Ahead of Halloween, on the heels of several months of forest fires, hurricanes, and heat waves, we present two posters—”Capitalism Is the Dance of Death” and “Capitalism Thrives on Death.” Learn how to make wheatpaste and cover the walls of your community in these!

Capitalism Is the Dance of Death

From Greece to the Amazon, environmentalists and volunteer firefighters are risking their lives to protect ecosystems threatened by urban expansion, agribusiness, and industrially produced climate change. Yet the causes of these disasters are only accelerating, driven by a system that rewards profit at any price. We are swept up in a rhythm we cannot control, moving faster and faster towards our doom. Capitalism is the danse macabre, the dance of death.

The upper image is a scene from the conclusion of Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal, in which death, bearing a scythe, comes to drag the protagonists away to their deaths. The lower image shows the Alter Brigade, a volunteer firefighting group in the state of Pará, Brazil. They work especially along the Tapajós River in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. They are among hundreds of groups who have risked their lives to contain forest fires in Brazil during the historic drought of 2024, when the Tapajós River reached its lowest level on record. Not only the Amazon, but other Brazilian and Latin American biomes, such as the Pantanal, Cerrado, and Atlantic Forests are under threat.

Capitalism Thrives on Death—Death to Capitalism

The market takes life and leaves destruction in its wake. It forces you to sell away the irreplaceable hours of your life to enrich bosses and bureaucrats—death on the installment plan. It rewards landlords for evicting families, engineers for inventing war machines, politicians for gentrification and genocide.

Capitalism reduces forests to junk mail and ecosystems to ash. A rally for the stock market means hurricanes and heat waves for us. Species by species, continent by continent, it is turning the whole world into a graveyard. If we don’t abolish it, it will destroy everything we love. This is a clear-cut case of self-defense.

For another poster in this vein, you could revisit our “Capitalism is a death cult” poster from 2020.