Donald Trump (117:13)
So that's what we kind of want to do, this episode, get a full breadth of its history, its present and its apparent future so that we can not not see all the different ways that this occurs. Now, this passing on of costs may have always been an option on the table, but we can see that a lot of traditional economies did not go that route, because traditional economies were often human economies, as David Graeber used the term in debt the first 5,000 years. These were economies focused on human relationships. They were embedded in kinship, in land, in customs, in obligation and reciprocity. So what you owed was really financial. It was to your neighbour, your elder, your clan, the land itself. And so you could not really avoid the costs of your actions on others, because that was at the centre of it all others. But the transition to capitalism was a shift in what the economy was. It enforced the idea that everything is or should be up for sale. The economist Carl Polanyi Plani called it the great transformation, when land, labour and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if they were products for sale. Pliny saw the modern state and the capitalist market economy as a package deal. Graeber also made this very clear in debt as well. For this new kind of economy to take hold, people had to change how they thought about work and trade and relation with each other and seeing the world, world, those conditions had to be created by the state. So you could look at how a lot of traditional economies and commons had to be disrupted to force this shift. In England, you had people pushed off of common land that they had used for centuries and they had no choice but to sell their labour to survive and go into the factories. Yeah, we have to remember that it never started in the factories. It actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people, people and from place started through that colonisation process, or really amplified through that colonisation process, extracting the wealth of people or of labour, of land, of resources from one place to concentrate it in another, to displace people and land and costs. And so colonialism was capitalism's sort of training ground for externalization. You plunder a little bit over here, you profit a little bit over there. And this is really where we get to the core of capitalist externalisation, with the shifting of the costs. On the small scale, that looks like the river pollution example, but on the global scale, it looks like what Wallace Team is getting into with world systems Theory how the wealth and stability of the core nations depend on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and genocide and ecological ruin, all of these are costs that create the wealth that the core enjoys, but is made invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an ongoing relationship with community, with land, with ecology, with people, your actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can feel them. And that demands a level of responsibility on your part. But when you take the things that have been woven into relationship and turn them into plain old transaction, those transactions can then offload the costs, offload the consequences, make them someone else's problem. So, yeah, clothing is very affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid and overworked. The smartphone, it's convenient, it's useful, it's accessible, but it's parts of mind under dangerous conditions. You know, your food is delicious, nutritious, not exactly affordable these days, but it's picked by hands that cannot afford that same meal. So the harms of these systems, the harms of these actions, of this level of consumption doesn't cease to exist. It's just externalized. So it could be rendered invisible to one point of view. Yeah, and it's not something that can be set up without a fight. You know, people would resist. Enclosures were met with resistance, Colonization was met with resistance. And even today, workers strike. You know, people do fight back. It's not just this sweeping, inevitable process, but because of the collaboration between state and capital, that collusion of statist and capitalist interests, the whole system has managed to persist thus far. It's a very formidable foe we're dealing with. So we can set it back here and there, but we have not defeated it yet. Yeah, and I say yet because, you know, as we get into, there are ways to loosen its grip. I think what's fascinating about capitalist externalization today is just how much it has scaled and cost. More sophisticated in terms of the work that makes the world run. The most essential labour is often the most invisible and undervalued and precarious label. You know, when we're talking about the work that's necessary to clothe ourselves, the work that's necessary to feed ourselves, the work that's necessary to build infrastructure. Such as in the Gulf States, where you have literal modern slavery taking place to build up those countries, Were they talking about gig work, transportation, delivery, that sort of thing, or reproductive work, stuff like what is called housewifery or domestic labor? Sure, you could think of other examples as well.
