MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Industrial Worker)

The iconic image of the pyramid scheme of the 1% (shown above) was first distributed by the legendary populist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union in 1911. Members of the IWW were nicknamed Wobblies, known for embracing marginal workers and their rambunctious, hell-raising organizing.

In fact, the IWW was so disdainful of oppressive capitalism that it became a major target of a government crackdown that eliminated them as an effective force in the '20s (until a recent reemergence following the Seattle WTO protests, including a contingent of IWW organizers at Starbucks.)

The reference site Historylink.org describes the heyday of the IWW:

The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, was founded in 1905 in Chicago, and by 1908 had become influential among migrant laborers in the Pacific Northwest. Members were dubbed "Wobblies" and soon earned a reputation for loud singing, radicalism, and militancy. IWW members and organizers played an active role in Northwest metal mining (in Idaho), logging, and agriculture. In 1909 the IWW Spokane free-speech fight was an early and legendary example of direct action in support of constitutional rights. The massive statewide lumber strike in the summer of 1917 brought the industry to a halt at the beginning of World War I. The union's bloody clashes with authorities in Everett (1916) and Centralia (1919) became the stuff of legend.

With its radical pugnacious passion, the IWW even found itself at odds with the trade unionism of the American Federation of Labor, according to Historylink.org. The IWW's most noted leader was "Big Bill" Haywood, who was a Marxist also aligned temporarily with the Socialist Party of the US, led by Eugene V. Debs.

That is all background for the pyramid/wedding cake image of how capitalism is supported at its foundation by the workers, enforced by the military and police, mollified by religion and ruled by an oligarchy - upon which sits the wealth that the 99% have been instrumental in generating for the 1%.

To put it another way, how could the 1% accumulate exponentially disproportionate sums of wealth without such a pyramid scheme? If only members of the 1% were alive on earth, how would they have any money at all? Just as a pyramid tip cannot exist without the foundation and rising triangular masonry support, the 1% cannot exist without a 99% sustaining its plutocratic lifestyle.

The IWW "Pyramid of the Capitalist System" is an adaptation of a Russian revolutionary image developed in the early 1900s, which was based on the rule of the tsar and his oligarchy. However, it had - and has - a universal application. The police and the military, for example, are interchangeable in the contemporary world on level two of the "cake." Religion as an enabler of exploitation of workers and the poor has not changed much over time. The rulers are no longer kings or tsars, but politicians elected in a charade of democracy (in most nations) that, as in the US, often are really electoral facades for plutocratic rule.

On the top of the cake - or pyramid if you will - is the bag of money. This symbolizes the vast hordes of cash in investments, real estate, offshore accounts, vacation homes, jewelry, hedge fund schemes and other commodities accumulated by the 1%. The list of places where the cash in that 1% moneybag goes is endless.

I recently authored "Radical Art Is an Act of Uncompromising Passionate Resistance" for Truthout, and the IWW print of 1911 strikes me as an exemplar of radical art that is directly accessible and understandable to the population at large. It is not caged in an art museum, but is a form of populist art that immediately impacts the viewer with an understanding of the economic structure of capitalism.

That may not make it great art in the canons of western civilization - and among those in the upper echelons of the establishment art world, who decide which artists are granted high-end art gallery acceptance. Rather, it is art that creates a new understanding of our relationship with the world in which we live, with the economic structure of our society and, increasingly, with the global world financial order.