Eat The Rich

More anthropomorphic animals! And another silly idea not related to dinosaurs! This will be a short one, since there isn’t much to say that isn’t already in the drawing itself. After my silly Iguana Jones piece, I thought of a way to graphically represent the popular “Eat The Rich” slogan that wasn’t the ubiquitous skull-and-crossed-cutlery design (although I still wanted it to be there). So I thought that depicting anthropomorphic animals would be a good idea, as they are very commonly (and often successfully) used for political satire and social commentary (George Orwell’s Animal Farm novella and Pink Floyd’s Animals album are two examples that immediately come to mind).

 

My take on the "skull-and-crossed-cutlery" logo for the Eat The Rich slogan.

Although it’s often used as a markedly leftist/socialist slogan, the phrase actually comes from Revolution-era France, and has a broader meaning of a warning against oppression and exploitation of the lower classes, as they form the majority of the population, and an eventual revolt or even a full-blown revolution will always end up badly for their rulers. The powerful remain in their position only because a wide majority implicitly agrees on their power. Break that equilibrium from the top by going too far, and you are most probably dead. Which, of course, is what eventually happened when the Revolution started in 1789, with the nobility being wiped out via guillotine… only to be replaced by the bourgeoisie. Or the Russian Revolution in 1917, when (again) the noble class was replaced by the Soviet Socialist parties in their respective republics. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, as Pete Townshend wrote.

The phrase is attributed to Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the full quote being “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich”. The funny thing is that, although it was initially conceived to criticize the nobility, after the Reign of Terror brought by the Revolution it was recycled to attack the new ruling class, who had clearly failed in solving the inequality and poverty problems they allegedly intended to address in the first place. And of course a similar situation happened later on in the USSR and most of Eastern Europe, where the theoretically Socialist governments imposed by the Soviets also became a new form of oppression despite their original intent on destroying social privileges and giving power to the people.

Both real stories pretty much outline the plot of Animal Farm. Orwell himself was, after all, a disenchanted communist who realized that a minority of humans will always end up oppressing a majority of their peers, accumulating power and resources and keeping them for themselves, regardless of how noble the ideas a political system is based on seem to be at first. That is unless rules are established to force some level of control over the ruling class by the general population. This realization turned him into a staunch anti-Stalinist and a democratic socialist. Hungarian-German writer Arthur Koestler had a similar epiphany, but instead of anthropomorphic animals he used the slave revolt led by Spartacus against the Roman republic as his chosen allegory when he wrote The Gladiators in 1939, in which the Thracian leader of the slaves goes from trying to establish a city-state where there are no ranks or privilege and all goods are equally shared, to behave like a despot ready to sacrifice as many lives as needed in order to keep such a dream alive. Idealism gone wrong is a staple in Koestler’s work as much as it is in Orwell’s.

With all that in mind, I chose to represent today’s ruling class, the rich and powerful, as a scavenger (vulture), a predator (shark) and an opportunist (pig), crammed into a bowl and ready to be eaten by those they exploit. And I quite like the way it turned out. Dressing them as an army officer, a banker/oligarch and a politician was the cream on the cake, and I don’t think it needs any further explanation. Hope you like it and if you don’t, forget it and move on. I’m returning to dinosaurs on my next post anyway.

That’s it for today. Take care and see you all very soon.

 

Revised, more subtle version without the slogan.