2014 was a turbulent year in the United States. From fast food and retail strikes to the Ferguson Insurrection and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, the oppressed in America are once again on the move. Of course, wherever there is resistance there are those waiting to slander and discredit that resistance. The past year has seen the return of the infamous “outside agitators,” socialists and anarchists slinking out of whatever holes they have been hiding in since the sixties. It is taken for granted in America that there are no communists toiling alongside the workers, no communists born in occupied and immiserated communities of color. There are no “inside agitators” in this country because communism, meaning racial and economic justice, is un-American.
This is a lie. Communism is as old as the first workers putting down their tools to strike, as old as the first slaves strangling their owners with their chains, as old as the first women trading the address of an illegal doctor. Communism is resistance and there has always been resistance inside America, as there is resistance in any prison.
"Inside Agitators" is a series of posters which aims to reintroduce the notion that communism is an American tradition and a powerful, intersectional tradition at that. American communists have been women and men, black and white and red and brown, queer and straight, disabled and able-bodied. That the posters resemble wanted posters is no accident: communism has been and is a crime, for which our brave forebears were hunted, banished, jailed, and killed.
They lived. They fought. Let them not be forgotten.
* * *
Click below for enlarged images.
Hope Asya is a radical artist, labor organizer, and Marxist-feminist. She is on the editorial board of Red Wedge.
Thomas Crane is a science fiction writer and working class militant living in Chicago.