Art and cartoons from The One Big Union Monthly

Hey all, this is Juan, I originally posted all the images. When I saw this one it did bring to mind the similar Nazi propaganda of that period, but figured it was a joke. The IWW of that time was very sarcastic and often reappropriated images, songs, and slurs for their own purposes. Also, this particular image is from a 1938 issue, during this time The One Big Union Monthly dedicated a lot of pages to the antifascist movements in Europe, which they supported and some Wobblies even volunteered with. That said, they weren't perfect and if you see the pictures, you'll notice the complete absence of women or people of color, which was not reflective of the American working class or even their own organization! It's possible it was meant to be antisemitic, but I doubt it. There's nothing I've seen in their old stuff that would lead me to believe this, unlike maybe some other trends in European syndicalism that had elements that did drift to the right.

I'm not sure the 'menacing octopus' thing is 'structurally antisemitic' without context. It was a popular thing to include in propaganda and was used, at least during and between the two World Wars to represent American, Soviet, German and Japanese imperialism, Communism, capitalism, and yes, the Jews. In 2014 it would not be wise to produce these sort of images, though, and I would have rather had another image from the collection I put in the library be used, but I'm not going to delete this, as some of you make important points that we should think about.

On the libcom Facebook it was brought up that the picture of the capitalist octopus resembles Nazi propaganda. Thought I would copy and past what I said about that.

Quote:

Hey all, this is Juan, I originally posted all the images. When I saw this one it did bring to mind the similar Nazi propaganda of that period, but figured it was a joke. The IWW of that time was very sarcastic and often reappropriated images, songs, and slurs for their own purposes. Also, this particular image is from a 1938 issue, during this time The One Big Union Monthly dedicated a lot of pages to the antifascist movements in Europe, which they supported and some Wobblies even volunteered with. That said, they weren't perfect and if you see the pictures, you'll notice the complete absence of women or people of color, which was not reflective of the American working class or even their own organization! It's possible it was meant to be antisemitic, but I doubt it. There's nothing I've seen in their old stuff that would lead me to believe this, unlike maybe some other trends in European syndicalism that had elements that did drift to the right.

I'm not sure the 'menacing octopus' thing is 'structurally antisemitic' without context. It was a popular thing to include in propaganda and was used, at least during and between the two World Wars to represent American, Soviet, German and Japanese imperialism, Communism, capitalism, and yes, the Jews. In 2014 it would not be wise to produce these sort of images, though, and I would have rather had another image from the collection I put in the library be used, but I'm not going to delete this, as some of you make important points that we should think about.