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An Anarchist FAQ - The Symbols of Anarchy
Anarchism has always stood deliberately for a broad, and at times vague, political platform. The reasoning is sound; blueprints create rigid dogma and stifle the creative spirit of revolt. Along the same lines and resulting in the same problems, Anarchists have rejected the "disciplined" leadership that is found in many other political groupings on the Left. The reasoning for this is also sound; leadership based on authority is inherently hierarchical.
It seems to follow logically that since Anarchists have shied away from anything static, that we would also shy away from the importance of symbols and icons. Yet the fact is Anarchists have used symbolism in our revolt against the State and Capital, the most famous of which are the circled-A, the black flag and the red-and-black flag. This appendix tries to show the history of these three iconic symbols and indicate why they were taken up by anarchists to represent our ideas and movement.
Ironically enough, one of the original anarchist symbols was the red flag. As anarchist Communard Louise Michel put it, "Lyon, Marseille, Narbonne, all had their own Communes, and like ours [in Paris], theirs too were drowned in the blood of revolutionaries. That is why our flags are red. Why are our red banners so terribly frightening to those persons who have caused them to be stained that colour?" [The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, p. 65] March 18th, 1877, saw Kropotkin participate in a protest march in Berne which involved the anarchists "carrying the red flag in honour of the Paris Commune" for "in Switzerland federal law prohibited public display of the red flag." [Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin, p. 137] Anarchist historians Nicolas Walter and Heiner Becker note that "Kropotkin always preferred the red flag." [Peter Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 128] On Labour Day in 1899, Emma Goldman gave lectures to miners in Spring Valley, Illinois, which ended in a demonstration which she headed "carrying a large red flag." [Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 245] According to historian Caroline Waldron Merithew, the 300 marchers "defied police orders to haul down the 'red flag of anarchy.'" [Anarchist Motherhood, p. 236]
This should be unsurprising as anarchism is a form of socialism and came out of the general socialist and labour movements. Common roots would imply common imagery. However, as mainstream socialism developed in the nineteenth century into either reformist social democracy or the state socialism of the revolutionary Marxists, anarchists developed their own images of revolt based upon those raised by working class people in struggle. As will be shown, they come from the revolutionary anarchism most directly associated with the wider labour and socialist movements, i.e., the dominant, mainstream social anarchist tradition. As Nicholas Walter put it:
"[The] serious study of anarchism should be based on fact rather than fantasy, and concentrate on people and movements that actually used the word. However old and wide the ideas of anarchism may be . . . no one called himself an anarchist before [Proudhon in] 1840, and no movement called itself anarchist before the 1870s . . . The actual anarchist movement was founded . . . by the anti-authoritarian sections of the First International . . . This was certainly the first anarchist movement, and this movement was certainly based on a libertarian version of the concept of the class struggle." [The Anarchist Past and other essays, pp. 60-1]
Unsurprisingly, the first anarchist symbols reflected the origins and ideas of this class struggle movement. Both the black and red-and-black flags were first used by revolutionary anarchists. The black flag was popularised in the 1880s by Louise Michel, a leading French communist-anarchist militant. From Europe it spread to America when the communist-anarchists of the International Working People's Association raised it in their struggle against capitalism before being taken up by other revolutionary class struggle anarchists across the globe. The red-and-black flag was first used by the Italian section of the First International and this had been the first to move from collectivist to communist-anarchism in October 1876. [Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, p. 111] From there, it spread to Mexico and was used by anarchist labour militants there before being re-invented by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in the 1930s. Like anarchism itself, the anarchist flags are a product of the social struggle against capitalism and statism.
We would like to point out that this appendix is partly based on Jason Wehling's 1995 essay Anarchism and the History of the Black Flag. Needless to say, this appendix does not cover all anarchists symbols. For example, recently the red-and-black flag has become complemented by the green-and-black flag of eco-anarchism (the symbolism of the green should need no explanation). Other libertarian popular symbols include the IWW inspired "Wildcat" (representing, of course, the spontaneity, direct action, solidarity and militancy of a wildcat strike), the "Black Rose" (inspired, no doubt, by the demand of striking IWW women workers in Lawrence, 1912, for not only bread, but for roses too) and the ironic "little black bomb" (among others). Here we concentrate on the three most famous ones.
