A Pictographic Summary of the Capitalist System

Here’s an amusing reminder how the world looked to nineteenth-century leftists and left-anarchists — a pyramidal chart of the levels of oppression in the capitalist system.

Much like those passages in Marx where he gets carried away and starts calling businessmen “vampires,” you almost have to find this sort of cartoonish exaggeration cute, even if it did lead to the murders of 100 million people under communism in the twentieth century, the bloodiest scourge ever visited upon humanity (and still seen as noble and idealistic by many leftists today nonetheless).

On a more technical/philosophical note, I think it’s worth noticing that only the bottom two layers of the pyramid diagram actually have anything to do with economics directly — the rest is just a typical case of blaming capitalism for all the things done wrong by the Powers That Be, a scapegoating process that you may have noticed continuing into the twenty-first century.