Anarchist symbolism

It is a negation of nationhood ... Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another ...

So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationship on and with this earth.

[2] Diagonally divided red and black flags were used by anarcho-syndicalists in Spain[17] such as the labor union CNT during the Spanish Civil War.

[2] George Woodcock writes that the bisected black-and-red flag symbolized a uniting of "the spirit of later anarchism with the mass appeal of the [First] International".

[18] An interpretation held by anarchists such as Cindy Milstein is that the A represents the Greek anarkhia ('without ruler/authority'), and the circle can be read as the letter O, standing for order or organization, a reference to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's definition of anarchism from his 1840 book What Is Property?

[20][21] In the 1970s, anarcho-punk and punk rock bands such as Crass began using the circle-A symbol in red,[22] thereby introducing it to non-anarchists.

[23] The origin of the black cat symbol is unclear, but according to one story it came from an Industrial Workers of the World strike that was going badly.

[24] The Swiss anarchist Théophile Steinlen made use of the black cat (Le Chat Noir) in a number of his paintings.

In an 1890 oil painting, he depicted a black cat raising a red banner emblazoned with the word "Gaudeamus" (English: Rejoice).

Francophone anarchists like Steilein and Zo d'Axa were inspired by the independent and undomesticated nature of the cat.

Likely dating back to a 15th-century German proverb, it appeared in an 1870 pamphlet by a disciple of Auguste Blanqui and became the title of Blanqui's 1880 newspaper Ni Dieu ni maître [fr] before it spread throughout the anarchist movement,[27] appearing in Kropotkin's 1885 Words of a Rebel and an 1896 Bordeaux anarchist manifesto.

[28] It has appeared on tombstones of revolutionaries,[29] as the slogan of birth control activist Margaret Sanger's newspaper The Woman Rebel,[30] and as the title of a 1964 song [fr] against capital punishment by Léo Ferré.