At the international conference of REVOLUTION on July 28, 2007 in Liberec, Czech Republic, a big majority of members decided that we need a new logo. A dozen proposals were submitted and it took several weeks to hold a vote amongst all our members internationally. But in the final run-off, a two-thirds majority voted for the logo you see above.

We decided to use the hammer and sickle as a symbol of the socialist revolution, of the alliance between workers and peasants to smash capitalism. Some people will object that today, only a small part of the working class uses hammers – for the modern working class, a better symbol might be a robot arm on the assembly line, a telephone headset in a call center, or a uniform hat at a fast-food restaurant. And there are not so many real peasants, more capitalist farmers and agricultural workers.

But this is only true in the industrially developed imperialist countries. We are a world movement, and in semicolonial countries it is not unusual for workers to use hammers on the assembly line or sickles on the field.

The hammer and sickle are often associated with the Soviet Union under Stalin and other so-called “communist” states. We certainly don’t define these states, which were ruled by a bureaucracy which suppressed workers’ democracy, as socialism. But since these Stalinist states have collapsed or re-introduced capitalism, this symbol has once again become more popular amongst radical youth. As can be seen at any protest of the anticapitalist movement, the hammer and sickle represent the complete negation of capitalist globalization.

So our logo has a traditional element. But the logo is also a stencil which can be made with spray paint. This gives us a possibility to make our red flags cheaply and change the aesthetics of the cities around us. Graffiti is a youth culture which can be taken up by revolutionaries.

In the Czech Republic and other countries where a fiercely anticommunist mood exists, we will use a slightly modified version of the logo which is not as recognizable as the traditional communist symbol.

We will always be a bit nostalgic for our old logo, but we felt is was necessary to make our Marxist orientation more clear in the logo itself. Aditionally, we wanted to distance ourselves a bit more from our former parent party, the LFI. The old Revo logo was invented by an older LFI fulltime functionary, without any participation by young activists.

For this reason, an LFI’ler claimed they owned the copyright on this design and threatened us with a lawsuit for copyright infringement! (Unbelievable, but true – see the document below.) We reject copyright laws and we don’t believe bourgeois courts should ever be invited into the workers’ movement or the left. We of course will not let ourselves be blackmailed by such legal threats, but at the same time we didn’t want to cling to an uninspired logo, simply out of spite.

Since we feel our name and logo make clear that we are revolutionary and communist, we also agreed to describe our group simply as an “independent youth organization”.

At the international conference, we also decided on theses explaining the importance of independent youth organizations for the revolutionary movement. The “Theses on independent youth organizations” are available on our web site.

REVOLUTION International Coordination, September 16, 2007

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LFI’s copyright

An LFI member wrote to a member of Revo on January 18: “I think we should have the abuse of our symbols banned [by a court].” As the Revo member objected: “You can’t do anything, because Revo doesn’t have a legal foundation”, the answer was: “There’s still a copyright”, since “when an individual creates a picture, this person has a copyright on the work of art”. Finally the LFI member threatened: “You’ll get the rest of it in writing” and “You’ll be surprised!”. As the Revo member answered, this is “like the MLPD” (a Maoist party in Germany that also uses bourgeois courts to persecute their political opponents), the LFI member was even more absurd: “you abuse our flags – just like the national socialists abuse the symbols of the left”. We have had to put up with a lot of insults from the LFI (Anarchists, Stalinists, economists, maximalists, bourgeois liberals) but a comparison with the nazis is a highpoint even for these professional mudslingers.

Two remarks should be made about this chat: 1) the original Revo logo was invented by a former LFI fulltimer who is no longer an LFI member. He hasn’t threatened us with a copyright lawsuit and we doubt he will threaten the LFI with one. 2) Apparently the LFI leadership was not so stupid as to consider a lawsuit in a bourgeois court a legitimate means of dispute within the left. But the very fact that a long-time member of the LFI would make such threats – combined with the threats of physical violence they’ve made against our members – shows the amazingly low political level within this “cadre organization”.