What Do Slogans Do?
Two years of Pen in Fist!
Hello readers of Pen in Fist! It’s 2 year since I started this newsletter on activism and writing. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
My first post went out on 8 March 2022, International Women’s Day. That month I wrote about manifestoes and words on the streets, the way activists present our demands in pamphlets, placards or on the walls, often with a touch of humour.
Continuing in the spirit or remembering and celebrating protest, this month’s post considers the multiple meanings of SLOGANS.
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When I first travelled to Cuba in the late 1980s, one thing I quickly noticed was a glaring gap in the urban landscape. Whereas the North American cities of my childhood were plastered with gaudy images, stamped with the curt commands of mass advertising – Think Different. Have it Your Way. Just Do It! – Cuban streets were lined with very different kinds of slogans: ¡Viva la Revolución! Patria o Muerte. ¡Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
Alongside the old jalopies and crumbling facades of Havana, the faded billboards gave the city a museum-like quality. But they also provided a welcome break from the neon lights and empty glitz, a reminder that people can come together for a cause other than mass consumption.
Their contemporary association with consumerism helps to give slogans a bad name: short simple statements that stick in the mind and treat the reader or listener like an automaton. These pithy sentences are certainly not meant to be pondered, analysed, debated, contested. But as the Cuban example reminds us, slogans have other histories. They’ve long been associated with politics; revolutionary movements have a history of condensing their demands and dreams into catchphrases: Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. – The Personal is Political – Black Lives Matter – Stop the War.
Though it’s hard to imagine a political protest without its share of slogans blazoned on banners, radical political movements have a complicated relationship to slogans. The best draw attention to a fundamental injustice, seek to overturn a well-entrenched worldview or make a clear demand for political change. Yet their very simplicity also makes them suspect. I recall a Women’s Studies teacher in the 1980s who flinched when she saw signs on pro-choice marches declaring “Not the Church, Not the State, Women Will Control Our Fate!”. “What a naïve understanding of power!” she would cry.
Today the same slogan might sound off for different reasons. Why assume the person seeking an abortion is a woman? An outdated slogan can either adapt to the times or be updated with more inclusive language. In the recent mass movement for the decriminalisation of abortion in Argentina, queer activists held placards demanding reproductive rights for trans men and nonbinary people as well as women. In 1789 Fraternité most certainly referred to brothers, but now it is widely understood to include women (though the extent to which the contemporary French Republic is inclusive in practice – in terms of gender, race, religion – is a matter of intense debate, one that underscores the dangers of celebratory slogans that obscure material realities).
Sometimes a slogan becomes outdated because circumstances have changed. In his 1917 pamphlet On Slogans, Vladimir Lenin complained
Too often has it happened that, when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans which had formerly been correct but had now lost all meaning.
Although the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” had been correct during an earlier period of the revolution, Lenin argued, that period was now over. He wasn’t concerned about Russian revolutionaries sounding a bit old fashioned. He warned that slogans must capture the realities of a given political situation: “Unless this is understood, it is impossible to understand anything of the urgent questions of the day.”
Lenin’s concern was that by using outdated understandings of reality the revolution could not adopt to new circumstances and advance forward. But slogans can also misrepresent history in ways that pose dangers to the present and future. In her book Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman cautions that slogans – “shortcuts with high aims” – can become a trap for progressive movements, seducing us into defending principles that cause harm. She cites the example of the feminist demand, “Believe women!”, popularised by campaigners against sexual assault.
We have this slogan in circulation because so many women are not believed when they tell the truth. But what about when they are not telling the truth? Are we still supposed to believe them? The histories of racism and colonialism remind us regularly that white women lying have been used to justify all kinds of cruelty against people of color, especially Black and Brown men in the United States. When we insist that we must “believe women” no matter what, we do help people who are telling the truth about violations they have experienced. But there are all kinds of truth.
The solution is surely not to create a counter-slogan (“Don’t Believe Women!” has the ring of a misogynist battle cry) or to go for a more nuanced version (“Believe Some Women!”). We can abide by the principle to believe women when they denounce sexual assault without succumbing to the idea that all women are liars, but we’re unlikely to be able to come up with a neat one-liner that encapsulates that task. For Schulman, slogans are no substitute for the deep conversation and listening that holds progressive movements together.
The Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini has outlined the dangers for such movements of taking slogans too literally, of fetishizing action above “mere talk”. Reflecting on interviews she conducted with imprisoned members of Italian armed organisations such as Prima Linea and Brigate Rosse, Passerini laments the tendency of these groups to “duplicate existing violence”. Drawing on the ideas of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, Passerini identifies what she calls a “mental laziness” in parts of the European New Left of the sixties and seventies, reflected in the uncritical embrace of certain key texts (for example, Chairman Mao’s statement that “power comes from the barrel of the gun” or some of the glorifications of violence found in Jean Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth). For Arendt, such works marked a radical departure from Karl Marx’s writings on violence. For Passerini, they were encapsulated in many of the movement’s slogans: truculent sentences, bloody, arrogant.
The association of slogans with violence is not accidental. The word is derived from the 16th-century Scottish word slog(g)orne, meaning war-cry. Though not all political slogans are calls to violence, the word’s origins continue to haunt our contemporary understandings of what slogans mean. And what they do.
Schulman and Passerini are not alone among progressive thinkers in being wary of slogans. No one who takes ideas – or political change – seriously can help but cringe at some of the more asinine attempts to encapsulate a just cause in a one-liner. Some of these attempts are just banal or silly. But others are more problematic. I’m thinking of the conceited claims to eternal truth, typically framed as simple equation or a neat binary opposition, that proliferate today across the political spectrum. Such slogans are less designed to bring about radical change than to showcase the purity of the speaker and put the listener firmly in her place. As such, they sound sinister, as well as deeply ahistorical and aggressively anti-intellectual.
But what slogans do politically is ultimately determined not just by the position of those who shout them but the context in which they are heard. The principal problem with the political slogan today is less its etymological association with the battlefield than the fact that it bursts onto a political stage where complex thinking is actively discouraged. When the smug elected official or the cocksure opinion writer tells us there is only one interpretation of a particular political slogan, we should not be surprised. After all, such people traffic in bad faith. Only in such a universe can the former UK Home Secretary call anti-war protesters calling for peace on Armistice Day “hate marchers”.
But as Julia Barnet explains in her Activist Explorer newsletter, “even bad-faith criticism can provide an opportunity to excavate and find deeper meaning in our words”. In her post Unpacking Ceasefire Now Barnet explains how, as part of ongoing discussions with fellow activists, she has come to understand the many elements of that slogan: from the demand to stop the slaughter of children to a call that brings communities together; from a challenge to dominant narratives to an acknowledgment of history; from a rejection of US and Western domination to a recognition of our responsibility; from a refusal to pit Jewish lives against Palestinian lives to a commitment to protect all life.
Barnett’s post is an exquisite excavation of the work of slogans, of their centrality to activist culture, and the excellent work they do when used to unite people in solidarity, to prompt memory, open conversation and further justice.
The very fact that slogans are controversial, open to diverse interpretations, suggests that when they are created well they can make one pause, think, discuss. Yes, some can alienate, simplify, inflate the egos of macho activists. But in the best revolutionary tradition, slogans bring us into a history and a future much bigger than ourselves.
If you’ve enjoyed this post on slogans, here’s a sample of my other writing on marches and protests: March 8;Writing in Public; Dalston Solidarities; Protest, Celebrate, Remember; May Day; Marching for Peace.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can:
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Happy two years of Pen in Fist Carrie! This was a great post.
Indeed brilliant post. Thank you, Carrie, for inviting us to careful reflection!