00:05:21The soldier is now anyone you can shove a gun into their hands.
00:05:26It's not some highly trained person who has spent their entire life in this arcane art that only a few people can afford to dedicate themselves to.
00:05:34Obviously, it's also true when it comes to maritime powers, how they tend to be far more affluent.
00:07:36access to water mattered in another important way these metropolises on broydles list were all
00:07:43major ports great centers of commerce and outstanding mobilizers of capital both the
00:07:48trade and the capital served the purposes of ambitious rulers by a circuitous route the
00:07:54observation brings us back to the arguments of lean and bean considering that both of them wrote
00:07:59as economic historians the greatest weakness in their analysis comes as a surprise both of them
00:08:05understate the importance of capital accumulation to military expansion as jean devry says of the
00:08:11period after 1600 quote looking back one cannot help but be struck by the seemingly symbiotic
00:08:19relationship existing between the state military power and the private economy's efficiency in the
00:08:25age of absolutism behind every successful dynasty should sorry stood an array of opulent banking
00:08:31families access to such bourgeois resources prince sorry access to such bourgeois resources
00:08:38prince's state building and centralizing policies so he's basically sort of making the argument here
00:08:44that um stability uh enables uh the markets stable markets uh sort of lead to the organization
00:08:53of capital which leads to banking which then leads to the ability of the state to raise
00:08:59further funds to build armies and, of course, more efficient taxation, which is necessary for
00:09:04all of this. Great capitalists played crucial parts on both sides of the transaction. As the
00:09:12principal sources of royal credit, especially in the short term, and as the most important
00:09:16contractors in the risky but lucrative business of collecting royal taxes, as I just said.
00:09:23The government's failure to pay these rents, incidentally, helped align the Parisian
00:09:29bourgeoisie against the crown during the frond some 12 decades later. By 1595 the national debt
00:09:39had risen to 300 million francs despite governmental bankruptcies, currency manipulations
00:09:44and the monumental rise in taxes. By Louis XIV's death in 1715 war-induced borrowing had inflated
00:09:52the total to about 3 billion francs the equivalent of about 18 years in royal revenues. War state
00:09:58apparatus, taxation, and borrowing advanced in a tight cadence. Well, as did printing of money.
00:10:06I believe he is talking about the inflation of the Assignan, which was essentially just a paper
00:10:11currency issued by the French crown that you had to pay your taxes in, which is how they kept it
00:10:17circulating. I think we've covered this before. This is called a legal tender, where you can't
00:10:25just rock up to the tax office with a bag of wheat uh you know or a load of bitcoin oh no no no you
00:10:30have to pay the tax office in a very very specific way who is it that controls the issuance of the
00:10:36thing that you need to pay taxes for well it's the government although france was precocious
00:10:43it was by no means alone quote even more than in the case of france reports the ever useful
00:10:50earl j hamilton the national debt of england originated and has grown during major wars
00:10:56except for an insignificant carryover from the stewart's the debt began in 1689
00:11:02oh shit uh pardon me with the reign of william and mary in the words of adam smith it was in
00:11:08the war which began in 1688 and was concluded by the treaty of rise week in 1697 that the0.97
00:11:15foundation of the present enormous debt of great britain was first laid so uh fiat money
00:11:23banking uh and you know usury as well enable massive sort of government incomes which enable
00:11:30the uh construction of large armies and depending on your point of view possibly pointless wars
00:11:39i'm you know i don't know this is uh sorry i was gonna uh interject here quickly uh this is
00:11:47for the people who have not studied nick land uh this is a big part of his philosophy that
00:11:54previous to these financial instruments previous to these uh emergent capitalist norms uh basically
00:12:01traditional societies created almost like a they had a negative uh input on the feedback loop they
00:12:08They acted like a thermostat on the process of capital accumulation.
00:12:14This is why usury was generally banned in many of these places.
00:12:17It keeps this capital acceleration from radically altering society in the very ways we're talking about.
00:12:23And so once that reaction begins, once you kind of pull the rods out of a nuclear reactor, it starts snowballing very quickly.
00:12:32It becomes a runaway force because all of those social norms start eroding one by one as the capital accumulation rapidly changes society.
00:12:42So the process here that's being described is exactly this concept of accelerationism in the philosophical sense, in the economic and political sense.
00:12:56that once you've kind of started this track of we're going to print money, we're going to create
00:13:02fiat currency, we're going to do usury, we're going to take out these big loans, you're going
00:13:09to naturally create these elements of scale that everyone has to do. It creates the tank problem
00:13:15where because you have tanks, I have to make tanks because the country next to me has invested
00:13:21in this system of banking and has exploded its capacity for state control through these financial
00:13:26instruments they now everyone else now must do so to keep up there is no way in order to
00:13:32maintain your sovereignty as a state until unless you engage in this process and this is why the
00:13:37city state and these smaller forms of government die is because they are unable to engage in this
00:13:42process the same way the process is fundamentally one of scale which requires you to move well
00:13:47beyond a traditional society and melts down all of the things that existed before this process
00:13:56all right where were we just got done with the hamilton here
00:14:02hamilton it is true goes on to quote the mercantilist uh charles davenant uh who complained
00:14:12in 1698 that the high interest rates promoted by governments borrow borrowing were cramping
00:14:19english trade davenant's uh complaint suggests however that england was already entering
00:14:24Frederick Lane's third stage of state capital relations when merchants and landowners receive
00:14:31more of the surplus than the suppliers of protection. Until the 16th century, the English
00:14:37expected their kings to live on revenue from their own property and to levy taxes only for war.
00:14:43G.R. Elton's marks the great innovation of Thomas Cromwell's drafting of Henry VIII's subsidy bills
00:14:51for 1534 and 1540. Quote, 1540 was very careful to continue the real innovation of 1534,
00:15:03namely the extraordinary contributions could be levied for reasons other than war. After that
00:15:09point, as before, however, war making provided the main stimulus to increase the level of taxation
00:15:16as well as of debt. Rarely did debt and taxes receive. What A.T. Peacock and Jay Wiseman call
00:15:24a displacement effect and others sometimes call a ratchet effect occurred. When public revenue
00:15:29and expenditures rose abruptly during war, they set down new higher floors beneath which peacetime
00:15:35revenues and expenditures did not sink. During the Napoleonic War, British taxes rose from 15 to 24
00:15:43percent of the nation's income and to almost three times the French level taxation true
00:15:48Britain had the double advantage of relying less on expensive land forces that then its
00:15:55continental rivals and a drawing more of its tax revenue from customer customs and excises
00:16:01taxes that were despite evasion significantly cheaper to collect than land taxes property
00:16:07taxes and poll taxes nevertheless in england as well as everywhere else both debt and taxes rose
00:16:14enormously from the 17th century onward and they rose mainly as a function of increasing the cost
00:16:20the increased cost of war making so he's saying here that war is traditionally this engine and it
00:16:28was the only thing that could justify large amounts of wealth extraction from the people
00:16:33The king was expected to live on his own lands. He was just another lord who gathered money from his crops and everything else. But ultimately, he could only levy that tax when it's time to go to war. We need troops. We need that extra boost to go ahead and send people to fight somewhere else. And so we have to extract extra money.
00:16:53with the introduction of the idea that there were non-war causes that were important enough to go
00:17:00ahead and levy taxes at a higher rate we end up with the scenario where now yes the war is still
00:17:06pegging the largest amount of extraction yes we're going to war we need more money that's going to be
00:17:12the main driver driver but every time we go to war and we increase the amount of money that the
00:17:16state is extracting it stays the same we never go back to pre-war spending levels and of course we
00:17:22can see something like this in the united states uh where once we create the war the the income tax
00:17:29so that we can pay for a war we never get rid of the income tax even when the war is over
00:17:34the tax stays the extra revenue stays we find new uses for that tax that has now been normalized
00:17:41and then the next time we go to war we find more taxes a new way to do that and then when we come
00:17:45back from that war the government spending continues to stay at that rate we never see
00:17:49a drop it just continues to justify a new floor below which we just never drop the spending rate
00:17:55so the growth of government continues in wartime and peacetime yeah there's a very um pernicious
00:18:02incentive kind of feedback loop at work here um which is why as as many people have have sort of
00:18:10pointed out um governments seem to really really like war because uh it not only increases the
00:18:16amount of money that they can take in, but their power, the amount that they can like fleece off
00:18:23their tax base, it gives them a sort of existential reason for being. I've noticed this about
00:18:30government a lot. COVID would be a very, very good example of this. Most of the time, the government
00:18:36is just out there just sort of administrating. It's not a very sexy job, right? The government
00:18:43doesn't you know they want to feel uh like you know they're they're doing something existential
00:18:49you know they want that respect and for example when when covid happened everyone was like oh my
00:18:54god you know we have to we have to look uh to the government you get certain figures that are
00:18:59elevated they're suddenly very important people don't just look at them as oh you're the guy who
00:19:02just administers the taxes which we don't like very much suddenly you're defending the country
00:19:06from an existential threat they love that stuff and of course they get to increase their money
00:19:12and how as a consequence well and it's hard not to it's hard not to notice that you know the
00:19:18american government fought a war in afghanistan for 20 years we finally leave afghanistan and we
00:19:25immediately need to go fund a war with russia and then go fight a war with iran right and there are
00:19:32a lot of reasons why that got done we don't have time to discuss them all here have discussed them
00:19:37other area at length but we can just see that continued stack of then the war never ends there's
00:19:42always another war another justification that's literally why we came up with the term forever
00:19:47wars even to the point where when one party explicitly campaigns against involving us
00:19:53directly in these wars the machinery of government still be seems inevitably tied to produce exactly
00:19:59this because without those you know the money does not flow the defense contractors don't get the
00:20:04the money the congressional uh campaigns don't get the money like it's always attached to something
00:20:10like this yeah the the well it's the incentive structure uh at the end of the day if we could
00:20:16find out a way to incentivize governments uh and i i think this also like works as well because like
00:20:22uh you know if you look post-world war ii in both england both the uk and the us um afterwards there
00:20:30was a big push, you know, well, we're not going to drop the tax rate. Well, what are we going to
00:20:34do? Oh, we're going to build the great society, right? We're going to build the NHS, right? We're
00:20:38going to give back to the people. I mean, the way surely to give back to the people would have been
00:20:43to lower taxes to previous things, but that's, of course, never going to happen. Okay, so what
00:20:50do states do? It's a fair question, I guess. As should now be clear, Lane's analysis of protection
00:21:00fails to distinguish among several different uses of state-controlled violence. Under the
00:21:05general heading of organized violence, the agents of states characteristically carry on
00:21:10four different activities. One, war-making, eliminating or neutralizing their own rivals
00:21:17outside of the territories in which they have clear and continuous priorities as wielders of
00:21:22force. Two, state-making, eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside those territories.
00:21:30Three, protection, eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients.
00:21:36And four, extraction, acquiring the means of carrying out the first three activities,
00:21:52They overlap incompletely and to varying degrees.
00:21:55For example, war-making against the commercial rivals of the local bourgeoisie delivers protection to that bourgeoisie, or war-making against a sort of an alternate client group.
00:22:07To the extent that a population is divided into enemy classes and the state extends its favors partially to one class or another, state-making actually reduces the protection given to some of those classes.
00:22:20War-making, state-making, protection, and extraction each take a number of forms.
00:22:25Extraction, for example, ranges from outright plunder to regular tribute to bureaucratized
00:22:31taxation. Yet all four depend on the state's tendency to monopolize the concentrated means
00:22:37of coercion. From the perspective of those who dominate the state, each of them, if carried on
00:22:42effectively, generally reinforces the other, because they all lead to the strengthening of
00:22:48power of the centralized state. Thus, a state that successfully eradicates its internal rivals
00:22:54strengthens its ability to extract resources, to wage war, and to protect its chief supporters.
00:23:00In the earlier European experience, broadly speaking, these supporters were typically
00:23:05landlords, armed retainers of the monarch, and churchmen. Each of the major uses of violence
00:23:12produced characteristic forms of organization. War-making yielded armies, navies, and supporting
00:23:17services. State-making produced durable instruments of surveillance and control within that territory.
00:23:24Protection relied on the organisation of war-making and state-making, but added to it an apparatus
00:23:29by which the protected called forth the protection that was their due, notably through the courts
00:23:34and representative assemblies. Extraction brought fiscal and accounting structures into being.
00:23:39The organisation and deployment of violence themselves account for much of the characteristic
00:23:44structure of European states. The general rule seems to have operated like this.
00:23:52the more costly the activity all other things being equal the greater was the organizational
00:23:58residue to the extent for example that a given government invested in long in large standing
00:24:04armies a very costly if effective means of war making the bureaucracy created to service the
00:24:10army was likely to become bulky furthermore a government building a standing army while
00:24:16controlling a small population was likely to incur greater costs and therefore build a bulkier
00:24:22structure than a government within a populist country brandenburg prussia was the classic case
00:24:28of high cost for available resources the prussian effort to build an army matching those of its
00:24:33larger continental neighbors created an immense bureaucratic structure it militarized and
00:24:38bureaucratized much of German social life. So right here, again, we can see the runaway
00:24:45nature of this process, right? It's a self-exciting feedback loop. Every one of these things makes the
00:24:53next one easier. It encourages it. It has the incentive structure we're talking about, the flow
00:24:58that makes sense. So you get rid of your internal enemies, which means you are not only more secure
00:25:05in your power but you're also more likely to be able to extract more wealth because now people
00:25:10aren't committed to their money isn't spent elsewhere it's not committed to other organizations
00:25:15you're not battling all the time for the purchase there once you have more money coming in well now
00:25:20you can increase the size and the power of the military once you've increased the size and power
00:25:25of the military you become a more effective warfighter but you also need a larger bureaucracy
00:25:30And that bureaucracy takes up, you know, commands more and more power. It creates more jobs. It has more influence inside your political system. As we were just talking about, it seems to some extent a large amount of your congressmen only exist to figure out how to get us to the next war so that they can continue to feed their machine.
00:25:48And so in this way, every aspect of the growth of the state adds to another incentive to grow the state more. And again, the tank problem, the more that is developed on your side, the more someone else has to figure this out on their side, or they're going to fall behind.
00:26:05If no one else can have a standing army, if you're the only one who has the necessary extraction ability and production ability to create the larger army, not only are they going to lose on you on the battlefield, they're also going to fall behind in the bureaucratic construction that gives you a tighter control over your populace, your domestic understanding, the extraction of tax revenues domestically.
00:26:29And so they're not just falling behind on the battlefield. They're falling behind everywhere. And so, again, every aspect of this process is pushing people farther and farther, deeper and deeper into this logic of growing the state, growing every aspect of the state, making every victory for the expansion of the state bigger over time.
00:26:47and also the larger the bureaucracy um the larger the client group that you need to service it
00:26:54because you definitely do not want your um bureaucracies being run by people who are not
00:26:59your clients so as the bureaucracy expands you need a larger and larger client group in order
00:27:04to staff them you have to give them protection um i mean i guess when you when it comes to
00:27:13the army if you know if they're battling in a foreign place they don't necessarily
00:27:16have to be your clients but the people administering that army absolutely have to be
00:27:22um otherwise they they could mess up you know mess the process up and stuff like that
00:27:27you have to you have to have a sort of uh compliant uh patron client relationship with
00:27:33those administering the war machine there's a reason that the american military is still full
00:27:39of guys from texas and appalachia but the actual like officer corps like the the general higher
00:27:46rank officer corps is increasingly a bunch of managers from washington dc right like they're
00:27:52very different sets for very different jobs even though they're all wearing the same uniform but
00:27:56i'll pick up for you here since you just read a bunch of that with respect to state making in the
00:28:01narrow sense of eliminating or neutralizing the local rivals of the people who controlled the
00:28:06state a territory a territory populated by great landlords or by distinct religious groups
00:28:12generally imposes large costs on a conqueror than one of fragmented power or homogeneous culture
00:28:18this time fragmented and homogeneous sweden with its relatively small but effective apparatus of
00:28:24control illustrates the corollary so interestingly here even though i think this guy is probably a
00:28:30leftist seems to have marxist leanings he's noticing something that i have talked about at
00:28:35length that many conservatives or, well, really right wingers have talked about at length,
00:28:40which is that the breaking up of a population that has these distinct beliefs, these distinct
00:28:48demands, these organic, natural phenomena are critical to centralizing the power of the state.
00:28:54The total state arises by turning everyone into an individual. When everyone is an individual,
00:29:01the state is the only thing that you interact with collectively, and it's always going to have
00:29:05more power but when you have these you know distinct religious groups when you have these
00:29:09uh well-founded uh you know relationship systems based on you know these great landlords or you
00:29:14know these feudal lords everything else they're going to be far more resistant and able to resist
00:29:18the growth of the state so the destruction of those groups is critical for this type of expansion
00:29:24of power which is why you see it over and over and over again that's not a mistake the people1.00
00:29:29in your country who are importing foreign working classes who are not loyal to you and your beliefs0.98
00:29:35and your way of life, but only to the state that gives them money, that's on purpose. They're1.00
00:29:41importing clients to complete this process. Finally, the cost of protection in the sense
00:29:46of eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of the state baker's clients mounted with the range
00:29:52over which that protection extended portugal's effort to bar the mediterranean to its merchant
00:29:59competitors in the spice trade provided a textbook case of unsuccessful protection against the
00:30:05nonetheless built up a massive structure thus the sheer size of the government vary directly with
00:30:11the effort devoted to extraction state making protection and especially war making but inversely
00:30:16with the commercialization of the economy and the extent of the resource space that what is more
00:30:22the relative bulk of different features of the government varied with cost resource ratios of
00:30:28extraction state making protection and war making in spain we see the hyper hypertrophy i can say
00:30:36this hypertrophy i can't say it okay thank you thank you of court uh and of court and courts as
00:30:45the outcome of centuries of effort at subsidizing internal enemies, whereas in Holland, we are
00:30:53amazed to see how small a fiscal apparatus grows up with high taxes within reach commercialized
00:31:02economy. Clearly, war-making, extractions, state-making, and protections are independent.
00:31:08Speaking very, very generally, the classic European state-making experience followed this
00:31:14casual pattern and you see the little diagram he has here where war making uh you know flows
00:31:20protection you have state making flowing to protection you have all the connections here
00:31:24in an idealized sequence a great lord made war so effectively as to become dominant in a
00:31:31substantial territory but the war making led to an increased extraction of the means of war
00:31:36men arms food lodging transportation supplies and or money to buy them from the population
00:31:42within the territory the building of the war making capacity likewise increased the capacity
00:31:47to extract the very uh activity of extraction if successful entailed the elimination neutralization
00:31:54or cooperation of the great lord's local rivals thus it led to state making as a by-product it
00:32:00created organization in the form of tax collection agencies uh police forces courts uh
00:32:06account keepers thus it again led to state making to a lesser extent war making likewise led to
00:32:19state making through the expansion of military organization itself as a standing army war
00:32:23industries supporting bureaucracies and rather later schools grew up within the state apparatus
00:32:29all of these structures checked the potential rivals and opponents in the course of making war
00:32:35extracting resources building up the state apparatus managers of states formed alliances
00:32:41with specific social classes the members of these classes loaned resources provided technical
00:32:47services or helped ensure the compliance of the rest of the population all in return for a measure
00:32:51of protection against their own rivals and enemies as a result these multiple strategic choices a
00:32:56distinctive state apparatus grows up within each major section of europe so he's explaining that
00:33:03there is this constant again incentive the better you get at making war as a local warlord uh the
00:33:09more you get better at extracting the resources that create uh the the conditions of war and
00:33:15victory in war and because you get better at extracting those resources you have to eliminate
00:33:20your local rivals uh once those local rivals are eliminated you start to uh look to build these
00:33:26institutions that uh fundamentally cement your power in this paradigm uh you have to find new
00:33:33classes of people to run these institutions to be loyal to you the thing you offer them is
00:33:37protection against their domestic enemies and advantages uh some would say that a managerial
00:33:42class might emerge uh to fill this in the modern day uh and so again you just see that every state
00:33:49that wants to compete every state that ultimately wants to be a big player has to follow in this
00:33:55logic the tank problem over and over again if the the state next to me has eliminated it's all its
00:34:00rivals it's gotten very good at extracting money if it's you know built these into these engines
00:34:05of state from uh the standing army to a state education system to indoctrinate its people
00:34:11then it's going to wield all of those things as powerful weapons against me and so as a rival
00:34:16state my only option is to accelerate along the same path or fall behind uh in my opinion this is
00:34:23this is the strongest part of this paper uh this is this is sort of the real nugget of what tilly's
00:34:29trying to get at. That sort of, you know, the large of the army leads to organization,
00:34:38which leads to greater extraction taxes, the bureaucracy to administer these things,
00:34:43the client groups that are needed to run them. And it just sort of like, you know,
00:34:47builds up in this feedback loop. And a lot of this process really results in what we would call
00:34:53modern society um although this is presented as wholly bad um after sort of periods of sporadic
00:35:04war during peacetime a lot of these structures do flow into the rest of society it's just that
00:35:11because of the the nature of the state as soon as they want to make war again or as soon as they
00:35:16start running out of like resources or i don't know uh they want a hot cocoa and decide that
00:35:21They've got to like steal it from Russia or something like that.
00:35:23The whole process starts up again, becomes even more extractive.
00:35:29And of course, in the modern world, technology provides a sort of a way to scale this once again.
00:35:34So possibly another way of putting this with Chile is that one of the main breaks
00:35:39on the sort of continual evolution of this process is technology.
00:35:44And once new kinds of technology are found and more scale opens up,
00:35:48This whole thing starts up yet again, enabling sort of more, even more organization by like a smaller group of people, more extraction, more war.
00:35:57And this is why every state is rushing towards AI right now, because AI is going to increase your war making capacity.
00:36:05We already know, you know, these algorithms are being used to do targeting packages and things in the Iran war as we speak.
00:36:12But it's also going to increase your domestic control over your population, right?0.60
00:36:16like it's going to give you better surveillance it's going to you're going to use the flock
00:36:19cameras they're not for criminals they're for you buddy uh you know like ultimately you know
00:36:23they're going to gain all of these advantages across the board ai is a new technical revolution
00:36:28and capacity some people think it's going to be a disruptor that's going to allow uh smaller states
00:36:33to compete you kind of mentioned that previously you know drone warfare that kind of thing uh but
00:36:37the other and i think more likely possibility is actually just expands the capacity of existing
00:36:42states for war making and extraction and all you know surveillance control security all of these
00:36:48things are all folded into this technological revolution but it also shrinks the size of the
00:36:54client group that you need to rely upon to run yes your bureaucracy because instead of having
00:37:00a hundred thousand bureaucrats each who can say cover a hundred people you can have a tenth of
00:37:06that that can cover 10 times as much so you can shower even more benefits on them they're a smaller
00:37:13size they're easier to control you can enforce greater ideological rigidity and you can also0.89
00:37:19increase the gap between them and the lumpen proletariat sort of you know enforcing the barrier
00:37:25between who is in and who is out okay how states formed this analysis if correct has two strong
00:37:35implications for the development of national states first popular resistance to war making
00:37:40and state making made a different difference really is that what okay when ordinary people
00:37:47resisted vigorously authorities made concessions guarantees of rights representative institution
00:37:52courts of appeal i mean i wouldn't say okay these concessions paragraph but this is entirely wrong
00:38:00we're going to rip it up okay these concessions in their turn constrained the later paths of
00:38:06war making and state making to be sure alliances with fragments of the ruling class generally
00:38:12increased the effects of popular action i would say it was essential but the broad mobilization
00:38:17of gentry against charles i helped give the english revolution of 1640 a far greater impact
00:38:23on political institutions than did any of the multiple rebellions during the tudor era i think
00:38:29he's talking about the you know mainly unorganized uh rebellions but um anyway second the relative
00:38:37balance among of war making protection extraction and state making significantly affected the
00:38:42organization of states that emerged from these four activities to the extent that war making
00:38:48went on with relatively little extraction protection and state making for example military
00:38:53forces ended up playing a larger and more autonomous part in national politics this is
00:38:59true. Spain is perhaps the best European example. To the extent that protection, as in Venice or
00:39:05Holland, prevailed over war-making, extraction, and state-making, oligarchies of the protected
00:39:10classes tended to dominate subsequent national politics. From the relative predominance of
00:39:16state-making sprang the disproportionate elaboration of policing and surveillance,
00:39:21the papal states illustrate that extreme. Before the 20th century, any state that failed to put
00:39:26considerable effort into war making was likely to disappear as the 20th century war on however it
00:39:32became increasingly common for one state to lend give or sell war making means to another in those
00:39:38cases the recipient state could put a disproportionate effort into extraction protection and
00:39:44or state making and yet survive this is an interesting point because what he's sort of
00:39:50describing uh in a way is uh the eu before trump where because of american security provision
00:39:57uh they didn't really have to uh spend any money on war making so they could devote all of their
00:40:03energies into uh extraction and and state making and uh you know giving largesse to their preferred
00:40:11client groups interesting yeah it's there's a couple things there so yeah this is obviously
00:40:17a phenomenon where we have we've watched a large chunk of the western world hand their uh you know
00:40:24their their war making capacity off to america and as you said uh that means that they all get
00:40:29the reward of being able to do more state state making doing more extract extraction increasing
00:40:35internal security and control of uh the people inside of their uh borders however of course in
00:40:42the end we're making a still sovereignty and so that has been a devil's bargain for them because
00:40:48a lot of these european countries have slowly come to realize oh we're not sovereign at all
00:40:52like by handing over that that power yes we have these other capacities but it turns out that
00:40:58ultimately violence is the ultimate authority from which all authority derives and if you don't have
00:41:03the capacity for violence you're ultimately not the state you might be running aspects of the state
00:41:08You might be increasing your capacity in those aspects, but you are not the final decider.
00:41:13You are not the final sovereign in this setup.
00:41:17I also want to go back and hit this idea that the people were resistant to war making and that's what stopped them.
00:44:16Because there's no real political force composed of ex-soldiers.
00:44:22You find this after large wars, all the soldiers, they come home
00:44:27and they become a sort of cohesive political force
00:44:29and begin to affect the political terrain.
00:44:33It's really fascinating because, excuse me, after World War II, America and its civic life was largely defined by these military fraternities.
00:44:47We have the veterans of foreign wars and the American Legion, and they had a post in usually multiple in every city in America.
00:44:56the the you know the vfw or the american ford legion was like the bar that everybody went to
00:45:03and because they were all vets they'd all had that experience and so that's where political
00:45:09life occurred a lot of times you know when i was working in local politics the first place we start
00:45:14campaigning was at the vfw because that's where a lot of the movers and shakers are going to end up
00:45:20that's where politically active people are going to be but as few and fewer americans have actually
00:45:24been in the experience of going through war you no longer have that faction anymore and like you
00:45:29said in the eu it's even more so to the point where there there's just no one around who's ever
00:45:33fought a war before like not really you know they've sent some troops to help american afghanistan
00:45:39or something but they've they've never actually spearheaded an independent military action so
00:45:44they're just over there like uh uh i don't know uh get the white guys to in in the uk that are
00:45:50still around to go fight for ukraine right like you guys are just gonna have to sacrifice for0.84
00:45:55even though we're actively telling you we're dispossessing you of the country and english0.66
00:45:58english is just a an idea and has nothing to do with your actual heritage or right to the country0.83
00:46:03but you should go die for this thing that you don't own right like they can't even get their
00:46:07rhetoric on board when it's time to go fight a war much less actually plan a military action0.76
00:46:13or make intelligent decisions on hey maybe this is too much and we shouldn't involve ourselves in
00:46:17Indeed, if there were, you know, in the EU or the UK sort of like large sort of fraternal orders composed of military men, they would be looked on with extreme suspicion by the government.
00:46:33You know, all the armed forces clubs, they're being forced to accept women now, commissars, you know, it'd be terrible.
00:46:42like you know military men hanging out uh you know what if they use a naughty word or you know
00:46:48it just it becomes the whole idea of of war making just becomes uh secondary to uh extraction
00:46:56and protection i i think this is going to end really badly personally uh do you want to go
00:47:02next part or should i uh let's see here uh this simplified simplified model however neglects the
00:47:07external relations that shaped every national state. Early in the process, the distinction
00:47:13between internal and external remained as unclear as the distinction between state power and power
00:47:19accruing to lords allied with the state. Later, three interlocking influences connected
00:47:26any given national state to the European network of states. First, there were the flows of resources
00:47:34in the form of loans and supplies especially loans and supplied uh supplies devoted to war
00:47:40making second there was the competition between states for hegemony in disputed territories which
00:47:46some sim which stimulated war making and temporarily erased the distinction between
00:47:51war making state making and extraction third there was the inter uh in intermittent uh creation of
00:47:58coalitions of states that temporarily combined their efforts to force a given state into a
00:48:03certain form or position within the international network the war making coalition is uh is one
00:48:09example but the peacemaking coalition played as an even more crucial part from 1648 if not before
00:48:16at the end ends of wars all effective uh european states uh coalesced temporarily to bargain over
00:48:23the boundaries and rules of the recent belligerence from that point on periods of major reorganization
00:48:29of the european state system came in spurts at the settlement of widespread wars from each war
00:48:35in general emerged a fewer national national states that had then had entered it so you have
00:48:41an interesting dynamic here where you have these kind of fits of a war of outbreak and once they
00:48:48are done the european community kind of comes together and signs a treaty that kind of redefines
00:48:54the nature of what states are in that moment now that one state has kind of been burned out you
00:48:59know these guys have conquered these guys we need to kind of reset the rules on what that looks like
00:49:03and every time you're kind of consolidating the states each one of these becomes larger each one
00:49:09of them becomes bigger player by having a seat at the table for the negotiations you kind of
00:49:15cement yourself as one of the few people that ultimately are one of the few players that
00:49:19ultimately has uh kind of this ability to make these final decisions and define the outcome
00:49:24define uh kind of the superstructure that these states are going to exist under post the war and
00:49:30so you are also narrowing the number of players who can be involved every iteration of this game
00:49:36so an interesting point there about the nature of kind of european warfare specifically uh this is
00:49:43not exactly the way that warfare has existed in other areas uh and so it has uh perhaps uh you
00:49:50could i don't know would you say that this is a function of europe still having kind of the
00:49:54skeleton of christendom through the pope like you still had this idea 1648 was the treaty of
00:50:01westphalia which was the start of the westphalian system which is the first thing they teach you
00:50:06when you you know do international relations at uni and like all sort of like principles it's
00:50:12it's messy but the important thing is 1648 was the end of the hundred years war and it produced a
00:50:18principle of whose ruler whose religion which was essentially a homogenizing tendency among
00:50:25european states um so if you're a country and your monarch was a protestant um then you could tell
00:50:34all the catholics that they had to leave uh you couldn't take all of their stuff they they had to
00:50:38leave voluntarily. But this homogenized thing, so you didn't have so much of a situation where0.80
00:50:45you would say have a Protestant country. I mean, again, the definitions were kind of different
00:50:52back then, but with little bunches of Catholics spread around inside it. Generally, during the0.97
00:50:59Hundred Years' War and leading up to it, what would happen is that as soon as a Catholic monarch
00:51:04ascended to the throne, every single Protestant within that territory would start trying to0.60
00:51:08overthrow them and vice versa of course because of the the massive split that was caused by the
00:51:13reformation so the treaty of westphalia um sort of cemented this idea that it was the king that
00:51:20chose the religion for that nation that nation state westphalia is said to be the birth of the
00:51:26nation state because of that homogenizing tendency it came down to the catholics the lutherans and
00:51:36And, oh, my God, there's like one other, I think the Catholics,0.70
00:51:40the Protestants and the Lutherans, the Anabaptists were excluded
00:51:43because of what happened in that city that I did a video of.
00:54:49um or as international relations early in the process external and internal rivals overlapped
00:54:57to a large degree only the establishment of large perimeters of control within which great lords
00:55:03had checked their rivals sharpen the line between internal and external if we allow the fragile
00:55:09distinction between internal and external state making process then we might uh uh schematize the
00:55:16history of european uh of european state making as as three stages a the different success uh
00:55:23the different success of some power holders in external struggles establishes the differences
00:55:30between internal and external arena for the deployment of first uh force b external competition
00:55:38generates internal state making c external compacts among states influence the form and
00:55:45locus of particular states even more powerfully in this perspective state certified organizations
00:55:52such as the league of nations and the unified united nations simply extend the european-based
00:55:57process to the whole world whether uh forced or voluntary bloody or peaceful decolonization
00:56:04simply completed the process by which existing states uh states lead to create new ones so
00:56:12So actually, this is what I was trying to get at when I was talking about the, you know, America as Christendom coming together, sorry, rather Europe as Christendom coming together and having these negotiations because they understood themselves as different pieces of what was at some level a cultural inheritance that I think flowed from that, you know, kind of that tradition.
00:56:36And so you have the exporting of this idea, as he says, to these larger organizations like the League of Nations or the United Nations, where they're trying to have take the same kind of council effect.
00:56:48They're trying to have this kind of these mediating forces between states that allow the creation of kind of modernity as we understand it, nation states as we understand it to exist.
00:57:02of course you know the the original league of nations comes out of world war one the death of
00:57:07monarchies right it's woodrow wilson generally trying to make a bunch of ethno states so that
00:57:13everyone can like understand themselves in this way that would sound horrendous today to the
00:57:17democratic party from which woodrow wilson of course uh came but ultimately like that was the
00:57:22the ideal that's what the united nations was originally or the league of nations originally
00:57:27was for was to create a world in which monarchies had died and now we had to understand ourselves
00:57:33in these uh in these nation states and of course the process of decolonization only encourages the
00:57:39emergence of ethnostates because they don't understand how else one can organize once the
00:57:44colony is gone once the colonial power is gone what are you supposed to do to remake the state
00:57:50and as you pointed out with the indian partition the question the answer is well we will homogenize
00:57:54the populations religiously as much as possible to create separate states that can withstand
00:58:00kind of this new process when the colonial influence is gone and all that gets mediated
00:58:04again through these uh supranational organizations like the united nations yeah um i mean the nation
00:58:14state is is a very sort of new idea uh really um but yes the idea of course for the for the
00:58:23league of nations especially um was to create peace the most hilarious um proposal by the
00:58:32league of nations was that everyone would disarm except for the league of nations and every major
00:58:38state was for it as long as uh their opponents disarmed first it never got off the ground for
00:58:45some reason the funny thing is if you go back and read a few of curtis yarvin's essays when he was
00:58:49trying to like give his complete understanding of like global governance he basically rebuilt this
00:58:54system but based on technology instead it's a fascinating thing that he kind of he accidentally
00:59:00reinvented exactly this process uh but he he cloaked in technology so he thought it was a very
00:59:06clever uh redoing i love curtis i think he's uh very smart on other things but it was very funny
00:59:11that he fell into exactly the same trap uh but just put put enough references to blockchain in
00:59:16to think that he had kind of created a new and different thing
00:59:20other than basically just the UN from space.
01:02:34You know, so before, for example, countries like Iraq were destroyed,
01:02:38it was widely acknowledged, Egypt is like this as well,
01:02:42that without a strong man, without a high degree of militarisation
01:02:46in these countries, these countries simply would not function.
01:02:50Obviously, because the bad white man done draw those borders,
01:02:55not because of any intrinsic differences between people we are all after all completely the same
01:03:00as i keep being told so well and no you're you're right that he obviously has a chip on his shoulder
01:03:08he's angry at colonization he's trying to blame this for the dysfunction as if these people
01:03:13wouldn't be murdering each other if no europeans had ever showed up we just they just figured out
01:03:18how to you know uh throw an axe at each other the minute that uh you know europeans showed up on the
01:03:24soil however there is an interesting dynamic here so for instance obviously we know uh that the uh
01:03:31this is very true of the middle east right the middle east is almost entirely run by different
01:03:35states you know figuring out where they got their arms from right whether they got them from the
01:03:40soviet union or they got from america obviously saudi arabia would not have the position it holds
01:03:45if it would not for american military influence obviously uh israel would not hold the position
01:03:49that it has in the middle east if it wasn't for american military influence these are not
01:03:54organic structures that were built up inside the country over time in the way that they were in
01:03:59europe they were they were artificially accelerated by the presence of a third party this is something
01:04:05that i really came to understand um you know i know a lot of people get angry at me for reading
01:04:09this guy but uh this the reason i do is the insights are are powerful when i was reading
01:04:15alexander dugan and he first floated the idea that the adoption of marxism in all these countries
01:04:21that were not ripe for marxist revolution right like the whole point of the of the marxist
01:04:25revolution is you have these capitalist societies that you know decay into the state that ultimately
01:04:30brings about the revolution of the proletariat and blah blah blah you you need the capitalism
01:04:35before you have the communism uh you know they basically expect the capitalism to create the
01:04:40abundance that will make communism functional after the capitalist state has been toppled.
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01:05:15rated r the reason that didn't happen in the capitalist state but it did happen in places
01:05:19like china and russia is very interesting right because those states are not in any way shape or
01:05:25form what marx was describing they were not capitalist states they did not have this access
01:05:30they did not go through the process so why did they adopt marxism and dugan's point was that
01:05:36they adopted marxism as a way to accelerate their own internal capacity for warfare without the
01:05:42interference of western powers so basically the marxism was not an adoption of a real way of life
01:05:48though many of these people did then take the ideology to its logical conclusion and try to
01:05:53implement it disastrously as we've seen for the deaths of many many many millions of people
01:05:58through famine and other uh terrible things but the reason they took it on was because it allowed
01:06:03them to centralize command and control economies, create economies of scale, and do it all without
01:06:10the influence that the Western powers, especially the United States, would have otherwise wielded
01:06:17if they wanted to kind of up jump somebody into this state capacity, right? And so that's what
01:06:23we're seeing is that a lot of people who understood this dynamic where, you know, you have this
01:06:28artificial injection of military arms and influence into a country and it basically made you beholden
01:06:35to the state right this is something i go to in my book the total state about why liberal democracies
01:06:40are so important to the united states well because we own them there are no independent liberal
01:06:44democracies if you're a liberal democracy you're probably a satellite of the united states you're
01:06:49probably a satrapy owned by us at some level because all of the institutional structures
01:06:54that allow for scalable liberal democracy are also entirely bound up with the american system
01:07:01if you want to do something that's not controlled by america if you want to have its own sovereignty
01:07:05you need something besides the liberal democracy and this is why so many other states were willing
01:07:10to engage in communism because it gave them a way to build internal capacity for war making
01:07:17without leashing themselves to the ideological structures of the united states because they took
01:07:21the aid they took the military weapons they took all of the things that's why the united states
01:07:26makes every nato country by its weapons and its ammunition and its technology because it knows it
01:07:32makes it entirely dependent on those people all of their war making capacity is simply an extension
01:07:36of america's war making capacity and if you want to do anything else then you need an entirely
01:07:40different system uh so while uh he you know he's he's very spiteful about the nature of uh this
01:07:46dynamic and you know blames it all for the dysfunction of these areas there is some truth
01:07:51to the fact that because these areas refuse to reject um you know these out these outside clients
01:07:57uh as the suppliers of their were making capacity they inevitably fall into dysfunction and
01:08:03disrepair because they did not go through the process they did not go through the trial of
01:08:08fire necessary to forge themselves into independent actual functioning nations that has real sovereignty
01:08:14I mean, Gramsci believed that the reason why communism didn't happen in capitalist industrialized states was because of the middle class and the middle class provided a sort of squishy third layer in between the lower class and the ruling class that made conflict theory much harder to execute, which is why there was a sort of determined attempt by the communists to thin out the middle class.
01:08:43so as to sort of, you know, dialectically slim down a country
01:08:49into only two classes of people, the poor and the rich,
01:08:52which would make conflict theory and thus revolution