Why the Red and Black Flag?

This was explained to me by a member of the Terrassa CNT who was living in Melbourne around the time I was discovering anarchism: red is the flag of equality, of classless cooperativism, but state communism, to paraphrase Bakunin, is the equality of the barracks.

The black is added to represent freedom, to make equality meaningful as the foundation of the freedom of the working-class individual, as the foundation of our rights and responsibilities (we can’t talk about the former without the latter, sorry capitalists hiding behind freedom like gutless yellowbelly cowards instead of standing in front of it and defending it for everyone).

The black rises from bottom left to top tight to symbolise freedom rising. I don’t know if the red and black has a nickname like Old Glory, but something on that theme might work.

So, red for equality and black for freedom to symbolise the political agency of the working class. Capitalist freedom is the liberty and autonomy of the capitalist class, a kind of propertarian universalism. Anarchist freedom is the freedom and autonomy of the working class, the universalism of the productive.

We should not only decide our own lives for ourselves, we should also decide who we are for ourselves. Being told we need parasites to save us from ourselves and protect civilisation from the law of the jungle is gaslighting, not emancipation, progress or the evolution of ideas.