In this episode, we look at an essay by the philosopher Nick Land on the topic of capital, and whether or not it is bound to escape any political liability. This is a topic that the right usually does not look at, but it's critical if we want to understand the politics of what is happening around us and whether we can actually constrain different aspects of globalism.
00:05:52.220That's the primary goal is the good of the people and not the long-term viability of my personal economic preferences or ideology.
00:06:00.800Well, the thing Land is going to invite us to do here is discard our own attachments to any of this stuff and instead look at this kind of analytically.
00:06:10.960He's saying that the left is better able to do this in this particular case, and he'll explain why.
00:06:16.020I won't dive too deep into that because he'll reveal a little more here in a second.
00:06:20.860It can be fixed provisionally by a hypothesis that requires understanding, if not consent.
00:06:27.540Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethnographic locality, ethno-geographical locality,
00:06:39.800and by its very nature, it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to liberate itself or de-territorialize.
00:06:48.860All right, so there's a lot in those two sentences.
00:06:57.780It's not about giving it our moral consent, right?
00:07:03.460He's making an appeal to a Machiavellian form of analysis here.
00:07:07.980We need to look at what works and what is true and not so much what we prefer or like to be true.
00:07:14.540And this is going to be difficult because in some ways I disagree with Land here.
00:07:18.400However, I think his call to think about this in this way is important because if we attach our own personal preferences to what's going to be true here,
00:07:27.620then we're going to have a hard time seeing, you know, the forest for the trees.
00:07:33.360So the second line here, capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographic locality.
00:07:44.560It means that capital does not want to be bound.
00:07:50.140We want to control the economic impacts, the movement of information and, you know, production, development, technology, and of course money.
00:08:05.580We want to, we want to control all of those things and we want to bind them for the good of the people, right?
00:08:12.780We want to bind them to the specific ethno-geographic locality, right?
00:08:17.300So we want things that are operating in America's interest because we're Americans.
00:08:22.580And then the Chinese want things that are operating in their interest because they're Chinese and people who live in Western Europe would prefer that those things be bound to them.
00:08:33.560But what he's saying is that that capital is incentivized to detach itself.
00:08:38.460So globalization, the process that we're undergoing, that we're watching, where capital stops serving the good of the nation and instead detaches itself and wants to escape the political concerns of a specific region.
00:08:56.900He's saying that that is incentivized by capital.
00:09:03.180And, of course, that makes sense if we think about it really quickly, right?
00:09:07.300So, for instance, capital says, you know, we want to offshore the manufacturing of something because it's cheaper, it's more efficient economically, something like that.
00:09:18.380Now, the specific political ethno-geographic concerns might say, well, actually, we want that manufactured in America because let's say all our antibiotics have been offshore to China, which they have, right?
00:09:31.660All of our antibiotics get manufactured outside of the United States.
00:09:35.540And we say, well, it would be better if we manufactured them here, even if it's more expensive or time-consuming or less efficient overall.
00:09:45.420Because if there's something, say, I don't know, a global pandemic or something, and we have a hostile power that produces all of our antibiotics, we would not have access to them.
00:09:57.680And that could be a really big problem.
00:10:00.080And so even though economically, like the needs of capital might say it's better to offshore this creation of antibiotics, our political motivations and our ethno-geographical concerns might say, actually, we'd like to pay the higher cost of keeping it short here.
00:10:27.820Going back to Land's quote here, and by its very nature, it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to liberate itself or de-territorialize.
00:10:37.960All right, so what is de-territorialization?
00:10:40.660That's a really critical concept to grasp here.
00:10:43.680So Land talks a lot about de-territorialization and re-territorialization.
00:10:49.540And I think it's a really important thing for us to get from him.
00:10:52.400He takes that verbiage from Deleuze and Guattara.
00:10:56.260These were actually two Marxists who wrote a book called Anti-Oedipus and another one called A Thousand Plateaus.
00:11:05.820The point of de-territorialization and re-territorialization is that capital is originally territorialized, meaning that it serves the interests of a particular group.
00:11:17.500We create a business or we create some kind of organization, and it serves the function of, I don't know, transporting people across America or making pharmaceuticals or whatever widget it does.
00:11:31.580And it does that in the service of people who are mostly bound to this area, right, to this region.
00:11:39.980However, as it grows and it globalizes, it seeks to de-territorialize.
00:11:45.280The company is no longer interested in serving a particular group of people.
00:11:50.340It doesn't want to just serve Americans.
00:11:52.400It wants to expand its reach, expand its capacity, and capital seeks to de-territorialize different aspects of the business and move them into a more global marketplace.
00:12:06.240This also happens with different things inside our society.
00:12:10.040So, for instance, at one time, finding a romantic partner was territorialized geographically, right?
00:12:22.360You could only travel so far, usually, to find a romantic partner.
00:12:26.820And it was also usually territorialized in the context of, let's say, the family or the church, right?
00:12:33.260You would find a romantic partner because your parents arranged a marriage or because you met somebody at your church or your church had a group where you got people together, those kind of things.
00:12:46.220That was where the primary business of finding a romantic partner was done.
00:12:52.400But it got moved out of, de-territorialized from the geographic region and the church and the family.
00:12:59.440And it's now been re-territorialized into the markets.
00:13:03.260And not just the marketplace, but a more global marketplace, right?
00:13:09.060They pay a fee to go on websites, to date online, or to use apps or those kind of things.
00:13:14.980And they often interact with people well outside of their region.
00:13:20.000And they do so in ways that they never would have done inside the context of a church or family.
00:13:24.860So that process has been de-territorialized from something that was sacred or familial and regional.
00:13:33.260And it has been re-territorialized into the market and in a global way.
00:13:37.300And so he's saying that increasingly, capital is able to de-territorialize itself, remove it from that ethno-geographic context, remove it from that political context, and then relocate itself, re-territorialize itself into kind of the more that global market.
00:13:55.480Now, we're going to dive deeper here into what that means.
00:14:00.600We just broke those two sentences down because we need to understand concepts in there.
00:14:05.840So let's jump back into actually making progress in the essay.
00:14:09.200It is certainly not, at least initially, a matter of approving such a tendency, even if moralistic inclinations of gregarious apes would prefer the question to be imminently transformed in this direction.
00:14:22.640So I obviously disagree with the characterization of gregarious apes.
00:14:28.540However, he is right that we have to look at this question with some degree of detachment.
00:14:36.300If we come at it directly from, well, should this happen, then we may not be able to understand whether it can happen or not.
00:14:44.980And that's always a dangerous place to be.
00:14:46.700I encourage people not to do that when they're doing their political calculus, right?
00:14:52.560So people will look at what's happening in our society, they say, and they say, well, today, and they'll say, well, look, the Constitution says it shouldn't happen.
00:15:04.960If the Constitution says it shouldn't happen and it's still happening and nothing about the political system is stopping it from happening, nothing about the legal system is stopping it from happening, if there's no action from the people to keep it from happening, then saying it shouldn't happen doesn't actually change anything.
00:15:24.400And we need to reevaluate the way we look at it politically so we can better understand what's happening.
00:15:30.100The same argument is being made by Land here.
00:15:32.660He's saying, look, when we when we're looking at the question of whether capital escapes, we must actually understand the truth of it.
00:15:42.080We don't want to approach it from, well, should it be able to escape or should we be able to control it?
00:15:47.660We're not trying to draw those moralistic lines.
00:15:49.420We're trying to better understand the truth of the situation.
00:15:59.640Integral leftist animosity to capital is actually valuable in this respect, since it makes some room for comprehensive apprehension of globalization as a strategy oriented to the flight of alienating productive capability from political answerability.
00:16:16.720The left sees capital elude its clutches and it sees something very real when it does so.
00:16:22.720Does so by the most significant agent of by far the most significant agent of exit is capital itself.
00:16:30.040A fact, which once again, practically.
00:17:01.840If you're looking at the World Economic Forum, if you're looking at, you know, George Shores or a lot of these people, they want the global governance.
00:17:11.180They want the global marketplace of both humans and and things.
00:17:17.360And so they don't have a lot of problems here.
00:17:19.220He's talking about kind of that old Marxist animosity towards capital.
00:17:23.660He says, well, he says, well, they might be wrong a lot of about a lot of things.
00:17:28.580Their hostility towards capital at least helps them to see the eventuality of this truth that capital does want to escape, that it does want to avoid political answerability.
00:17:42.080Because that's kind of the socialist idea, right, is that we will make political we will make capital politically answerable.
00:18:54.900The fact that there was investment and there are all these ways that you could you know, you could split of finance a voyage and you could secure new products and send them back.
00:19:06.080You know, there's also the fact that today, you know, how do you escape political accountability?
00:19:10.360Well, you rich being rich is a great way to do that.
00:19:13.720And so there's most certainly some truth to that.
00:26:57.960Even if we could control it is a separate question.
00:27:01.440But the bigger question for land here is the first one, can we even control in the first place?
00:27:06.200Can we actually bind it to specific people, specific areas?
00:27:11.260Can we limit its constant desire to de-territorialize, right?
00:27:19.380Because I think that's a lot of what, when especially conservatives look at what's happening,
00:27:24.220a lot of people on the right, they look at what's happening in society.
00:27:27.280What they see is a lot of de-territorialization.
00:27:30.120They see a lot of economic de-territorialization.
00:27:32.900And that's what they're worried about.
00:27:34.440They think they're worried about social degeneration.
00:27:36.580And they're right, right, that we see a lot of degeneracy that has come, you know, morally.
00:27:44.400But a lot of that stuff follows from the economic consequences of de-territorialization.
00:27:49.080When we remove the ability of one man to provide for a whole family, we're going to change the family structure, right?
00:27:58.680When we open up markets to women and children, you're going to see the social structure of the family change.
00:28:07.240We're going to see critical parts of our social structures and our traditions change when we de-territorialize things.
00:28:15.360And so a lot of the things that the right observes that they don't like are actually the consequences of capital escape.
00:28:22.620And so the right, in many ways, is looking at ways that it can bind capital to serve those family units or those traditional kind of bonds that we have as humans,
00:28:33.540rather than letting everything escape and kind of turning everything into this globalized, homogenized market.
00:30:42.860They live in kind of that Elysium future where everything is very nice and they can avoid many of the consequences of what has happened.
00:30:52.380But the average person has to live with the consequences of the fact that escape, capital, exit has de-territorialized so many things
00:31:00.160that society, normal social bonds and functions have broken down.
00:31:03.600And that's when you look at a lot of that science fiction of that style, that's what they're talking about is that these different things have kind of,
00:31:31.420He thinks that capital escaping its need to kind of care for the larger group means that the small group of people or really even just intelligence,
00:31:41.400whatever, however you want to define that, that can escape the need to sustain the masses.
00:31:46.160Well, that's going to grow and that's going to accelerate and that's going to become hyper-advanced.
00:31:51.360And that's this amazing kind of sci-fi future for that group.
00:31:56.120However, it's terrible for everybody that's left behind, obviously.
00:31:59.340But this is a really difficult question because as technology advances, we can kind of feel this, right?
00:32:07.080For a while, it felt like we were in this golden age where the rising tide would lift all the boats, right?
00:32:13.840The technological innovation would come around and everyone would have longer lifespans and they would be able to look up any information at all time.
00:32:23.860You'd have the library of Alexandria at your fingertips, blah, blah, blah.
00:32:28.380But then we look at the actual consequences of that technology.
00:32:31.760And what's really happening is families are breaking down.
00:32:34.960The average, you know, the ability of people to sustain like a middle class existence falls apart.
00:32:40.980And we start having this extreme separation where, yeah, you know, the lives of the very rich are the people who can stay ahead of the consequences of capital escape.
00:32:51.980They live amazing lives, but you end up with a bunch of squalor everywhere else.
00:32:55.840Again, you can look at basically any place to the left rule where, you know, yes, you can live this amazing nightlife in Manhattan or somewhere and you can have the best of everything.
00:33:20.280Again, that's that very cyberpunk reality where this bifurcation of society gets more extreme.
00:33:28.880And he says that, you know, this is kind of the nature of if capital is going to escape, then that's kind of what that means is that we're going to see as capital separates itself from the need to sustain the larger society, it can become more and more advanced.
00:34:35.460It destroys traditional structures that sustain humanity and the wider good of the people it's supposed to serve.
00:34:43.480But he's saying, that's not the question I'm asking you guys.
00:34:46.380I'm not asking you, is this a good thing?
00:34:48.480I'm asking you, is this the process that's actually happening?
00:34:53.160And the difficult thing is the answer that seems to be yes, right?
00:34:57.080It's hard to look at the situation we have and say that this is not happening.
00:35:02.440Now, you could say, well, there's not a sufficient effort made to keep things territorialized, right?
00:35:11.260Keep things locked in kind of that box of the ethno-geographical concern.
00:35:17.620There's not enough effort expended in limiting capital escape.
00:35:21.400There's been all of these free market policies.
00:35:23.540There's been this desire of the ruling class to separate themselves and become uber rich and make this incredible existence.
00:35:30.880And so really, it's not that capital restriction isn't possible.
00:35:36.960It's that it simply has not been tried sufficiently.
00:35:39.100I'd remind you, as much as I'd like that to be true, that all the political ideologies of the 20th century that were not liberalism were founded basically in response to liberalism in an attempt to stop this process.
00:35:55.600This is what Alexander Dugan talks about in the fourth political theory when he talks about the fact that both communism and fascism were basically founded as reactions to economic liberalism in the interest of binding the capital escape, binding the process, stopping the very process that land is asking about now.
00:36:16.600And as we can see, both of those ideologies sit in tatters.
00:36:22.200They fail to do what they wanted to do.
00:36:25.280Now you might say, well, there's some combination.
00:36:28.520That's kind of what Dugan says in some ways.
00:36:30.980We can take the bad elements of those ideologies and we can recombine the good elements.
00:36:35.720We just drop the bad elements, recombine the good elements, and that can stop this process.
00:36:40.300Maybe, though I think even Dugan is sketchy on whether or not that actually works, and I think for him, it's really that after this process, there's a post-liberal order.
00:36:53.940There's a post-liberal state that can learn from kind of the mistakes that were made and carry into the future controls on capital exit that might rebind us to the spiritual, rebind us to the traditional, rebind us to our prior loyalties of places and peoples and groups and nations, and not just drop us into kind of this global homogenized marketplace.
00:37:21.660But again, Lan's question is, is this for the process that's happening?
00:37:26.100And I think if we're honest, the answer is, unfortunately, yes.
00:37:31.120It is the contention, back to his essay here, it is the contention of this blog.
00:37:35.460Remember, all of these essays are written on a blog he used to have.
00:37:39.600Contention of this blog that without a conception of economic automatization, which means escape, modernity makes no sense.
00:37:59.040We are increasingly removing the interests of the state, of the people, of the human, of the individual from the economic process.
00:38:08.640And again, if you look at some of the things that go on, it's hard to say that's not the case.
00:38:15.200Now, most people will say, well, no, those are individual decisions being made, right?
00:38:19.840The CEO of the corporation is deciding not to serve the nation and instead serve the interests of the global marketplace.
00:38:25.900Or, you know, the politician, the think tank guy, the academic, they're all making active choices to serve the interests of a global order or, you know, de-territorialize these things and not serve the interests of the people that they're supposed to.
00:38:44.460And yes, they are making individual choices.
00:38:47.460However, remember, those are based on incentive structures and those incentive structures seem to be accelerating towards this more egregious capital escape.
00:38:57.160That's kind of his point is, you know, and he'll say this elsewhere.
00:39:01.100I'll get more into this probably in a later episode.
00:39:03.480But the decisions start to make themselves.
00:39:05.780Yes, individuals are making choices, but those choices are lined up with the incentives created by capital.
00:39:12.540And so in this way, he's saying capital liberates itself because, you know, we have this incentive structure that is aligning with the needs of capital to escape.
00:39:23.600And so even though individual actors are making decisions, they are constantly incentivized to dismiss the needs of the people, the nation, the group, and instead pursue that which is advantageous to capital escape.
00:39:41.100The basic vector of capital cannot be drawn in any other way.
00:39:44.880Furthermore, the distribution of ideological positions through their relation to this vector as resistance to or promotions of escape of capital constructs the most historically meaningful version of the left-right political spectrum since it confirms the social conflict of greatest real consequences.
00:40:05.400So he's basically saying that the best way to understand the left-right divide in politics is actually instead of, you know, taking the hodgepodge of different policy issues and things that, you know, we all have probably noticed that left and right don't mean very much right now for a lot of people.
00:40:26.280And so he's saying the best way to construct this is actually along this idea of capital escape, whether it supports capital escape or it doesn't.
00:41:13.960If capital is escaping, the emergence of the blockchain is an inevitable escalation of modernity with consequences too profound to easily summarize.
00:41:22.980If it isn't, the macroeconomics might work.
00:41:26.880So what he's saying there is, you know, traditionally we have macroeconomics, you know, or at least we have a monetary policy.
00:41:36.420We have different regulations on banking and these kind of things.
00:41:40.280There's a central, there's a centralized institution or a distributed web of institutions which authorize interactions and, you know, they limit these things.
00:41:51.920And that's kind of what macroeconomics is.
00:41:55.120It's an attempt to put it like a governor on, a limiter on the constant feedback, the constant positive feedback of economic interactions.
00:42:05.240And he's saying the blockchain, because blockchain technology basically allows you to decentralize economic interactions.
00:42:12.620You don't have to run things through this network of banks that can be controlled through states.
00:42:16.980Blockchain allows you to create the system that is entirely disconnected from state controlled entities.
00:42:26.540That allows you to have an incredible escalation of modernity.
00:42:32.120You can have an incredible escalation of this capital flight because then countries really have no way to control things.
00:42:38.340And there's this battle back and forth.
00:42:40.400You know, a lot of blockchain people, a lot of Bitcoin people, a lot of cryptocurrency people like the idea because specifically it allows for their transactions to no longer be governed by the state.
00:42:54.620The state can't inflate money or, you know, slap controls from banks onto things to limit what you're doing.
00:43:01.740There's no longer that accountability to a single political entity.
00:43:06.760And that's really advantageous if you're like, if you think that political entities are poisonous to you.
00:43:13.420And a lot of people do right now, right?
00:43:16.460I personally think that the U.S. government is more dangerous than pretty much any other external enemy to the well-being of the people of the United States.
00:43:26.340And so in some ways, you might say, well, well, blockchain and Bitcoin, those things solve that problem because it removes the United States government's ability to manipulate monetary policy and therefore prop up the regime with these infinite fake dollars.
00:43:42.500And that's all true. Right. And that seems good in theory, right, that the regime would would no longer be able to manufacture this kind of fake control over the economic system and kind of everything through its macroeconomic policy.
00:43:59.340However, there is a consequence to this. Right.
00:44:02.040If you completely free capital from states and the control of states, that that seems good because the state is against you.
00:44:11.400Sure. However, then you free pretty much its ability to be controlled in the interest of any any political entity at all, which means you have lose the ability to contain to say the United States ever for any reason, even if the United States is something you are looking to preserve or people in the United States are something you're looking to preserve.
00:44:32.040And so there's this, you know, there's certainly you could say a dual edge sword, but I would say, you know, almost almost legion edge sword of what capital escape can do.
00:44:43.460Sure. It can topple bad regimes, but it could also topple any regime, good or bad, which is kind of its point is to to reduce the ability of of politics to have any bearing on capital because capital can escape its consequences entirely.
00:45:02.500So this is a very difficult question, one that I'm still grappling with, because it's hard to argue, I think, with the inevitability of some of the process that land is talking about.
00:45:13.000So at the same time, it seems very difficult for humans to, I don't know, exist in any good way, any meaningfully good way with each other if that if this becomes reality.
00:45:27.440Now, for many people, this is certainly a mindset on certain parts of the right saying, well, that doesn't matter because only the strongest and the fittest would survive only only kind of the cream of the crop would escape with the capital.
00:45:40.620And that's going to be for the best. And perhaps that's true. Maybe that maybe that is ultimately the good.
00:45:46.060However, that's going to leave a lot of very good people to rot and they're going to they're going to lose any contact with tradition, family structures, religion, anything that gave their lives meaning and protected them from a very cruel world.
00:46:01.040Again, perhaps that is what you're seeking. You're saying, well, all of that sounds very leftist and that that's not anything that we should be doing.
00:46:07.800However, if you have any interest in actually protecting any kind of community, those are kind of things that you have to do.
00:46:13.680So there's a very real tension there. I don't think this is a problem that has been solved in any way, shape or form, but it is a mechanical thing that we really need to understand about what's going on in the world around us.
00:46:25.720If we want to have a chance at addressing the issues that we're facing.
00:46:30.740All right, guys, going to go ahead and pivot over to the questions of the people here.
00:46:35.260Let me take a look. Oh, we've got Thursday here for five dollars.
00:47:27.060The global elite now appear fully neo-feudal, an international and insular group of people who marry one another and appoint one another to positions of power over the lucasers and debt peons.
00:47:45.280Yeah, that is most certainly the attempt that is happening, of course, on the global level, though.
00:47:51.000I think you're going to get, and this is probably not anyone's favorite prediction from me, but I think you are going to get feudalism either way.
00:47:58.860I think that society, I think Gatana Mosca is right, and the society tends to work from bureaucratic complexity back to feudal complexity, back to bureaucratic complexity, down to feudal complexity.
00:48:12.040Right now, we have bureaucratic complexity, and they're attempting to globalize it.
00:48:16.140However, that kind of creates a feudalism at a global level.
00:48:21.580However, I don't think that's going to be sustainable.
00:48:24.300I'm not long on the ability of the global elites to maintain an empire, and so I think that we are going to see a devolution of things, but I don't think it'll be even down to the size of nations that we see now, but to something far smaller, perhaps even something that people would describe.
00:48:47.060Big downfall of the U.S. is state control of private property.
00:48:51.540Limits on excluding people from property based on beliefs, behavior, is civil rights state control or agent of deterritorization and homogenization.
00:49:05.800So, obviously, you're talking about the right of association, and the right of association has been dead in the United States for a long time.
00:49:15.260It's very weird because it used to be a critical part.
00:49:18.900It would have been listed as a critical part of any kind of liberalism, the right of free association of citizens.
00:49:28.720You correctly pointed out that civil rights law has more or less destroyed that decision-making.
00:49:35.680Now, to be clear, guys, just because you can make that decision doesn't necessarily mean you would or should, but whether or not the right exists is really the thing that is up for debate, and the answer is it does not.
00:49:47.540And so the question is, is that an agent of deterritorization and homogenization?
00:49:52.320So, obviously, it requires you to have a more globalizing look, and I think we can see this in a macro way when we look at immigration policy, which is really just an extension of this.
00:50:06.040You know, citizens do not have the right under kind of the liberal paradigm or the progressive paradigm to limit who enters their country, just as you do not have the right to limit who lives in a neighborhood or works at a business or shops or wherever.
00:50:22.320And so the idea there is that this is a removal of any kind of separation, any kind of exit, any kind of decision made on behalf of the property holder as to whether or not they can limit access.
00:50:39.860And we've taken that, again, that kind of micro determination that was made inside the civil rights framework, and that has been blown up to a nationwide understanding of entry into the country and to citizenship.
00:50:55.060And so, you know, is this an agent of deterritorialization?
00:51:15.180And so you have to get rid of national borders in order to do this.
00:51:18.320In case you're wondering, you know, who thought this was a good idea?
00:51:22.020I mean, Marx said that he was a free trader in the sense that it was more likely to accelerate the breakdown of nations.
00:51:29.600And that's ultimately something that he was looking for because he wanted a global control of capital.
00:51:34.000And so, yes, I think that ultimately that does make it an agent of deterritorialization.
00:51:44.240If you don't have the ability to control who's moving in and out of your borders because they need to, or, you know, whether they be your own personal private property or the nation as a whole,
00:51:55.260because the needs of capital must be served, then obviously that's going to have that effect.
00:52:43.500Of course, if this is your first time on the channel, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel.
00:52:48.400And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, make sure there's just a subscribe to the Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:52:57.180When you do, please leave a rating or review.
00:52:59.840It really helps with all the algorithm magic.
00:53:02.600Once again, guys, I appreciate your comments.