In 1968, the Indian reformer Satish Kumar
NOTE
Satish Kumar (born 1936) is an Indian British activist and speaker. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate and pacifist. Kumar was founder and Director of Programmes of the Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies, and is Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. His most notable accomplishment is the completion, together with companion E. P. Menon, of a peace walk, two and a half years and over 8,000 miles from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, the capitals of the world's earliest nuclear-armed countries. He insists that reverence for nature should be at the heart of every political and social debate.
gave a series of lectures in the UK at the invitation of Christian Action, a pressure group based in London.
Kumar was close to Gandhi and his movement to ‘turn every village into a republic’. His lectures offered an insider’s view of Gandhi’s philosophy and were published by Christian Action in 1969 as
Non-Violence or Non-Existence.
Firrell came across a copy of this book in an antiquarian bookshop on the North Norfolk coast. At the same time, he was also in conversation with Clare Short, Secretary of State for International Development (1997-2003) and Frances O’Grady, General Secretary of the TUC (2013-2022).
These influences led to the creation of the
Union City
series of 9 digital billboards.
The artist’s conversation with Clare Short centred on her observation that ‘socialism is a moral idea’. In Short’s own words:
People want to make socialism mean the Soviet Union and so on, but it also meant Clement Attlee becoming British Prime Minister in 1945 and the development of the welfare state across Europe after the war: actions that produced the best and most civilised time we have ever experienced.
And what has capitalism meant? the Chilean dictator Pinochet, slavery, famine! My point is that
socialism is first and foremost a moral idea not an economic system.
The artist also explored the history and contemporary activity of the trade union movement and drew on Satish Kumar’s commentary on Gandhism for practical grassroots approaches to creating greater social justice.
Visually, the
Union City
series quotes from a repurposed wartime poster, created as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in the USA.
Welcome - Defense Workers!
was drawn by the American artist Joe Donaldson Jr. (1914 - 1997). The poster depicts an idealised worker halfway between home and factory to advertise the availability of houses, apartments, and rooms for rent expressly for defence workers.
When the
Union City
series appeared in the public realm, rightwing groups ridiculed the work, adding words and commentary to suit their own ends.
Socialism Is a Moral Idea was vandalised,
rather unimaginatively, to read, ‘socialism is a really bad idea’.
Several familiar tropes of the far right were aired including conflating socialism with the Soviet Union, and attempting to drive a wedge between different groups in response to
Union City’s
presentation of social equality.
