With manufacturing less than 5% of workers in core countries, and without a peasantry (more on that in a sec) the hammer and sickle symbol while iconic feels stuck in nostalgia to me. At the same time nothing I can come up with has the same resonance.
However I did come up with something silly I was hoping someone could sketch! Thinking it could be a spatula to represent service workers, a caduceus (shocked i got that right on the first try) to represent care workers over a steering wheel to represent transportation and logistics?
Also to the point about the peasantry, while there aren't peasants in most of the imperial core there is often a group of extremely oppressed non-citizen migrant farm workers whose experience cannot go unacknowledged. A really effective organization committed to justice and some vision of socialism must organize among them too because they deserve dignity and a decent life too.
I don't disagree with any of your points, but this sentence jumped out at me:
Also to the point about the peasantry, while there aren’t peasants in most of the imperial core there is often a group of extremely oppressed non-citizen migrant farm workers whose experience cannot go unacknowledged.
Seems like a sickle would be relevant to them in terms of symbolism, no?
You're absolutely right! I guess I overlooked that because a lot of my ag work has either been in orchards just picking by hand or else mechanized...I haven't actually really seen sickles anywhere. But in terms of symbolism that's absolutely the best thing for it. On the other hand, even including non-citizen farm laborers (really struggling on humanizing wording) ag. makes up less than or about the same share of employment as manufacturing.