The Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes unpacks one of the most enduring images in radical labor iconography: the 1911 Pyramid of Capitalist System, first published in the IWW’s newspaper, the Industrial Worker. It takes Marx and Engels seriously — the bourgeoisie really did accomplish wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids — and asks what those powers could build in other hands.
The poster reads downward as a hierarchy of exploitation:
- Capitalism itself sits at the top, a giant sack embroidered with $$$, resting on politicians and monarchs (“we rule you”)
- Below them the priests (“we fool you”), then the military and police (“we shoot at you”), then the rich dining on stolen surplus value (“we eat for you”)
- At the base, the lynchpin of the whole structure: the workers (“we work for all, we feed all”) — some bent under the load like Atlas, others already waving the red flag
The image had a transatlantic genealogy:
- A 1900 Belgian Labor Party cartoon of a pyramide à renverser — a pyramid that must be overthrown
- Nicolas Lokhoff’s 1901 caricature of Imperial Russian society, whose workers carry a red banner: “to live free, to die for the struggle”
- The 1911 American version, published by Nedeljkovich, Brashich and Kuharich — Serbian immigrants in Cleveland whose International Publishing Company specialized in socialist imagery
A century on, the poster remains the clearest one-page answer to the question of who actually holds up the economy — and a reminder that its publishers’ answer was not reform but overthrow.