In 1913, two years before he was executed by the US state of Utah in a frame-up, Joe Hill wrote the song “Should I ever be a soldier”. The chorus goes:
Should I ever be a soldier,
‘Neath the Red Flag I would fight,
Should the gun I ever shoulder,
It is to crush the tyrant’s might.
Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, of which he was a member, identified the red flag with the cause of international socialism, symbolising that the same blood flows through the veins of the entire human race. The time in which Hill’s song went around the world was very similar to our own: a time of increasing imperialist tensions. In a few short years, millions of working-class people would be gunned down in hellish trench warfare. The vaunted national “freedoms” for which the warring states of the First World War urged working-class people to sacrifice were buried under concentration camps, censorship and conscription.
In that period of universal horror, the red flag became the symbol of hope for the world’s workers. Unlike the various national flags, which divide humanity and under which imperialist wars are waged, the red flag was the symbol that workers all over Europe raised to signify their rejection of nationalism and embrace of international solidarity. In Petrograd, in Riga, in Helsinki, in Vienna, in Prague, in Budapest and in Kiel and Berlin, it was the symbol of working-class revolt against the human slaughterhouse.
The red flag was also raised in Australia, where working-class newspapers from coast to coast republished the story of how German sailors had raised the red flag in November 1918, motivated by “working-class sentiment, the sentiment of justice”, and saved thousands of lives on both sides by refusing to follow military orders any longer. It was this revolt which finally ended World War One.
While Australian workers were inspired by the Russian Revolution to hoist the red flag on trades halls across the country, the Australian government made flying it a crime punishable by up to six months’ imprisonment. Dozens of socialists were imprisoned for flying the flag and Russian-born activists were deported, while vigilante mobs whipped up by right-wing worthies and a fearmongering media bashed unionists and anti-war socialists.
Precisely because the red flag signifies the rejection of national divisions, its displays have always evoked frothing, maddened denunciations from the ruling class. As the US socialist Eugene Debs remarked, the red flag “produces the same effect upon a tyrant as it does upon a bull”.
While some historians have discussed an ancient origin to the red flag, in modern political history it dates to the French Revolution of 1789. According to the French socialist Jean Jaures, a red flag was originally raised by the first, moderate and pro-monarchist government in 1791 to signify the implementation of martial law. A year later, the red flag was flown by the insurrectionary workers and sans-culottes of Paris to signify the “martial law of the sovereign people against the rebellion of the executive power”. i.e., the French king’s conspiracy with foreign powers to crush the revolution. From that time onwards, the red flag became “the people’s flag”.
In 1831, coal miners in the Welsh town of Merthyr marched behind the red flag in a revolt against cuts to their wages. Twenty-four workers were killed by soldiers, and a number were executed or sentenced to transportation to Australia. The British home secretary who crushed the uprising and carried out the subsequent repression was Lord Melbourne, after whom an Australian city was later named.
The red flag appeared again at the head of struggles for peace, liberty and justice in 1871 during the Paris Commune, in 1927 in China and in 1968 all over the world. During the recent general strikes in Italy, Spain and Greece, the red flag was flown to call for an end to the Israeli genocide and in revolt against the far right.
All over the world, socialists fly the red flag to carry on the tradition of working-class self-emancipation. When we fight for Palestine, against the drive to war, for better wages and for public housing, the red flag signifies that our struggles form part of the global fight to realise our common humanity and to put an end to the class system that rules by hatred, greed and fear.
