Manifesto for an Oligarchic Era

Notes on Money

Jerzy Grotowski

1.I will never confuse money with worth or even with status.

2.I recognize that making money is (generally speaking) hard work and worthy of respect.

3.I have no difficulty with the complicated economic system we have where money is convertible to any number of goods and services.

4.I am highly suspicious of how money converts to public influence. This is one of the trickier domains of politics and admits of no easy answers.¹

5.I find it abhorrent when people see the intrusion of money into artistic or spiritual domains — say, an infusion of cash to build some vast building for an artistic hall; or an elevation of production values — and assume that that money all by itself confers value.

6.I will never assume that someone with more money has more right to an opinion than someone with less.²

7.I will never judge a work of art on its ‘production values’ — which in, almost every case, is a direct function of the budget — as opposed to the underlying idea or emotion or experience being expressed.³

8.I will educate myself on the role of money in public life — and understand that institutions need to be understood not as entities in themselves but largely as functions of their funding.

9.I do know the feeling of the world shrinking down to the point where the only thing that matters is paying rent, or getting to the next pay check, where all kinds of values and ambitions fall abruptly by the wayside. I recognize that people, often whole classes, can spend the entirety of their lives in this kind of precarity. I would never judge someone for taking a job they don’t really want, or doing work that is distasteful to them, out of that sense of precarity.

10.I know, on the other hand, the fear-based personality that runs through every white-collar workplace I have ever been in — people doing literally anything to keep their jobs or to preempt any possibility of losing their jobs and, maybe even more than that, people ascribing all sorts of virtues to anybody who is higher than them on the totem pole and various character failings to anybody who is lower — and there is no part of me that can respect that. While it is impossible to live outside of money, integrity and independence can be found only through building a sort of series of bulwarks within one’s own mind, in which money is given its due but the inherent inequalities of money are never to be confused with the inalienable equality that runs between all human beings, if not all living things.

Sam Kahn writes

Castalia

.

1. We seem to be at a particularly difficult moment on the borderland of money and politics. Elon Musk has started nakedly bribing swing voters to vote Republican. In The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells accurately notes that, “The Election Looks Like An Intramural Squabble Between Billionaires.” The ship seems to have completely sailed on any kind of campaign finance reform. All that can really be said is that there is nothing new here. Of the rampant inequality of the early part of the 20th century, Carroll Quigley writes, “In 1930, one corporation (American Telephone and Telegraph, controlled by J.P. Morgan) had greater assets than the total wealth in twenty-one states of the Union.” This is not so different from our current state of affairs where, as Bernie Sanders wrote in 2021, “Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined.” With that kind of wealth disparity, the intrusion of private wealth into politics becomes more like the heart of the system itself rather than a bug. The hard work of the Progressive and Social Democratic era in American politics did succeed, to a surprising extent, in sidelining figures like Morgan. The real political work of this era should go into antitrust and, broadly, into excising the flood of private influence over public policy.

2. Jerzy Grotowski has the perfect line on this. He says (speaking of theater), “The budget is the show.”

3. There was a recent dust-up about this on Substack between Becca Rothfeld and Udith Dematagoda, both of whose writing I like, over the Washington Post/LA Times’ cancellation of presidential endorsements. Dematagoda wrote, “Nothing more delusional than journalists still pretending that their essential function is anything other than serving the vested interests of the Oligarchy.” Rothfeld, who writes for The Washington Post replied, “I’m not sure what people who say things like this think the alternative is. no press at all? random people on substack who don’t have the resources to do real reporting?” My head agrees with Rothfeld — an expensive endeavor like reporting requires a financial structure which, as a practical matter, will have to rely on the funding of a mercurial owner like Jeff Bezos. But my heart is with Dematagoda. In the end, a newspaper delivers a particular institutional slant, and a newspaper that rests on the pockets and whims of somebody like Bezos may be worse for the body politic than simply an array of independent actors offering their own opinions and reportage. What is striking about the exchange is that Rothfeld, who seems to have been domesticated very quickly, really does seem to believe that opinion, as it’s laid out in an entity like The Post, somehow has more value than opinion just delivered by an individual.