Art & Labour
Thoughts:
The creation of art is labour in itself. It is the intersection of both mental and physical work, first requiring the creation of the mental image before the actual piece is birthed. Every single piece of art is the result of the artist toiling away at their work in the hopes of reaching some kind of satisfactory endpoint. Artists often have little to no success when it comes to their extensive efforts, due to a volatile and highly competitive market, where corporations dominate over independent auteurs. Being an artist under capitalism usually means financial instability and insecurity. You are not always fairly paid for your labour and companies find much more success and have way more money to spend and earn. Other than some creatives that make it big and become millionaires and such, most artists will never see this kind of success and will have to do the work they enjoy with no monetary achievements.
The process of labour is art in itself. Labourers also toil away at their own creations, yet the perception is different. Their endpoint is a commodity that should come to serve somebody. I would argue that the process of creation is what makes art, it is the human effort behind the product. I would say the buildings in my city, the cars roaming the streets and every other product of effort is a tapestry of the millions of unidentified hands that toiled for the comfort of people and their own security. Every single man-made object is a piece of art simply because of the effort that went into it from people we will never know by name. But you've passed them in the street, or maybe talked with them at family dinner. It is the labourers who build our society, and it is the labourers who, like artists, will often get the short end of the stick. What sense does it make for bosses to get more money just for managing the people that do all the work?
Art & Labour are linked and inseparable, from both sides. You can't have one without the other. Process and Symbolism: I decided to have the background be FF0000 in RGB, or the purest red possible according to the sliders of paint.net. This flag draws heavy inspiration from already existing leftist and working class imagery. For example, red is widely associated with with leftism as a representation of the blood spilled by the working class. I wanted the red to be the purest red imaginable, very vibrant and striking.
000000, or the blackest black, compliments the red very nicely. I added black as a symbol of anarchism. When red and black are combined they usually signal anarcho-communism, but I want this flag to be useable by any movement that advocates and fights for the working class. This flag is not explicitly anarcho-communist, the red of the working class and the black of anarchy represent the freedom of the working class and do not endorse any specific ideology besides a general libertarian leftism. So if freedom and the working class are what you fight for, this flag is for you, no matter what the specific label may be.
The whitest white, or FFFFFF, is the colour of the anarchist A. I used a common public domain punk-style A, but I changed the formerly diagonal line to be horizontal instead. This was done to distinguish the A and make it less recognizable for people who have a keen eye for the specific punk-style A. On its own, the A represents anarchy, but in this flag it's meant to show the freedom of the working class and that they belong to no state. The reason I made it white is to represent pacifism. If you read any of my other polpookaposts, you might know how I feel about civilian casualties, unconditionally. This doesn't mean that I support pacifism blindly. Once all peaceful means have been thoroughly exhausted, pacifism is no longer an option. I kept it in the flag anyway to show that the working class is non-violent unless forced, and it contrasts nicely with the other colours.
The hydra of hands represents the collective character of the working class. The hands themselves are created from photographs of my own hands. I silhouetted them and touched them up to make them look a bit smoother. There are three left hands and two right hands. The fist I chose to base on my left hand as a nod to leftism. The center fist represents worker solidarity. It is central and larger than the other hands and holds no tools as it is the most important thing, I believe.
The lower-left hand holds a fountain pen to represent the intellectual artist who mostly writes, the upper-left holds a hammer to represent the industrial labourer, the upper-right holds a brush to represent the artist who makes physical pieces and installations, and the lower-right represents the agrarian labourer.
The hammer and sickle were appropriated from the Soviet flag and the pen and brush were free-to-use, no-attribution-required clipart.
I showed the flag to some of my young and progressive-minded friends, and some of them took issue with such explicit use of symbols that have been used by totalitarian communism. Slovakia has a communist past which is still a point of discussion and much of the youth feels apprehensive toward the former regime, which I don't fault them for. Authoritarianism, capitalism, nationalism, are all plagues that need to be purged from the human populace. They are the three pillars of harmful ideology.
Despite the symbols also being associated with totalitarian communism, I feel comfortable using them because symbols of the working class belong to the working class, and not to any specific ideology. Even if the hammer and sickle are most associated with the USSR, perpetrator of many atrocities against civilians, they do not belong to communism or to the Soviet State. They belong to us and we should be able to use them without any shame. There is a lot of stigma in Slovakia about being left-wing and you have to add thirty disclaimers if you don't support authoritarianism or SMER's cultural backwardism and corruption. The best way to fight back against this perception is to not be afraid of using the symbols associated with those negative perceptions, and explicitly use them in a positive manner that is antithetical to those negative perceptions.
EDIT: I have attempted the creation of a flipped-colour variant to some success
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