A thread of 1970s Communist cartoons. I’ve been looking through editions of Scottish Marxist, the Commujist Party of Great Britain’s Scottish magazine. I’ve found some great pictures that were mostly drawn by Bob Starrett. This one has a lot of lockdown resonance.

Starrett’s definite sense that art’s value lay in its capacity to challenge class society shine through in a few drawings. Hugh MacDiarmid appears several times, as a literary revolutionary who combined the causes of socialism and Scottish nationalism.

But MacDiarmid is also placed in the sensibilities of cosmopolitan intellectual influences too.

An edition turned around art emphasises the need to demystify culture with a materialist analysis and challenges traditional binaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ brow genres. It’s cover resonates with Raymond Williams’ view that ‘culture is ordinary’.

There are also more conventional images of class struggle like this drawing which accompanied an account of the 1955 Rolls Royce strike.

This cartoon depicting Mick McGahey leading British miners in their strike for wages during 1974, and toppling the Heath government's incomes policy in the process, is one of my favourites. It will be appearing in my book!

Energy policy and Scotland’s economic development were also recurring feature. This cartoon was a sardonic comment on the multinational’s dominance of North Sea oil production.

The edition that reflected on the fallout from the 1979 devolution referendum again had an energy theme. A nuclear reactor forms a question mark over whether it’s an economically or ecologically sound method of generation. Both sides were out forward in the magazine.

The agonies of devolution and frustration with the insufficient commitment of the Labour government to either constitutional reform or Scotland’s need for a distinctive cultural policy were portrayed in a cover the year before too.

There's a quite orthodox Marxist optimism about science and technology in the magazine, especially when it comes to cultural production and methods for spreading the socialist message. This cover from a 1977 edition which features a cassette tape exemplifies that line of thought.

The magazine demonstrates a live connection with the arts, including music and writing as well as visual artwork. So I’ll end the thread on this advert for an art exhibition that is seemingly themed around critiquing the time of the artist. Meta!