In an Era of Wars and Revolutions

£9.00
Combination/copies

American Socialist Cartoons of the Mid-Twentieth Century

Book Cover "In an Era of Wars and Revolutions: American Socialist Cartoons of the Mid-twentieth Century" in black text on a red background above a cartoon image of the twin vultures of the Washington and Moscow pecking away at the red flag of revolutionary socialism.
by
Carlo and others
2014
Long book
-
320 pages
ISBN
978-1-909639-21-8

A few bold strokes by an artist can convey ideas vividly and fix them firmly in a viewers’ mind. These cartoons depict US politics, workers’ struggles, America’s “Jim Crow” racism, Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Truman’s “Fair Deal”, and Stalinism at its height, as revolutionary socialists saw them at the time.

Blurb

A picture cannot always, in politics, do all that a thousand words can do; but often it can arouse, inspire, and enlighten faster and more widely than many thousands.
Between the 1930s and the 1950s the revolutionary socialist press in the USA had talented cartoonists such as "Carlo" (Jesse Cohen). The selection of their work in this new book does in pictures what it would take several volumes to do in words.
It communicates basic socialist arguments, as the cartoon above does on capitalism and war.
It gives a snapshot history of the times - the rise of the mass trade union movement in the USA, the great strike wave of 1945-6, the fight against "Jim Crow" racism, World War Two, the imposition of Stalinism on Eastern Europe...
It puts socialist policy proposals - opening the books of the corporations, organising workers' defence guards... - in vivid form.
For readers who already know a bit about the politics, it gives an illustrated mini-history of the struggles and activities of the revolutionary socialist movement in the era of turmoil between the great capitalist disruption of 1929 and the the restabilising of the system (for the time being) in the early 1950s.

Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Timeline
  • Them and Us
    • Perceptions of Capitalism
    • Wages, Prices, Rents, Profits, Taxes
    • Labour Movements
    • German Workers After the Defeat of 1923
    • Women Workers
    • The Economic Front
    • The Political Front
    • The Battle of Ideas
  • Independent Working-class Politics
    • Plutocrat Democracy
    • For a US Labour Party
  • Proposals to the Working Class
  • Jim Crow: Fighting Racism
  • Roosevelt and the New Deal
  • Stalinism
    • The USSR
    • The Popular Front
    • The Moscow Trials
    • The Murder of Leon Trotsky
    • Parrot Party: the CP USA
    • The Stalin-Hitler Pact
  • Fascism
    • Native Fascism
    • Hitlerism
    • Catholic Reaction
    • Anti-semitism and Other Bigotries
  • World War
    • On the Road to War
    • The World War
    • Taking the Profit Out of War
    • Labour in the War
  • Civil Liberty
    • The Minneapolis Case
    • Sacco and Vanzetti
  • The War is Over
    • The Victors
    • Conquered Germany
    • The Hope of Humanity: A Working Class Socialist Revolution
  • In the Shadow of Nuclear War
    • The Atomic Bomb
    • Stalin's Empire
    • The Witch-hunt Republic
    • US Imperialism
    • The Permanent Arms Economy
  • World War Three?
    • Colonial Revolts
    • Korea
    • Towards a Third World War

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