Quotes

Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

In common with all socialists, the anarchists hold that the private ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time; that it is condemned to disappear: and that all requisites for
production must, and will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by the producers of wealth. And…they maintain that the ideal of the political organization of society is a condition of things where the functions of government are reduced to minimum….(and) that the ultimate aim of society is the reduction of the functions of government to nil—that is, to a society without government, to an-archy.

Education is modeled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it.

This is perhaps best exemplified by Christoph Büchel’s contribution to the Sculpture Park, several examples of his new series 1% which were placed, unmarked, around the fair’s grounds. Comprising six shopping carts, each filled with all of the belongings of a homeless New Yorker, purchased by Büchel for $300 to $500 apiece, the carts are being sold by Büchel’s gallery Hauser & Wirth, with prices ranging from $30,000 to $50,000; the “1%” in question refers to the fact that the amount Büchel paid for each cart represents 1% of its new value, once inscribed as a work of art. Though there is, I suppose, an argument to be made for the project as a critique of art-market capitalism, in which the authorial touch of the artist can transform objects that are otherwise considered not only worthless, but also downright squalid by most, into things of monetary and cultural value; it might function better if the artist himself—and his gallery—didn’t profit so heavily from it. Whatever Büchel’s aims for the project might have been, it struck me as exploitative

It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on — because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.

But nevertheless, there is a complex system of filters in the media and educational institutions which ends up ensuring that dissident perspectives are weeded out, or marginalized in one way or another. And the end result is in fact quite similar: what are called opinions “on the left” and “on the right” in the media represent only a limited spectrum of debate, which reflects the range of needs of private power – but there’s essentially nothing beyond those “acceptable” positions.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system…and then present a range of debate within that framework – so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

But the point is, if things ever come to a crunch in the United States, this massive part of the population ( Fundamentalist Christians ) – I think it’s something like a third of the adult population by now – could be the basis for some kind of a fascist movement, readily. For example, if the country sinks deeply into a recession, a depoliticized population could very easily be mobilized into thinking that it’s somebody else’s fault: “Why are our lives collapsing? There have to bad guys out there doing something for things to be going so badly” – and the bad guys can be Jews, or homosexuals, or blacks, or Communists, whatever you pick. If you can whip people into irrational frenzies like that, they can be extremely dangerous: that’s what 1930’s fascism came from, and something like that could very easily happen here.