The composition shows a queue at a music festival. The people waiting are drawn in punk, goth and hippie styles, representatives of subcultures historically defined by their stance against capitalism. At the front of the queue stands a T-shirt stall, and the shirt for sale carries a single line: “Destroy Capitalism”. It costs thirty dollars.

The joke speaks for itself. People who want to destroy the system pay money to that same system in order to express that wish. Opposition itself has become a product you can buy off the shelf. Here Banksy is not targeting power, but opposition itself, and he does it without any explanation, simply by drawing a queue patiently waiting.

For this reason, the piece is sometimes also known as “Destroy Capitalism”. The text on the T-shirt is more memorable than the title itself.

The choice of setting is not random either. Since the sixties, the festival has been described as a space where counterculture shows itself: freedom, solidarity, distance from the system. Today it is a large industry, run on ticket prices, sponsored stages and branded areas. Banksy turns his camera directly on this transformation.

The piece is a 2006 three colour screenprint. It is part of a set of six prints made for Banksy’s Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles, alongside Grannies, Applause, Trolleys, Sale Ends and Morons.

The prints were produced at the Modern Multiples workshop in Los Angeles, and the screens were destroyed once the exhibition ended. The edition consists of 500 unsigned prints, 150 signed prints and seventeen artist’s proofs. At the exhibition itself only around a hundred of each print were offered for sale, priced at five hundred dollars each. A signed artist’s proof sold for 126,000 pounds in March 2021.

One end of the joke always points back at the artist himself. This image, which criticises capitalism, has ended up as a collector’s item, its price multiplying many times over.