June 25, 2025 • 27 mins
James and Andrew continue their discussion on different ways of splitting up the world, and what they tell us about the way their proponents see the world.
Sources:
David Graeber - Debt: The First 5000 Years
Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation
Immanuel Wallerstein - The Modern World System
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hey, and welcome to take it up. And here I'm
Andrew Sage and I'm back with James.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It's me again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome back.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Yeah, good to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Great to have you once again, offer you to have me.
I'm not sure the dynamic is here.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, yeah, I mean there were. It's nice to be together.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's an egalitarian dynamic. You know, we're both having each
other in a sense.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah, we're sharing this podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah. I think there are a lot of concepts that
it's good to grasp to get a sense of how
this world works. Kind of continuing from the previous episode
where we spoke about all the different ways that we
can divide up the world and understanding the world and
so on. Today's sort of pursuit of that endeavor. I
(00:50):
wanted to get into a particular concept that is so
benign yet supervsive in this system, and it's the idea
of externalization. Do you get what I mean by that?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, like making people of things other.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yes, But specifically, I think I want to address how
capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other, yeah, onto
the someone or something else, shifting the costs of particular actions,
either environmentally socially or economically. I think the easiest example
I could point too is how a company may choose
to save on disposal costs by dumping their waste into
(01:27):
a river, which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem,
and the health of all those human and non human
lives who rely upon or live near that river. Do
you have another example you could probably point to?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean there are lots of them. One of
them that I think of a lot is like how
in the US, rightly, products that we can't recycle or
that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere
else to be dumped. Like, our consumption creates so much
excess and so much waste, and we can't be confronted
with that waste, so we tip it to play. This
is where people consume less.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it's uh, I mean you see, I don't know
if you've seen any of the footage of some of
these places, their whole costs of fast fashion waste for
example in Africa, or just eweiste leaching into the soil.
It's really quite tragic. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I remember someone on net once was telling me that
like one of the things that children did where they
had come from, was they would pick through e waste,
specifically charging cables to get the copper out.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
This would result in them having these terrible injuries to
their fingers because they were like prying the cables apart,
and you know, over time they would get little pieces
of both shards of metal embedded their fingertips.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Town. Yeah, that's terrible.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, it's a pretty pretty grim condemnation of a way
of consuming.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, it's messed up. It's messed up, and I think
when you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to
unsee it. When you see that impact onto the world,
it's hard to unsee it. But that's part of how
this concept thrives, this externalization thrives. It's by obscure in itself. Yeah,
So that's what we kind of want to do with
this episode, get up a full breadth of its history,
(03:14):
it's present, and its apparent future, so that we can
not see all the different ways that this occurs. Now,
this pass and on of costs may have always been
an option on the table, but we can see that
a lot of traditional economies did not go that route
because traditional economies were often human economies. As David Greeber
(03:37):
used the term in Debt. The first five thousand years,
you know, these were economies focused on human relationships. They
were embedded in kinship and land and customs and obligation
and reciprocity. So what you owed was really financial. It
was to enable your elder, your clan plan itself, and
so you could not really avoid the costs of your
(04:00):
actions on others, because that was at the center of
it all others. But the transition to capitalism was a
shift in what the economy was. It enforced the idea
that everything is or should be up for sale. The
economist called Polani called it the Great Transformation, when land, labor,
and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if
(04:24):
they were products for sale. Plenty saw the modern state
and the capitalist market economy as a package deal. Graybot
also made this very clear in Debt as well. For
this new kind of economy to take hold, people had
to change how they thought about work and trade and
relation with each other and see in the world, those
conditions had to be created by the state. So you
(04:46):
could look at how electritional economies and commons had to
be disrupted to force the shift. In England, you had
people pushed off of common land that they had use
for centuries, and they had no choice but to sell
their labor to survive and go in to the factories.
We have to remember that it never started in the factories.
That actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people
(05:08):
and from place started through that colonization process. Already amplified
through that colonization process extracting the wealth of people or
of labor, of land, of resources from one place to
concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and
costs and se Colonialism was capitalism sort of training ground
(05:29):
for externalization. You plunder a little bit over here, you
profit a little bit over there. And this is really
where we get to the core of capitalist externalization. With
the shifting of the costs on a small scale that
looks like the river pollution example. From the global scale,
it looks like what will steam is getting into with
world systems theory. How the wealth and stability the coronations
(05:51):
depends on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and
genocide and ecological ruin all of these are costs that
create the wealth that the core enjoys. But it's made
invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an
ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people,
the actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can
(06:14):
feel them, and that demands a level of responsibility on
your part. But when you take the things that have
been woven into relationship and turn them into plain old transactions,
those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences,
make them someone else's problem. So, yeah, cloven is very
(06:36):
affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid
and overworked. The smartphone. It's convenient, it's useful, successible, but
it's parts of mind and the dangerous conditions. You know,
your food delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days, but
(06:57):
it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal.
So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions,
of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist. It's
just externalized. So it could be rendered invisible to one
point of view. Yeah, and it's not something that can
be set up without a fight. You know, people would
(07:19):
resist enclosures were met with resistance. Colonizations make with resistance
and even to the workers strike. You know, people do
fight back. It's not just this sweeping and nevitable process.
But because of the collaboration between state and capital, that
collusion of status and capitalist interests, the whole system has
managed to persist thus far. It's a very formidable forward
(07:42):
dealing with So we can set it back here and there,
but we have not defeated it yet. Yeah, and I
say yet, because you know, as we get into there
are ways to loosen its script. I think what's fascinating
(08:04):
about capitalistic externalization today is just how much it has
skilled and got more sophisticated in terms of the work
that makes the world run. The most essential labor is
often the most invisible and undervalued and precurious labor. You know,
where we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves,
(08:27):
the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work is
necessary to build infrastructure, such as in the Gulf States
where you have litual modern slavery taking place to build
up those countries where they're talking about gig work, transportation delivery,
that sort of thing, or reproductive work stuff like what
it's called housewife y or domestic labor. So you can
(08:49):
think of other examples as well.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yeah, I like the one you gave about your cell phone, right,
like those rare earth materials. Like, it's not some slick,
safe mining operation that brings serves out the ground. It's
human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Exactly, poisoned people. It's not even necessarily a quick death.
It's often a slow, yeah, lifelong death.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
And it poisons that part of the world for generator.
We could stop right now, and it would take generations
for the damage to stop, exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
That's the thing about destruction, right, destruction can be very quick,
as the rebuilding that can take a long time. Yeah,
you know, if you look at how quickly Gazo has
been flattened versus how long it's going to take to
recover from that, it's like nine and.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
D yeah, yeah, yeah like it. I mean I'm very
familiar with that particular example, right, Like how quickly you
can destroy something with a bomb from an aeroplane and
how hard people had to work to build it. In
October of twenty three, I was in Kurdistan, and like,
I know how hard people work to build at Rijaba, right,
to try and build a little island of democracy without
(10:02):
the state, in a place where the state has been
weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab,
and even against Arab people who didn't agree with the
state's particular line a thing. And one night, you know,
like the power station has gone, they bombed while I
(10:23):
was there, like an oxygen bottling plant for people who
need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently, and like it's
gone now. And now to build that back up in
a world where you are largely alienated from the system
of states in capital, right, you're trying to build stuff
back up as much as you can from networks of
(10:43):
solidarity and ingenuity, and that takes years and yeah, yeah,
but it's not visible.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental
tool of something like that. Yeah yeah, Oh that can
be a setback as well. Yeah, when we're not even
talking about resources, we're talking about Yeah that loss, Yeah
that that that pain, Yeah, yeah, a pain. It made
even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who were
(11:13):
responsible for upkeeping such something like that also whiped up
by that same bomb. It makes it all the more
difficult to recover.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yeah, or drawn away right by the conditions of becoming
a liverable. So you have this like brain drain, where
people who have skills that are considered to be commercially
valuable have an opportunity to leave. The people who who
don't have those have the opportunity to stay or don't
have the opportunity to leave, I guess, like or even like,
(11:41):
you know, the US made a different version of externalization,
I guess, But like the US made a big thing
of how it defeated the Islamic state in you know,
twenty nineteen, I guess. I can't remember when the last
Atlan Alba goose was, I think twenty nineteen. But like
we externalized it off Lord, the cost of that struggle, Yeah,
(12:02):
the dying part, Like, yeah, US pilots did a whole
lot of killing, but the dying part that, yeah, we
externalized that right to Kurdish and Arab and the Syrian fodder. Yeah,
to people who would whose lives didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
And like I remember a time standing in a cemetery
there just looking at lines and lines of graves, and
I just left the house of someone who's thirteen year
old son was killed in a drone strike and just
thinking like each of these is a mother burying her child.
That like we essentially asked for the most part, right like,
(12:41):
to do that. We said, hey, what you guys do
the dying part because we don't want to like it
kind of sucks, sucks for the United States and Britain
in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we'd like someone else to
die now. And then you know, here we are a
few years later, right and like the night before Turkey
has been bombing the place where I'm looking at these graves,
(13:02):
and the US ain't doing shit to help, right Like,
even though these people had like made this massive sacrifice,
the US wasn't like, yeah, we're your friends. It's not
a friendship relationship, you know, Like it's it's like you said,
I forget an interaction, look like a yeah, purchase more
than a solidarity based thing.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, And once again we really see that core externalizing
its costs onto periphery. And we see that both in
the sense of on the global stage between countries or
between populations cores and peripheres, but even internally within countries.
As we've mentioned in the previous episode talking about that
(13:48):
divide between the core and the periphery where you have
but a lot of people have called the economies biggest trick,
you know, your socialized failures and privatize profits. Yeah. So
in two thousand and eight to find and Shall crash,
people were evicted, but the balanks got built out and
the early stages of COVID corporations got relief. Gig workers
(14:10):
were exposed. Yeah. You know, in the process of austerity
resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to
balance the books, but there's never any consideration of or
the straight cuting profits. Yeah, and that's the one thing
that can never go down.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I think or even like within you know,
we all all food come from the soil at some point, right,
But like I can't tell you how many people I
know that my family are in agriculture, right, who have
died or lost limbs on farms. It's the same is
true if you're in the mining industry, right, Like, that's
(14:50):
not something that's visible. You know, you don't like go
to the supermarket and bite your bread, right, and you
don't think that someone got their arm in the combine
harvester when they were doing the fee that went to
the flower that made your loaf of bread that costs
one dollars ninety cents, and now that person doesn't have
an arm.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
It's invisibilized.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
I mean, it's the same thing when you see like
these natural disasters taking on place, right, floods or burnings,
right when California is on file and when Pakistan is
completely flooded out. Those are the consequences of the actions
of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system.
And meanwhile, the corporations are getting carbon credits to continue
(15:31):
doing what they were always doing. Yeah, you know, and
so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying
for carbon credits, but the actual consequences of what they're
doing are being paid for by the communities that are
displaced by the consequences of this climate change.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And we never talk about when we talk
about migration, right, Like that's a great the climate change
is a great example that we don't talk about how
the bulk of people coming to the United States are
coming from the place is most heavily impacted by climate change.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few
years ago, and there will be no more Marshall Islands
within our lifetime, yeah, because of the consequences and massive
corporations have made, but like they don't have any agency.
It made me really like it was hard because they're
doing stuff like they use a to get it to
(16:21):
get around the atolls, right, they use little like two
strikeout boards, and they're trying to build solar canoes instead
and solar boats so that it's it's cleaner energy. Right,
Like less than a percent of a percent of the
world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands and they're
like trying their hardest to do their part to reduce
their emissions, but like they can't make the impact that
(16:45):
needs to be made just stop the sea levels rising
and arguably like when the world had a chance to
do so, like you see them speaking at the United
Nations and then the UN being like the line has
to go up. Yep, that means your island has to sink.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And that's why you know reform is not in kneph
for be enough, because this is how the system is designed.
It's designed to push risk downward and outward, onto the
working class, onto the global south, and onto the next generation.
Because that's another dimension of externalization right time, even our
future gets externalized in a sense. You know, all of
(17:21):
our resources are limited or finite resources that can used
up now at an increase in velocity. Right, Yeah, the
national debt of some countries is being sunking further and
further into now right the emissions the center of all
those emissions now fossil fuels, you know, all that stuff,
because we don't have to do the consequences, so the
(17:43):
future don't have to do the consequences. As the system
digging its own grave, because even though the system needs stability,
it will sacrifice future stability for present profits. It will
sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy. It
will sacrifice nature to the economy in service of the economy.
(18:05):
It will treat natures disposable and infinite and something external
to the way that we run things as if, as
if it's not going to catch up to us, and
so as collapse will accelerate as the consequences become more
apparent on the sacrifice zones of the periphery, the powers
are beyond interested in fixing it. You know, they're going
(18:26):
to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate
walls through militarized disaster response. They're going to double down.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, make it harder and harder to see the consequences
of excessive consumption of capitalism, like until the levy breaks,
I guess literally or metaphorically.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yep, literally or metaphorically. And I want people to keep
in mind who are listening. You know, this Quan periphery
is un just the periphery out there, it's also the
(19:09):
periphery within that we're talking about in terms of consequences.
The internal dumping grounds, whether it be you know, indigenous
reservations or the neighborhoods of black and round people, or
the prisons are often serve as the holding tanks for
discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences
(19:30):
that society doesn't want to deal with because of the
way society has been structured.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, or just like under the bridge near your house,
you know, like like we exactly treat our exactly. Like
San Diego has this particular legisative initiative, which I find
like obviously it's fucked, but also like it's very so
it's so obvious, like they passed to think or of
(19:55):
camping there where they're going to make it illegal to
be unhoused on the sidewalk. You're like, it's a band.
It's a band against camping on the sidewalk, right, And
all it does it doesn't provide housing for people, and
that's it doesn't solve the issue. It moves people. Our
cities very hilly, and we have lots of canyons in
(20:15):
which they can't build, so it moves people into these canyons. Wow,
and it just makes the same people invisible, right, Like
that's the goal that the goal is not to provide
any form of solution. It's just to move these people
away so they don't have to be poor in public.
And so the people who who use homes as a
(20:37):
vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans
to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Exactly. It's all about what they want, right I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, in a sense, depending on how you look
at it, any one of us can be a core,
and any one of us can be a periphery. You know,
to a rulers, we are all the periphery that they
can push their consequences onto. In another sense, you know,
(21:08):
I am part of the periphery, and do you are
part of the core, James? And in another sense, you know,
I might be considered part of the core in my
own country in some ways because of my class position,
because of my educational background, because of some of the
ways that I can be insulated, whereas you know, other ways,
(21:28):
you know, you might be the periphree in the United
States to the core, to the elites, to the ruling class.
And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences
between the global core and the global periphery. It wants
to make it clear to those of you in the
global core that you should be in solidarity with that
global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own. You know,
(21:51):
ultimately we are all the ones who are going to
be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout,
and then somehow tough it is because when you live
with a system that is based on externalization harm, you
can end up lashing out on others as well. You
know that that that logic, that systemic logic becomes it
(22:13):
o anizes, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships.
But we don't have to accept that way of doing things.
The periphery, regardless of which prefer you're referring to, does
hold the potential for change. And so, you know, in
the beginning when we were speaking of externalization of economic
and economic dimension specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies
(22:38):
on these flowers, these very smooth flows of labor, energy,
and resources and data from preferred to core, however you
define those terms, and so when we interrupt those flows,
even briefly, we can shake those foundations. And that sort
of approached, that effort to interrupt, is really part of
(22:59):
what social revel is about. It's how we make the
changes that we want to see. Yeah, you know, I
speak a social revolution as not some flashy one time
event or moment in history, but as an ongoing process,
as something that has taking place right now at different levels,
in different ways all over the world. And so we
(23:21):
can speak of the things we do to oppose the
current system, like these strikes and blockades that have taken
place around the world, the indigenous land defense struggles that
are taking place around the world, they rent strikes and
mutual aid that have taken place around the world. And
then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things
(23:43):
we do to propose and alternative, to construct the kind
of world and the kind of life that we need,
so we don't have to rely on these systems anymore
that exploit us. To make these systems obsolete, to build
the cooperatives, to build work a control, collectives and disaster
response out side of the state, to sort of crack
the system, and to create in those cracks the space
(24:06):
where a different system, a new life can grow. Yeah,
to not become one big machine or one centralized struggle
or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to
the niche circumstances we're all to den with like my celium,
(24:27):
you know, like the mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Yeah, yeah, that technology, Like it's sort of you're like
opening a crack thing paraphrases Zappatista texts right like and
they have this either this phrase I like from Supermandente
Marcos that translates just like, we don't have to change
the world because we're building another one right now, and
you know, you don't have to. We don't have to conquer.
(24:50):
Like there's this obsession on the left with like revolutionists,
like you said, like an act that occurs at a
point in.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Time capital our revolution, yes.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, as opposed to like building the world where the
things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through
our actions every day. Like you use the example of
people being an house, which I mentioned before, right, Like
the way we build a world where those people aren't
externalized is by not externalizing those people. Like you know,
(25:22):
it's not hard to do. You probably talk to human
beings every day anyway, Like, just continue to do that,
you know, take your neighbor a sandwich, and like that's
the revolution that you can build slowly, and maybe it's
not as exciting. It's like, you know, the one way
you I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state,
(25:45):
but you still have to do the hard work. You
still have to do the like day to day building
of a different way of relating to one another, even
in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean even before we get to
that point, you know, to be able to change the
way relate to each other, it starts with mindset. It
starts with shifting our realm of possibility is you know,
not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism. And I mean
memes in the sensor. Richard Dawkins originally use the term
(26:19):
as these cultural ideas that persist, that spread that adapt
It's difficult to kill those those memes, but you can
replace them with better memes. And so replacing and popularizing
those memes those ideas, you are challenging the idea that
you know rest is laziness, you know, challenging the idea
(26:39):
that you know the end goal is profit, that there's
no other system besides Catholics, and that that's something better,
isn't on the horizon. Shift in that sense, reality I
think is a very important part of the struggle, and
with every act, because I think ideas have to be
accompanied by act. With every act, I think it helps
to break this, to cut off, to put an end
(27:04):
to that externalization. Because even though capitalists and will continue
to try to push its harm outward and downward, are
we and away from view, we can continue to challenge
it inwardly, to push our struggle upward and to center
our struggle in the center of you, so we can
see it, so that we can feel us, and so
(27:24):
that we can act against it. And that's all I
have for this episode. All forward to all the people peace.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
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All the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hey, and welcome to take it up. And here I'm
Andrew Sage and I'm back with James.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
It's me again.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome back.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Yeah, good to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Great to have you once again, offer you to have me.
I'm not sure the dynamic is here.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, yeah, I mean there were. It's nice to be together.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It's an egalitarian dynamic. You know, we're both having each
other in a sense.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah, we're sharing this podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah. I think there are a lot of concepts that
it's good to grasp to get a sense of how
this world works. Kind of continuing from the previous episode
where we spoke about all the different ways that we
can divide up the world and understanding the world and
so on. Today's sort of pursuit of that endeavor. I
(00:50):
wanted to get into a particular concept that is so
benign yet supervsive in this system, and it's the idea
of externalization. Do you get what I mean by that?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Yeah, like making people of things other.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Yes, But specifically, I think I want to address how
capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other, yeah, onto
the someone or something else, shifting the costs of particular actions,
either environmentally socially or economically. I think the easiest example
I could point too is how a company may choose
to save on disposal costs by dumping their waste into
(01:27):
a river, which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem,
and the health of all those human and non human
lives who rely upon or live near that river. Do
you have another example you could probably point to?
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean there are lots of them. One of
them that I think of a lot is like how
in the US, rightly, products that we can't recycle or
that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere
else to be dumped. Like, our consumption creates so much
excess and so much waste, and we can't be confronted
with that waste, so we tip it to play. This
is where people consume less.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, it's uh, I mean you see, I don't know
if you've seen any of the footage of some of
these places, their whole costs of fast fashion waste for
example in Africa, or just eweiste leaching into the soil.
It's really quite tragic. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
I remember someone on net once was telling me that
like one of the things that children did where they
had come from, was they would pick through e waste,
specifically charging cables to get the copper out.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (02:35):
This would result in them having these terrible injuries to
their fingers because they were like prying the cables apart,
and you know, over time they would get little pieces
of both shards of metal embedded their fingertips.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Town. Yeah, that's terrible.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, it's a pretty pretty grim condemnation of a way
of consuming.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, it's messed up. It's messed up, and I think
when you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to
unsee it. When you see that impact onto the world,
it's hard to unsee it. But that's part of how
this concept thrives, this externalization thrives. It's by obscure in itself. Yeah,
So that's what we kind of want to do with
this episode, get up a full breadth of its history,
(03:14):
it's present, and its apparent future, so that we can
not see all the different ways that this occurs. Now,
this pass and on of costs may have always been
an option on the table, but we can see that
a lot of traditional economies did not go that route
because traditional economies were often human economies. As David Greeber
(03:37):
used the term in Debt. The first five thousand years,
you know, these were economies focused on human relationships. They
were embedded in kinship and land and customs and obligation
and reciprocity. So what you owed was really financial. It
was to enable your elder, your clan plan itself, and
so you could not really avoid the costs of your
(04:00):
actions on others, because that was at the center of
it all others. But the transition to capitalism was a
shift in what the economy was. It enforced the idea
that everything is or should be up for sale. The
economist called Polani called it the Great Transformation, when land, labor,
and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if
(04:24):
they were products for sale. Plenty saw the modern state
and the capitalist market economy as a package deal. Graybot
also made this very clear in Debt as well. For
this new kind of economy to take hold, people had
to change how they thought about work and trade and
relation with each other and see in the world, those
conditions had to be created by the state. So you
(04:46):
could look at how electritional economies and commons had to
be disrupted to force the shift. In England, you had
people pushed off of common land that they had use
for centuries, and they had no choice but to sell
their labor to survive and go in to the factories.
We have to remember that it never started in the factories.
That actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people
(05:08):
and from place started through that colonization process. Already amplified
through that colonization process extracting the wealth of people or
of labor, of land, of resources from one place to
concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and
costs and se Colonialism was capitalism sort of training ground
(05:29):
for externalization. You plunder a little bit over here, you
profit a little bit over there. And this is really
where we get to the core of capitalist externalization. With
the shifting of the costs on a small scale that
looks like the river pollution example. From the global scale,
it looks like what will steam is getting into with
world systems theory. How the wealth and stability the coronations
(05:51):
depends on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and
genocide and ecological ruin all of these are costs that
create the wealth that the core enjoys. But it's made
invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an
ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people,
the actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can
(06:14):
feel them, and that demands a level of responsibility on
your part. But when you take the things that have
been woven into relationship and turn them into plain old transactions,
those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences,
make them someone else's problem. So, yeah, cloven is very
(06:36):
affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid
and overworked. The smartphone. It's convenient, it's useful, successible, but
it's parts of mind and the dangerous conditions. You know,
your food delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days, but
(06:57):
it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal.
So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions,
of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist. It's
just externalized. So it could be rendered invisible to one
point of view. Yeah, and it's not something that can
be set up without a fight. You know, people would
(07:19):
resist enclosures were met with resistance. Colonizations make with resistance
and even to the workers strike. You know, people do
fight back. It's not just this sweeping and nevitable process.
But because of the collaboration between state and capital, that
collusion of status and capitalist interests, the whole system has
managed to persist thus far. It's a very formidable forward
(07:42):
dealing with So we can set it back here and there,
but we have not defeated it yet. Yeah, and I
say yet, because you know, as we get into there
are ways to loosen its script. I think what's fascinating
(08:04):
about capitalistic externalization today is just how much it has
skilled and got more sophisticated in terms of the work
that makes the world run. The most essential labor is
often the most invisible and undervalued and precurious labor. You know,
where we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves,
(08:27):
the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work is
necessary to build infrastructure, such as in the Gulf States
where you have litual modern slavery taking place to build
up those countries where they're talking about gig work, transportation delivery,
that sort of thing, or reproductive work stuff like what
it's called housewife y or domestic labor. So you can
(08:49):
think of other examples as well.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Yeah, I like the one you gave about your cell phone, right,
like those rare earth materials. Like, it's not some slick,
safe mining operation that brings serves out the ground. It's
human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
Exactly, poisoned people. It's not even necessarily a quick death.
It's often a slow, yeah, lifelong death.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
And it poisons that part of the world for generator.
We could stop right now, and it would take generations
for the damage to stop, exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
That's the thing about destruction, right, destruction can be very quick,
as the rebuilding that can take a long time. Yeah,
you know, if you look at how quickly Gazo has
been flattened versus how long it's going to take to
recover from that, it's like nine and.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
D yeah, yeah, yeah like it. I mean I'm very
familiar with that particular example, right, Like how quickly you
can destroy something with a bomb from an aeroplane and
how hard people had to work to build it. In
October of twenty three, I was in Kurdistan, and like,
I know how hard people work to build at Rijaba, right,
to try and build a little island of democracy without
(10:02):
the state, in a place where the state has been
weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab,
and even against Arab people who didn't agree with the
state's particular line a thing. And one night, you know,
like the power station has gone, they bombed while I
(10:23):
was there, like an oxygen bottling plant for people who
need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently, and like it's
gone now. And now to build that back up in
a world where you are largely alienated from the system
of states in capital, right, you're trying to build stuff
back up as much as you can from networks of
(10:43):
solidarity and ingenuity, and that takes years and yeah, yeah,
but it's not visible.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental
tool of something like that. Yeah yeah, Oh that can
be a setback as well. Yeah, when we're not even
talking about resources, we're talking about Yeah that loss, Yeah
that that that pain, Yeah, yeah, a pain. It made
even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who were
(11:13):
responsible for upkeeping such something like that also whiped up
by that same bomb. It makes it all the more
difficult to recover.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
Yeah, or drawn away right by the conditions of becoming
a liverable. So you have this like brain drain, where
people who have skills that are considered to be commercially
valuable have an opportunity to leave. The people who who
don't have those have the opportunity to stay or don't
have the opportunity to leave, I guess, like or even like,
(11:41):
you know, the US made a different version of externalization,
I guess, But like the US made a big thing
of how it defeated the Islamic state in you know,
twenty nineteen, I guess. I can't remember when the last
Atlan Alba goose was, I think twenty nineteen. But like
we externalized it off Lord, the cost of that struggle, Yeah,
(12:02):
the dying part, Like, yeah, US pilots did a whole
lot of killing, but the dying part that, yeah, we
externalized that right to Kurdish and Arab and the Syrian fodder. Yeah,
to people who would whose lives didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
And like I remember a time standing in a cemetery
there just looking at lines and lines of graves, and
I just left the house of someone who's thirteen year
old son was killed in a drone strike and just
thinking like each of these is a mother burying her child.
That like we essentially asked for the most part, right like,
(12:41):
to do that. We said, hey, what you guys do
the dying part because we don't want to like it
kind of sucks, sucks for the United States and Britain
in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we'd like someone else to
die now. And then you know, here we are a
few years later, right and like the night before Turkey
has been bombing the place where I'm looking at these graves,
(13:02):
and the US ain't doing shit to help, right Like,
even though these people had like made this massive sacrifice,
the US wasn't like, yeah, we're your friends. It's not
a friendship relationship, you know, Like it's it's like you said,
I forget an interaction, look like a yeah, purchase more
than a solidarity based thing.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
Yeah, And once again we really see that core externalizing
its costs onto periphery. And we see that both in
the sense of on the global stage between countries or
between populations cores and peripheres, but even internally within countries.
As we've mentioned in the previous episode talking about that
(13:48):
divide between the core and the periphery where you have
but a lot of people have called the economies biggest trick,
you know, your socialized failures and privatize profits. Yeah. So
in two thousand and eight to find and Shall crash,
people were evicted, but the balanks got built out and
the early stages of COVID corporations got relief. Gig workers
(14:10):
were exposed. Yeah. You know, in the process of austerity
resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to
balance the books, but there's never any consideration of or
the straight cuting profits. Yeah, and that's the one thing
that can never go down.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I think or even like within you know,
we all all food come from the soil at some point, right,
But like I can't tell you how many people I
know that my family are in agriculture, right, who have
died or lost limbs on farms. It's the same is
true if you're in the mining industry, right, Like, that's
(14:50):
not something that's visible. You know, you don't like go
to the supermarket and bite your bread, right, and you
don't think that someone got their arm in the combine
harvester when they were doing the fee that went to
the flower that made your loaf of bread that costs
one dollars ninety cents, and now that person doesn't have
an arm.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
It's invisibilized.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
I mean, it's the same thing when you see like
these natural disasters taking on place, right, floods or burnings,
right when California is on file and when Pakistan is
completely flooded out. Those are the consequences of the actions
of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system.
And meanwhile, the corporations are getting carbon credits to continue
(15:31):
doing what they were always doing. Yeah, you know, and
so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying
for carbon credits, but the actual consequences of what they're
doing are being paid for by the communities that are
displaced by the consequences of this climate change.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And we never talk about when we talk
about migration, right, Like that's a great the climate change
is a great example that we don't talk about how
the bulk of people coming to the United States are
coming from the place is most heavily impacted by climate change.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few
years ago, and there will be no more Marshall Islands
within our lifetime, yeah, because of the consequences and massive
corporations have made, but like they don't have any agency.
It made me really like it was hard because they're
doing stuff like they use a to get it to
(16:21):
get around the atolls, right, they use little like two
strikeout boards, and they're trying to build solar canoes instead
and solar boats so that it's it's cleaner energy. Right,
Like less than a percent of a percent of the
world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands and they're
like trying their hardest to do their part to reduce
their emissions, but like they can't make the impact that
(16:45):
needs to be made just stop the sea levels rising
and arguably like when the world had a chance to
do so, like you see them speaking at the United
Nations and then the UN being like the line has
to go up. Yep, that means your island has to sink.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
And that's why you know reform is not in kneph
for be enough, because this is how the system is designed.
It's designed to push risk downward and outward, onto the
working class, onto the global south, and onto the next generation.
Because that's another dimension of externalization right time, even our
future gets externalized in a sense. You know, all of
(17:21):
our resources are limited or finite resources that can used
up now at an increase in velocity. Right, Yeah, the
national debt of some countries is being sunking further and
further into now right the emissions the center of all
those emissions now fossil fuels, you know, all that stuff,
because we don't have to do the consequences, so the
(17:43):
future don't have to do the consequences. As the system
digging its own grave, because even though the system needs stability,
it will sacrifice future stability for present profits. It will
sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy. It
will sacrifice nature to the economy in service of the economy.
(18:05):
It will treat natures disposable and infinite and something external
to the way that we run things as if, as
if it's not going to catch up to us, and
so as collapse will accelerate as the consequences become more
apparent on the sacrifice zones of the periphery, the powers
are beyond interested in fixing it. You know, they're going
(18:26):
to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate
walls through militarized disaster response. They're going to double down.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Yeah, make it harder and harder to see the consequences
of excessive consumption of capitalism, like until the levy breaks,
I guess literally or metaphorically.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Yep, literally or metaphorically. And I want people to keep
in mind who are listening. You know, this Quan periphery
is un just the periphery out there, it's also the
(19:09):
periphery within that we're talking about in terms of consequences.
The internal dumping grounds, whether it be you know, indigenous
reservations or the neighborhoods of black and round people, or
the prisons are often serve as the holding tanks for
discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences
(19:30):
that society doesn't want to deal with because of the
way society has been structured.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
Yeah, or just like under the bridge near your house,
you know, like like we exactly treat our exactly. Like
San Diego has this particular legisative initiative, which I find
like obviously it's fucked, but also like it's very so
it's so obvious, like they passed to think or of
(19:55):
camping there where they're going to make it illegal to
be unhoused on the sidewalk. You're like, it's a band.
It's a band against camping on the sidewalk, right, And
all it does it doesn't provide housing for people, and
that's it doesn't solve the issue. It moves people. Our
cities very hilly, and we have lots of canyons in
(20:15):
which they can't build, so it moves people into these canyons. Wow,
and it just makes the same people invisible, right, Like
that's the goal that the goal is not to provide
any form of solution. It's just to move these people
away so they don't have to be poor in public.
And so the people who who use homes as a
(20:37):
vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans
to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Exactly. It's all about what they want, right I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, in a sense, depending on how you look
at it, any one of us can be a core,
and any one of us can be a periphery. You know,
to a rulers, we are all the periphery that they
can push their consequences onto. In another sense, you know,
(21:08):
I am part of the periphery, and do you are
part of the core, James? And in another sense, you know,
I might be considered part of the core in my
own country in some ways because of my class position,
because of my educational background, because of some of the
ways that I can be insulated, whereas you know, other ways,
(21:28):
you know, you might be the periphree in the United
States to the core, to the elites, to the ruling class.
And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences
between the global core and the global periphery. It wants
to make it clear to those of you in the
global core that you should be in solidarity with that
global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own. You know,
(21:51):
ultimately we are all the ones who are going to
be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout,
and then somehow tough it is because when you live
with a system that is based on externalization harm, you
can end up lashing out on others as well. You
know that that that logic, that systemic logic becomes it
(22:13):
o anizes, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships.
But we don't have to accept that way of doing things.
The periphery, regardless of which prefer you're referring to, does
hold the potential for change. And so, you know, in
the beginning when we were speaking of externalization of economic
and economic dimension specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies
(22:38):
on these flowers, these very smooth flows of labor, energy,
and resources and data from preferred to core, however you
define those terms, and so when we interrupt those flows,
even briefly, we can shake those foundations. And that sort
of approached, that effort to interrupt, is really part of
(22:59):
what social revel is about. It's how we make the
changes that we want to see. Yeah, you know, I
speak a social revolution as not some flashy one time
event or moment in history, but as an ongoing process,
as something that has taking place right now at different levels,
in different ways all over the world. And so we
(23:21):
can speak of the things we do to oppose the
current system, like these strikes and blockades that have taken
place around the world, the indigenous land defense struggles that
are taking place around the world, they rent strikes and
mutual aid that have taken place around the world. And
then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things
(23:43):
we do to propose and alternative, to construct the kind
of world and the kind of life that we need,
so we don't have to rely on these systems anymore
that exploit us. To make these systems obsolete, to build
the cooperatives, to build work a control, collectives and disaster
response out side of the state, to sort of crack
the system, and to create in those cracks the space
(24:06):
where a different system, a new life can grow. Yeah,
to not become one big machine or one centralized struggle
or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to
the niche circumstances we're all to den with like my celium,
(24:27):
you know, like the mushrooms.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Yeah, yeah, that technology, Like it's sort of you're like
opening a crack thing paraphrases Zappatista texts right like and
they have this either this phrase I like from Supermandente
Marcos that translates just like, we don't have to change
the world because we're building another one right now, and
you know, you don't have to. We don't have to conquer.
(24:50):
Like there's this obsession on the left with like revolutionists,
like you said, like an act that occurs at a
point in.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Time capital our revolution, yes.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, as opposed to like building the world where the
things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through
our actions every day. Like you use the example of
people being an house, which I mentioned before, right, Like
the way we build a world where those people aren't
externalized is by not externalizing those people. Like you know,
(25:22):
it's not hard to do. You probably talk to human
beings every day anyway, Like, just continue to do that,
you know, take your neighbor a sandwich, and like that's
the revolution that you can build slowly, and maybe it's
not as exciting. It's like, you know, the one way
you I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state,
(25:45):
but you still have to do the hard work. You
still have to do the like day to day building
of a different way of relating to one another, even
in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently exactly.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Yeah, yeah, And I mean even before we get to
that point, you know, to be able to change the
way relate to each other, it starts with mindset. It
starts with shifting our realm of possibility is you know,
not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism. And I mean
memes in the sensor. Richard Dawkins originally use the term
(26:19):
as these cultural ideas that persist, that spread that adapt
It's difficult to kill those those memes, but you can
replace them with better memes. And so replacing and popularizing
those memes those ideas, you are challenging the idea that
you know rest is laziness, you know, challenging the idea
(26:39):
that you know the end goal is profit, that there's
no other system besides Catholics, and that that's something better,
isn't on the horizon. Shift in that sense, reality I
think is a very important part of the struggle, and
with every act, because I think ideas have to be
accompanied by act. With every act, I think it helps
to break this, to cut off, to put an end
(27:04):
to that externalization. Because even though capitalists and will continue
to try to push its harm outward and downward, are
we and away from view, we can continue to challenge
it inwardly, to push our struggle upward and to center
our struggle in the center of you, so we can
see it, so that we can feel us, and so
(27:24):
that we can act against it. And that's all I
have for this episode. All forward to all the people peace.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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