| This dissertation deals with problems of organizational communication and sensemaking in the course of laying out a Bolshevik (Trotskyist, not Stalinist) theory of political slogans, focusing particularly on explaining norms of slogan interpretation, formulation, and deployment. A discussion of the Aristotelian rhetorical enthymeme sets the stage for an exploration of the rhetorical approaches of Bolshevik organizations to reaching common ground with different kinds of audiences, such as the methods of the United Front and Transitional Program, and the types of slogans entailed by them.; The Bolshevik theory proposes that the slogans of a political tendency are “stepped” according to the level of intensity of the class struggle, and must therefore be understood in relation to each tendency's previous slogans and the developments in the socio-political situation that have prompted their alteration. The author's contribution lies in explicitly proposing the notion of a constellation of slogans. A particular slogan needs to be interpreted in light of the ensemble of slogans deployed simultaneously by a political organization. Conversely, the meaning of a given constellation is dependent not only upon the slogans that constitute it, but also in relation to other (constellations of) slogans circulating at the time. The author also proposes that, analogously to atoms in molecular bonding, slogans have a conditions-specific valence, limiting the range of sectors of a population that will latch onto a slogan and the spectrum of interpretations that they will likely derive from it.; In the course of the exposition, a number of contemporary perspectives—principally, articulation theory—prevalent in organizational communication, rhetoric, critical theory, and cultural studies are critiqued for incompletely assessing the degree to which Marxism, and Bolshevism in particular, have addressed (organizational) communication issues in a non-reductive manner.; A historical case study demonstrates how the Bolshevik slogan theory and rhetorical methods work in organizational practice by documenting the struggles that developed within the American Socialist Party—which was entered into by a large contingent of Trotskyists in 1936–37—over the appropriateness of proposed slogans and organizational measures in response to the Spanish Civil War. |
