Ford's Inferno: Communist Propaganda From the 50s

Another item of interest located in my mother's basement (no, I don't live there!), that I felt was worth sharing. My Great-Grandmother had some McCarthy-era leaflet from 1957 designed to warn Michiganders about the insipid communist threat, and it was an actual excerpt from a Soviet textbook discussing America. It talked about how the auto plants in Michigan were soul-sucking capitalist machines hell-bent on the destruction of the American proletariat. Michael Moore, eat your heart out, because this propaganda is way more professional. Click to enlarge:

Some money quotes include:

"America is supposed to be the land of individualism. But Fordism is the thing that capitalists have established in many parts of the country, and want to make universal. They want a land of robots, who will work themselves out by the time they are forty and then go off somewhere and die."

"The Soviet workers get vacations of a month with full pay; they have no fear of unemployment or accident"

"Here you pass through an inferno of fear. You can see it in the eyes of these men. They know that any minute they may find themselves in the streets without any work."

The quality of life for the American autoworker was far better than any Soviet, as people from the impoverished South and overseas (like my ancestors) flocked to Detroit to earn a decent wage in the auto factories. It's odd how leftist propaganda during the cold war was incredibly analogous to official Soviet propaganda. Just saying.