The naive optimism of the past

Being a socialist with an eye for Soviet design - typography, art, architecture - you won't be surprised that I have this poster on my walls:

I must take a proper picture. It's Russian, and celebrates 20 years of Russian space exploration since Gagarin's flight. It's a beautiful example of the romanticism which imbued both Russian and American discourse about space, despite the fact that both programs were almost exclusively military in design and intention. 

Here are a few more Russian space posters, intended to persuade the Russian people that - despite archaic industrial infrastructure and barely being able to feed the population properly - Soviet Communism was capable of cutting-edge technology. 

Fatherland! You lighted the star of progress and peace. Glory to the science, glory to the labor! Glory to the Soviet regime!

Socialism is our launching pad

In the name of peace

We were born to make the fairy tale come true!

Sons of October - Pioneers of the Universe!

No doubt American space propaganda fulfils similar requirements, though it probably isn't so neo-romantic: capitalist hegemony was rarely ideologically explicit, perhaps because its Western population rarely starved or got sent to gulags. 

I'm no Soviet Communist: as far as I can see, the USSR failed in the early 1920s when a mix of Russian Nationalism, anti-semitism, other forms of racism and authoritarianism set in. I'm much more sympathetic to some variations of Trotskyism and syndicalism, in which the state withers away as workers collectives behave altruistically. However, I do believe in strong states as the only way a population can collectively determine policy and distribution of goods and services: not very romantic, but serviceable. 

For a syndicalist take on science fiction, I highly recommend techno-utopian Ken MacLeod's series of novels, many positing the colonisation of space by Scottish workers' co-operatives. What might have been…

Comrades, come rally…

Some more highlights from my photos taken at the People's History Museum. Click on these for larger versions.

Something the government would do well to remember

From the days in which socialists were proud and loud. Ed Milliband and friends don't really cut it in comparison to this. 

Suffrage Atelier banner detail

I sense a new edition coming

This is the Spanish Civil War appeal poster the Manics appropriated.

A typically sensible suggestion for Thatcher's funeral arrangements from the Morning Star

We lefties hated the Murdoch press from the very beginning. 

Return to the source

I took myself off to the People's History Museum last week, to see their exhibition of election posters. Not just because I'm a massive nerd, but because it's a wonderful, unapologetically leftwing place. Going back occasionally is a way to recharge my batteries and cheer myself up.

The exhibition was fascinating: a lesson in how we've returned to the same arguments, over and over again. The Tories are still the party of the selfish rich. The workers are permanently exploited. The Liberals are still untrustworthy turncoats. Only the Labour Party has changed. It used to believe in things. Now its job is to soften the edges of Conservative Capitalism.

I took some photos: they're not very good because the museum lighting is low to protect the textiles and there's so much material that a good angle isn't always possible. Still, see them here, or click on these highlights for larger versions:

They're STILL using this. They keep saying 'the Labour recession' and 'the recession we inherited' despite the facts: the country wasn't in recession in the quarter before the election.

Labour instituted tuition fees, the scum. The Tories and Lib Dems have tripled them, despite campaigning to abolish them!

Deeply ironic.

One of my ancestors fought in the Irish Brigade during the Boer War. The anti-British Irish Brigade, that is. Later on he was the Dublin Commandant of the IRA and one of Michael Collins' closest allies. 

This is a much more honest Tory poster about Ireland. The Union-Jack chaps are famous conservatives. The lad in the shamrock is an Irish nationalist getting a buffing.

What can I say? Has the Daily Mail changed at all? Although given that its owner, Lord Rothermere, claims to be French to avoid tax, perhaps it wouldn't support 'tax the foreigner' these days.

Ici commence l'aliénation

Alienation starts here: one of the slogans of the 68 uprising, in which French students and workers united against the capitalist regime of Charles de Gaulle, which they saw as neo-fascist, with some strong evidence in their favour, and as the local manifestation of systematize oppression. Over a period of months, strikes, riots and savage police violence brought France to the brink of revolution, only for minor reforms to buy off the voters.

Do I sound wistful? I am of course. Before we were all bought off with consumerism, the 68ers had the intellect, the vision, the strategy and the bravery to force bourgeois capitalist democracy to reveal its contradictions and hypocrisies. Not just in France, but in the US, across the developing world and even in the UK. The moment passed, but it can be revisited, even improved upon. The witty, spontaneous UK Uncut and the student protesters of last year were hopefully merely the beginning. We may be cowed by our narrowed imaginations, our debts and our manners, but we all have the potential to express ourselves with the joyous rage of Mai '68. We mustn't nostalgically revisit 68, but we should remember that cowed acceptance is not the way it's always been.

Here are some of the posters produced by the Atelier Populaire during the evenements of 1968.

Be Young and Shut Up. 

Have an iPhone and leave the politics to the grown-ups.

They revolutionnaires believed that French tertiary education removed potentially troublesome individuals from their class, nipping rebellion in the bud: it was time to reconnect the proletariat with the student body. It worked for a time too, though there are always points of tension (even Chaucer's students are smartarses).

Or as another slogan had it: the owners need you: you don't need the owners.

What distracts the population? Racial antagonism, foreign wars, TV, minor concessions. Sound familiar?

Systems are automatically oppressive. Foucault called them 'disciplinary systems' and they certainly are still in play here.

Time to end the exclusive and ideologically conservative nature of education and make it a public right, available to all. Time to revive this one, I feel.