The Red Flag: Symbol of Working-Class Revolt

This May Day Progressive Labor Party will proudly unfurl the red flag of workers’ revolution across the world. Why do we carry high the red flag?
In 1890, on the eve og history’s first May Day, Frederick Engels wrote, “The proletariat of Europe and America is holding a review of its forces. It is mobilizing for the first time as one army, one flag, one class...”
Both the red flag and the word “strike” first appeared in 1768, when sailors “struck” (or removed the topgalant sails of merchant ships at port), thus immobalizing the ships. The red flag indicated defiance and readiness for battle. Again in London in 1780, when 100,000 workers marched on Newgate Prison to burn it to the ground, the multi-racial leadership carried the red flag. Their cry was, “Away with all prisons,” because the working class was being increasingly incarcerated in them.
In 1831, the red flag was part of the struggle of the working class in Wales as well as in the revolution to topple the monarchy during the French revolution (1789-1794), especially during the struggle in July of 1791. But the general adoption of the red flag as the workers’ own symbol occurred in 1848 when it appeared spontaneously on the barricades in Paris, and then everywhere throughout revolutionary Europe.
During the Paris Commune of 1871 — when workers first took over a whole city and held it for two months — the red flag of the working class flew over Paris. It had become the symbol of emancipation. By 1892 it flew above the May Day marches throughout Europe, Australia, South America, Cuba and Japan. In 1889, in order for the newly formed Labour Party of Great Britain to win the masses, a song was written about the red flag which became the anthem of the Party: “Bandiera Rosa”
In Italy, too, “Bandiera Rosa” became a symbol of May Day.
In the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the red flag became the symbol of the working class in power. And as revolutions spread around the world in the next 50 years — from China to Eastern Europe — the red flag of working-class emancipation was raised on high. Significantly, the Cultural Revolution that fought the capitalist turn in China were led by the Red Guards.
In 1971, the Progressive Labor Party picked up the red flag from where it had been dropped and has marched proudly with it in every gathering we hold throughout the world. The red flag is truly the flag of workers’ internationalism, as opposed to the hundreds of flags that the bosses-of the world fly to symbolize their respective capitalist states.