Agitprop,
Part 6a
T-Shirt Blanks
Clothing and Caps
You can design your own T-shirt by putting
colours, graphics and slogans on to the blanks, above. You can do it in the
“Paint” programme that is part of Windows.
Caps are even easier to design. A cap needs
to be specified as to its colour and a badge, or a slogan, or both (e.g. badge
in front and slogan at the back).
Most people would contract out the printing
of the T-shirts these days. Silk-screening your own T-shirts is still possible,
but rarely done.
Can you make money from T-shirts and caps? It
is not likely. Given that your main aim is political, namely agitational
propaganda (Agitprop), it follows that if you are also trying to make money
then you are trying to do two things which do not correspond. Serving two
masters is a recipe for failure in any field.
It is better to maximise the political
benefit, and to try to recover the costs in an all-round way.
Therefore, by all means do sell, but also
try to get your clothing project funded in other ways, for example by outright donations
and by “crowd funding”.
The discussion about T-shirts and caps
could extend out to include other kinds of merchandise such as literature, and
other kinds of clothing such as track suits and sweat-shirts. A full discussion
of the business of merchandise would have to be extensive and to include long-term
accounting for all “overhead” expenses, plus stocktaking and the writing-off of
damaged and unsaleable goods.
Such a discussion will quickly become
over-elaborate for our purposes, because at this level, we never have the means
to sustain such activities as businesses over time. So we will not do that. But
in the next item, we will consider what it is to run a stall as a one-off,
occasional activity, and not primarily as a serious money-making affair.
In the Induction course, we have said that
the secret of funding Party and mass movement activities is to make them all generate
a small surplus as they go along.
Now, we are saying that the apparently
money-making activity is no different. Like all our activities, it has to,
taken overall, generate a small surplus, including from funding and from outright
donations taken.
The distinction between political
activities that also attract money, and money-making activities that carry a
political message, is found to be no distinction at all.
For us, the political intention is the
governing intention.
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