It Could Happen Here - Dividing the World, Pt. 2: Externalization ft. Andrew

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

James and Andrew continue their discussion on different ways of splitting up the world, and what they tell us about the way their proponents see the world. Sources: David Graeber - Debt: The First 5000 Years Karl Polanyi - The Great Transformation Immanuel Wallerstein - The Modern World SystemSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart podcast. Hey and welcome to Krapen here. I'm Andrew Siege and I'm back with James. It's me again. Welcome back. Yeah, good to be here. Great to have you once again or for you to have me. I'm not sure the dynamic is here.

Yeah, yeah, me neither. We neither. It's nice to be together. It's an egalitarian dynamic, you know, we're both having each other in a sense. Yeah, we're sharing this podcast. Yeah. I think there are a lot of concepts that it's good to grasp to get a sense of how this world works, kind of continuing from the previous episode where we spoke about all the different ways that we can divide up the world and understand in the world. And so in today's sort of pursuit of that endeavor, I wanted to get into a particular concept that is so benign yet so pervasive in the system. And it's the idea of externalization.

You get what I mean by that? Yeah, like, like making people or things other. Yes, but specifically, I think I want to address how capitalism persists by pushing harm onto the other. Yeah, onto the someone or something else. Shifting the costs of particular actions, either environmentally, socially or economically. I think the easiest example I could point to is how a company may choose to save on disposal costs by dumping their waste into a river, which can thus poison the water supply, the ecosystem and the health of all those human and non-human lives who rely upon or

live near that river. Do you have another example you could probably point to? Yeah, I mean there are lots of them. or live near that river. Do you have another example you could probably point to? Yeah, I mean, there are lots of them. One of them that I think of a lot is like how in the U.S. right, like products that we can't recycle or that we can't landfill, we will literally ship to somewhere else to be dumped. Like our consumption creates so much excess and so much waste and we can't be confronted with that waste.

So we ship it to places where people consume less. Yeah, it's uh, I mean, I don't know if you've seen any of the footage of some of these places, the whole coasts of fast fashion waste, for example, in Africa, or just e-waste leaching into the soil. It's really quite tragic. Yeah, I remember someone I met once was telling me that like one of the things that children did where they had come from was they would pick through e-waste, specifically charging cables to get the copper out.

This would result in them having like these terrible injuries to their fingers because they were like prying the cables apart and over time they will get little pieces of bill shards of metal embedded in their fingertips. Town just terrible. Yeah it's pretty pretty grim condemnation of our way of consuming. Yeah it's messed up it's messed up and I think when you see that sort of stuff it's hard to unsee it when you see that sort of stuff, it's hard to unsee it. When you see that impact onto the world, it's hard to unsee it. But that's part of how this concept thrives. This externalization thrives. It's by obscuring itself.

Yeah. So that's what we kind of want to do with 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 of the First000 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 rarely financial. It was to your neighbor, 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 Karl Polanyi called it the Great Transformation, when land, labour and money were turned into fictitious commodities, treated as if they were products for sale. Plany 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 relating with each other and seeing the world. Those conditions had to be created by the state.

So you can look at how a lot of traditional economies and commons had to be disrupted to force their shift. In England, you had people pushed off of common land that they had used for centuries, and had no choice but to sell their labour to survive and go into the factories. We have to remember that they never started in the factories, they actually started in the colonies. This dispossession of people and from place started through that colonization process, or really amplified through that colonization process.

Extracting the wealth of people, 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 externalization, with the shifting of the costs. On the small scale, that like the roof of pollution example, but on a global scale it looks like what Wallis-Steam is getting into with World Systems Theory.

How the wealth and stability of the core nations depends on the exploitation of the periphery. So slavery and genocide and ecological ruin, all of these are costs that create the wealth that the core enjoys, but is made invisible to that core. Because when you're part of an ongoing relationship, with community, with land, with ecology, with people, the actions have consequences that matter. They reverberate, you can feel them, and that demands a level of responsibility on your part. But when you take the things that have been woven into relationship and turn them into plain old transactions, those transactions can then offload the costs,

offload the consequences, make them someone else's problem. So yeah, clothing is very affordable now, but it's affordable because somebody somewhere was underpaid and overworked. Your smartphone, it's convenient, it's useful, it's accessible, but it's parts are minded 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 can 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. Inclusions were met with resistance. Colonizations 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 status 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 externalisation today is just how much it has scaled and gotten more sophisticated in terms of the work that makes the world run. The most essential label is often the most invisible and undervalued and precarious labour.

You know, where 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. Where they're 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. Yeah, I like the one you gave about your cell phone, right?

Like those rare earth materials, like it's not some slick safe mining operation that brings out the ground. It's human hands in dangerous conditions that kill people. Exactly. Poisons people. It's not even necessarily a quick death. It's often a slow, lifelong death. And it poisons that part of the world for generations. We could stop right now and it would take generations for the damage to stop. Exactly. That's the thing about destruction, right? Destruction can be very quick as the rebuilding that can take a long time. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if you look at how quickly Gaza has been flattened versus how long it's gonna take to recover from that. It's like 910D. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like it, uh, I mean, I'm very familiar with that particular example, right? Like how quickly you can destroy something with a bomb from an airplane and how hard people had to work to build it. In October of 23, I was in Kurdistan and like, I know how hard people work to build at Rojava, right, to try and build a little island of democracy without the state in a place where the state has been weaponized against tons of different ethnic groups who are not Arab. And even against Arab people who didn't agree with the state's particular line on a thing.

And one night, you know, like the power station's gone. They bombed while I was there, like an oxygen bottling plant, the people who need supplemental oxygen, either temporarily or permanently and like, it's gone now. And now to build that back up in a world where you are largely alienated from the system of states and capital, right? You're trying to build stuff back up as much as you can from networks of solidarity and ingenuity and that takes years and yeah, but it's not visible. And that's not even getting into the emotional and mental tool of something

like that. Yeah. Oh, that can be a setback as well. Yeah. Like when I've even talking about resources. We're talking about, yeah, that loss. Yeah. That, that, that pain. Yeah, the pain.

It made even worse when the skilled people, skilled workers who were responsible for upkeep and such, something like that, also wiped out by that same bomb. It makes it all the more difficult to recover. Yeah. Or drawn away, right? By conditions becoming unlivable. So you have this like brain drain where people who have skills that are considered to be commercially valuable have an opportunity to leave.

People who, who don't have those, have the opportunity to stay or don't have the opportunity to leave, I guess, like, or even like, you know, the U S made a bit of a different version of externalization, I guess, but like the U S made a big thing of how it defeated the Islamic state in, you know, 2019, I guess I can't remember when the last battle in Abu Ghuz was, I think 2019, but like we externalized it off, Lurit, the cost of that struggle. Yeah. The dying part, like the U S pilots did a whole lot of killing, but the dying part. Then the, yeah, we, we externalize that right to Kurdish and Arab and Assyrian.

To fodder. Yeah. To people who would do his lives didn't matter. Yeah. I'd like, I remember time standing in a cemetery there, just looking at lines and lines of graves. And I just left the house of someone who's 13 year old son was killed in a drone strike.

And just thinking like each of these is a mother burying her child that like, we essentially asked for the most part, right, like to do that. We said, Hey, well, you guys do the dying part because we don't want to look at kind of such sucks for the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we'd like someone else to die now. And then, you know, here we are a few years later, right. And like the night before Turkey has been bombing the place where I'm looking at

these graves and the U S ain't doing shit to help. Right. Like, like, even though these people had like made this massive sacrifice, the U S wasn't like, yeah, we were your friends. It's not a friendship relationship. You know, like it's, it's like you said, okay. An interaction. I look at like a purchase more than a solidarity based thing. Yeah. know, like it's like, you say, okay, an interaction, okay, like, yeah, purchase

more than a solidarity based thing. Yeah. And once again, we really see that core externalize and its costs onto the periphery and we see that both in the sense of on the global stage between countries or between populations, cause and peripheries, but even internally within countries, as we mentioned in the previous episode, talking about that divide between the core and the periphery where you have what a lot of people have called the economy's biggest trick, you know, your socialized failures and privatized profits.

Yeah. So in 2008 with the financial crash, people were evicted while the banks got bailed out. In the early stages of COVID, corporations got relief, gig workers were exposed. Yeah. You know, in the process of austerity resulting from neoliberalism, social services get cut in order to balance the books, but there's never any consideration of all the strike cuts in profits. Yeah.

You know, that's the one thing that can never go down. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think, or even like within, you know, we all, all food come from the soil at some point, right? But like, I can't tell you how many people I know that my family are in agriculture, right? Who have died or lost limbs on farms.

The same is true if you're in the mining industry, right? Like that's not something that's visible. You know, you don't like go to the supermarket and buy your bread, right? And you don't think that someone got their arm in the combine harvester when they were doing the field that went to the flower that made your loaf of bread that costs $1.90. Now that person doesn't have an arm. It's invisible. Yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing when you see like these natural disasters taking place, right? Floods or burnings, right? When, when California is on fire or when Pakistan is completely flooded out, those are the consequences of the actions of corporations, of the actions of this entire global economic system. And meanwhile, corporations are getting carbon credits to continue doing what they were always doing. Yeah. You know, and so the actual consequences of what they're doing, they're paying for carbon

credits, but the actual consequences of what they're doing are being paid for by the communities that are displaced by the consequences of this climate change. Yeah, yeah. And we never talk about when we talk about migration, right? Like that's a great, the climate change is a great example that we don't talk about how the bulk of people coming to the United States are coming from the places most heavily impacted by climate change. Yep. Or like I was in the Marshall Islands a few years ago and there will be no more Marshall Islands within our lifetime because of the consequences that massive corporations have made, but like they don't have any agency.

It made me really like, it was hard because they're doing stuff like they use a, to get it to get around the atolls, right? They use little like two-stroke outboards and they're trying to build solar canoes instead and solar boats so that it's, it's a cleaner energy, right? And like less than a percent of a percent of the world's carbon emissions come from the Marshall Islands and they're like trying their hardest to do their part to reduce their emissions, but like they can't make the impact that needs to be made to stop the sea levels rising. And arguably like when the world had a chance to do so, like you see them speaking at the United Nations and then the UN being like line has to go up. Yep. That means your island has to sink. And that's why, you know, reform

is not and can never be enough because this is how the system is designed. It's designed to push risk downward and outward onto the working class, onto the global south and onto the next generation. Because that's another dimension of externalization, right? Time. No. Even our future gets externalized in a sense, you know, all of our resources Are limited or finite resources that can used up now at an increasing velocity Right. Yeah, the national debt of some countries is being sunk in further and further into now Right the emissions that center all those emissions now fossil fuels, you know all that stuff Because we don't have to deal with the consequences.

The future will have to deal with the consequences. As the system dig in its own grave, because even though the system needs stability, it will sacrifice future stability for present profits. It will sacrifice nature, which is the basis of the economy. It will sacrifice nature to the economy in service of the economy. It will treat nature as disposable and infinite and something external to the way that we run things as if it's not going to catch up to us. And so as collapse will accelerate, as the consequences become more apparent on the sacrifice

zones of the periphery, the powers of beyonds are interested in fixing it. They're going to fortify themselves against it through border patrols, through climate walls, through militarized disaster response. That's going to double down. Yeah, make it harder and harder to see the consequences of excessive consumption of capitalism until the levy breaks, I guess, literally or metaphorically. Yep, literally or metaphorically. And I want people to keep in mind who are listening, you know, this Khorne periphery is not just the periphery out there, it's also the periphery within that we're talking

about in terms of consequences, the internal dumping grounds, whether it be, you know, indigenous reservations, or the neighbourhood neighborhoods of black and brown people or the prisons that are often served as the holding tanks for discontent and for poverty and for all the nasty consequences that society doesn't want to deal with because of the way society has been structured. Yeah. Or just like under the bridge near your house, you know, like, like we treat our homes. Exactly. Like San Diego has this particular legislative initiative, which I find like, obviously it's fucked, but also like it's very, so it's so obvious.

Like they, they passed this thing called a camping ban where they're going to make it illegal to be unhoused on the sidewalk. But you're like, it's a band, it's a band against camping on the sidewalk. Right. And all it does, it doesn't provide housing for people and thus it doesn't solve the issue, it moves people. Uh, our city is very hilly and we have lots of canyons in which they can't build. So it moves people into these canyons.

Wow. And it just makes the same people invisible, right? Like that's the goal. The goal is not to provide any form of solution. It's just to move these people away so they don't have to be poor in public. And so the people who use homes as a vehicle for wealth creation, not as a place for humans to live, don't have to see the consequences of their actions. Exactly. It's all about what they want. Right. I mean, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, in a sense, depending on how you look at it, any one of us can be a core and any one of us can be a periphery. You know, it's all rulers. We are all the periphery that they can push the consequences onto.

Um, in another sense, you know, I am part of the periphery and you are part of the core James. Yep. And in other sense, you know, I might be considered part of the core in my own country in some ways because of my class position, because of my educational background, because of some of the ways that I can be insulated. Whereas in other ways, you might be the periphery in the United States to the core, to the elites, to the ruling class.

And so this isn't to diminish the very real differences between the global core and the global periphery. It wants to make it clear to those of you in the global core that you should be in solidarity with that global periphery because their consequences are ultimately your own. You know, ultimately we are all the ones who are going to be holding the costs, cleaning the mess, surviving the fallout. And I understand how tough it is because when you live with a system that is based on externalization of harm, you can end up lashing out on others as well.

You know, that logic, that systemic logic becomes internalized, becomes part of how you navigate even your relationships. But we don't have to accept that way of doing things. The periphery, regardless of which periphery you're referring to, does hold the potential for change. And so, you know, in the beginning, when we were speaking of externalization of economic and economic dimension, specifically, it's important to understand capitalism relies on these flows, these very smooth flows of labor, energy and resources and data from periphery to core. However, you define those terms. And so when we interrupt those flows, even briefly, we can shake those foundations.

And that sort of approach, that effort to interrupt is really part of what social revolution is about. It's how we make the changes that we want to see. Yeah. You know, I speak of social evolution as not some flashy one-time event or moment in history, but as an ongoing process as something that has taken place right now at different levels in different ways all over the world. And so we can speak of the things we do to oppose the current system, like the strikes

and blockades that have taken place around the world, the indigenous land defence struggles that have taken place around the world, the rent strikes and mutual aid that have taken place around the world. And then beyond that sort of opposition, talking about the things we do to propose an alternative to construct the kind of world and the kind of life that we need. So you don't have to rely on these systems anymore that exploit us to make these systems obsolete, to build cooperatives, to build worker control, collectives and disaster response outside of the state to sort of crack the system and to create in those cracks the space where a different

system and new life can grow. To not become one big machine or one centralized struggle or movement, but to multiply and interconnect and adapt to the niche circumstances we're all dealing with, like mycelium, you know, like the mushrooms. Yeah, yeah, that analogy. Like it's sort of, you're like opening a crack thing, paraphrases, Zapatista text, right? Like, and they have this, either this phrase I like from Su Comandante Marcos

that translates as like, uh, we don't have to change the world because we're building another one right now. And you know, you don't have to, we don't have to conquer. Like there's this obsession on the left with like revolution is like you said, like an act that occurs at a point in time. Capital R revolution. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

As opposed to like building the world where the things that we don't wish to see become irrelevant through our actions every day. Like you use the example of people being unhoused, which I mentioned before, right? Like the way we build a world where those people aren't externalized is by not externalizing those people, like, you know, it's not hard to do. You probably talk to human beings every day anyway, like, just continue to do that. You know, take your neighbor a sandwich. And like, that's the revolution that you can build slowly. And maybe it's not as exciting. It as like, you know, the the one where you I've attended the revolutions where people fight against the state, but that you still have to do the hard work. You still have to do that like day to day building of a different way of relating to one another.

If even in those revolutions where things change quickly and violently. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, even before we get to that point, you know, to be able to change the way we relate to each other, it starts with mindset. It starts with shifting our realm of possibilities, you know, not necessarily killing the memes of capitalism. And I mean, memes in the sense that Richard Dawkins, originally used the term as these

cultured ideas that persist, that spread, that adapt. It's difficult to kill those memes, but you can replace them with better memes. And so replacing and popularizing those memes, those ideas, you know, challenging the idea that, you know, rest is laziness, you know, challenging the idea that, you know, the end goal is profit, that there's no other system besides capital, that something better isn't on the horizon. Shifting that sense of reality, I think is a very important part of the struggle. And with every act, because I think ideas have to be accompanied by acts, with every act, I think it helps to break the spell, to cut off, to put an end to that externalization. Because even though capitalism will continue to try to push its harm outward and downward and away from view, we can continue to challenge it inwardly to push our struggle upward and to center our struggle in the center of our view, so

that we can see it, so that we can feel it, and so that we can act against it. And that's all I have for this episode. All power to all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions.

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