The Revolution will not be Televised

By Will Novosedlik

Will Novosedlik/Midjourney. 

Our headline reprises Gil Scott Heron’s famous rap lyrics from the ‘70s, which were meant to convey the message that ‘the revolution’ cannot be co-opted or commercialized. Which may be why, if you’re looking for coverage of the protests engulfing America right now, or footage of immigrant detention, you won’t see much on TV. But you’ll see lots online.

As well as non-stop online content, there’s nothing like a threat to the First Amendment to blow the dust off the printing presses and start churning out protest posters. While the form of the poster has long lost its primacy as an advertising medium, it just won’t die as a medium of dissent.

It can be traced back to the Russian Revolution. The presses were working 24:7 to keep the propaganda flowing and the revolution going. As the leaders of what has been referred to as the ‘Bolshevik Art Army’, or ROSTA – the Soviet version of an ad agency – designers and artists like Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky were fully engaged in the design and production of posters and other collateral in support of the revolution.

Vladimir Mayakovsky. ROSTA posters were placed in shop windows as an early Soviet propaganda channel. From the collection of the Melton Prior Institute.

Ever since then, political posters have established a visual language of their own, easily distinguished from that of the commercial mainstream. We saw it in the 1968 student revolts in Paris. We saw it during the Vietnam war. And now we’re seeing it in the streets of New York, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Los Angeles as tens of thousands of Americans voice their anger with the anti-democratic onslaught of Trump’s fascist administration.

Posters from the Paris protests of May 1968. The brute force of these messages (‘THE FIGHT CONTINUES’ and ‘BORDERS=REPRESSION’) is matched only by their quick and dirty execution. Designers: Atelier Populaire.

Anti-Vietnam war posters. Note the same rough edge as the Paris 68 and the ROSTA posters. left, Tomi Ungerer; right, Seymour Chwast

While the majority of what we see in the street is handmade, websites like ETSY are full of vendors who are cranking out a variety of much slicker digital downloads you can buy and print at home, at prices anyone can afford.

Credit: HUGR Graphic Designers, offering a ’10-pack’ of anti-Trump protest posters sold on Etsy. The messages in these more contemporary versions of protest posters are just as forceful as as their older cousins but a lot slicker. 

On the one hand it speaks to how anything can be commodified and put up for sale – even protest. On the other hand, its reliance on the internet to foment widespread resistance is a noble and effective use of a technology that the Bolsheviks would have killed for. Of course, they did a lot of killing anyway, even with the primitive technology that they had.

It’s not just in America that the digital distribution of protest posters is flourishing. Canada and Mexico are in on the act too. According to its website, justseeds is a decentralized network of 41 artists committed to social, environmental and political engagement from Canada, the US and Mexico:

A recent example of their work, in conjunction with Artists for Radical Imagination, can be seen below:

“In early October 2023, Micah Bazant and Artists for Radical Imagination put out a call for artists to donate their graphics for Palestinian liberation. Since then, over 150 artists all over the world have generously donated their work for use in protests and events “

 –  justseeds website

To bring an old cliché up to date, the poster is mightier than the AR-15. 

Will Novosedlik is a Toronto-based writer, designer and editor. He is known for a critical perspective on the socioeconomic impact of design, advertising and marketing.