My second example is the cover of the very first issue from 1906 of renowned anarchist Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth. At a verdant tree stands a young man and woman, maybe Ask and Embla. At the roots of the tree lays the fetters that they have just liberated themselves from. The man salutes the rising sun. They are both naked and the era seems to be simultaneously before the birth of civilisation and after its termination.
Despite the fact that Walter Crane now and then played with baccantic motives and portrayed ludic games out in the wild, the more carnal aspects of the thiasos were alien to the nature of his art. Likewise, the humans on this cover (by an unknown artist) lack any sense of sinfulness. Yet, the cover image, with the erected tree between the seperated lands, easily opens up for interpretations of a sexual sort. In any case, some kind of emancipated, physical senusalism is cherished. Reinforcing these arcadian qualities is the fact that whilst Crane maintained a hierarchical order, with the tree in the middle of the image, the visual “movement” on the cover is rather horizental: the glance of the viewers drift away from tree and mankind. The tree trunk may be pleasant to lean against, but it is the distant rising sun – and the utopian land its brings with it – that is the true centre of the world.
courtyards – has in the poster been substituted for a 
I’m reading the final draft for 


Female socialists take part in fighting for the cause, but their bodies is moreover regularly used as propagandistic icons. In contrast to the iconic liberal painting La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, the female socialists not only instigate and lead but take active part in the violent struggle. The essential message of these photos is thus the emancipation of women from enclosed homes, restrictive garments and patriarchal codes of conduct by martial empowerment.
* Photos of
Conspiracy theories about occult origins of socialism circulate on the Internet. Socialists who have been initiated into freemasonry or accidental similarities between socialist and esoteric iconography are taken as proof of an occult, virtually satanic, genesis of the worker’s movement. Not everything in these far-fetched theories is false however, as the existence of The Noble and Holy Order of the
halfway between a pair of compasses and an A – “A” for Asociation/Association, I take it. It’s like the pair of compasses (and maybe the square/ruler) builds the letter. (There is probably also a plumb bob.)
Inspired by the masons, the above-mentioned Knights of Labor used an emblem called Great Seal of Knighthood, depicting simply an encircled triangle. (Here represented in the animated Sherlock Holmes and the Valley of Fear from 1984 as the ominous emblem of The Eminent Order of Freemen.) The triangle is a good start on the way to the letter A as in the anarchist A… After the collapse of the Knights of Labor, the anarcho-syndicalist 