The red star of communism is one of the most familiar signs in modern politics. Still, there seems to be surprisingly little known about its origin. Like everything else that we encounter repeatedly, and has been present already from our childhood, the red star of communism appears palpable. But on reflection, this choice of symbol is of course far from evident: why on earth do a star painted red symbolise the movement that aim to abolish class societies?! During the last year, I have taken every opportunity to ask historians, even specialists in the history of socialism, if they knew the answer to this enigma, but they have left me empty-handed.
If we conveniently start our investigation with consulting Wikipedia, we learn about the occurrence of the read star on the Red army uniforms in 1917. We also encounter a competing theory explaining that Trotsky brushed the green star of Esperanto red. The first theory doesn’t really seem to answer the question about the choice of symbolism, however. (Maybe the theory implies that stars are frequently used symbols on uniforms, which I guess is true, at least nowadays, and painting them red an obvious choice for socialist?) The second theory just comes across as long-fetched. Let me suggest another hypothesis.
In 1908, Alexander Bogdanov published Красная звезда (translated into English as Red star: The first Bolshevik Utopia in 1984). Through the eyes of the most advanced socialist revolutionary on the planet earth, Leonid, the novel describes a utopian socialist society on Mars, the red-coloured planet. The society the reader gets familiar with, and the Martians portrayed, are fascinating and the novel truly worth reading. Could it be that this popular novel – written by a person that for while, by some, was depicted as Lenin’s chief rival as the chief ideologue of the Bolsheviks – became the inspiration for the symbolic adaptation of the red star? Somewhere out there, there must be someone to know the answer to enigma of the birth of red star.
(Nota bene, that the red star on this newyear postcard is, for some reason, a pentagon.)
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 
Socialist heraldic designs, the earliest examples going back to late 19th century organizations and fraternities, display a fascinating mixture of observance to established rules of heraldry and consciously rebellion against these rules. Beside is an emblem painted by Walter Crane for “The World Order of Socialists”, a fraternity/trade union I believe only existed in his mind.* The heraldic shield is substituted for the rose, which at the same time functions as a kind of mantling. The handshake, typical for trade union iconography, stretches over the entire globe, divided in rational quadrangles. The sun is rising.
Finally, most experimental and rebellious, is the coat of arms for a Hungarian city, designed in the 1970s.*** Op art goes commie.
Heart in a Heartless World 