The Auron MacIntyre Show - Nick Land on Capital Escape ｜ 11⧸20⧸23

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00:00:30.260 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.000 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.620 I am Oren McIntyre.

00:00:35.280 So, I have been working on a long-running series

00:00:38.640 looking at the works of the philosopher Nick Land.

00:00:42.140 Land is one of the critical figures when it comes to neoreactionary thought.

00:00:47.160 He is somebody who was formerly a Marxist, or still, I guess, in many ways.

00:00:52.380 Things along those lines, but however, kind of moved to the right

00:00:55.880 and in that transition brought a very interesting set of skills when it came to analyzing our political situation.

00:01:04.500 I've been looking at a number of different essays by him,

00:01:07.520 and today we're looking at something from his Xenosystems blog.

00:01:10.420 It's something you can't find online easily anymore.

00:01:13.700 However, there is a PDF collection of them.

00:01:16.440 There's a rumor that there will eventually be a printed version,

00:01:20.560 but we will have to see if that comes to fruition.

00:01:23.560 Today, we're looking at the topic of capital and whether or not it is bound to escape any political liability.

00:01:33.480 Now, again, that's a topic that is something that the right usually does not look at,

00:01:37.680 but it's critical if we want to understand the politics of what is happening around us

00:01:42.500 and whether or not mechanically we can actually constrain different aspects of globalism.

00:01:49.820 So we're going to read through this essay, look at some of the critical things that we need to understand

00:01:54.040 about capital and its tendency to move outside of the political organizations that bind it.

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00:03:11.780 All right, guys, so let's go ahead and dive into the essay here.

00:03:16.900 I'll read pieces of it, and then we'll stop and discuss as we get to the critical part.

00:03:22.660 So again, the title of this short essay is Capital Escapes.

00:03:27.180 Land says,

00:03:27.700 So he's going to talk about the fact that the right has a hard time when it looks at capital,

00:03:49.640 because capitalism and the battle between capitalism and socialism or other economic forces

00:03:56.820 has become a big part of the identity of the different political sides.

00:04:01.780 Many people only see the different sides of the political spectrum as a battle between economic ideologies.

00:04:08.640 I think that's a big mistake.

00:04:10.500 I think that's a real problem.

00:04:11.700 But it's true that in many cases, a lot of people on the right see themselves as capitalists

00:04:18.680 or defending capitalism, and capitalism is its own good or its primary goal, those kind of things.

00:04:24.800 And so they wrap themselves around this as their identity.

00:04:28.620 Now, to be clear, economic systems should at least, and we'll talk about,

00:04:32.580 this is going to be a big part of this essay, whether or not this can be true.

00:04:35.560 But in the past, economic systems should be bound to the people they serve.

00:04:43.620 They should be for the good of the people they serve.

00:04:46.160 And in many cases, the thing that we call capitalism has been the best form of economic system,

00:04:51.840 and therefore, it is the one that is best for the people at that time.

00:04:56.520 However, it's not a suicide pact, capitalism, socialism, whatever you want to call the current system you're following.

00:05:05.800 You should not be bound to that system.

00:05:08.740 You should be worrying about the good of a people.

00:05:11.840 Now, that does, of course, mean taking in a lot of things into account.

00:05:15.500 Maybe something looks like it's good for people in the short term, but in the long term, it's very harmful.

00:05:20.920 So I'm not saying that you shouldn't look at the long-term effects of economic systems.

00:05:27.260 But the point is that if you are caring only about the economic system itself, the economic system becomes the religion.

00:05:35.020 If the economic system becomes the thing you are serving and not, hey, this is a tool,

00:05:40.080 and if it's good for the people I care about and I rule over or I'm a part of or I serve, well, then it's good for them.

00:05:50.100 Then that's good.

00:05:50.780 And if it's not, then it's not.

00:05:52.220 That's the primary goal is the good of the people and not the long-term viability of my personal economic preferences or ideology.

00:06:00.800 Well, 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.

00:06:10.960 He's saying that the left is better able to do this in this particular case, and he'll explain why.

00:06:16.020 I won't dive too deep into that because he'll reveal a little more here in a second.

00:06:20.860 It can be fixed provisionally by a hypothesis that requires understanding, if not consent.

00:06:27.540 Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethnographic locality, ethno-geographical locality,

00:06:39.800 and by its very nature, it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to liberate itself or de-territorialize.

00:06:48.860 All right, so there's a lot in those two sentences.

00:06:51.220 Let's break that down.

00:06:52.320 First, he says, look, we need to look at this kind of in a detached way.

00:06:56.200 We need to understand this.

00:06:57.780 It's not about giving it our moral consent, right?

00:07:03.460 He's making an appeal to a Machiavellian form of analysis here.

00:07:07.980 We need to look at what works and what is true and not so much what we prefer or like to be true.

00:07:14.540 And this is going to be difficult because in some ways I disagree with Land here.

00:07:18.400 However, 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,

00:07:27.620 then we're going to have a hard time seeing, you know, the forest for the trees.

00:07:31.880 And that's what he's encouraging.

00:07:33.360 So the second line here, capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographic locality.

00:07:42.880 All right.

00:07:43.300 What does that mean?

00:07:44.560 It means that capital does not want to be bound.

00:07:50.140 We want to control the economic impacts, the movement of information and, you know, production, development, technology, and of course money.

00:08:05.580 We want to, we want to control all of those things and we want to bind them for the good of the people, right?

00:08:12.780 We want to bind them to the specific ethno-geographic locality, right?

00:08:17.300 So we want things that are operating in America's interest because we're Americans.

00:08:22.580 And 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.

00:08:33.560 But what he's saying is that that capital is incentivized to detach itself.

00:08:38.460 So 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.

00:08:56.900 He's saying that that is incentivized by capital.

00:09:01.580 That's what capital wants to do.

00:09:03.180 And, of course, that makes sense if we think about it really quickly, right?

00:09:07.300 So, 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.

00:09:18.380 Now, 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?

00:09:31.660 All of our antibiotics get manufactured outside of the United States.

00:09:35.540 And 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.

00:09:45.420 Because 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.

00:09:57.680 And that could be a really big problem.

00:10:00.080 And 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.

00:10:24.140 That that is to serve our interest.

00:10:27.820 Going back to Land's quote here, and by its very nature, it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to liberate itself or de-territorialize.

00:10:37.960 All right, so what is de-territorialization?

00:10:40.660 That's a really critical concept to grasp here.

00:10:43.680 So Land talks a lot about de-territorialization and re-territorialization.

00:10:49.540 And I think it's a really important thing for us to get from him.

00:10:52.400 He takes that verbiage from Deleuze and Guattara.

00:10:56.260 These were actually two Marxists who wrote a book called Anti-Oedipus and another one called A Thousand Plateaus.

00:11:04.360 There's a lot behind that.

00:11:05.820 The point of de-territorialization and re-territorialization is that capital is originally territorialized, meaning that it serves the interests of a particular group.

00:11:17.500 We 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.

00:11:31.580 And it does that in the service of people who are mostly bound to this area, right, to this region.

00:11:39.980 However, as it grows and it globalizes, it seeks to de-territorialize.

00:11:45.280 The company is no longer interested in serving a particular group of people.

00:11:50.340 It doesn't want to just serve Americans.

00:11:52.400 It 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.

00:12:06.240 This also happens with different things inside our society.

00:12:10.040 So, for instance, at one time, finding a romantic partner was territorialized geographically, right?

00:12:19.540 You had to be in a specific region.

00:12:22.360 You could only travel so far, usually, to find a romantic partner.

00:12:26.820 And it was also usually territorialized in the context of, let's say, the family or the church, right?

00:12:33.260 You 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.

00:12:46.220 That was where the primary business of finding a romantic partner was done.

00:12:52.400 But it got moved out of, de-territorialized from the geographic region and the church and the family.

00:12:59.440 And it's now been re-territorialized into the markets.

00:13:03.260 And not just the marketplace, but a more global marketplace, right?

00:13:06.720 Now, people date online.

00:13:09.060 They pay a fee to go on websites, to date online, or to use apps or those kind of things.

00:13:14.980 And they often interact with people well outside of their region.

00:13:20.000 And they do so in ways that they never would have done inside the context of a church or family.

00:13:24.860 So that process has been de-territorialized from something that was sacred or familial and regional.

00:13:33.260 And it has been re-territorialized into the market and in a global way.

00:13:37.300 And 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.

00:13:55.480 Now, we're going to dive deeper here into what that means.

00:14:00.600 We just broke those two sentences down because we need to understand concepts in there.

00:14:05.840 So let's jump back into actually making progress in the essay.

00:14:09.200 It 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.

00:14:22.640 So I obviously disagree with the characterization of gregarious apes.

00:14:28.540 However, he is right that we have to look at this question with some degree of detachment.

00:14:36.300 If we come at it directly from, well, should this happen, then we may not be able to understand whether it can happen or not.

00:14:44.980 And that's always a dangerous place to be.

00:14:46.700 I encourage people not to do that when they're doing their political calculus, right?

00:14:52.560 So 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.

00:15:01.120 So it can't happen.

00:15:03.140 But that's not how that works.

00:15:04.960 If 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.

00:15:24.400 And we need to reevaluate the way we look at it politically so we can better understand what's happening.

00:15:30.100 The same argument is being made by Land here.

00:15:32.660 He's saying, look, when we when we're looking at the question of whether capital escapes, we must actually understand the truth of it.

00:15:42.080 We don't want to approach it from, well, should it be able to escape or should we be able to control it?

00:15:47.660 We're not trying to draw those moralistic lines.

00:15:49.420 We're trying to better understand the truth of the situation.

00:15:54.400 All right.

00:15:56.520 So back into Land's essay here.

00:15:59.640 Integral 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.

00:16:16.720 The left sees capital elude its clutches and it sees something very real when it does so.

00:16:22.720 Does so by the most significant agent of by far the most significant agent of exit is capital itself.

00:16:30.040 A fact, which once again, practically.

00:16:35.100 Explicable.

00:16:37.240 Excitable.

00:16:37.960 Sorry.

00:16:39.000 Apes find hard to see straight.

00:16:41.220 So what's he what is he saying there?

00:16:42.880 He's saying, well, in some ways, the left understand this issue better because they're actually have this animus towards capital.

00:16:50.700 Now, here he's talking about really the Marxist left.

00:16:55.200 Obviously, in many ways, the neoliberal left are not they don't have hostility to this at all.

00:17:00.920 This is their goal.

00:17:01.840 If 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.

00:17:09.020 They want the globalization.

00:17:11.180 They want the global marketplace of both humans and and things.

00:17:17.360 And so they don't have a lot of problems here.

00:17:19.220 He's talking about kind of that old Marxist animosity towards capital.

00:17:23.660 He says, well, he says, well, they might be wrong a lot of about a lot of things.

00:17:28.580 Their 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.

00:17:42.080 Because that's kind of the socialist idea, right, is that we will make political we will make capital politically answerable.

00:17:50.480 We will control its flow.

00:17:52.440 We will make sure that it cannot escape the consequences that it visits upon our our ethno geographical locality.

00:18:01.500 Right.

00:18:01.940 We want to control it.

00:18:03.920 We want to penalize it in certain ways.

00:18:06.860 We want to punish it.

00:18:08.780 We want to keep it under wraps.

00:18:10.920 We do not want it to just be able to escape and do whatever it does.

00:18:14.820 However, he's and he's saying that the left's animosity towards this lets you know that, you know, gives it some some truth.

00:18:22.180 It allows them to see something that many people on the right maybe don't want to see.

00:18:27.360 He's he's saying that really the most significant agent of exit is capital.

00:18:32.180 The most significant agent of getting people out of political accountability is capital.

00:18:39.040 And well, that that's hard to argue in some ways.

00:18:42.780 Right.

00:18:43.040 We look at whether it's people fleeing kind of more controlled governments originally for the new world.

00:18:52.800 What allowed them to do that?

00:18:54.340 Well, capital.

00:18:54.900 The 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.

00:19:06.080 You know, there's also the fact that today, you know, how do you escape political accountability?

00:19:10.360 Well, you rich being rich is a great way to do that.

00:19:13.720 And so there's most certainly some truth to that.

00:19:17.160 Back to his essay here.

00:19:18.980 It's escaping.

00:19:20.320 Let's punish it.

00:19:21.480 He says, yes, yes, that's there's always plenty of time for that. 0.85

00:19:25.320 But shelving such idiocies for just a few moments is a cognitive prerequisite.

00:19:32.460 Primary question is is a much colder one.

00:19:35.280 Is this actually happening?

00:19:36.760 So he says, yeah, I get it.

00:19:38.360 You want to go ahead and punish this.

00:19:40.580 I get it that you want to go ahead and tell capital what it wants to do.

00:19:44.100 We can figure that out in a second.

00:19:45.860 The more important thing to figure out is, is this actually happening?

00:19:49.520 Is escape actually a primary function of this?

00:19:53.520 And can we control it?

00:19:56.840 The implications are enormous.

00:19:58.420 If capital cannot escape, it is a it's apparent migration into global circuits beyond national

00:20:04.880 government control or non exhaustive for non exhaustive example is mere illusion.

00:20:12.020 Then the sphere of political possibility is vastly expanded.

00:20:17.020 Policies that hurt, limit, shrink or destroy capital can be pursued with great latitude.

00:20:22.520 They only be constrained by political factors, making the political fight the only one that

00:20:28.480 matters.

00:20:29.120 All right.

00:20:29.840 So he's saying here, if we can actually control this, if capital can't escape and it's constant

00:20:37.520 shift, what looks like it's constant desire to shift into the, you know, kind of the global

00:20:44.440 market escape the boundaries of the nations that would try to control it. 0.98

00:20:48.500 If that's not true, if that's merely an illusion, well, then we have all these political options.

00:20:54.940 We have all these political tools.

00:20:56.760 You can put regulations on it.

00:20:58.460 You can shift the incentives.

00:21:00.280 You can work to slow it down.

00:21:02.540 You can put barriers between capital and its acceleration.

00:21:06.340 You can do all of these different things if capital isn't inevitably destined to escape.

00:21:13.540 However, if it is, then that really matters.

00:21:16.820 The question is really, what is the realm of political, or what is the realm of political,

00:21:22.360 how can it work in concert with economics?

00:21:27.860 Is there a limit to the realm of the political when it comes to economics?

00:21:31.220 Will capital eventually escape, or can economics control capital?

00:21:37.560 Can economic policy ultimately put restraints on capital?

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00:22:14.340 Back to his essay here.

00:22:16.400 If capital cannot in reality flee, then progress and regress are simply alternatives.

00:22:22.620 Either nations advance as wholes in a way that compromises on an awkward diagonal

00:22:31.500 between the very different optimisms of Whigs and socialists,

00:22:36.120 or they regress as wholes, destroying techno-economic capability

00:22:40.520 on the downslope of social degeneration.

00:22:43.980 All right, so if capital can't flee, if it can't actually get away from all political control,

00:22:54.940 all political forces, then either you're going to regress or you're going to progress,

00:23:04.400 and it's going to kind of happen simultaneously, right?

00:23:07.720 Nations are going to work towards a thing in a way that, like he says here,

00:23:14.380 in a way that compromises between very different optimisms of Whigs and socialists.

00:23:19.520 So whether these people are right and you have some level of control

00:23:23.640 and you're going to progress because you exercise that control in a positive way

00:23:28.580 that grows your society,

00:23:30.740 or you kind of have this Doomer mentality where, like, the social economic ability decreases

00:23:38.980 because when you try to control it, it just kind of starts falling apart,

00:23:43.940 and then you have social degeneration.

00:23:46.560 So if it can't escape, then it's going to be one of those two things.

00:23:49.520 Either you have this optimistic view that we can control it in a positive way

00:23:53.020 because that's one assumption that a lot of people make, right?

00:23:56.140 If we control capital, if we find a way to control capital's escape and localize it

00:24:01.200 and hold it accountable for particular effects that it has,

00:24:04.920 then it will always be positive, right?

00:24:06.760 That's kind of the socialist hope or the Whig hope he's highlighting here, 0.91

00:24:12.060 that there will be a positive future if we manage capital correctly

00:24:15.780 and we can control it correctly.

00:24:17.480 But he's saying that's not necessarily the case, right?

00:24:19.600 There is this thing where humans will ultimately try to control capital

00:24:23.820 and they could succeed in controlling capital.

00:24:27.420 We could succeed in controlling economics.

00:24:30.640 However, that will lead us to doom, right?

00:24:33.640 And that's a very real possibility.

00:24:35.680 A lot of people make that case.

00:24:37.120 Any attempt to control capital, if it is controllable at all,

00:24:41.760 could lead to a downward economic spiral.

00:24:44.740 A lot of free trade people, a lot of laissez-faire economic people will say this, right?

00:24:49.600 You'll hear a lot of neoconservative economics guys say this.

00:24:53.280 We have to have all these open borders.

00:24:56.860 We have to have open markets all the time.

00:24:59.660 We have to have free trade all the time.

00:25:01.320 Any attempts to put any kind of economic policy or restriction in place is socialism.

00:25:05.960 And if we do that, then everything falls apart.

00:25:08.600 Anything that has to be a real possibility you consider, right?

00:25:11.620 Maybe there will be positive effects of controlled capital.

00:25:14.600 Maybe you will have this positive progress of controlling capital if it's possible.

00:25:21.820 But also, you could control capital and then you just have a giant failing.

00:25:26.540 And a lot of people will point to state attempts throughout history to control economic progress,

00:25:33.660 economic liberalization, and kind of their downfalls.

00:25:37.220 And you will have a track record of that.

00:25:39.060 That won't be something that's entirely wrong.

00:25:42.560 And the question is, is there a good balance that could be struck, right?

00:25:46.140 If capital escape is not inevitable, if capital can be controlled, if it can be limited,

00:25:54.120 if it can be put in kind of the box and forced to serve particular peoples,

00:26:00.640 then the two eventualities are progress or degeneration because there's consequences.

00:26:08.620 We want there to be the sweet spot.

00:26:10.260 We want there to be this perfect balance where we control capital sufficiently to where it continues

00:26:15.820 to serve the needs of humans and specifically the human group that created it, you know,

00:26:20.280 as people who would prefer that capital serve our own nations, our own peoples,

00:26:25.100 then we're people who want to be able to control it and bind it to our ethno-geographical locality,

00:26:32.480 right?

00:26:32.760 That's what you talked about earlier.

00:26:35.080 But we want that to happen without significant consequence.

00:26:38.180 We don't want there to be just like this general social degeneration because we attempted

00:26:43.460 to limit, you know, the ability of capital to escape.

00:26:48.000 But again, that's all predicated on the idea that we can limit the ability of capital to escape.

00:26:55.100 Is there that sweet spot?

00:26:57.960 Even if we could control it is a separate question.

00:27:01.440 But the bigger question for land here is the first one, can we even control in the first place?

00:27:06.200 Can we actually bind it to specific people, specific areas?

00:27:11.260 Can we limit its constant desire to de-territorialize, right?

00:27:19.380 Because I think that's a lot of what, when especially conservatives look at what's happening,

00:27:24.220 a lot of people on the right, they look at what's happening in society.

00:27:27.280 What they see is a lot of de-territorialization.

00:27:30.120 They see a lot of economic de-territorialization.

00:27:32.900 And that's what they're worried about.

00:27:34.440 They think they're worried about social degeneration.

00:27:36.580 And they're right, right, that we see a lot of degeneracy that has come, you know, morally.

00:27:44.400 But a lot of that stuff follows from the economic consequences of de-territorialization.

00:27:49.080 When we remove the ability of one man to provide for a whole family, we're going to change the family structure, right?

00:27:58.680 When we open up markets to women and children, you're going to see the social structure of the family change. 0.90

00:28:07.240 We're going to see critical parts of our social structures and our traditions change when we de-territorialize things.

00:28:15.360 And so a lot of the things that the right observes that they don't like are actually the consequences of capital escape.

00:28:22.620 And 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,

00:28:33.540 rather than letting everything escape and kind of turning everything into this globalized, homogenized market.

00:28:40.880 All right, back to our essay here.

00:28:44.020 Only if capital escapes or practically decouples does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about social-political trends,

00:28:53.620 alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of techno-economic innovation.

00:28:59.560 The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split political forecasts.

00:29:05.520 The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split future forecasts in which squalid ruin

00:29:25.700 and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely tangled tandem cyberpunk and Elysium.

00:29:40.260 Sorry, I messed that reading up real bad.

00:29:42.540 Here's what he's trying to say here.

00:29:44.500 He's saying if capital escape is inevitable, right?

00:29:49.160 If this is going to happen this way, then we end up in a situation where we get these split forecasts, right?

00:29:56.780 Where capital is no longer serving a particular group well, but it's still accelerating in its design.

00:30:05.580 And we can see this in a lot of dystopian science fiction.

00:30:09.640 He kind of gives us cyberpunk or Elysium if you've never read any of the neuromancer novels, the cyberpunk type fiction.

00:30:22.060 Basically, this is a world where technology becomes very advanced, but the average person lives in squalor.

00:30:30.040 So people who are extremely rich or people who are at the end of this,

00:30:33.600 people who are able to escape through capital from kind of the social consequences of this de-territorialization,

00:30:41.080 they live very well, right?

00:30:42.860 They live in kind of that Elysium future where everything is very nice and they can avoid many of the consequences of what has happened.

00:30:52.380 But the average person has to live with the consequences of the fact that escape, capital, exit has de-territorialized so many things

00:31:00.160 that society, normal social bonds and functions have broken down.

00:31:03.600 And 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,

00:31:12.260 these two futures have separated.

00:31:14.080 The people who could escape with the capital are doing quite well.

00:31:18.340 They're living amazing lives.

00:31:20.140 That rift grows quite quickly because that capital has jettisoned its need to basically take care of the average person.

00:31:29.880 Now, for land, that's a good thing.

00:31:31.420 He 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,

00:31:41.400 whatever, however you want to define that, that can escape the need to sustain the masses.

00:31:46.160 Well, that's going to grow and that's going to accelerate and that's going to become hyper-advanced.

00:31:51.360 And that's this amazing kind of sci-fi future for that group.

00:31:56.120 However, it's terrible for everybody that's left behind, obviously.

00:31:59.340 But this is a really difficult question because as technology advances, we can kind of feel this, right?

00:32:07.080 For a while, it felt like we were in this golden age where the rising tide would lift all the boats, right?

00:32:13.840 The technological innovation would come around and everyone would have longer lifespans and they would be able to look up any information at all time.

00:32:23.860 You'd have the library of Alexandria at your fingertips, blah, blah, blah.

00:32:28.380 But then we look at the actual consequences of that technology.

00:32:31.760 And what's really happening is families are breaking down.

00:32:34.960 The average, you know, the ability of people to sustain like a middle class existence falls apart.

00:32:40.980 And 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.

00:32:51.980 They live amazing lives, but you end up with a bunch of squalor everywhere else.

00:32:55.840 Again, 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.

00:33:09.240 You can have the best restaurants.

00:33:10.320 You can have the best museums.

00:33:11.540 You can have the best clubs.

00:33:13.060 You can go to the finest schools.

00:33:15.760 But, you know, increasingly there's this larger, larger homeless population.

00:33:19.160 The streets get more dangerous.

00:33:20.280 Again, that's that very cyberpunk reality where this bifurcation of society gets more extreme.

00:33:28.880 And 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.

00:33:45.360 It can make more and more progress.

00:33:46.620 It can accelerate faster and faster because it's decoupled itself from the specific needs of a people group.

00:33:52.280 But the people group it left behind is going to face really serious consequences.

00:33:57.240 Back to his essay here.

00:33:59.920 Try not to ask, if only for a moment, whether you like it.

00:34:04.020 Ask first whether intellectual integrity can...

00:34:08.300 Sorry, ask first with whatever intellectual integrity you can summon, what is the real process?

00:34:16.800 Okay.

00:34:17.540 And this is the very difficult question, right?

00:34:19.880 He's not asking us to say, is capital separating itself from the people it serves good?

00:34:25.360 Is capital exit good?

00:34:27.220 The answer, as someone for me who cares about the people it's separating from, is no.

00:34:32.200 It causes serious problems.

00:34:33.680 It destroys families.

00:34:34.620 It destroys communities.

00:34:35.460 It destroys traditional structures that sustain humanity and the wider good of the people it's supposed to serve.

00:34:43.480 But he's saying, that's not the question I'm asking you guys.

00:34:46.380 I'm not asking you, is this a good thing?

00:34:48.480 I'm asking you, is this the process that's actually happening?

00:34:53.160 And the difficult thing is the answer that seems to be yes, right?

00:34:57.080 It's hard to look at the situation we have and say that this is not happening.

00:35:02.440 Now, you could say, well, there's not a sufficient effort made to keep things territorialized, right?

00:35:11.260 Keep things locked in kind of that box of the ethno-geographical concern.

00:35:17.620 There's not enough effort expended in limiting capital escape.

00:35:21.400 There's been all of these free market policies.

00:35:23.540 There's been this desire of the ruling class to separate themselves and become uber rich and make this incredible existence.

00:35:30.880 And so really, it's not that capital restriction isn't possible.

00:35:36.960 It's that it simply has not been tried sufficiently.

00:35:39.100 I'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.

00:35:55.600 This 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.

00:36:16.600 And as we can see, both of those ideologies sit in tatters.

00:36:22.200 They fail to do what they wanted to do.

00:36:25.280 Now you might say, well, there's some combination.

00:36:28.520 That's kind of what Dugan says in some ways.

00:36:30.980 We can take the bad elements of those ideologies and we can recombine the good elements.

00:36:35.720 We just drop the bad elements, recombine the good elements, and that can stop this process.

00:36:40.300 Maybe, 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.

00:36:53.940 There'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.

00:37:21.660 But again, Lan's question is, is this for the process that's happening?

00:37:26.100 And I think if we're honest, the answer is, unfortunately, yes.

00:37:31.120 It is the contention, back to his essay here, it is the contention of this blog.

00:37:35.460 Remember, all of these essays are written on a blog he used to have.

00:37:39.600 Contention of this blog that without a conception of economic automatization, which means escape, modernity makes no sense.

00:37:46.500 All right, so what does that mean?

00:37:47.340 It says, basically, our modern, if we look at the world around us, modernity really is the story of economic automatization.

00:37:56.980 It's doing this on its own, right?

00:37:59.040 We are increasingly removing the interests of the state, of the people, of the human, of the individual from the economic process.

00:38:08.640 And again, if you look at some of the things that go on, it's hard to say that's not the case.

00:38:15.200 Now, most people will say, well, no, those are individual decisions being made, right?

00:38:19.840 The CEO of the corporation is deciding not to serve the nation and instead serve the interests of the global marketplace.

00:38:25.900 Or, 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.

00:38:44.460 And yes, they are making individual choices.

00:38:46.940 That's true.

00:38:47.460 However, remember, those are based on incentive structures and those incentive structures seem to be accelerating towards this more egregious capital escape.

00:38:57.160 That's kind of his point is, you know, and he'll say this elsewhere.

00:39:01.100 I'll get more into this probably in a later episode.

00:39:03.480 But the decisions start to make themselves.

00:39:05.780 Yes, individuals are making choices, but those choices are lined up with the incentives created by capital.

00:39:12.540 And 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.

00:39:23.600 And 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.

00:39:39.320 Back to our reading here.

00:39:41.100 The basic vector of capital cannot be drawn in any other way.

00:39:44.880 Furthermore, 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.

00:40:05.400 So 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.

00:40:26.280 And 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.

00:40:34.700 If it doesn't, it's left.

00:40:35.640 If it does, it's right.

00:40:37.640 Again, for land, this is a good thing.

00:40:40.580 He wants capital to escape the political because for land, the political is inherently leftist.

00:40:46.280 Leftist, he says the political is inherently leftist.

00:40:50.480 It's always a collection of decision-making bodies looking to drag things down.

00:40:56.320 And so leftism is the attempt to kind of drag things down through the political process for him.

00:41:02.600 And rightism is basically the embrace of escape.

00:41:07.740 And in this case, capital escape.

00:41:09.860 Maybe you agree with that.

00:41:11.040 Maybe you don't.

00:41:11.740 But that's his construction here.

00:41:13.960 If capital is escaping, the emergence of the blockchain is an inevitable escalation of modernity with consequences too profound to easily summarize.

00:41:22.980 If it isn't, the macroeconomics might work.

00:41:26.380 All right.

00:41:26.880 So what he's saying there is, you know, traditionally we have macroeconomics, you know, or at least we have a monetary policy.

00:41:36.420 We have different regulations on banking and these kind of things.

00:41:40.280 There's a central, there's a centralized institution or a distributed web of institutions which authorize interactions and, you know, they limit these things.

00:41:51.920 And that's kind of what macroeconomics is.

00:41:55.120 It's an attempt to put it like a governor on, a limiter on the constant feedback, the constant positive feedback of economic interactions.

00:42:05.240 And he's saying the blockchain, because blockchain technology basically allows you to decentralize economic interactions.

00:42:12.620 You don't have to run things through this network of banks that can be controlled through states.

00:42:16.980 Blockchain allows you to create the system that is entirely disconnected from state controlled entities.

00:42:26.540 That allows you to have an incredible escalation of modernity.

00:42:32.120 You can have an incredible escalation of this capital flight because then countries really have no way to control things.

00:42:38.340 And there's this battle back and forth.

00:42:40.400 You 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.

00:42:54.620 The state can't inflate money or, you know, slap controls from banks onto things to limit what you're doing.

00:43:01.740 There's no longer that accountability to a single political entity.

00:43:06.760 And that's really advantageous if you're like, if you think that political entities are poisonous to you.

00:43:13.420 And a lot of people do right now, right?

00:43:15.300 That makes perfect sense.

00:43:16.460 I 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.

00:43:26.340 And 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.

00:43:42.500 And 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.

00:43:59.340 However, there is a consequence to this. Right.

00:44:02.040 If you completely free capital from states and the control of states, that that seems good because the state is against you.

00:44:11.400 Sure. 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.

00:44:32.040 And 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.

00:44:43.460 Sure. 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.

00:45:02.500 So 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.

00:45:13.000 So 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.

00:45:27.440 Now, 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.

00:45:40.620 And that's going to be for the best. And perhaps that's true. Maybe that maybe that is ultimately the good.

00:45:46.060 However, 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.

00:46:01.040 Again, 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.

00:46:07.800 However, if you have any interest in actually protecting any kind of community, those are kind of things that you have to do.

00:46:13.680 So 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.

00:46:25.720 If we want to have a chance at addressing the issues that we're facing.

00:46:30.740 All right, guys, going to go ahead and pivot over to the questions of the people here.

00:46:35.260 Let me take a look. Oh, we've got Thursday here for five dollars.

00:46:40.820 Benedict the 16th.

00:46:43.680 Cardus in.

00:46:47.540 Sorry, I don't know all of that pronunciation talks about.

00:46:51.280 Oh, sorry. I should put up on the screen here.

00:46:53.020 Talks about this kind of specifically stakeholding versus shareholding.

00:46:57.300 Yeah. So that sounds like a lot of Catholic doctrine that I'm not particularly familiar with,

00:47:03.500 but definitely something that probably is worth looking into here.

00:47:08.600 I'll have to contact somebody like the distributist who is more familiar with some of those encyclicals.

00:47:16.940 Looks like a slosher here for 10 Canadian. 0.98

00:47:20.360 Thank you very much.

00:47:21.140 Just a donation.

00:47:22.380 Really appreciate it.

00:47:23.260 Jacob Zindel for $10 here.

00:47:27.060 The 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.

00:47:45.280 Yeah, that is most certainly the attempt that is happening, of course, on the global level, though.

00:47:51.000 I 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.

00:47:58.860 I 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.

00:48:12.040 Right now, we have bureaucratic complexity, and they're attempting to globalize it.

00:48:16.140 However, that kind of creates a feudalism at a global level.

00:48:21.580 However, I don't think that's going to be sustainable.

00:48:24.300 I'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.

00:48:42.040 As feudal in nature.

00:48:44.860 Raul McNuggets here for $20.

00:48:47.060 Big downfall of the U.S. is state control of private property.

00:48:51.540 Limits on excluding people from property based on beliefs, behavior, is civil rights state control or agent of deterritorization and homogenization.

00:49:03.340 Well, so you've got a mix here.

00:49:05.800 So, 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.

00:49:15.260 It's very weird because it used to be a critical part.

00:49:18.900 It would have been listed as a critical part of any kind of liberalism, the right of free association of citizens.

00:49:26.660 However, that has been destroyed.

00:49:28.720 You correctly pointed out that civil rights law has more or less destroyed that decision-making.

00:49:35.680 Now, 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.

00:49:47.540 And so the question is, is that an agent of deterritorization and homogenization?

00:49:52.320 So, 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.

00:50:06.040 You 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.

00:50:22.320 And 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.

00:50:39.860 And 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.

00:50:55.060 And so, you know, is this an agent of deterritorialization?

00:50:59.460 Yeah.

00:50:59.720 I mean, I think that obviously has to be the case, ultimately, if you have this kind of free flow.

00:51:05.880 And this is one of the things that you'll hear from free traders.

00:51:09.340 You need the free flow of capital, and capital includes people.

00:51:12.500 You need labor, free flow of labor.

00:51:15.180 And so you have to get rid of national borders in order to do this.

00:51:18.320 In case you're wondering, you know, who thought this was a good idea?

00:51:22.020 I mean, Marx said that he was a free trader in the sense that it was more likely to accelerate the breakdown of nations.

00:51:29.600 And that's ultimately something that he was looking for because he wanted a global control of capital.

00:51:34.000 And so, yes, I think that ultimately that does make it an agent of deterritorialization.

00:51:44.240 If 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,

00:51:55.260 because the needs of capital must be served, then obviously that's going to have that effect.

00:52:01.300 All right, guys.

00:52:02.940 So I think that is all of our questions for today.

00:52:06.280 I want to thank everybody for coming by.

00:52:09.240 I know this one's a little more complicated.

00:52:11.820 There's a little more technical nuance on this one.

00:52:14.980 But I like to dive into the theory with you guys.

00:52:16.920 We do, of course, you know, the news of the day.

00:52:19.460 Every once in a while we get to dive into even some drama, I guess, here or there.

00:52:22.400 But I do try to bring the theory.

00:52:25.100 So we're offering something a little different and we're not just riffing on constantly on the current thing.

00:52:30.220 And so sometimes we do these deep dives.

00:52:33.040 They can be a little more intense, a little more confusing.

00:52:35.940 But I think they're well worth our time to break down this kind of stuff and understand it.

00:52:39.660 So thank you guys again for coming by.

00:52:42.020 I really appreciate everybody.

00:52:43.500 Of course, if this is your first time on the channel, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to the YouTube channel.

00:52:48.400 And 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.

00:52:57.180 When you do, please leave a rating or review.

00:52:59.840 It really helps with all the algorithm magic.

00:53:02.600 Once again, guys, I appreciate your comments.

00:53:04.880 And I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - November 20, 2023

Nick Land on Capital Escape ｜ 11⧸20⧸23

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