Anarchists have employed certain symbols for
their cause, including most prominently the
circle-A (Ⓐ) and the black flag (⚑), although
anarchists have historically largely denied
the importance of symbols to political movement.
Since the revival of anarchism around the
start of the 21st century and concurrent with
the rise of the anti-globalization movement,
anarchist cultural symbols are widely present.
== Red flag ==
The red flag was one of first anarchist symbols
and it was widely used in late 19th century
by anarchists worldwide.
Peter Kropotkin preferred the use of the red
flag.
Use of the red flag by anarchists disappeared
after the October Revolution, when red flags
started to be associated only with communist
parties and bureaucratic, reformist and authoritarian
social democracy.
== Black flag ==
The black flag and the color black in general
have been associated with anarchism since
the 1880s.
Many anarchist collectives contain the word
"black" in their names.
There have been a number of anarchist periodicals
entitled Black Flag.The uniform blackness
of the flag is in stark contrast to the colorful
flags typical of most nation states.
Additionally, as a white flag has been used
to request parley or to surrender, the black
flag symbolizes defiance and opposition to
surrender.
=== Historical origins ===
The black flag represents the absence of a
flag and thus stands in opposition to the
very notion of nation states.
In that light, the flag can be seen as a rejection
of the concept of representation, or the idea
that any person or institution can adequately
represent a group of individuals.
Modern anarchism has a shared ancestry with—amongst
other ideologies—socialism, a movement strongly
associated with the red flag.
As anarchism became more and more distinct
from socialism in the 1880s, it adopted the
black flag in an attempt to differentiate
itself.
Some anarchists at the time, such as Peter
Kropotkin, preferred to continue using the
red flag rather than adopt the black.
=== Subsequent use ===
The black flag first became associated with
anarchism in the 1880s.
The French anarchist paper, Le Drapeau Noir
(The Black Flag), which existed until 1882,
is one of the first published references to
use black as an anarchist color.
Black International was the name of a London
anarchist group founded in July 1881.
Louise Michel, participant in the Paris Commune
of 1871, flew the black flag during demonstration
of the unemployed in Paris in March 1883.
An open-air meeting of the unemployed was
broken up by the police and around 500 demonstrators,
with Michel at the front carrying a black
flag and shouting "Bread, work, or lead!"
marched off towards the boulevard Saint-Germain.
The crowd pillaged three baker's shops before
the police attacked.
Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years
solitary confinement.
Public pressure soon forced the granting of
an amnesty.
According to Michel, the "black flag is the
flag of strikes and the flag of those who
are hungry".The black flag soon made its way
to the United States.
The black flag was displayed in Chicago at
an anarchist demonstration in November 1884.
According to the English language newspaper
of the Chicago anarchists, it was "the fearful
symbol of hunger, misery and death".
== Bisected flag ==
The colors black and red have been used by
anarchists since at least the late 1800s,
when they were used on cockades by Italian
anarchists in the 1864 Bologna insurrection,
and in 1877 when anarchists entered the Italian
town Letino carrying red and black flags to
promote the First International.
Diagonally divided red and black flags were
popularized during the Spanish Civil War by
the anarcho-syndicalist labor union CNT, and
are used to this day by anarchist organizations.
Similar flags but with different colors are
commonly used to represent specific anarchist
ideologies, such as black and purple for anarcha-feminism,
black and green for green anarchism, and black
and orange for mutualism.
== Circle-A ==
The 
circle-A is almost certainly the best-known
present-day symbol for anarchy.
It is a monogram that consists of the capital
letter "A" surrounded by the capital letter
"O".
The letter "A" is derived from the first letter
of "anarchy" or "anarchism" in most European
languages and is the same in both Latin and
Cyrillic scripts.
The "O" stands for order and together they
stand for "society seeks order in anarchy"
(French: la société cherche l'ordre dans
l'anarchie), a phrase written by Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon in his 1840 book What Is Property?.The
circle-A long predates the anarcho-punk movement,
which was part of the punk rock movement of
the late 1970s.
However, the punk movement helped spread the
circle-A symbol more widely and helped raise
awareness of it among non-anarchists.
This process began with the use of anarchist
imagery when members of the band Crass became
aware of the symbol while traveling through
France.
== See also ==
== References ==
== External links ==
"Anarchism".
Flags of the World.
"Anarchism and the History of the Black Flag".
Spunk Library.
"Blog: Heart in a Hearless World".
"History of anarchist symbols".
AnarchyIsOrder.org.
"The Symbols of Anarchy".
An Anarchist FAQ.
