TDR™40 - This Machine Kills Fascists - Screenprint

Originally created as a cover image in response to an, as yet, unreleased album by Marco Simioni, stalled by the death of Mille Plateaux reactivator Achim Szepanski, This Machine Kills Fascists joins the TDR™40 collection as a special anniversary edition celebrating forty years of The Designers Republic™’s “uncompromising visual language and cultural commentary”.

The title borrows the famous slogan first painted on Woody Guthrie's guitar in the early 1940s. For Guthrie "This Machine Kills Fascists" expressed the belief that music, ideas and culture could be powerful weapons against fascism, authoritarianism and injustice, and the twats that support it.

The bespoke letterforms are geometric deconstructions built on broken incoherent ‘discredited’ swastikas… not to re-contextualise or punk glam-up the hi-jacked symbol, but to expose and confront it. “As with much of The Designers Republic™’s work, familiar visual language is appropriated, deconstructed and reworked to provoke thought rather than passive consumption.”
Ian Anderson: “We debated long and hard about whether any use of the swastika, even deliberately broken, even if the idea was sound, was a sound idea… We decided that the debate in itself was reason enough to evolve the idea…”

Meticulously screen printed by Imp in Sheffield, this edition reflects four decades of design that has consistently challenged convention, questioned authority and refused to separate aesthetics from ideas.

If you’re offended by TDR’s anti-fascist attitude… go fuck yourself. ‘The Right is Wrong’.

Limited Edition Screenprint.

Hand-stamped, embossed, signed and numbered.

500 × 700 mm.

Edition of 40.

Munken Design Polar Rough Crisp White 300 gsm.

Two-colour Black Screentec Aqua Art Fluorescent inks.

Screen printed at Imp. Studio, Sheffield, UK.

TDR™40 2026.