the snmall party of good boys and offer more publicity. Perhaps, we could make sure those countries where we have companion parties are singled out for the flames….so they could use it locally as propagands I would suggest it is part of our election campaign and that our publicity concentrates on this aspect… Yes a bonfire ot flags and flag-poles…aand for the literate and historic…a bonfire of vanities….http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonfire_of_the_Vanities And despite the fact i cannot participate…i'm in full agreement with the proposal
Always open to other suggestions…..And interested in just why you think this one is not going to work to our advantage. Do you think our usual manner of conveying our message is effective enough in this age of social media and the internet? Aren't we out-gunned by the establishment propaganda?
I'm happy for it to be suggested, and wouldn't object to members of the general public doing it but flag-burning is not something the party or members should be doing. It doesn't encourage critical thought, rather the opposite. Nationalists (ever-ready to shut down critical faculties) would readily be enraged and respond emotively, and the apathetic would remain apathetic.Stunts are not the way to raise our profile. They're certainly not a shortcut to consciousness raising either. Stunts aren't a strategy, they're the absence of one.
jondwhite wrote:I'm happy for it to be suggested, and wouldn't object to members of the general public doing it but flag-burning is not something the party or members should be doing. It doesn't encourage critical thought, rather the opposite. Nationalists (ever-ready to shut down critical faculties) would readily be enraged and respond emotively, and the apathetic would remain apathetic.Stunts are not the way to raise our profile. They're certainly not a shortcut to consciousness raising either. Stunts aren't a strategy, they're the absence of one.Ok, its just a suggestion and I'm not too hung about it but I would have thought it would be quite possible to combine an approach that embraces "critical thought" with a symbolic gesture of this sort. – for instance in the form of a leaflet opposing nationalism which could be distributed before, during and after the event in question.. Ditto a press statement to explain the significance of the event. Things are not black-or-white.
ALB wrote:Another silly idea.Totally agree with ALB.Such provocative voluntarism kindly gifts those in political power the opportunity to distort the self-styled “critical thought” supposedly behind the action in countless ways prejudicial to the Party.All voluntarist political “thought” should seriously think beyond the stunt itself to the political consequences of its proposed action. Unfortunately, it is prevented from doing so by its essentially creative free-wheeling seat-of-the-pants nature. Like Robbo’s proposal, voluntarist “thinking” stops short at the “cunning plan” stage.Beyond that, voluntarist “thought” turns into voluntarist delusion, imagining miraculous consequences of its action, where it perpetually dwells as “half thought”—or only half thought out—best characterized as thought’s coitus interruptus.
Well, i still await any alternative "cunning plan" (i do like that Baldrick expression you use, TWC)We cannot simply persist with our 19th century means of propaganda. Already, we have one element of it, the outdoor meeting relegated redundant. The 21st century substitute, discussion lists such as this is simply ineffective at "drawing" a crowd…we have little means of offering our presence…we don't have the numbers to be outside every tube station…We have to use the capitalist media to a certain extent. Paid newspaper adverts have to stand out, not hidden away in the small ads section of items for sale…Even a photo has more impact than the text (a picture worth a thousand words) …and the headline , more message than the the text…We agree the election statement but the layout and presentation is secondary (i am sure it won't be but it is as equally important and should have the same EC attention given to it as the text)We have tried stunts…Glasgow branch, attended a protest with a banner that read "this march will achieve nothing"…i am sure party historians can suggest more unorthodox attempts where the intent was to spark interest rather than deliver the full Declaration of Principles …(.is it a party myth that at one party election meeting the candidate addressed the audience from behind a curtain…probably just a legend…but the masked candidate would stimulate interest)The mainstream parties literally spend millions on their campaigns and employ gifted talented ad-men from the commercial PR world. We can't, of course, do the same…but surely there is a DIY advertising for dummies guide out there to use as a basic manual instruction.
Our ideas are controversial, our party is controversial and we should be courting controversy, not playing it safe with respectability and our staid image…we have to seek out the public eye…If Robbo's idea is not the best then suggest others…i'm fed up being seen as the conservative socialists.I recall our open air meetings…a chairman would begin to try and gather an audience…party members would feed him the usual questions …what is socialism…what about Russia…but more effective was the pretend heckling of the speaker…a bit of theatre…impromptu agit-prop…members acting hostile…until we had succeeded in getting a core audience…once people were listening…others joined the crowd….they saw something attacted others and were curious to know what…I'm all ears to how we can get that audience other than the limited methods we now have at our disposal. No-one should be shot down for coming up with ideas, no matter how "silly" it might seem to one member…after all enough of us have said we are put off by Russel Brand's humour….but it doesn't stop some of his message succeeding in getting across.
Alan,Baldric’s “cunning plans” were conscious coitus interruptus—unimplementable, unable to be carried to completion, predetermined to fail.Socialism plans to be consciously implementable and predetermined to succeed.I can’t see much in between. We’ve all witnessed countless creative political and social acts over the last century that turned out to be no more than “cunning plans”. Such voluntaristic acts remind me of Marx’s critique of religion as a false consciousness, in this case the conscious acting out of a false hope, predestined to be dashed in the undertaking.By the way, I take issue with your recent posting, as if endorsing, the conclusions of a theological critique of Marx’s “cry of the oppressed masses”, as being supplanted by the “thoughts of the well-to-do”. But such things need a considered response.
What posting would that be?Perhaps its just me, but i do have difficulty in understanding your meaning at times…which rather undermines any criticism of a stunt being misunderstood or misinterpreted if plain English is not suffice in conveying a simple message.
twc wrote:Totally agree with ALB.Such provocative voluntarism kindly gifts those in political power the opportunity to distort the self-styled “critical thought” supposedly behind the action in countless ways prejudicial to the Party.All voluntarist political “thought” should seriously think beyond the stunt itself to the political consequences of its proposed action. Unfortunately, it is prevented from doing so by its essentially creative free-wheeling seat-of-the-pants nature. Like Robbo’s proposal, voluntarist “thinking” stops short at the “cunning plan” stage.Beyond that, voluntarist “thought” turns into voluntarist delusion, imagining miraculous consequences of its action, where it perpetually dwells as “half thought”—or only half thought out—best characterized as thought’s coitus interruptus.Not quite sure what you are going on about, mate. Nor would I think Joe or Jill Public down in the Duck and Hounds enjoying a swift half. But I would say this, though – whatever we do and however we do it, is going to be "distorted" in an environment that is fundamentally antithetical to socialist ideas at the moment. Socialists just have to live with that and do they best they can.I repeat again – a publicity stunt of this nature doesn't have to be at the expense of critical thought; it can be accompanied by critical thought throughout in the form of press statements, leaflets and whatnot. Don't you want more publicity? Why is the SPGB standing in the General Election at great expense, if not? Of course you cannot control the way others perceive you at the moment but the more publicity you generate the more the public takes note of you and the greater the chance that people on the same wavelength making the effort to approach you.I can imagine a certain section of the population, the more politically inclined – the people you ought to be targeting first in my view – sitting up and saying "Blimey, the SPGB! Who would have thought of it., Good on 'em. I hate effing nationalism too!"As I said , you don't know until you try it. The uniqueness of a publicity stunt of this nature is that it doesn't discriminate between any flag; it burns the lot. Don't you think maybe, just maybe. that might make people sit up and ask – what are these guys on about?
robbo203 wrote:I can imagine a certain section of the population, the more politically inclined – the people you ought to be targeting first in my view – sitting up and saying "Blimey, the SPGB! Who would have thought of it., Good on 'em. I hate effing nationalism too!"It sends to that “more politically inclined”, and so already politically committed, section of the population the anarchist message: Abolish the national state! The national state is a necessary part of the social superstructure of capitalism. All the hating in the world won’t abolish the nation state before we capture it and change its social base from private to common ownership and control of the means of social life.
robbo203 wrote:As I said, you don't know until you try it.Really? Do you imagine we have so little confidence in our science that we can’t foresee the consequences?
robbo203 wrote:The uniqueness of a publicity stunt of this nature is that it doesn't discriminate between any flag; it burns the lot. Don't you think maybe, just maybe. that might make people sit up and ask – what are these guys on about?No, I don’t think, maybe or otherwise, that people might sit up and ask anything at all; they’ll already “know” all they need to “know”, because provocative stunts fuel little more than existing prejudice.
alanjjohnstone wrote:What posting would that be?It comes from your adulation of the reformist Popehttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/pope?page=1#comment-19407I refer to your indented quotation.The PDF article is indeed interesting, although tendentially hostile to socialism in general, and the studies on early Christianity by Engels and, especially, the fine study by Kautsky, and the familiar early Marx critiques, that need a thoughtful rebuttal, time permitting.
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