# Art & Design of Protest and Activism



## killer b (Jan 24, 2012)

I found this website earlier, which has a large archive of posters, t-shirts etc mainly from the apartheid era, and felt the need to share. 

http://africanactivist.msu.edu/galleries.php






















is there any mileage in a thread where people post their favourite political posters / trade union banners / whatever of the past? or even of now...?


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## sim667 (Jan 26, 2012)

Yes, I'd be really interested in it, I'm particularly interested in chinese propaganda, but love looking at lots of stuff.


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## wayward bob (Jan 26, 2012)

good stuff. cheers mr


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## sim667 (Jan 26, 2012)

I think this would do better in photography and art section though.


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## not-bono-ever (Jan 26, 2012)

Nice OSPAAL poster there


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## jakethesnake (Feb 4, 2012)

I really like the art of Emory Douglas for the Black Panthers.


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## killer b (Aug 10, 2012)

i took the kids to the people's history museum in manchester this afternoon - it was bloody brilliant. plenty of banners & posters which i took pics of... i thought this would probably be the best thread to bump with them.






detail:


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## butchersapron (Aug 10, 2012)

Download this.


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## killer b (Aug 10, 2012)

on it, cheers.


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## butchersapron (Aug 10, 2012)

It's a rar, but it's safe, i promise.


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## Pickman's model (Aug 10, 2012)




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## purenarcotic (Aug 10, 2012)




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## killer b (Aug 10, 2012)

butchersapron said:


> Download this.


looks good at first glance. 

i'm going to stick it to the man and print it out at work on monday.


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## butchersapron (Aug 10, 2012)

killer b said:


> looks good at first glance.
> 
> i'm going to stick it to the man and print it out at work on monday.


heavy heavy on the ink.


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## killer b (Aug 10, 2012)

i'll use the best quality paper too.


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## purenarcotic (Aug 10, 2012)

Cheers for that, butchers, looks great.


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## Pickman's model (Aug 10, 2012)




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## Nice one (Aug 16, 2012)

off on a tangent - the political banner
http://uncomradelybehaviour.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/get-the-banner/


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## killer b (Aug 16, 2012)

not at all, that's what the thread's for. although none of those grab me tbh.


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## Nice one (Aug 16, 2012)

aye, they're more slogan-centred than art/design based, which was never my forte. All hand painted though.


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## Nice one (Aug 17, 2012)




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## Firky (Aug 18, 2012)

Couple of names for you to look up the art work of

Emory Douglas, Black Panther's Minister of Culture. 

James Jasper, Sociologist at an American uni, has a couple of books on the subject of creativity within social movements.

Google the British Peace Movement and Modernism too, some great post war art work - slightly different to what you're after but still very interesting I think.

Great thread btw, I wanted to do something like this for my dissertation at uni but ended up doing a wanky pretentious idea on architecture instead, doh!


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## Firky (Aug 18, 2012)

firky said:


> James Jasper, Sociologist at an American uni, has a couple of books on the subject of creativity within social movements.!


 
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3629802.html


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## killer b (Aug 18, 2012)

Don't think im after anything in particular tbh firky. I just like pretty things.


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## killer b (Aug 18, 2012)

Pretty things with history in particular.


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## Firky (Aug 18, 2012)

killer b said:


> Pretty things with history in particular.


 

This is another book which, although doesn't really mention protest art work, it lends ideas from it. It discusses how counter culture and protest has become a mainstream commodity and failed it's own ethos.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Rebel-Sell-Counter-Consumer/dp/1841126551


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## Firky (Aug 18, 2012)

One final book, "33rpm (revolutions per minute)", a history of protest songs 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/20/33-revolutions-minute-protest-songs


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## Termite Man (Aug 19, 2012)

I have this tattooed on my arm


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## wayward bob (Aug 19, 2012)

killer b said:


>


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 19, 2012)

wayward bob said:


>


 
You were stroking your type trays as you posted this, weren't you?


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## Firky (Aug 27, 2012)

Check this out, just got an email about it

http://www.mydesignshop.com/design-activists-handbook?lid=prtw082712

Not sure what to think about this..



> The book also includes many tools and resources to help you affect positive change. There are tips on applying for grants, *being an activist without getting fired* and staying educated on pressing issues. At the end of every chapter, you’ll find some questions and next steps to help you move forward on your own design activist path


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## Firky (Mar 26, 2013)

Would anyone mind if I spammed this thread a bit with posters and flyers? Only I have a thing for GD and typography.

I will upload them to the forums if I can so they're not deleted.

These are from Beamish Museum


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## ddraig (Mar 26, 2013)

go for it!


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

These a mostly Latin or Latin support groups in teh UK.


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

got a few GLC ant iracism ones if anyone is interested innit


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## killer b (Mar 28, 2013)

whack 'em up.


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

Im killing the eds bandwith here


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)




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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

oops

have some more soemwhere inc. a Welsh language Mandela poster.

but I think thats enough for today

eta oh fuck it


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## butchersapron (Mar 28, 2013)

Oh my fucking god - it looks like Ken 'ken' Livingstone designed that one himself


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## killer b (Mar 28, 2013)

i love that - it's like the cover of a ropey pop-reggae album from 1982.


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## Fozzie Bear (Mar 28, 2013)

The cake one and possibly some of the others are taken apart by Paul Gilroy in his book "There Ain't No Black In The Union Jack" iirc.


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

these are all pics of original copies, hence the condition/ creasing etc


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

Raul Martinez is a favourite of mine - this silkscreen edition is above the marital bed - got it in cuba like 20 years ago - shit picture doesnt do it justice :


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## not-bono-ever (Mar 28, 2013)

not-bono-ever said:


> View attachment 30743
> oops
> 
> have some more soemwhere inc. a Welsh language Mandela poster.
> ...


 

any idea wot it means ?


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## ddraig (Mar 28, 2013)

Y Frwydr yw fy Mywyd - The Fight/Battle is my Life


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## Fozzie Bear (Mar 28, 2013)

There's a good website about radical print shops which has some great images on it:


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## Fozzie Bear (Mar 28, 2013)

Snappy title:


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## Fozzie Bear (Mar 28, 2013)




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## Fozzie Bear (Mar 28, 2013)

And finally, this: (NSFW, but kind of amazing) http://www.posterworkshop.co.uk/revolution/l13.jpg


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## killer b (Mar 28, 2013)

love it. is that a new SWP poster?


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## sihhi (Mar 30, 2013)

Art as a part of social transformation - a few examples.

Marc Chagall - not a artist of political themes at all, but as I understand it a contributor to the orphan rehabilitation programme of the revolutionary government - seen here in action in late 1918 with a group of them.









1919 The famous (artistic and linguistic) Literacy Teaching Train of the October Revolution
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	






 This is the First Things First Manifesto from 1964 I believe, before the economic slowdown of the 1960s British designers and advertisers just fed up of their role, similar feelings emerge in actions around 1968-9 in Britain Hornsey Art College, Essex and Bristol University art dept efforts etc.





Paris in 1968, general strike and social transformation posters in action, on the bottom right you can see the iconic Ouvriers Etudiatiants Population poster in the shape of factory - suggesting all productive society must consider itself a factory:





Ceder un Peu C'est Perdre Beaucoup - to give way a little is to lose a lot - next to it.
Ne Pas Avaler above it - is Do Not Swallow refering to state censored TV and Radio Broadcasts. Lots you get the picture.
There's lots of responses to 1968 in Britain one of them is the development of a radical British art movement.
So 1972 sees the formation of an artists' union - hard to combine art teachers, commercial designers, gallery exhibitors all in one go but it gives a go. Sample magazine cover.




One of the sprouts of this movement comes in the series of posters produced for the Grunwick's struggle. They are produced by "filthy squatters" - the Poster/Film Collective, a group of artists and designers occupying a squat in Tolmer Square, London - mostly Slade students.




A film production collective the Newsreel Collective made a film that tried to put the strikers centre stage apparently (I've never seen it)




One of the effects of Grunwick is the racial abuse police give to Asian pickets an art student supporter Rasheed Araeen takes racialist violence to form a short presentation art piece that is shown in community centres and also Whitechapel Gallery. It is quite provocatively called 'Paki Bastard' and is shown in 1977-78 and features the artist being subject to a mock assault.




Meanwhile in the USA, during the anti-militarist focus of the late 1960s and early 1970s - there are a number of important efforts to transform the art world - the Art Workers' Coalition in New York in 1969 is probably the most famous. Kurt Vonnegut in an interview in early 2003 just before the Iraq invasion basically an inevitability at that point probably exaggerating "every respectable artist" nonetheless explained the power of art is _very_ weak: 
"During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in and which we lost every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." 

The ideas that come out of the 1970s sort of Vonnegut's point. They start to urge that an aim of art should be as an aid for people to a. become their own artists b. remain mentally strong to act against power structures. Not for it to beg for humanity from the liberal wing of powerful classes or to _just play around_ with large concepts. One important but overlooked grouping is the _Art Workers Coalition_ later re-coalesced as  _Artists' Meeting for Cultural Change_ who attack sterile fancy that conceptualism in modern art, and urge abandoning individual names but working instead as collectives.

They take on the art world beginning in 1970 they are demands for the art world to release resources to poor American communities to participate in art, not to fund culturally imperialist shows abroad however 'progressive' the content of the modernist conceptual art was. 





A demo leaflet from 1970





1970. Part of the massive flypostering throughout dozens of major cities for the weeks of student strikes in response the National Guard assassinations at an anti-ROTC demonstration at Kent State University.






These were fliers handed out to the public to highlight the antidemocratic nature of a number of 1976 (USA bicentennial) shows funded by the Rockefellers.

A rally poster for the same issue:





An artist leafleting in 1976





The US radical art movement sort of continued but lost touch with its purpose and couldn't dislodge the hold of the art system - most art students continue to go into advertising or produce playful (pretentious) concept or heavily stylised (individual, marketable) art.

1981. another coalesced group PAD in a rally against Reagan's military spending increases. 





One area where it had some strength in the 1980s and 1990s was the push for feminist art - Barbara Kruger, despite once again later showy pretentious conceptualism, is still the best example of popularisation:





1992.





1986. A reproduction for Angel Art exhibition - the small posters of Turkish exiled in USSR poet Nazim Hikmet are hard to explain there. ??

The now classic Your Body is a Battleground has been used for lots of posters and campaigns.


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## killer b (Mar 30, 2013)

wow


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## Firky (Mar 30, 2013)

Sihhi


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## albionism (Apr 6, 2013)




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## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

Might aswell bump this for celebration from CAnadian auto workers CAW


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## Blagsta (Apr 30, 2013)

purenarcotic said:


>


 

I've got a poster of that.  "read anarchist books and you will be a man"


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## Blagsta (Apr 30, 2013)

Surprised the classic "Beat the whites with the red wedge" hasn't been posted yet.


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## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> Surprised the classic "Beat the whites with the red wedge" hasn't been posted yet.


 
I've never really got that one - how it triumphs over other abstract stuff.


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## purenarcotic (Apr 30, 2013)

Blagsta said:


> I've got a poster of that. "read anarchist books and you will be a man"


 
We want to get a poster of it too.  It's fucking awesome.


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## Nice one (Apr 30, 2013)

something i knocked together for transition:


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## chilango (Apr 30, 2013)

In that case here's a few of mine for anyone who hasn't seen them already....


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## chilango (Apr 30, 2013)

...actually I need to shrink the images.

You'll have to wait.


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## belboid (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Download this.


you got a working link to that, butch?


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## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

belboid said:


> you got a working link to that, butch?


I can have if you give me a sec to upload it again.


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## butchersapron (Apr 30, 2013)

belboid said:


> you got a working link to that, butch?


Here you go.


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## belboid (Apr 30, 2013)

butchersapron said:


> Here you go.


cheers!


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## chilango (Apr 30, 2013)

Ok. Fingers crossed.


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## chilango (Apr 30, 2013)

Obvs they work bette big, you can read the text etc. but there you go, a quick sample.


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## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

I don't know if we want to widen this out to graffiti wall scrawls but Tunisia during protests against RCD/Ben Ali in Ras Djebel I think






Martyrs turned into cardboard cut-out figures





Massive one (careful if you click) - Sukri/Chokri Belaid - assassinated by Islamists in early Feb. this year:


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## sihhi (Apr 30, 2013)

The cut out figures were based on graffiti BTW:











































This one seems to have children playing with them:





One in a barbershop for a photo.


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## sim667 (May 2, 2013)

Those cutouts are a really cool idea.


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## Delroy Booth (May 9, 2013)

I might've put this up on the forum before, but here seems a good place for it. This is the Skelmanthorpe Radical Banner, made in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre, which lay hidden in a pub for nearly a hundred years until local historian Fred Lawton re-discovered it in the 1920's. Note the use of masonic imagery, harking back to old Luddites days with the secret societies and so on.






And here's the pub it was found in, The Chartist, one of only 2 pubs in Britain to have the name, the other being in South Wales


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## butchersapron (May 21, 2013)

Flavio Costantini died yesterday.


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## butchersapron (May 21, 2013)

**


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## butchersapron (May 21, 2013)

Here's Stuart Christie on FC and his art. Well worth a read if the pics at the above link interested you at all.


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## editor (May 21, 2013)

One of a series of cartoons I drew as part of the Footie Fans vs the CJA campaign. This one was about being arrested and having your DNA forcibly sampled (vintage 1995).


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## killer b (May 6, 2014)

this looks interesting, if only tangentially related...

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2014/05/branding-terror-the-logotypes.php#.U2k4o61dVD6


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## killer b (May 15, 2014)

found this t-shirt on the bootmarket this morning - can anyone help me translate/ date it? not-bono-ever? I can read 'Perestroyka', what's the other word?


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## sim667 (May 15, 2014)

sihhi said:


> One area where it had some strength in the 1980s and 1990s was the push for feminist art - Barbara Kruger, despite once again later showy pretentious conceptualism, is still the best example of popularisation:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Barbara Krueger is visually one of my favourite artists/typographers, although I didn't know there were made as protest images.


I'd love a barbara krueger original

*goes off to google.


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## chilango (May 15, 2014)

killer b said:


> found this t-shirt on the bootmarket this morning - can anyone help me translate/ date it? not-bono-ever? I can read 'Perestroyka', what's the other word?


The other word is also perestroika - in Cyrillic.


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## fractionMan (May 15, 2014)

Not exactly protest but I photographed a union banner in Bristols MShed the other day




DSCF0536 by fraction man, on Flickr


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## killer b (May 15, 2014)

chilango said:


> The other word is also perestroika - in Cyrillic.


 
Ah, ok. Do you think I'm right to date it to the late 80s? I can't imagine perestroika t-shirts being made after that?


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## chilango (May 15, 2014)

killer b said:


> Ah, ok. Do you think I'm right to date it to the late 80s? I can't imagine perestroika t-shirts being made after that?



That would make sense. But who knows?


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## seventh bullet (May 16, 2014)

killer b said:


> Ah, ok. Do you think I'm right to date it to the late 80s? I can't imagine perestroika t-shirts being made after that?



From the mid-1980s.  Do you think it was made in the Soviet Union?  Is it a design taken from actual propaganda at the time?  

It might be someone who had just printed it more recently thinking 'Lets do Soviet-looking stuff' without understanding much about what it was with regard to the Soviet working class, their place in it, and what it meant to them.  I wouldn't wear something that represents it, anyway.


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## killer b (May 16, 2014)

It's definitely not modern - the cut of the t-shirt is very 1980s. Unfortunately all the info has worn off the label so I cant tell where it was made, but I'm struggling to imagine why it might have been made outside of the soviet union or eastern Europe? I haven't been able to find another example of the same design, but I dont suppose that means anything.


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## seventh bullet (May 16, 2014)

There's loads of crap around using Soviet or cod Soviet imagery for t-shirts etc these days  (not saying the above design is crap, although what it represents politically isn't my cup of tea, and nor was it for Soviet workers).  That's why I asked. Did you buy it?


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## killer b (May 16, 2014)

Yeah, it was only 50p. Would have been silly to leave it.


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## seventh bullet (May 16, 2014)

I was talking about perestroika specifically in my above posts, btw, not the Soviet experience in general.


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## killer b (May 16, 2014)

Yeah, I understand


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## Mr.Bishie (May 16, 2014)

Thought I'd share a local work of art on this thread. Brighton's 'Stop The March For England' activists with their hand stitched banner depicting Picasso's Guernica. And a very fine piece it was to!


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## ddraig (May 16, 2014)

seen that before, they are so bloody 
http://remakingpicassosguernica.wordpress.com/


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## killer b (Aug 13, 2016)

This looks good.

2,200 Radical Political Posters Digitized: A New Archive |  Open Culture


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