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At the time - when Communism was the most popular, in 19th and 20th century, symbols of revolution, “hammer and sickle”, fully represented the proletariat; which is the working people. Sickle representing the peasants in the fields, and hammer representing the industrial workers. Both of these groups generally represented the working class.
In today’s service economy, with nearly no peasant class and a dwindling farming society, manufacturing jobs have been subsidized to be sent to countries with cheaper labor. What we have left in the western countries - especially in the United States, is mostly service jobs.
The question now is: what tools are mostly used by today’s, still exploited, working class? Construction workers, nurses, dishwashers, store workers, janitors, teachers, office workers and many others are disconnected or alienated by 19th century farming tool such as the sickle, or metallurgy beating of the hammer. I updated this image with a “phone head set”, representing all the workers who have to make, or take phone calls as part of their work, including workers with walkie-talkie; and “computer key board”, representing all the workers whose jobs are in someway digitalized and computerized. The muscled body still represents hardworking manual labor force. Perhaps these tools would speak again to the masses of 21st century working class of United States.
The work is called “Response to Shepard Fairey”, and it is meant to be a response to him systematically exploiting images portraying struggle, or revolt and turning it into a commercialized product.
I imagine his remake of this historical poster as an “OBEY person” holding fast food in one hand and a television remote control or videogame joystick in the other, or perhaps he could be just giving us the middle finger with one hand.
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