The colors black and red have been used by anarchists since at least the late 1800s, though generally used by anarcho-
communists. The
flag was used as the symbol of the anarcho-
syndicalists by the
CNT during the Spanish Civil
War. The black represents
anarchism and the red represents leftist and socialist ideals. 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"
Class War, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in
society consequent to socio-economic competition among the
social classes or between rich and poor. The forms of class
conflict include direct violence such as
wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations, indirect violence such as deaths from
poverty and starvation, illness and unsafe working conditions, and economic coercion. In the political and economic philosophies of
Karl Marx and
Mikhail Bakunin, class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting
radical social and political changes for the social majority. The anarchist Mikhail
… Read more Bakunin said that the class struggles of the
working class, the peasantry, and the working poor were central to realizing a social
revolution to depose and replace the ruling class, and the creation of libertarian
socialism. In political
science, socialists and Marxists use the term class
conflict to define a social class by its relationship to the means of production, such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The social control of labor and of the production of goods and services, is a political contest between the
social classes. Marx's theory of history proposes that class
conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as
class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the
working class is viewed by them as inevitable under plutocratic capitalism.