34% 2024 – 7 x 22 x 32cm, stone, trace plaster, sheet plastic, cardboard, paper, letraset
In a new book called Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, historian Quinn Slobodian chronicles the efforts of billionaires to create “alternative political arrangements at a small scale” through “acts of secession and fragmentation, carving out liberated territory within and beyond nations.”
The enclave or zone is the perfect framework for exiting democracy because it carves up a country into smaller easily manageable units where patchworks of corporate sovereignties replaces a country’s collective sovereignty (people power). Privately run Special Economic Zones (SEZs) can function under deregulated laws free from the ‘oppressive constraints’ of Big Government. Neoliberal billionaires such as Peter Thiel claim ‘freedom and democracy are no longer compatible’, he and many other oligarchs seek ‘exit strategies’ from democracy, strategies that were developed in the 1950s/60 as radical fringe ideology, born out of a rebuke to F.D.Roosevelt’s 1932 New Deal that saw nearly 4 decades of managed capitalism, a fair and balanced distribution of wage share and profit share of GDP, an egalitarian economic system, state provision of sustainable well built social housing, functioning healthcare systems, and good governance.
