The French Communist party has dropped the symbol of workers and peasants that has become tainted by association
The news that the French Communist party has abandoned the hammer and sickle as its insignia in favour of a five-pointed star is about more than historical embarrassment. For the PCF, traditionally one of the most cravenly Stalinist of communist parties, scrubbing the sign from the membership card is obviously going to have a traumatic emotional impact. "Everyone in the party is shocked," according to the PCF's Paris secretary. What sort of a symbol is it that they are abandoning, and does it matter?
The hammer and sickle is the symbol of communism, but didn't exist in Marx's time. It was gradually adopted after the Russian revolution, first on demonstrations and by the Red Army, and was adopted as the official symbol of the Soviet Union in 1922. Its symbolism is extremely simple – a hammer, to represent the industrial workers; a sickle, to represent the peasantry.
The alleged ruling classes in the "workers and peasants republic" could see the main tool of their labour as the insignia of their country and their movement. It may have represented a lie, but a lie to which the symbol served as a constant reproach. And as a symbol it was clearly a smart choice – memorable and easily scrawled on walls, as any visitor to Naples or Athens can still attest. It also serves as a useful reproach to the idea that communism and nazism were fundamentally identical. The swastika, the Nazis' own version, dates from the same time, and was used first in 1919 by the Freikorps, the far-right mercenaries that the German Social Democrats used to suppress their communist opponents. The swastika literally represents very little. Hinduism maybe, to esoterics like Himmler; an image of sexual sublimation for Wilhelm Reich, who saw intertwined legs as its hidden meaning. But about nazism and its political programme, the swastika said nothing. But the hammer and sickle said, unambiguously, that workers and peasants should rule.
It was also perhaps the first truly international political symbol since the tricolour and its permutations, or maybe more pertinently, since the Christian cross. Communist parties from Maerdy to Moldova to Kerala all use the hammer and sickle, as if to declare their adherence to a creed that aimed to abolish nations altogether. Some measure of its success can be garnered by the way that organisations to the right of it used similar symbols – until the 1980s, Labour used an oddly familiar symbol that featured a crossed quill and spade, with "LIBERTY" behind it to quash any doubts. So why would anyone want to abandon such a powerful and self-explanatory symbol?
Why indeed. For many, and entirely unsurprisingly, the hammer and sickle represents one thing – the one-party states that ruled several countries from 1917 to 1991, and that still rule a few – including, of course, the second-largest economy in the world. So, the PCF's reformers might well think, why should communists in the 21st century want to march under the banner used by the regime that starved and shot millions in the 1930s USSR, who declared Year Zero in Phnom Penh, or who declare that "to get rich is glorious" in contemporary Beijing? That's if communists today are even allowed to use the symbol – it is sometimes banned outright. This applies even in countries where communism still has an electoral appeal – the Czech Communist party, which came second in last year's regional elections, is forced to use a bunch of red cherries, as limp an image as Labour's red rose.
The defenders of the hammer and sickle, however, have a case. The POUM, the unorthodox communists who were ruthlessly crushed by the NKVD in the Spanish civil war, fought Stalinism under the hammer and sickle. The youth who spray the symbol today in Italy or Greece are not doing so to evoke the show trials, but to evoke class conflict and egalitarianism, and to do so as simply and quickly as possible. But what does the actual hammer and the actual sickle symbolise today? Unlike the cross, the hammer and sickle is limited in its technological application. Not much work in factories is done with hammers; and since the green revolution, sickles aren't much in evidence in agricultural production either. A smart leftist party somewhere ought to start a competition for the new equivalent – and when they do so, they will find themselves up against the problem of visualising the new workforce of neoliberal capitalism. The phone and mouthpiece of the call centre worker over the protective mask of the Chinese factory labourer? The high-vis jacket and the JSA card? Define it, and the scrawlable symbol may follow.
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