I was reading this post and thought it would be an interesting idea to make a design for. So I made a scratch design of the logo, which I have attached.
What do you guys think?
It's kinda neat, but it misses the point of the hammer and sickle. By the time that imagery was adopted, the hammer and sickle were already kinda outdated. There was industrial means of production and industrial farm equipment (though they weren't necessary super widely spread yet). The meaning of the hammer and sickle isn't literally the hammer and sickle, but the representative primitive tools of the proletariat.
The hammer forges the sickle and the sickle feeds the labor that creates it with a hammer.
It's a really cool design though
The thing is, even though they were outdated tools, they were representative of an industrial society. We aren't an industrial society anymore. We're an information age society. People are working in job sectors whose adjacent jobs didn't even exist when the hammer and sickle was created. In addition, especially in the imperial core states, there aren't really a whole lot of industrial workers anymore.
There is functionally, three primary outputs in Imperial Core states (whose socialists this symbol was made for):
Agriculture, usually on the backs of immigrants.
Service, on the back of service workers.
And the communications industry, on the back of IT people, which the entire world's economy and industry no longer works without.
And the symbols of those professions are, with the exception of the sickle for agriculture, not the same as the socialists that came before it. So I decided the best thing to do was to pick new ones, for the workers of the society we denizens of the imperial core now find ourselves in.
The sickle, of course, remains the symbol of agriculture.
The gear is the symbol of service workers, whose job is to keep the cogs of our world spinning.
And the microprocessor, whose existence is responsible for the IT field.
These three fields run on each other. IT runs on service, which runs on IT, and both run on agriculture, which in turn runs on the other two.
We're still an industrial society, just an imperialist one. The industry that creates commodity and drives the social production is just now mostly done in colonized territory.
The only way to really symbolize the imperial proletariat is through internationalism and anti-imperialism. The work we do is unproductive for the most part, and our goals should be the abolition of our forms of unproductive labor.
I’m partial to driving wheel as symbol instead of sickle tbh, but it’s difficult to add
i like it. my brain immediately says it's the revolutionary flag for the sentient robot uprising in 2320
It's good! I can almost see myself dying during the revolution with a patch of this stitched onto my coat.
I do love the gear focuss that things like CPUSA and the Canadian comunist Larry have going on.
Spiffy.
My brain wants this to be rotated 45 degrees counter clockwise but it won't tell me why.
It looks cool but there’s too many competing concepts and it’s a little too literal. There’s probably some way to combine a few of these ideas, focusing on their overlap instead of their individual traits. Maybe you try communicating “microchip” without actually drawing one. And so on.
Or you could do the opposite and add a bunch more detail and symbolism. Full maximalist, have fun and go nuts. Right now it’s in that in-between space where it just looks like a mash-up of icons.
Good start though!
Love this! I would mirror the surrounding elements and rotate it so the sickle sits at the traditional angle to emphasize continuity at the past. Also if there is some way to make the sickle shape stand out more? With the weight of the rest of the gears, it took me a long time to not just read it as an abstract circle. Alternatively, there could easily be text across the top which would make this a great org logo for a left wing tech group!
