Subway guerrilla artists.

San Francisco RICHMOND. FREMONT. PLEASANTON. PITTSBURG. DALY CITY. Those destinations flash across overhead display monitors at Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART) stops in San Francisco. But during the month of July, BART commuters blinked in wonder when another destination flashed overhead: CAPITALISM.

The word appeared in the same size and font as the destination logos. Below it, the phrase STOPS AT NOTHING appeared in the space that usually indicates the number of cars on an approaching train.

Guerrilla artists were behind the subway messages. A group calling themselves Together We Can Defeat Capitalism paid $800 in commercial fees for the fifteen-second ad, which ran every ten minutes during July at two key San Francisco BART stations: the Powell Street station in the heart of the city, and the Montgomery Street station in the financial district.

Together We Can Defeat Capitalism is the brainchild of Andy Cox, a thirty-seven-year-old civil engineer.

"The aim is to inject a contradictory message into a public space," says Cox. "It's intended to raise questions about a society where inequality is getting worse, where corporate control is so strong."

Cox, who lived in Britain until eight years ago, says he finds the U.S. attitude toward capitalism troubling. "People could read into Capitalism Stops At Nothing a pro-capitalist message if they wanted to," he says. "But in this country you seldom hear people advocating capitalism openly. People seem almost embarrassed to use the word, like under the surface there's something wrong with it."

The first day the slogan went up, BART received a number of calls from people who assumed the message was from the transit system.

"The first function of an ad is to get people's attention," says BART spokesperson Ron Rodriguez. "It looks like it worked."

Together We Can Defeat Capitalism has produced other messages over the past year, including a sticker project during the Batman and Robin movie release in the summer of 1997.

Arguing that the caped crusaders "are, in fact, social revolutionaries," the group created its own sticker with the Batman logo and the message: The Revolutionary Bat Government In Exile.

Another large poster that popped up around town mimicked Citibank's "In Your Dreams" ad campaign. The revised poster featured a color photograph of Che Guevera. In Your Dreams Everyone Is Treated Equally, it proclaimed.

For more information, contact Andy Cox at [phone]. Or e-mail him at [e-mail].