SEZ 2024 – 43 x 38 x 4cm, plaster, jute, wire
Freeports, Special Economic Zones (SEZs), and Charter Cities are all experiments in privatization, and corporate governance, they are variations on extreme wealth accumulation at the expense of local communities and the public sector. The whole point of Brexit was to opt out of rules and protections so the asset-classes can compete in the UK’s 86 free zones. What’s concerning now is that Starmer’s changed Labour Party expunged the left and has opted for a sinister model of politics, that of the corporation, you are not a citizen anymore, you are a customer. In his book ‘Crack-Up Capitalism’, Quinn Slobodian writes about small acts of secession that lead to the formation of dergulated SEZs, I think of these acts like a build-up of mini traumas over decades as neoliberalism erases socialism from democracy. Neoliberalism was eagerly adopted by Clinton, Schroder, Blair, Starmer, and Reeves. As each public sector is eroded, it crumbles as defunding pushes them all to the brink of collapse, this is the point where corporations seize on the public sectors demise and ‘rescue’ democracy from its failings.