A dual process model of ideology, part 2
(Section 4 of Ideology and Practice)
When we hit pause on part 1 of this model we summarised where we had got to:
So far we have only the barest abstraction of a dual process model, implicit and explicit ideologies 1 & 2 respectively, and corresponding notion and concept atoms. So far we are lacking any concrete linkage to practice, power and strategic implications for working for social change.
First we need to expand the dual process from simple “atoms” like notion and concept to more articulated assemblages and then we need to consider the processes behind the component parts.
Note: For ease and rapidity in sketching the outlines of the model, the social context is assumed to be that of liberal democratic highly developed consumer capitalist societies like the OECD countries. Not that the bulk of humanity that live outside of such a “Eurocentric” frame are not important, but that the generalisation of the model will have to wait until a later stage in the exposition.
Flows 1: Comment & opinion
Journalism, whether reportage or commentary, is primarily system 1 ideological production. It implies a one-way or at least journalist-mediated conversation with a broad, consumer-defined audience and presupposes the liberal democratic model of social change centred around the agency of the peculiar object that is “public opinion”. This model is based on discursive/cognitive performance, journalism moves public opinion which then causes “civil society” to demand action of the representative state apparatus and, eventually, the mediating political class responds and issues directives for changes in state action. This is obviously an idealised view rather than a realistic model of how the process actually works in any given society. Nonetheless, by an admittedly circular definition, in liberal democratic societies, an actual process approximates this to enough of an extent that this ideal often becomes the dominant model of social change accorded the title of “realism” or “political pragmatism”.
The consequence is that other models of social change, i.e. ones not based around system 1 ideological production and a strategy of using media to influence public opinion to push for change through legal state representational channels, are designated as “unrealistic”, “idealistic” or — ironically — “ideologically driven”. In reality all social change is ideologically driven, as is opposition to social change, regardless of the differing types of ideologies involved. But it is a signal characteristic of the dominant ideology that it always perceives itself as “non-ideological”.
But an important distinction must be made between comment and opinion, even though newspapers and other media routinely conflate the two. Comment always appears as an individual act or production. The individual commentator promotes their personal opinions, but always in dialog with not only the personal opinions of the readers, but also this numinous third party, “public opinion”. Individuals can argue about their personal opinions over the dinner table or the bar, but when the commentariat speaks, it is always in dialogue with the notional collective “public opinion”, irrespective of rhetorical tricks used to create false intimacy between writer and reader (or broadcaster and viewer, etc). Comment is individual, but opinion is collective — at least the opinion that mediates, in one form or another in the (re)production of collective social doxa.
Secondly, even though comment appears as an individual production, this is not a production that is open to all, equally, even in the age of social media and personal blogs. The potential capacity to produce comment does not make one a member of the commentariat. In order to be in dialogue with public opinion in a real rather than imaginary way, a critical mass of reach has to be attained. Despite the meritocratic illusions held out by internet self-publishing, mass reach is still predominantly controlled by capitalist media institutions. Television, radio, newspapers, “they haven’t gone away, you know” — and they still have dominance over the mass propagation of commentary, including on the internet. The commentariat proper are the wage-workers who work for these capitalist media institutions and are hired for saying the “right” things and fired for saying the “wrong” things. The illusion of a free-market of ideas and opinions, is simply that — an illusion.
Flows 2: Theory & doctrine
Moving on from System 1, System 2 ideological production can also be broken down into two types — the theoretical and the doctrinal — but according to a quite different distinguishing logic.
The theoretical approach is in some ways produced on the same individualistic model as the dominant system 1 ideological production of commentary. That is individuals (or small teams) articulate analytical perspectives which are then broadcast to an ill-defined, consumer-elected audience through alternative media channels that consciously ape themselves on the mainstream media channels (journals, blogs, websites, YouTube channels, etc). (We’ll examine the slightly different role of academia in relation to theory and doctrine a little further on).
The dominant model of the (social change) effectiveness of theoretical production is the bourgeois ideal of individual genius broadcasting more or less unidirectionally to the masses, with minimal (or no) feedback. Given the amount of time required for theoretical production this imposes on the individual producers, this usually limits the time left to them to engage in practical activity, so there is an inherent tendency towards separation of theoretical production from practice inherent in the bourgeois individualist model of theoretical production. Not to mention the inevitable limitations of perspective in the social situations of sole trader or small partnership ideological productions.
The counterpart is collective production of system 2 ideological output, which we’ll call doctrine, for lack of a better alternative. Such production presupposes a relatively structured organisation that has defined consensus and coherence decision-making processes (usually implying distinctions between who is in or out of the decision-making, processes for joining and disaffiliation, including collective discipline, internal education, etc, i.e. a non-trivial organisational overhead necessary for the formation of a functional collective).
Etymologically, doctrine comes from the Latin “doctrina” meaning “teaching” or “instruction”, the Greek analogue being “catechism”. Again this points to its role in a collective process, here the need to have an agreed standardised articulation of the core ideology that can be used to instruct (indoctrinate) new recruits into the collective body and form the basis of coherent collective action, tactics and strategies, as well as the framework for evolving the latter two, as changing circumstances require.
Doctrine, therefore is defined as shared analyses that are formed collectively through the process of discussion, debate and ultimately agreement within the collective. But further, that this agreement implies a collective undertaking by participants that their actions, their practice, be governed (at least to some defined extent) by the agreed doctrine.
In collectives formed specifically around the aspiration for social change, it’s clear that as well as shared values and common goals, the agreed doctrine should include an agreed strategy of how to get from here to there. The evidence that this is in practice, much rarer than one might reasonably expect, is a phenomenon that demands explanation — but we will return to later.
A corollary to the collective aspect of doctrine, is that the organisation must actually do something to justify its existence in the world in order to attract new members to be voluntarily indoctrinated. Religious groups are the exception that prove the rule of all non-religious groups needing to act upon the society of here and now (rather than the promise of pie in the sky when you die) in order to grow[1]. So the process of doctrinization (the collective production and re-articulation of doctrine) and indoctrination (the conveyance of doctrine to new members) always runs in parallel with the passing on of practical skills to enable members to participate in the activity of the collective. Skilling, drilling and fulfilling has to run alongside the doctrinization process and the latter has to relate directly to the former, either in showing its use in application or in contextualising the practical activity of the collective.
The distinction between the individual subject of theory and the collective subject of doctrine is not merely a numbers game or some bourgeois ideological obsession with “authorship” and intellectual property, but a distinction between two separate modes of production, individual and social, and their different relations to practice — from the inessential, tendentially negative link of individual theory to the existential necessity of collective doctrine’s relation to practice. It is this opposite relation to practice that distinguish theory and doctrine. In other words, this is a distinction of quality, rather than mere quantity.
As a counter-example of where numbers alone do not make the difference, consider the situation of far too many ostensibly political groups where the production of “collective” ideology is in reality monopolised by a small inner circle of theorists — themselves usually relieved of the obligation to take part in the practical activity of the collective — while the majority of the membership, who carry out that same activity at the direction of their theory-producing Brahmin elite, have to receive that same theory as tablets of stone brought down from the mountain. In strictly formal terms, such theory being explicitly formulated and taught within a collective body, may have the form of doctrine. But in its content, the collective having reproduced within itself the division between mental and manual labour characteristic to capitalist society — the separation between practice and the production of the ideology means that this remains mere theory, not doctrine. What marks doctrine out from theory is not so much the conditions of its dissemination but the conditions of its production in relation to practice.
That is not to say that the doctrinal-practical relation of any collective subject cannot decay into quietist or introspective forms, unthreatening to the status quo, or even objectively playing a supporting role in its reproduction (despite any subjective opposition to dominant values). But to point out the necessity of going beyond the bourgeois ideology that artificially separates physical labour from intellectual labour and abstracts the latter from its conditions of production in such a way as to abstract from the individual/social and inactive/practical distinctions implied by them. In other words, if we are to be consistent with a commitment to a materialist analysis of production, then we need to apply this equally to the production of ideas and values, as well as the production of material (and immaterial) commodities. Unfortunately the class position of most Marxist intellectuals and academics is that they routinely apply this double standard of applying materialist analysis to commodity production only and idealist prejudices to intellectual production (all the better to collaborate with the process of commoditising the results of intellectual production the publishing and educational corporations this class fraction are economically dependent upon).
It is axiomatic in our model here that theory cannot effect social change due to its individual nature, its lack of collective process and its consequent inability to scale.
Forms 1: Narratives and tropes
As well as the flows of comment and opinion, doxa (Ideology 1) requires more molecular forms, beyond the simple atom of notions (introduced in part 1). These are narratives and tropes. Narratives are familiar to most consumers of contemporary journalism as political spin doctors are always seen as “trying to control the narrative” and this is one of the core functions of media management. Narratives are a condensed, predigested form of the story-telling methods of forming and understanding meaning that have been used by humans throughout their history. But in our model of modern ideological production, they have a more historically and socially specific meaning of particularly crafted stories that are specifically formed to justify a particular policy or action of constituted social power (or, potentially, of constituent counter-power — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves). The power of a narrative is its plausibility which is generally a measure of how well it fits in with and leans for support on, the existing framework of general social doxa — the “default” or “dominant” ideology (1). Tropes are a kind of dressing up box for narratives, of familiar storylines and clichéd plots whose very familiarity (see Tversky and Kahneman’s “mere exposure effect” for a cognitive analogue) makes the appropriating narrative feel more instinctively pleasing and/or reassuring and plausible.
Forms 2: Scripture, doctrine and formulas
When we talk about doctrine, it’s important to remember that we are not dealing with a mere abstraction, but an actual technology. One which, like money, was invented at a certain historical point, relatively late in the long view of human social development. A properly researched and elaborated global history of this genesis is beyond the scope of this text, but we can sketch the outline of the stages of development. We begin with storytelling which in turn evolved into a developed oral tradition with shared epics and mythos. With the invention of writing these oral epics are transcribed into texts. Those texts that acquired a cosmic significance became scriptures — the Vedas, Sutras, Avesta, Book of the Dead, Dao De Jing, Tanakh and so on. The existence of scriptural texts is a primary resource for the scholar-priest classes of Brahmins, Kohanim, rú (儒 Chinese scholars), and so on. But these are, by material necessity, minority castes or classes with the time to dedicate to the study of scriptures while subsisting off the appropriation of the surplus product of the direct producer class(es).
The progression from scripture to doctrine is a process of “massification” analogous to the military progression from cavalry to hoplite to trireme in Ancient Greece. The monotheistic revolution that led from Sassanid Zoroastrianism to Roman Christianity, via the post-Babylonian Judaism of Ezra, eventually produced a new textual form of doctrine in the credo. The replacement of scripture by the innovation of the credo was a revolutionary massification of religious doctrine, taking it out of the hands of a narrow priestly elite and recruiting the masses into its ranks, in the first instance, the military of the struggling late Roman Empire. The first Ecumenical Council of Nicea was called by Constantine and the emperor sat at the back of the hall with his Praetorian guard making it clear that if the assembled religious did not hammer out a unified line, they would all be put to the sword. The importance of the Christian credo to the, by now “Roman-in-name-only” army, the essential ligature binding the whole empire, is made clear by this vignette from a later conflict over the Creed of Chalcedon.
“The monks initially won the support of Vitalian, an East Roman general who was the magister militum of Thrace and the leader of a powerful pro-Chalcedonian rebellion against Emperor Anastasius I, who was a convinced Monophysite. Vitalian was a native of Scythia Minor and one of the Scythian monks was a relative of his. The rebellion started in 512, when a nearly identical formula to that of the Scythian monks, added to the Trisagion in the liturgy of Hagia Sophia, was removed by Emperor Anastasius II. The rebellion continued until 515, when Vitalian was defeated and forced to go into hiding. By the reign of Anastasius’ successor, Justin I, orthodoxy extended even to the army: soldiers were ordered to subscribe to the creed of Chalcedon or be deprived of their rations.” [2]
The credo was a revolution in the production and reproduction of doctrine, which allowed it’s expansion to the mass of soldiery, including those who were illiterate or whose first language was not Latin. While war cries and slogans (etym. from war cry) had long been part of the ancient world battlefield, the compression of religious doctrine from a life-long study of voluminous scriptures by a non-producing professional religious elite into the meal ticket of the ordinary rank and file soldiery was a real technological revolution that allowed the political recomposition of the ideological superstructure (in the original Marx sense, which includes the soldiery) of the late Roman empire, threatened existentially as it was externally by the competition of the Zoroastrian Sassanids and internally by the loss of any Latin cultural commons, given the predominantly Thracian, Scythian and Germanic composition of its Legions.
In its more generalised and secularised, the credo becomes the simple formula. The doctrinal (as opposed to mathematical) formula is now so commonplace in our cultural commons that the ubiquitous examples of it often go unnoticed. Nonetheless they are a significant form for the communication of axioms of doctrinal systems.
Deviations 2: From Doctrine to Dogma
The great strength of doxa (ideology 1) is also its great weakness, namely its adaptive but limited flexibility, which means it does not suffer from the same possibility of run-away deviations like doctrine, but also means that when it is confronted by new circumstances that require changes of perspective beyond that easily reconcilable with its existing corpus, it becomes stuck.
The great strength of doctrine, its capacity to make radical departures outside the limited horizon of the common doxa, also creates the possibility for entirely unproductive or destructive deviations from broadly progressive social adaptations. The simplest lens through which to view the categories of deviation is that of empowerment.
Tendentially, in class society built on the passive acceptance of the status quo by the vast majority of the exploited class, the dominant doxa is conciliatory, and based around maximising individual survival, mainly through conflict-avoidance. For the most part, the dominant ideology (1) justifies non-resistance, quietism and compliance (“Sure, what can you do…”, “There’s nothing we can do about it”, “It’s just the way things are”). In contrast, doctrine empowers and enables action. At least when it is being effective, from a social change perspective (which is of course a normative judgement).
The deviation from the empowering effects of doctrine passes through the “ossification” process of becoming-doctrinaire, to end up in the trap of dogma. Dogma does not enable action, it either compels it, as a duty and mainly in an unthinking, alienated and ritualised form, or — at the extreme — it forbids it entirely as deviation from dogmatic purity.
On a practical level the process of becoming doctrinaire is the waning capacity of the collective to evolve, change and reformulate the doctrine dynamically to adapt to new circumstances and challenges. To the extent that this increasing difficulty of adopting doctrine to new demands for activity starts to inhibit practice beyond repeating practices that worked previously, leads either to avoidance or mistakenly reinterpreting new circumstances as a version of a previous, better understood situation — in the manner of the old saw that “to a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” — the deviation of doctrinaire-ism starts to hinder self-activity as much as it previously enabled it. And, as mentioned, at the extreme degeneration of sectarian dogmatism, where the relation of who serves who has been reversed and the collective now exists to serve the reified doctrine, rather than the other way around, the dogmatic interdiction on “impure” action, leads to a recreation of the passive quietism of the dominant doxa, except with the addition of an affect of furious denunciation of the “fools and traitors” outside the sect who persist in trying to act on this corrupt world, rather than wait on the promised future apocalypse that will transform the world.
Although there is much to be said about the collective and individual psychology of this descent into dogmatism, the main thing is to recognise it as a danger and its negative relation to collective agency and practice.
The guardians of dogma and the martinets of doctrinaireism are forever on the lookout for challenges to the “one true doctrine” which they routinely denounce as “opportunism”. But the stark dichotomy between opportunism and “being principled” is a false binary. Which is to say, it does not exhaust the possibilities in an either/or way. Certainly opportunism — which we can define as the pursuit of short-term personal or collective gain at the expense of any other objectives — is definitely an evil to be guarded against at all costs. But slavish adherence to pre-determined doctrine, regardless of the actual threats and opportunities of the concrete situation is not the only defence against “opportunistic deviations”. The point is that the rightness or wrongnes of doctrine is not imposed externally as some objective reality, unconnected to the actual immediate needs of the collectivity that doctrine is supposed to be empowering. As the Italian operaist Mario Tronti once remarked on this point:
“As regards the practical resolution of practical problems of direct struggles, of direct organisation of direct intervention in a given class situation where workers are involved — all these should be gauged first of all by what the movement needs for its own development. Only secondarily should they be judged from the viewpoint of a general perspective which subjectively imposes these things on the class enemy.”
The ideological cycle - idiomatization and recomposition
All doxa begins life as doctrine. Every universally accepted truth began as a fringe idea, rejected as madness. That’s not to say that all fringe doctrines eventually become accepted as common sense, the vast majority do not, of course. But for those that do successfully make that transition we can break the process down into three stages — construction, adoption and assimilation. The construction phase is the initial creation of the doctrine by whatever collective forms around its problematic. The adoption phase is the process whereby people outside that collectivity, usually people involved in system 1 ideological production — journalists, academics, professional commentators and so on — start to spread awareness of the doctrine to wider society. Finally assimilation is the stage at which the doctrine is seen as generally or universally accepted or even becomes common sense and is absorbed into the dominant or default doxa (ideology 1).
As doctrine passes from the creation stage to the adoption stage, the control over the signification of its terms and overall meaning, begins to slip from the control of the original creative collective. Through a process of “translation” the adoptionists begin the reconciliation of the doctrine with the dominant doxa. It’s important to note that certain “indigestible” aspects of the doctrine may be downplayed or quietly erased in this process of bowdlerisation. Often this can lead to a split in original creative collective between those who are happy to compromise on the thorny issues, in return for the rewards of social recognition, status and resources the adoption process offers, and a die-hard faction of those who see the process as a “betrayal” of the integrity and potency of the original doctrine. The die-hard faction then faces the danger of leaping from the frying pan of compromise with the status quo, into the fire of dogmatism and sterile sectarianism.
As doctrine passes from the phase of adoption and acceptance into assimilation, the need for the argumentative framework of its militant missionary form disappears and the shift to mere apologism takes over — Marx already made this distinction in his discussion of the differences between the “classical” and “vulgar” phases of political economy. We will not rehearse his discussion here, but just signpost it as an example of how the idea of this transformation is not a new one or specifically original to our model here.
In the construction phase doctrines are not cut from wholly new cloth. They must be constructed from already existing raw materials available only in the matrix of doxa — the originality in the construction, apart from the formulation of the base problematic itself, is mostly a creative recombination of already existing components (notions, opinions, narratives of the dominant doxa, along with recycled concepts and theories from defunct doctrines from the past), with new elements being a relatively minor quantity (albeit occasionally having far greater significance than its relative proportion would suggest). New doctrines grow out of the materials available in doxa as plants and rainforest trees grow out of the humus and mulch of the forest floor, itself made up of the broken down and decayed materials of previous flora. There is an ideological cycle analogous to the nitrogen cycle or the water cycle.
The passage from the adoption phase to the assimilation phase is one where the previous theoretical structures the doctrine relied on push upwards in its struggle towards the sunlight blocking canopy of the dominant doxa, is no longer required. Having finally found its place in the sun, the newly adopted doxa can float freely as one of the things that “comes without saying”. Perhaps the historical theoretical root system is kept alive or curated in the field of associated academic disciplines, but for most of society the backstory of how this particular doctrine came to acquire its status as unquestionably obvious, is never encountered.
The analogy from language would be the idiom. An idiom is a group of words or phrase that has a known and set figurative meaning to native speakers but cannot be determined from the literal meanings of the individual words for someone learning the language as a foreign language. “Kick the bucket”, “Spill the beans”, all languages are full of these idioms which is why human translators still have a job, despite Google Translate. The original story of how the idiom came to acquire its accepted meaning (and there usually is an origin story) is long forgotten by speakers, in an analogous way to how the original theoretical underpinnings of a doctrinal element assimilated into the dominant doxa is usually entirely forgotten.
Unlike language, where the process of idiomatization can take decades or centuries, the passage from doctrine to doxa, for apologist doctrines that defend and support the status quo, can be very rapid. A case study in point would be Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” paper of 1968 from which the notion of the tragedy of the commons as a long-established piece of folk wisdom sprung in very short space of time, in cultural time frames.
While ideology is not functionalist in some essential way, there are of course circumstances where new theory that serves the dominant political and economic classes very well in the contemporary conjuncture, can get an “assist” or be fast-tracked for idiomatization into doxa status.
If linguistic idiomatization can be understood as semantic deterritorialisation, then its ideological equivalent — doxification — is decontextualisation from its original theoretical armature, but above all, a de-pragmatization. Meaning that the practice associated with the doctrine in its creation phase — the practice of the creating collective — is separated from it, because as we saw above, the relation of the dominant ideology to practice is primarily to avert it by encouraging passive acceptance of the status quo. The dominant discourse can, at the limit, allow for arguments that “something must be done”, but never “we must do something”.
Describing the processes and transformations that doctrine must pass through to be successfully incorporated into the dominant ideology begins the process of sketching out the limits that bar this road to many deviant or oppositional doctrines that cannot, by design, be so easily de-fanged or conciliated with existing power relations. But in raising this question of power, we are anticipated a topic which we will deal with in a later section. Before we wrap up this section we will just take one final look at forms.
Hybrid forms — contrivances, slogans
In addition to the neat division between forms proper to ideology 1 and 2, there is also the interesting phenomenon of forms that are neither fish nor fowl, but an ersatz hybrid of both.
Armed with a problematic to impel its work, the collective engaged in the creation of new doctrine finds itself faced with a fundamental problem. Having identified terms whose notional meaning needs to be critically retheorised in order to substitute concepts for notions, the difficulty arises that that theorisation itself has to rely on further terms, most of them also requiring re-conceptualisation. A problem of infinite recursion quickly appears and at some stage the theoretical work needs to be paused, not least to allow the practical activity necessary to develop the doctrine as a living intervention in the social process. The contrivance is the result — a temporary stopgap that is neither a (doxic) notion nor a theoretically underpinned concept.
These contrivances are always matters of interest. In some cases they may be indications of “hand-waving” indicating that the whole doctrinal edifice is in danger of collapsing under its own contradictions. But in other cases, they may be indications that behind this improvised neologism, a rewarding concept awaits theorisation. “Surplus value” is a prime example of this possibility.
Contrary to popular opinion, Marx did not create the term “surplus value” (or Mehrwert). The 1824 Inquiry of ur-socialist William Thompson contains this intriguing passage:
Marx, on an early visit to Manchester to read the works of the Cooperative and early socialist movement, read the Inquiry in 1845 and made copious notes on it (sadly illegible to all but a few specialists these days). Today we rightly recognise Marx as the first person to give “surplus value” a developed theoretical meaning, and in the process savagely reconceptualise the classical economists concept of value. But Thompson’s contrivance, particularly in a problematising context relating to the conflict of interests between employer and worker, was the acorn from which this mighty oak grew.
Contrivance are the afterimage or trace of refracted passage from notional terms to retheorised concepts during the otherwise interminable process of doctrinal production. They are both a necessity and a signpost to imminent possibilities for further development or potential systemic collapse.
The final hybrid form that bears a brief mention is the slogan (etym: early 16th century: from Scottish Gaelic sluagh-ghairm, from sluagh ‘army’ + gairm ‘shout’). “Ó Domhnaill Abú!”, “Viva Zapata!” The traditional tribal or clan war cries were straight-forward enough, the name of your clann or clan chief and Abú — “to victory!” or “forever!”(depending on your preferred translation). The format is preserved in the more contemporary “Tongs ya bass!” of the famous Glasgow street gang. But the slogans that interest us here are the more “programmatic” slogans of the political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Flora Tristan’s “The emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves” or Louis Blanc’s “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, or even “All power to the soviets”[3]. These formulations appear as the ultimate condensation of the credo or programmatic formula into a single phrase to be chanted in demonstrations. Nonetheless, the very compression leads to change of quantity leading to a change of quality. With such extreme abbreviation the slogan cannot retain any sustainable link to any formal doctrine and is forcibly idiomatized by its truncation. On the other hand this allows it to become like a kind of ideological rorschach blot into which people can project all their millenarian hopes and fantasies for a world turned upside down. This powerful but ambiguous duality of the slogan which can be both used to fire up supporters but also to shout down and silence sceptics and critics, needs to be appreciated in its own right.
Having spent some time in this section unfolding the flows, forms and cycles of the model, we will hit pause again. In the next section we’ll begin with a necessary narrowing of scope regarding the ever-vexed “science versus ideology” question, leading on to the role of the academy and thence to that most ideological of notions — non-ideological thought — and the relation between ideology, practice and power.
Notes
- Although in today’s secular capitalist society, many religious groups are also finding the need to engage in some forms of voluntary social work and community building activities in order to recruit and retain people.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythian_Monks
- “Later that month, the Provisional Government reaffirmed its loyalty to its allies’ war aims of conquest. There was a wave of protest in Petrograd — against the war and the government both. Such marches in 1917 displayed a forest of hand-lettered banners — in themselves proof of the revolution’s vitality. On 21 April, an unknown Bolshevik activist brought a sign that displayed three words: Vsya vlast’ sovetam — all power to the soviets. It was noticed by a reporter from Pravda, the Bolshevik paper, who mentioned it in an article. Lenin called attention to the slogan in an article published on 2 May. Five days later the Bolsheviks issued a programmatic statement built around the slogan.” — https://johnriddell.com/2017/11/28/all-power-to-the-soviets-a-slogan-that-launched-a-revolution/