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Hossam el-Hamalawy

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Hossam el-Hamalawy

Tag: socialism

‘We must develop a new Communist reporter’

Posted on 12/10/201203/03/2021 By 3arabawy

Zinoviev wrote for the Communist International to the editors of Communist papers in 1921. He complained that:

Our papers are too dry, too abstract, too similar to papers of the old type. They are made up too much of what is of interest to the professional politicians, and contain very little of such items as would be eagerly read by every working woman, every day laborer, every kitchen maid, every soldier. Our papers contain too many ‘learned’ foreign words, too many long and dry articles. We are too eager to imitate the ‘respectable’ papers. All this must be changed …
A daily Communist paper must under no circumstances concern itself solely with so called ‘high’ politics. On the contrary, three quarters of the paper must be devoted to the every day life of the workers …
Our newspapers have to compete with bourgeois and other newspapers. We must give plenty of good material, well set up and readable … We must systematically think why the rank and file of the working class are attracted by … bourgeois newspapers … We must learn from such papers as the Daily Herald which strives to serve all phases of the life of the worker and his family … Furthermore, we must also introduce something that is peculiarly our own and what the bourgeois and social democratic newspapers cannot give. This is precisely the letters from working men and working women from the factories and works, letters from soldiers etc.
We must develop a new Communist reporter. He must be less interested in the lobbies of parliament than in the factories, shops, the workers’ homes, the workers’ dining rooms, the workers’ schools, etc. He should contribute to the paper not lobby gossip, but reports of labor meetings, descriptions of the workers’ needs, the most concrete information about the rise in the cost of living etc. …
The rank and file appreciate very much poignant sarcasm a vitriolic sneer hurled at the enemy. One caricature which hits the nail on the head is of better use than scores of high flown so-called ‘Marxist’ articles … We must often, instead of the customary official daily editorial, insert a more or less remarkable letter by a worker or a group of workers from a certain factory, or a picture of some workers who have been arrested or the biography of a worker who has been sentenced by the bourgeois courts and who has displayed a staunch spirit at his trial. Less abstractness and more concreteness – that is what is needed in our papers … (Bulletin of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, 1921).

Anarchism: A Marxist Critique

Posted on 15/09/201203/03/2021 By 3arabawy

After watching the lecture, I also highly recommend you read John’s book on the subject.

#RevSoc Visualizing propaganda and agitation

Posted on 10/09/201203/03/2021 By 3arabawy

Leon Trotsky, “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema” 12 July, 1923:

The most important weapon in this respect, a weapon excelling any other, is at present the cinema. This amazing spectacular innovation has cut into human life with a successful rapidity never experienced in the past. In the daily life of capitalist towns, the cinema has become just such an integral part of life as the bath, the beer-hall, the church, and other indispensable institutions, commendable and otherwise. The passion for the cinema is rooted in the desire for distraction, the desire to see something new and improbable, to laugh and to cry, not at your own, but at other people’s misfortunes. The cinema satisfies these demands in a very direct, visual, picturesque, and vital way, requiring nothing from the audience; it does not even require them to be literate. That is why the audience bears such a grateful love to the cinema, that inexhaustible fount of impressions and emotions. This provides a point, and not merely a point, but a huge square, for the application of our socialist educational energies.
The fact that we have so far, ie., in nearly six years, not taken possession of the cinema shows how slow and uneducated we are, not to say, frankly, stupid. This weapon, which cries out to be used, is the best instrument for propaganda, technical, educational, and industrial propaganda, propaganda against alcohol, propaganda for sanitation, political propaganda, any kind of propaganda you please, a propaganda which is accessible to everyone, which is attractive, which cuts into the memory and may be made a possible source of revenue.

Lenin in a conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky, April 1919:

You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.

Cinema was a new invention in the age of Lenin and Trotsky, but the Bolsheviks were quick to understand the need to visualize dissent. Today, YouTube and similar online platforms, can provide a venue for revolutionary movements to spread their propaganda and agitation visually to a much wider audience.

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