The Poster Workshop Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

May 1 1968

Between the late 1960s and 1970s numerous alternative printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left. Emerging mostly at the tail end of, or just after, the 1960s underground culture, they arose in a period that saw not just the extension of political concerns to cultural ones but also the rise of community activism and feminism. Despite their differences in position, those involved in the various printshops shared common left/libertarian ground: they were, in general, anti-capitalism and anti-'the state', anti-imperialism, anti-hierarchy, anti-racist and pro-feminist. The London-based Poster Workshop (1968-1971), which recently uploaded its archive to the web, provides a snapshot of some radical concerns of the time: the political situations in Vietnam, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Angola, Iran and Ireland; apartheid; housing; racism and rights for workers. Their rhetoric was one of resistance, solidarity, fight, strike, occupation, revolution and freedom.

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