It Could Happen Here - Money and the Survival of the Revolution

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Mia is joined by Kyle and Steve of Strange Matters magazine trace the history of money, discuss what money actually is, and how certain theories of money like Modern Monetary Theory fail in ways that have profound impacts on any post-revolutionary society.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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podcast about things falling apart things putting back together again and also today it's just about money um and also well okay it is not just about money it is about money and is about seemingly seemingly esoteric arguments about the nature of money that actually turn out to be extremely important for any post-revolutionary society or even just this society. So yeah. And joining me to talk about this are Kyle Flannery and Steve Mann, who are the co-editors of Strange Matters Magazine, which is a new workers' co-op that's in the middle of a fundraising drive. So yeah, go support the magazine. And Steve and Kyle, welcome to the show. It's great to be here, Chris.

Thanks for having us. The basis of this interview is a piece that is coming out. Actually, when is it coming out? That's a good question that I should probably have asked before this. Oh, let's see. It will come out later this month. Okay, yeah. That will be out later this month that is about the history of money and what money is.

So I guess we can start there, which is, yeah, can you walk us through a bit about the debate over what money is and how various people have gotten parts of it wrong and parts of it right? Sure. I got into this debate as a economics graduate student in 2011. And a book that really kind of shaped my initial understanding was David Graeber's Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Great book. Yeah, it's excellent. It's very long and it's a bit scattered, but I love what he put together with it. And so he kind of introduced me to ideas from a school of economic thought called chartalism.

And chartalism is kind of the theoretical forebear of MMT. And MMT, which is modern monetary theory, is kind of in the news now as a theory which is saying, okay, if you're a government that issues its own money, its own currency, that is not really backed by anything, it's not backed by any other currency or any other commodity, then you don't really face a financial limit as far as how much you can produce. You're the sole source of that money, and you can spend it into existence. Spend by buying things, the money into existence. And people will accept it to the extent that they either need it or they want it. And that's one theory that's kind of in the air now. But chartalism, over 100 years before this, is putting out very similar ideas around money that is created by states in order to marshal physical resources. meaning all of the material, people, techniques, physical processes that are required to create economic activity. So to the extent that people either need or want your money, you can use it as a social technology sort of to marshal those resources into action. And you being a state, chartalism says. So from chartalism,

we got MMT. But David Graeber's book is about a lot more than just chartalism and MMT. So it's about the origins of money. And origins of money, it turns out, are at least 5,000 years ago, as the title says. There are examples of early accounting systems that are where people are just, rather than there being a circulating medium of exchange type money, like a coin or something, or a dollar bill, there were just records of what people own and what people owe, and their debts and credits against each other.

And their debts and credits against each other. And it was in early Mesopotamia. So we have these early accounting systems that yield more advanced credit systems over time that are ruled by temples. Which are sort of proto-states in a way. In terms of they administer the flow of goods and services through through their territory and between their territory and another temple's territory using their domestic money, but also international money. International money was facilitated through trade networks. Trade networks use things like they needed to convert between a domestic money and international money. they needed to convert between a domestic money and international money. And Graeber goes through these wonderful examples of silver and other metals being used as international means of payment.

That's sort of our term in our piece, basically, which is covering foreign exchange. But he says in order to get from the domestic money into the international money, you need to have these linkages of experts in the temple and the trade networks to get together and make credit instruments, which knit them together into this trade network. And from there, we go into, I don't want to spend too much time on the history,

but we go from there to situations. Thousands of years later, we get coins. Coins are being minted by starting in the roughly 600 BC. I want to say Carl. Yeah. That sounds about right. It's going to be early iron age.

Right. So the first I, someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've been doing some homework on this cause I've been on a few podcasts and they're like numismatists in the comments and whatnot. But the first and whatnot. But the first mixed gold and silver coin was

sometime in the 7th century BCE. And the first gold coin was not long after. I think it was like they were both Lydian kings. Like one after another. Anyway, just wanted to hit that because someone said I got it wrong earlier.

These coins were kind of the first widely used sort of retail means of settling debts like at the point of sale between people. So it wasn't just an accounting system. It was an elaborate credit system with no circulating means of payment. It was a circulating money now. And it's getting around based on military conquest. Military conquest in the Axial Age spread the use of coins much wider than the domestic spheres in which they were first minted.

Yeah. And I think we should, just to talk about roughly when this is, if you go back, I mean, this is slightly later, but one of the huge sort of like, the periods where the entire Mediterranean is using coinage, right? This is when you're dealing with your sort of like classical Greek, like you have your Greeks and your Persians and you have your sort of like athens and sparta um and those guys are very much uh they're engaged in this thing that uh graber calls the the military industrial coinage slavery complex the military industrial coinage complex yeah and i yeah and i think he adds slavery on the end because it's yeah it's it's this giant sort of like this giant warfare system. Athens is an empire.

They run around. They seize people's gold and silver mines. And they have slaves that work in. It's this whole sort of like. You get this system of empire. That is what the actual age is defined by. Yeah. Whereas previously.

Precious metals did circulate. But they weren't in coin form. And they were more as a bulk means of payment stored from one temple to the next, almost as if they were central banks, but central banks don't exist yet. And the Axial Age coinage system gave rise to the much more sophisticated medieval coinage system. And I'm going breezily through this because there's a lot there. Yeah, several thousand years of history. There's several thousand years that are passing in a few minutes here, so bear with me. But now in the medieval and Renaissance times,

not only do we have the coinage circulating, but we also have credit instruments um which uh are being submitted transferred transmitted rather between banks uh between banks in different countries and territories that are saying hey you don't even need to based on what is written on this piece of paper, I already know you're good for it. I will dispense with the coins that I have in my bank because this paper signifies that you're good for it, basically. And so that greatly speeds things up in terms of settling commerce debts and settling bills between different states.

But going through all this history, the point of it is that at every sort of step of the way, you see, okay, there's a lot of different types of monies that are circulating, and they're being exchanged against one another. And there also seems to be a domestic sphere and international sphere. The international means of payment, which is an analytic category that I and my co-author, John Michael Colon, thought up, is kind of, sort of sets the tune as far as what kind of hierarchy of money, if you will, develops in each of these ages. So prior to the Axial Age, there was bulk settlement from one temple to the next in terms of silver, although it wasn't coins.

It was just like bullion, basically. And then later it was coins, and then later it was bills of exchange and then uh after a while there emerged gold standards um that existed between nations and they had central banks eventually which um hoarded gold not because not just because they were fetishizing it or something basic like that, but rather because it was the established international means of payment. And

if you either need that or you need something that is easily transferable into that in order to conduct your trade, especially if you're a developing country or otherwise like an upstart state of some type. Now, today, we're in a dollarized world.

The dollar is the international means of payment. From 1971 onwards, the MMT story, yeah, I mean, that's basically true. onwards, the MMT story, yeah, I mean, that's basically true. The, for the US government as the issuer, the sole issuer of the dollar, which is a fiat currency, which is not backed by anything. Yeah, you can make as much of that as you want. You can make, you can create and spend into existence as many dollars as the US government wants, and then delete it from existence by taxing it away. And that makes perfect sense. Totally acknowledge that.

But there's some problems nonetheless, in terms of how they apply that into a more general theory. Because it's like, can you, okay, you can make as much of your own money. What about other types of money? From the perspective of a U.S. statecraft interested individual, like, why would you care about other people's money, basically, if you're just the sole source of the U.S. dollar, which happens to also be the international means of payment? Of course you wouldn't. Or if you're like say to

tunisia the tunisian dollar is accepted almost nowhere as payment yeah and and one one of the big thing i mean it's not the sole driver and people sort of emphasize this i'm going to caveat this immediately because people will yell at me but like one of the very important things about the dollar is that the dollar is what you can buy oil in. And this is extremely important because if you are a society in the world, you need oil. This is basically universally true. And this, you know, but the fact that you need to buy oil and the fact that you need to buy a lot of other things that are manufactured in the U.S. means you have to find some way to get U.S. dollars. Now, again, the U.S. doesn't this doesn't matter for the U.S. means you have to find some way to get U.S. dollars. Now, again, the U.S. doesn't,

this doesn't matter for the U.S. because we can just make them. Well, okay. This is another thing. This stuff gets very weird and convoluted very quickly. But essentially the U.S. can just sort of make this money. Technically speaking, it's the Federal Reserve and there's all of this

just incredibly convoluted finance stuff. But the u.s like doesn't the u.s does not have to worry about obtaining u.s dollars you could just do it but you know yeah if if you're yeah if you're if you're i don't know if you're tunisia if you're denmark's an example i like yeah denmark yeah like you you need to find a way to get u.s dollars because you need to have stuff where you need to use US dollars to buy it. Yeah, and so in our international context, this is after all of the history I just went through since about 1971 or so when we went off the gold standard. We have a system of central banks dominated by the dollar, and the dollar represents about 60% of settlement of all trade. And the next five or so currencies plus the U.S. account for like 80% to 85% of all trade. So there's really just a few currencies which dominate everything, with the U.S. being outsized among them.

with the US being outsized among them. And when you look at the historical record, this is very similar to other forms of international means of payment, where it's like, okay, I either need to have the one that's at the top or failing that, one of the other sort of reserve currencies, even though that terminology didn't really exist prior to about, say about 80 years ago.

But yeah, so if it's not gold, then okay, it's the US dollar. So we need dollars, or we either need to be printing dollars because we're the US, or if we're not them, then we need to get into either US dollar or the yen or the euro or one of the major trading currencies. the yen or the euro or one of the major trading currencies and um like china china does a lot of trade with the u.s and they they sell things to us we give them dollars they're rational they put their dollars into treasuries to gain a little bit of return instead of just holding the dollars themselves for no return should we explain i, I guess, what a treasury is?

Yeah, sorry. A treasury bill is if you receive dollars, you can use them to purchase what's called a treasury note or a treasury bill. And sometimes it's called T-notes too. So if you ever hear someone talk about T-notes, that's what this is. Yeah, so it's a way to learn. It's like moving from your checking to your savings account, essentially. So if you have just dollars in a bank, it doesn't earn hardly anything. If you go into the savings account, which is basically the treasury bills, you'll earn a little more.

And you'll earn dollars. You won't earn renminbi from them. You'll earn more dollars. And dollars are the international means of payment, so that's good. Yeah. So basically, the US government puts out a bond and you buy it. And then whenever it expires, there's a 10-year T-note that people talk about. In 10 years, you buy it and it'll give you a certain amount of dollars later on that is more than what you paid for it.

Exactly. So you'll earn a little bit of interest over time. And then you may earn a little lump sum when it matures in the future. So China has tons of dollars. It's part of a huge strategy that they have in order to manage their foreign currency reserves, or what's called Forex. So Forex is the, and it's a term we're going to use a lot, that just is the foreign currency reserves you have on hand in order to pay for things that are only available for sale

in currencies that you can't make yourself. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. Modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

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Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series. Apple Podcasts, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works

while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so you have this question of like why do we care about this right like why do we people who want to make the world better care about this and the answer is okay take take take your hypothetical scenario uh your your hypothetical scenario is the scenario in which like a a a a bunch of workers in alliance with tribal confederations have taken Vancouver Island, right?

And they've set up a new government. They have worked out sovereignty arrangements. Things have happened. You now have a new sort of entity that is in Vancouver Island. So immediately, you have both resources both you have both uh resources and you have problems right you have a certain amount of resources that are on vancouver island right you have you know you have like you have literally like what you have the things that are on the island right you have cars you have like probably some yachts you've managed to like steal you have

you know you have you have shops you have uh production facilities you have a extremely large number of very good chinese restaurants you have yeah uh trees got a lot of trees yeah you've got trees major asset yeah you know chinese restaurants i mean also it's true like i yeah my my family spent a lot of time like specifically going going to vancouver island just to eat Chinese food. Yeah. You know, and say, say like, let's say you've taken Vancouver Island and you expand out and you now have like a swath of Canada, right. That, that is, that is, that is now sort of been liberated. And, you know, you have, you have, you have a lot of resources, you have sort of timber, you have, I don't know, maybe you have coal, maybe you have other stuff you have, you have, and you also have a lot of people. And I'll say, yeah, yeah. You got a lot of labor you can marshal.

Yeah. You have a lot of labor and, you know, and those people have a lot of skills. They have a lot of dedication. They have like, you know, they, they, they had, they have, they have a belief that you can make the world a better place. And I think this is where, you know, this is, this is the arena in which MMT can sort of explain what you're doing next. Yeah, so you have this, you have a territory that has undergone revolutionary change. And you have biophysical resources that are in it, and biophysical resources that could be in it.

And you have, and you also have the social technology of money. Some of the money you can just make yourself. Other monies you cannot. MMT is applicable in the sense that it says, in this scenario, I think the way MMT is most applicable is to say everyone can be employed who wants to be employed. Yeah. One of their principal ideas is a job

guarantee, a federal job guarantee, and it could be applied just as easily conceptually in this situation. It says there's nothing preventing a revolutionary government of some type, not necessarily a state, but any non-state type of administration from setting up something sort of like a central bank to make its own money to marshal domestic resources, domestic in terms of within its own territory. And to get everyone who wants to be employed to be employed and to be paid for their work.

Like, not to be too vulgar, but why this stuff is important, this monetary theory and this history, is like, people want to be paid for their work. They're not going to go and barter things. They want to get paid. Yeah. And I think this is something that, like, you know, if you look at sort of, like, the thing that gets held up is, like, the classic example of an anarchist revolution, right, is what happens in Spain in 1936.

And if you look at what they do, right, like, almost immediately after the revolution, what happens is you have basically, like, a union of all of the bank workers, and those guys take over all the banks. And you, you have, you have the individual workers and different unions start seizing.

They start seizing the factories that start seizing like the trains. And once they've done that, they start just pulling all of their resources into, you know, like into like they, they have, they, they now have this,

like they have, they have the banking union. The banking union is, is the sort of central body that has resources that can distribute it. And, you know, what, they, they now have this, like they have, they have the banking union. The banking union is, is the, the sort of central body that has resources that can distribute it. And, you know, what, what, what MMT is essentially saying is like, yeah, so in as, as long as what you're moving around is the resources that you have in your territory, like you can just create money in order to do that.

And you can sort of, you know, and you can use this to get people to do certain things. And like, you know, the, the, the, the Catalonians, like the the catalonians like they they they equalize everyone's wages for example i mean it would be better if we equalize everyone's wages i i do agree with that yeah well you know i mean they they do have a lot of other stuff that's like okay so like they they get rid of a lot of jobs that are like sort of managerial stuff or like just bullshit jobs they just kind of eliminate and yeah and you know and this this frees up people to like do stuff that actually matters and is real instead of sort of this like this sort of bureaucratic hierarchy that's above them and yeah but and i think the other thing they do that's that's very important for our sort of scenario for us talking about money is that like

they they immediately start like they start seizing gold and they start seizing uh you know like they start seizing foreign currency and yeah and i think that this this is where we can get into where i guess mmt doesn't work because mmt like it's it's it's it doesn't it doesn't really think much about the fact that like okay you you have vancouver island you have a part of like canada right there is a lot of resources that you don't have absolutely yeah that's that's that's going to be a lot of why foreign exchange matters so much as that uh you know inevitably you think what if we just made an autarkic society that's uh sorry that's a little

i probably should have jumped the gun a little bit there what if we just made everything ourselves what if we made a society that was fully economically independent uh um that's what autarky tends to be used to mean and the answer to that is because that sucks that's the problem with it. It sucks. Like you, you don't want to be trying to manage an autarkic society on multiple grounds. Not least of which is that.

I mean, we've, we've, we've seen societies try to do it. And you know, we, me, me and Steve could go for hours and hours and hours talking about historical precedents of previous economic systems, many of which did try to be autarkic because that was something that monarchies liked a lot, was the idea that their kingdom could be fully independent.

Because the thing is that when you're economically independent, that means that you've got a certain amount of security, of international security. you've got a certain amount of security, of international security. And there's kind of a trade-off where the more stuff that you're reliant on importing, the more vulnerable you are to the people you're importing and screwing you. But it's just so massively difficult to be a good producer of every possible good. Yeah, and this is true even if you have an enormous amount of resources. Like I think – we can talk about one case study of this, which is socialist period China. And socialist period China, they have – they're getting resources, especially in the early periods. They're getting some resources from Hong Kong.

They're getting some stuff from the Soviets. But they get into – Mao famously does not like markets. This is a thing that is known about Mao. And so Mao is like, okay, no, we're going to shut off the sort of market system that we've been running sort of through Hong Kong. And then China had been getting technology transfers and aid from the USSR, but the USSR and China got into a bunch of political fights. And the USSR pulls out all of its advisors. And China has an enormous amount of resources. They have a large population. They have just an enormous geographic mass. And

so they basically try to build an autarkic society. And they try to sort of just, okay, well, we'll just marshal our resources and we'll just sort of like, we'll plan a way out of it and they run into this problem which is that there is actually things that they need from other countries which is technology and they they hit this thing i've talked about before which is uh like they basically hit this bot this production bottleneck where it's like well okay so in order to produce more industrial goods they need more food but the problem is in order to produce more food to support a larger urban population uh you need more industrial goods right you need your like fertilizers need your tractors need stuff like that

and you know and once they're cut off from sort of the rest of the world from through hong kong and from the ussr they don't have a way they they you know they're sort of scrambling to figure out how we do this and their solution is the great leap forward which is essentially we're just we're we're we're gonna just bust through this whole thing and we're going to do it by forcing everyone to work for an absolutely enormous increase in hours. We're going to have peasants working in the fields literally until they collapse from exhaustion. And it just doesn't work. It is a epochal failure. There are millions of people die from famines.

And the response to this is that like is that china eventually ends up like winds up opening its economy again yeah and yeah and yeah and like you know and this is the thing like if if china which has like just just an astounding breath of natural resources can't pull this off like it's probably just not a good idea because like yeah uh well i mean we even have like a very know, a very contemporary example that, you know, makes the make certainly makes my blood boil. And I'm sure it will make some of the listeners blood boil the vaccines. You know, the realistically, you know, the the coronavirus is fun is a more or less is an incredible threat to basically every state on the planet at this point. And the really chemical and biomedical research is done in just a handful of places on the planet.

And there have been attempts to create vaccines outside of those places. And they have been somewhat successful successful but it has been difficult and most places are just not in a position to create a to develop their own competing technology uh and even china struggled with creating their own competing vaccination technology and i'm not at all a biology expert, but I understand it's not quite as efficient vaccine, the Sinovac. But at the end of the day, South Africa is not developing their own independent vaccine.

That's a quite sophisticated economy. All the various South American countries could have pulled their resources together in theory, but it's so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch a primary research industry. It's so hard to turn a dime and develop from scratch a primary research industry uh it's so difficult and it's so not worth it it's you know if you have trade relations with a country that has technology developments in a field that you really care about it's just not really worth it like we don't the united States doesn't really compete with several forms of Japanese technology

because it's just not worth the bother. Just let Korea and Japan handle that for us and we buy it. And they accept our forex, they accept our dollars, but let's say you're the Philippines. How are you going to get those?

And this is now international trade and international politics and uh if we're creating our now independent vancouver island we have now entered into this territory uh we have now entered into uh international politics and international uh trade yeah and this this is an arena that's fraught in a lot of ways because it's it's you know as we've sort of been talking about right it's it's not just that you need it's not just that you need forex or like for example like you know if you you you have you have your sort of like you know you you you you you have your new society in like vancouver right yeah vicar violence uh you know you need the thing you need mostly is dollars and this is this is a real problem because this requires you to have something that you can turn

into dollars and you know okay so you're gonna have some amount of dollars that are just there right from from when you see society there's there's assets you can sort of just sell off that like okay like do we really need this yacht like okay we can we can sell this for some amount of dollars but this becomes a a real economic problem because you you need to produce something that you can exchange for dollars and you know there's there's a pretty good chance that like whatever sort of new currency whatever new sort of like mmt currency that's like oh it's it's controlled it because we're producing it it moves our resources around we can make as much of it as we want like yeah you have to actually be able to convert that into dollars and you know why why does the u why is the u.s going to want your

currency yeah it's a bit dialectical because you have your MMT currency, which domestically is accepted because of tax receivability or something, or national fervor, if you will, to create a new democratic confederalist society. And that's accepted there, but yeah, you need US dollars. So you need US dollars, like you need US dollars but why do you need them partly because like you eventually want to not need them yeah and so you have what you can you have assets right now that you can just sell

so that's one way but long term you can't do that so you need to have cash flow over the long haul that allows you to buy what are called capital goods, which is a fancy term for machines that make machines or machines that make some sort of in-product, which is a physical thing. It's not like a service or something. And, um, you want to classic, like really classic economic development advice that is actually pretty good is you want to move up what's called a value chain and eventually be not producing, um, just like a stable crop or something, but doing really innovative advanced technology things later on. So you're like, here's where I am. Here's what I have. Here's what I could have, though.

How do I get there? Part of the formula to get there is, yes, acquiring Forex. But it's other things like saying, how do I cultivate political alliances that will yield trade partners such that I have a stable flow of Forex and maybe even technology transfers, you know, or something down the line, which could be a game changer. You need to have an education system. Like, if you're a fan of the economist Thorsten Veblen, he thought, like, in his mind, he

thought the economic development was ultimately from the human intellect, and everything was downstream of that. You can use your MMT money to create a basic education system, and you can augment it with importing things that you can't yet make, and using it to create a university or something, which can do R&D work. You have to find tools to get enough of the money that you can't just infinitely produce, Forex, in order to augment what your society can produce beyond what it initially could, and show essentially that you, okay, I can make a better mousetrap. Like I don't need to, I don't need donations from well-meaning imperial powers or something.

We're building what we need in order to move up the value chain and then build out our productive capacity in such a way that it doesn't leave anyone behind. Everyone's employed because we're doing the classic MMT stuff on the home front, such as a job guarantee, but we're also doing the international economic development stuff of assiduously monitoring our foreign currency reserves and then using them to import things that we cannot yet make, but can make things internally and then have a snowballing effect as far as being able to sell

even higher value things, which to our trade partners who are hopefully share our values of like democratic confederalism or whatever you whatever your chosen guidelines are yeah and this is something that like this is something that that becomes very difficult in like the current market you know this this is to some extent like why the cold war went the way it did right which is that you know once once you have the sino-soviet split once you have like i mean you have chinese and russian troops killing each other on the border um china it like enters a situation where it's like well okay so we still want to do economic development but we've lost the soviet union as a technology as a way to get technology transfers and their solution to

that was to ally with the u.s and this is like it it works out for the chinese economy it is an apocal disaster for like literally everyone else on earth because like it means that capitalism is the thing that wins the cold war and this means that like you know i mean like if you look if you look at how you know like the the the the things that china are doing in order to be able to get technology transfers for the US, it's like there's – so there are joint Chinese CIA operations inside of China that are monitoring Soviet missile sites. So there's just CIA outposts in China that are just doing spying for the US government. There's like – they invade Vietnamietnam which is a enormous you know and

it's not just that they invade vietnam it's like they invade vietnam and then they fight this like there's really you know the immediate war doesn't last that long but they fight this like horrible border war that goes on for like a decade that kills enormous numbers of people and you know and the end result of this is like yeah like you know trying to get the technology transfers and they developed their economy but everyone else on earth yeah the cost is like everyone who's ever tried to be a labor organizer in like

you know in like El Salvador gets murdered by a bunch of fascists and it's like development econ is so fucking frustrating because at every single step of the way there's like there's like a really razor thin line between risk and reward at single step of the way, there's a really razor thin line between risk and reward at every step

of the way. Imperial powers will dangle technology transfers or extended trade agreements on somewhat favorable terms in exchange for allowing them to just go to war with your neighbors

or rope you into it? Or extract resources that would be valuable for you later in your development phases? Yeah, actually, this leads to me going to our hypothetical here, thinking about Vancouver Island, the People's Republic of Vancouver Island. And we can kind of talk about some of the development traps because that's kind of what I was churning through my head right now

because I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for Vancouver Island and that incredibly deep level of research. And so what they list under the economy is there's a tech sector, logging, fishing, tourism, and food. And so we talked first about you could sell off the yachts and the cars and stuff like that. And that's I don't even know if that counts as a sector of the economy at that level. That's a.

You can have a yard sale. Yeah, you can have a yard sale. But, you know, logging and fishing, those are those are pretty solid primary sector economies. You know, to describe the terminology, you know, they've got this. You know, to describe the terminology, you know, they've got this, this is part of that hierarchy that Steve was talking about that, you know, the chain of development and a primary sector is like a basic extractive element of your economy, a mine, logging, fishing, food production, you know, basic goods and then you know you talk about a secondary development which is like manufacturing and then a tertiary which is you know services uh those are kind of your basic those are usually considered like sectors of the economy but in a way they kind of correspond to development um and they require different amounts of developments and you know the thing about primary is everybody

needs those things like unless people just stop using wood for construction which we are very far from doing we still use a lot of wood for construction uh your logging industry is going to have buyers um until people stop buying eating fish your fishing industry is going to have buyers you know up to a really ludicrously bottomless reserve uh but you're going to be stopped on that secondary industry until you have capital. I don't mean just the sense of having a lot of money, but you know, as Steve said, the right money. And well, you need capital

production. You need capital. You need the machines. Yeah, you need your factories. You need your... And wealthy countries, partly in order to maintain their power, they have... They want to be the only seller of capital goods yeah and they're gonna be very withholding about it um like a

really good example for right now with like all the inflation stuff going on and like the chip shortage yeah so the machines that make the machines that make the chips holy shit those are like those are they only make like 50 of those a year yeah and it's all two companies yeah well you know i wasn't the thing with the thing with the chip shortage right it's also like though if if you can be like the people who do that that gives you a lot of economic power like this is this is one of taiwan's things right which is that like you know it's like okay so why hasn't taiwan just sort of been bowled over by by china and like i mean there's a lot of sort of geopolitical reasons for that but it's also partly it's just that like yeah like taiwan has this enormous chip making industry and it's incredibly advanced and you

know it has like you know this this is i think another thing that that's a real problem for sort of revolutionary society doing this is that like, yeah, like Taiwan's chip making economy, like it's not like people like fall in like vats of chemicals, like a lot, like there's a lot, there's a lot like just horrible sort of labor exploitation. And this comes back to even your sort of like, like,

you know, if you're talking about your, your sort of primary, primary sector stuff in the economy, which is that like, okay, well, yeah. I mean like oils, particularly example of this, but like, you know, if you're talking about your sort of primary sector stuff in the economy, which is that like, okay, well, yeah, I mean, like oil is a particular example of this, but like, you know, same with timber and same with fish. It's like these are extractive industries. Yeah. And this becomes a real problem for a lot of your sort of like newly revolutionary developing societies. Absolutely.

Because you get this tension between, like, and you see this a lot in Latin America. you get this tension between like, and you see this a lot in, in Latin America is like, this is a, there was a huge tension like this in Bolivia, for example, you see this in Ecuador too,

where like you have different factions of, you have different factions of the political movements where you have people who are like, okay, yeah, I'm okay with just like, you know, building these highways through indigenous land or just like doing mass deforestation or like digging,

doing open pit mining. And those people will be like those people will be leftist right there'll be people like okay well we need to do this because we need to like you know this is an anti-poverty measure we have to move up the value chain we have to increase our production but then you know you have the indigenous people who's like homes these are right yeah yeah you can rationalize a lot of evil shit if you've got the right intellectual backing yeah yeah and like and this this happens like and this happens in China, too. A lot of the industrialization has been absolutely devastating. And this becomes a real...

The fact that you need forex becomes this incredible trap that you sink into because it's like, on the one hand, yeah, there are resources that you need in order to have a functioning society but it's also that that you can't get in in your territory but also like the cost of getting that forex is enormous and and a lot of times it's it's it's it's a it's something that just simply destroys revolutionary project yeah what hit me when i looked at this list of vancouver's uh economic sectors was uh you know tourism being listed among the big ones. And my mind immediately went to Cuba, to pre-revolutionary, pre-Castro Cuba.

And, you know, pre-Castro Cuba has all these things going for it when you're looking at it from a developmental standpoint. You know, it's got this very good productive base of primary resources like sugar. very good productive base of you know primary resources like sugar uh it has uh great relations with the united states of america particularly through the mafia uh yeah wonderful right uh it has uh the tourism industry is is very successful it's producing manufactured cigar so it even has a secondary industry bridge but it is still absolutely failing to develop in a way that is meaningful for the people living in cuba you know pre-castro cuba was a nightmare for most people uh and that's you know that's like steve said you know there's this razor thin thing between uh risk and reward and uh during that you know during the 40s and 50s in Cuba it was

just it just made so much sense to just stick it with this impoverished extractive tourist heavy mafia friendly economy and yeah they were friend with the US they could have gone technology transfers in in principle but you were they actually going to and that's something we have to think about with our people's republic of vancouver island is you know yeah like people are going to want our logs people are going to want our fishing american tourists are going to come here and go whale watching and that's going to bring in forex but are we going to be able to like leverage that and how would we leverage that yeah yeah and i kind of want to move the conversation to like

i think people might be listening and saying like okay okay, yeah, I can see why it's really important. But like, what are the specific ways in which we can acquire it, but also manage it? And it's like, okay, well, Without being evil, which we want. Without being evil, while being socialists who want democracy. without being evil while being socialists who want democracy. Um, okay. Okay. So I think if we're, I'm,

I'm picturing some sort of assembly structure taking shape because I'm a lip sock, libertarian socialist. Um, and, uh, it could be something else, but any case,

uh, I think they should appoint 50 or so people, some of them experts, some of them not, to examine. They should do a thorough economic analysis of the entire island. And you should do it on the basis of, here are the assets we have. Here's where we want to go in terms of assets. How do we get from here to there? And one of the assets that you have is, okay, we have so many US dollars.

We have so many Canadian dollars. We have reserve balances. So we need to import things. We can make some of it ourselves and we need to buy the rest of it. We can't buy all of it now. We need to cash flow some of this. We need to do export-led growth,

as the classic development econ people would say, where we say, we have some industries where we can gradually and consistently ramp up to the point that they give us the types of money which we need in order to input capital goods, the machines that build machines, to buy them, learn how to use them, and maintain them, and then build more ourselves, ideally. course of say basically i'm basically suggesting that vancouver island should have a 10-year plan they should have a 10-year plan for further economic development and it should be as democratically decided upon as possible within the limits of like okay there's some experts which will obviously be needed and not everyone can do that but um whatever assembly structure you have

should be given oversight ultimately and you should say um just be really frank with it like we have these are our biophysical resources now in 10 years they should be this in order to get there each year these things need to happen. We have to have this much foreign currency. We have to have this many workers involved in this industry. We can change things along the way, but we're constrained by these factors. We're like, we need trade partners.

We need to reverse engineer some technology that we've acquired or something in order to educate ourselves on how to create chips or something in the future yeah there should be an extremely vigorous discussion of what assets do we have, what do we need, what's our goal and then thread together a development plan from there. And then use your MMT money to marshal the resources that you currently have and that you need for the next year, say domestically, while monitoring and

augmenting your foreign currency reserves and using the tools of monetary policy to safeguard those reserves and economize on them in order to import what you can't yet make so that you can make it in the future. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by iHeart and Sonora An anthology of modern day horror stories Inspired by the legends of Latin America From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you

love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to

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of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think the thing that we should learn from the fact that like a lot of these projects haven't worked is, well, I think it's twofold. One is that you have, okay, there's constant sort of like, there's traps you have to avoid that have to do with like, for example, like who actually has access to the Forex because this is what this is a way that like you know and also like because it it's it's very

very easy to like access to sort of like incidentally redevelop ruling classes when you're trying to do planning technology stuff when you're trying when you're dealing with enormous amounts of foreign currency and this is a problem and you know and in the second problem has to do with how do you make sure that your economy essentially doesn't end up as a resource colony? like a region of territory, but there's, there's political limits on it. And the political limits have to do with, you know, who actually controls the sort of like vast majority of,

of resources and technology. And the only way to really deal with that is that like, you know, you can't, you can't sort of have like you, if, if, if you want to actually have sort of long-term stability,

you can't just have your sort of like your your like libertarian social councils in one country like that's a thing that has to like keep moving and keep spreading because otherwise it becomes it becomes just increasingly difficult and you come under increasing pressures you know for you know in order to do things that you do that you need to do in order to make sure people don't starve in order to make sure that people have educations to make sure that people you know are able to sort of live live their lives and also like in order to make sure that you don't just annihilate the like annihilate the entire environment while doing this because that's something that happens a lot

when in these developmentalist states is that like you know you you get you you you get groups who like come in the power and are like well okay we're like we're going to be an ecological regime and then you know they wind, and then they wind up doing oil extraction and mining, because that's the easiest way to get money. And I think

it's valuable that these are things that if you're serious about taking power, you have to think about, but I also think it's, it's important to keep in mind just the, the, the,

the, the inherent limits that you have, if you're just sort of an, if you're, if you're a completely isolated, like if you're completely isolated revolutionary movement in one place, it doesn't have people where that you can, you know, give stuff to and move it doesn't have people where you can, you know,

give stuff to and move stuff around between. yeah. I mean, it's, it's always been, I mean, that's, that's been like a kind of inevitable thing that like,

you know, there are, there are communes in my extended family. You know, I've got members of my family who live on, you know, those little farm communes. And they're not fully economically independent. And I'm sure that we could find people who would be willing to say,

oh, you know, this is like, this is totally fake. This is not a real commune because they, you know, sell, you know, sell sunflower seeds at the farmer's market and stuff. sunflower seeds at the farmer's market and stuff. And that's kind of the unfortunate that's kind of like the tough reality that unless you manage to

create a truly global revolution as I said, until you've got like two-thirds of the population under your umbrella you're going to have foreign relations and you're going to have foreign trade uh which is going to uh it's going to be it's going to be difficult to manage you know you're going to have to be both you're going to have to have like a you know a

diplomatic core that's something we're barely mentioning here but like we're gonna need to have diplomats coming out of this council if we're talking about them having relations with the U.S. and Canada and negotiating these trade deals. You know, these trade deals don't happen out of nowhere. And, you know, we kind of brush this aside, but it's a bit of there's a bit of a misperception that people tend to have that. The United States is pro free trade in like an extreme sense that like any trade with the United States is done without any tariffs oh yeah no I don't think that you if you believe that without having done a lot of research I do not think that that is an absurd thing to believe because that is the propaganda that is passed along in common knowledge a very quick examination of how

trade works between international actors will reveal that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of tariffs active all the time in every trade deal yeah and like the like the the the big one with the u.s agricultural subsidies which are just it is it is it is illegal to have them we have like just in just like billions and billions of billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies that have us producing cheap food that's like we're not even good at making it like it's it's a complete disaster it i mean this like this this has just single-handedly annihilated the economies of like enormous swaths of the globe because, because no one can compete with, with American agriculture subsidies.

And it's, you know, and, and, but like when you join the free trade system, like that's one of the carve outs that was, that's, that's,

that's in the WTO is you can't have subsidies for your, for your agriculture programs except for the U S. Yeah. And it's, it's great. And by great, I mean, everyone dies.

Well, and there's all sorts of like weird technical ways that you can create pseudo subsidies, you know you know, Italy very famously has a price floor on wine uh and this means that you know if you if you make a bottle of wine that nobody would buy for the minimum price the government will buy it off of you for that price and so there are wineries in italy that just produce wine at such a this so bad nobody would buy nobody you'd have to pay people to drink it uh but the government just buys it at this minimum set price and then throws it enough in a giant olympic swimming pool vats uh to go

rot uh and like there are yeah there's the trade is you, there's a lot more complex. The free trade is kind of a myth at the international level. It is at the most cynical free trade as a doctrine is a cudgel used by more powerful countries. They impose that you have to do free trade with them and that they get to do protracted trade with you. Well, firstly, like you you well it's a it's well firstly like you mentioned it's a myth and historically speaking we had like we had infant industries in this country that were highly protected from the very earliest days through most of the 19th century and into the 20th century and we had And we had export-led growth from infant-led, from infant

industries in the US. And that's precisely the opposite advice we now turn around and give via our imperial apparatus from the IMF and the World Bank to developing countries. And countries

that examined what the US was telling them to do and did the opposite are the ones that succeeded. Yes. South Korea said, nah, fuck that. And they went up the value chain and they did all of the things that we said Vancouver Island should do, basically.

Except not being evil. They did not do that. Okay, they were evil. They were evil for a time and they were dictatorial. But in terms of their economic development plan, divorce from political reality, which is probably naive of me to say, they took the opposite advice of the IMF in terms of that narrow scope.

Well, yeah. I think the other thing that's kind of important here that we haven't really touched on yet is that like, so part of what was going on with South Korea'sorea's economy is that south korea's economy was it was a war economy and it was a war economy designed to build i mean originally just it was it was a war economy because they were fighting a war right but then it became this i mean it was central axis of sort of the production the korean war and then it became this axis that uh like it became a huge part of the american sort of arms industry in in vietnam and this is the same

thing japan has this too where both these economies are like a huge part of the reason why they're able to develop is because they get enormous amounts of just money and that guaranteed contracts and stuff like that from american military development and this isn't this is another really big problem for like your sort of free state that like you've created like whatever you're sort of like council republic you're like created, like whatever you're sort of like council Republic, you're like, if on his own, you're like indigenous confederation is that like,

you need weapons. And the people who make guns are like the U S and Russia. And this is a real, you know, and, you know, we've, we've been talking on this show about,

about producing like 3d weapons. But I mean, you know, and you know we've we've been talking on this show about about producing like 3d printed weapons but i mean you know in terms of things like you know you're like artillery right like in terms of your mortars and like things like that or like you know you you can't you can't 3d print to best of my knowledge and i'm like 99.99 sure about this that like unless you had extremely advanced facilities and even then it's not clear to me like I I like I don't think anyone on earth has ever 3d printed like an anti-aircraft rocket like you you you know you can't make you can't make stingers you can't make man pads you can't make like anti-tank anti-aircraft weapons not to not to get too much into it but like the way in which Ukraine is fighting like Russian tanks in its very specifics

is kind of encouraging actually yeah but like like the like specific yeah i mean there's only a few companies who are making the components for these things yeah so that's a problem and that's like the personnel launched uh the in-law or whatever things yeah like the the anti-tank and take off weapons like yeah if you can get them they're effective and they they do they do stuff they're mostly just handed out from by the u.s or the uk yeah yeah and that's and that's that's a huge problem if you're you know not trying to like be a political colony of these two things and this this is another trap that you see like you see dictators especially falling into which is that that they you know okay so like on the one hand yeah you do need weapons right like you you need you need some kind of military complex and you you need arms

in order to make sure that like you know you're not like the u.s doesn't roll tanks across the border but simultaneously like there's there's a thing that happens a lot with this happens particularly with petro states where you know okay so you the the the u.s is like okay so we need this oil right and how do you how do you deal with this sort of balance payments deficits and the answer is we just sell them like 100 billion tanks and we just like we just like dump f-35s on them and you can get into these scenarios where like you get these like because i mean the problem with weapons right it's like okay so you need them to survive but they also they don't produce anything

right in fact they're sort of they're sort of net economic negatives because the only thing you could do with a gun is i mean i guess you could technically hunt but like you know the thing you're doing with the weapon is destroying value yeah yeah and i mean and they require maintenance yeah yeah you know like these things are substantial net negatives yeah and and and you know and countries get sucked into these traps where like you know okay we're just going to keep buying American weapons because of security or like we want to invade some other country or like well you know and you see this with Soviet weaponry too

like back when that was a thing and today modern Russian weaponry where it's like you can get funneled into these traps where like the ruling class of your society just decides that the thing that it wants to spend its forex on is weapons and you have to be very very like you have to be and this is the thing that it wants to spend his forex on his weapons and you have to be very very like you have to be you know and this is the thing that happens like

like evander hoxa for example famously like makes just a bunch of bunkers right and like militarizes society and it's like well you know part of this is just hoxa being extremely weird but like you have to be very careful when you're a society that is genuinely under threat, that you're not sort of like just throwing all of your resources into, into stuff like that, where you, you know,

it doesn't, it doesn't produce anything, but you know, and it, yeah. And also, I mean, this is a,

it is a need like, like whatever the, the Vancouver economic planning, whatever group should, like, one of the objectives would be military. Of course. Yeah. You need to, I don't know if you could get your hands on in-laws or man pads or anything like that. But you, I think you'd be foolish, frankly frankly not to distribute and train on weapons and stuff like that yeah and use some of your forex for that yeah yeah like i think like yeah it's like

you have to use some of it for that and it sucks because this is something that like this this sucks you into the arms complex right yeah i mean like rojava rojava is using its oil revenues to fund 50% of its expenditure, at least in 2020, the last time I checked, was to defense forces. A lot of that came from dollars, euros, and Turkish lira that they acquired through oil yeah and like this and this is the thing that like yeah this is this is a problem if you're in your revolution

society surrounding people who just literally want to murder you it's like stuff like this winds up happening and you wind up like i don't blame them yeah it's like it's obviously real it's like reality yeah and i think that's a you know that that that's a good example of like what happens if the revolution doesn't spread and if you get sort of like you get isolated contained by imperial powers who just want to murder you is that you wind up like you basically you want you wind up fighting an endless war against both the proxy forces and the real forces of armies that are significantly larger and more powerful than you.

Yeah, and a lot of times there's not much you can do about it, but it's like, I think, you know, in terms of like in the school of high principle, like this is why internationalism is important. I mean, yeah, of course, obviously the other answer is, you know, selling out on the revolution. And, you know, we,

you know, there's the example that people don't think about of syriza uh you know syriza gets elected on all these like radical promises for greece and then just doesn't do any of them um and then you can look at say nepal and you know the communist one in nepal and then they establish a government that's functionally you know it's a liberal government yeah my my my my favorite nepal fact is that uh okay so that nepal has like 17 different like maoist factions but the guy who was the head of of the largest maoist faction uh yeah yeah i think it's him is he's the one who now lives in the mansion of the guy who used to be the nepalese head of security i think so yeah and

it's like huh huh we've well this is this this has gone great we've changed the person in the mansion it's like you've got a yeah and i mean the and and you know uh not too surprisingly uh you know the second leader a couple about a year ago kiran was on the verge of declaring a new people's war against the maoist faction yeah it's a maoist war against the maoists like yeah i mean that's you know you you you end up it's yeah it's it's tricky to try to like game it out so to speak because you know my i i i maybe i'm just squeamish. I am hoping for things to not happen with a river of blood. In life, I hope that we don't get rivers of blood.

Plan for war so you get peace. Yeah, yeah. But like Chris has said, you can get trapped into that escalating security dilemma. And of course, investing in security trapped into like that escalating security dilemma. And of course, you know, investing in security doesn't actually necessarily lead to security. We have, you know, over a century of looking at Latin American countries that investments in the military is just investments in the next civil war. Yeah. Or you get couped. And that's another real problem.

Like, like, it's weird because it's like a double, it's a double edged sword. Like, I mean, it's weird because it's like a double, it's a double-edged sword. Because like the 20th century, like there's all, there's a lot of like socialisty governments that come into power just from military coups. But also like probably more of those governments like get overthrown by their own coups. And it's. Yeah. There was, there was one lesson I learned from playing Tropico. It's that if you try to invest more in your no matter how much you invest in your military it only will ever get you up to

50-50 odds of surviving a coup yeah don't have colonels and don't have generals then you can capture those coups it's always colonels because they're like passed up

for generalship by the next administration or something. Yeah. Again, sometimes, sometimes you do get like, sometimes you get like your Pinochet and sometimes you do get your captain's coups.

And it's like, this is a, that goes, that's ambition right there. When the captain, who is the government? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, once, well, once your captains have hit, fuck it mode, it's bad. bad yeah that's indicative of like bigger deeper problems yeah well and i think like the bath is an interesting example of this because like okay so like the bath is we're never like good but like you know the bath

is like originally like we're kind of a mass movement but then increasingly like over time as as they consolidate power through military revolutions, it becomes increasingly just the Ba'athists are powerful because they have control of various portions of the military. And the end result of this is instead of having revolutions, all political power has nothing to do with whatever's happening in the street. You get these giant protests that are like, we want to go back to being part of the united the uh united air republic and it just doesn't matter because the actual political power is just what happens when the army fights itself and yeah i think like there's no easy solution to that other than just like don't have an armed body that's separate from just the masses of people which is difficult to do but also like or just arm the people somewhat

yeah and you know means of violence should be more evenly distributed I will say that was I guess part of why the scenario we had started off with like you've declared the People's Republic because the question of how you get that People's Republic feels like that's 75% of your podcast

episodes yeah we've done just like Because the question of how you get that People's Republic feels like that's 75% of your podcast episodes. Yeah. Yeah. We've done just like a miracle has occurred, but like a revolution has occurred. And I don't know. They like blockaded all the roads or something. As I like to say, it's good to have a plan for if you win.

Yeah. It would suck to win and then fumble once you've already gotten. Yeah. It would suck to win and then fumble once you've already gotten... This is something that actually does happen a lot, which is like you get into these revolutionary moments, but then there's just sort of like no... No one has any idea

what to do next, and so they sort of bungle it. Or you get into revolutionary scenarios. Or you get into revolutionary scenarios where nobody's thought about what happens next, and that's another And so they sort of bungle it or, you know, you get into scenarios. Yeah. Or you get to revolution areas where like, nobody's thought about what happens next. And that, that's, that's another way that like,

yeah, these, these things collapse all the time. And that's another way you get like, you know, this, this is in some sense, like the,

the, the whole of the sort of like the trial and error of the 20th, the 20th century, which most of which is sort of ended in error is that, you know, a bunch of people were experimenting and a lot of the stuff they tried didn't work and there are lots of reasons for that but you like you have to in order to win you have to actually be serious about taking power and you have to be you know you you have to

be thinking strategically and have a like have at least a vision of what you're going to do before you like you know like before things happen because otherwise there's just sort of like you know you just you just get sort of mass confusion and yeah and say what you will about the fascists they know what they're going to do when they seize power they're not confused about it it's more well their problems are what you

do after yeah they're not confused about that those first like 48 hours when things start going their way I hope that nothing we've said I hope that nothing we've said, I hope that nothing we've said on this podcast kind of makes people think like, Oh, they,

so they have like one weird trick basically to like secure, secure your power. Like, obviously no. and like, and the, and that we aren't like singularly focused on acquiring Forex or something.

Also, I mean, it's just like, it's an important lever to, to have at your disposal. And number one you should know that it's important number two you should have tools in place such as like uh running uh running a fixed fixed exchange rate or something to make it a bit easier to acquire forex on the whole or doing capital controls or doing price controls or something like that and you should have these tools in mind in order to get from

year one to year 10 in terms of your biophysical resources like here's what we have here's what we need and uh you know some of that could be military some of that could be military, some of that could be economic, and some of that could be political. And no one, like, I don't have the answers, we don't have the answers, but at each step of the way, you need to find groups of people who can come together and think objectively about them. Yeah, I want, yeah, it's not that I think that there is an answer. I'm kind of thinking about it almost a little bit parallel to, like, we know that if we create our... If socialists manage to seize any amount of power, they're going to reform whatever healthcare system they're currently existing in. We know that it's going to be better because it would be hard for it to be worse.

Uh, we know that it's going to be better because it would be hard for it to be worse. Uh, but you know, that's making a good hospital system is not the entire thing that makes a revolution happen. It is just one of those things that you need to do and you need to think about it. And my objective here, and it's, uh, a lot of my objective with you know making this whole magazine project is that my socialism means that we we have say over our lives you know that's fundamental to me that we have say over what we do with our lives and i want to make sure that the people who are in this with me which is hopefully everybody i am an optimist i'm hoping that everybody is with me on creating a better socialist world that all of us are at least

somewhat informed about the decisions we're making i i'm not actually economically trained uh you know i'm i i've learned this stuff as i've gone uh it's not insurmountable uh and uh it's you know i i would want the decision about how do we make a socialist economy, you know, the, the core of socialism worker control of the means of production that the people involved again, hopefully everybody, uh, has, you know, at least has, uh, an inkling of what's going on. I don't want people to be confused and baffled by the decisions being made on their behalf. That's, you know, a fundamental evil of a capitalist system.

We don't know what the fuck decisions are being made for us by powerful people. Well, part of the problem comes back to education because people are... The bourgeoisie have hogged they've hoarded the knowledge of how to plan in certain respects and I think socialists socialists will sometimes look at the body of knowledge in terms of planning an economy and say

because they are the only ones who know how to do that the knowledge itself is tainted and I don't need to learn this because it's evil basically I don't need to learn how to manage a currency board or do forex management because that's money and that's evil stuff. Yeah. I hope what we've described so far says,

I don't know if it's evil or not, but it's important, and it should be. I honestly think you're going to probably fail if you don't consider these things at each step of the way. Try to keep a separation between the parts of their economy that like are planned and the parts of their economy that like are about moving Forex around. And I think like, okay, like there are varying degrees of effectiveness of this, but like, this is like, even, even if you're like, okay, like we want to get rid of the economy, right? Like we want to get rid of labor. We want to get rid of all the stuff as a concept like you're gonna have to deal like until until you like win right like until until you've like until you've like raised a flag over like new york berlin shanghai like and new delhi at the same time right like you're you're gonna be you going to have to be dealing with this stuff and how you do that

and how quickly you're able to figure this out, how quickly you're able to implement it and how quickly you're able to sort of like seize control of and use the resources that you have in order to advance your political project is, you know, that's going to be one of the things that determines whether or not your revolution survives no matter what it's fighting for like in addition to all the

military stuff um military and economic i think you have to just say like you have to get to a point economically and militarily and all the other stuff to where you can just say to international powers like i don't need to make some moral claim to you. I've built a better mousetrap. I'm going to let the people decide. And it's like it just shows people living freely together and enjoying a good standard of living, and they don't need to exploit each other to get it. And like for not everyone, but many people, that will be really appealing.

And you have to have, well, more than just a diplomatic corps, you have to have a full court international push to say, it's just a better mousetrap. It's like, I don't need to focus on moral claims about like, well, it's better because you should just care about people because of like, you should care about people more than capitalism permits because it's just morally right. Um, that may be the case, but also people want to get paid and they want to be treated well and have a decent standard of living at the same time. And we can do it. So here's how. You've shown them specific steps you've taken and you've shown them the material standard of living that is shared democratically. And it's not just like a state handing things out to people.

It's like a state giving, handing things out to people. It's like a, a, um, true industrial democracy where it's like you, you get plugged in, you make decisions along the way. And, um, yeah,

basically that. Yeah. And I think, I think, I think that's a pretty good note to, to end on as a, a, a, a thing that we want and things that are going to have to be components of it. And also, I guess, thinking about rejecting theories about money as incomplete that don't deal with the fact that you don't have all the resources in your country and you, in fact, need other things to acquire them that you cannot

simply create into existence yeah do you two have anything else you want to say before i guess you move into plugs i mean like i said i mean i i you know we this may have sounded like a whole bunch of you know high-minded theoretical egghead crap but again i am i'm not formally educated on this stuff uh this is stuff that i have learned and participated in uh as a socialist first and foremost and it's been driven uh from the get-go at least for me from um a really fundamental desire for egalit for egalitarianism and for people having a say in their own lives. And I hope that the people who have stuck with us through this, who didn't know these concepts before, feel a little bit more equipped to participate in a discussion

about how you would handle these things. And as I kind of alluded to, this scales all the way down to 12 hippies on a farm uh you know this this scales all the way up until you've got a total total global communism pretty much anything below that uh this this these principles scale and uh i i hope that people feel um more able and more willing to, uh, engage both. First of all, you know, to, to tell liberals to, you know, shut the fuck up, uh, that I should have a say over how I participate in the economy, even when that's things like

Forex that seem very abstract and far away. Like I, I am, I'm a person who's affected by this. Therefore I've got a stake. Therefore my opinion matters. way like yeah i i am i'm a person who's affected by this therefore i've got a stake therefore my opinion matters uh and that you you can get there you can learn and you should be allowed to participate in that and yeah this this is what i'm trying to create is you know that socialists do not feel like they can they'll just get browbeaten out of the room of a discussion because some liberal nerd pushed up their glasses a whole bunch and spun their bow tie and then sense of bullshit like you know you

it is your life and uh you have a right to have an opinion on it and this is not an insurmountable thing to it's hard i want to be clear here this is hard and hard, but I want you in the discussion. Well said. Yeah, so I guess speaking of things that people are involved in, I can do transitions like this because I'm a professional. Yeah, do you two want to talk a bit about your magazine? Sure. Like we mentioned up top, Kyle and I are both co-editors of Strange Matters magazine, and we're in the middle of a fundraiser right now. You can find the fundraiser at the URL tinyurl.com slash strangematters. No dashes or anything.

You can also follow us on Twitter at strange underscore matters. underscore matters. And the magazine itself is going to be a, we're a literary magazine and each issue we're, we're publishing in both print and digital. And the print issue one is about 300 pages and it's split in half between the front pages, which is topics like economics, philosophy, politics, more technical fields. And then the back pages is art, like culture reviews. Anthropology. Anthropology, like more so, we kind of attach it to the word meaning, like meaning development. And there's a middle resting spot, which is actually called the futon, which is a play on the word futon, which is like kind of a resting spot between those two halves where there's going to be short pieces of usually of humorous nature.

halves where there's going to be short pieces of usually of humorous nature and um overall it's going to cover a wide range of topics and you can find out more of us you can find out more about us on our fundraiser on our website strange matters.coop we got a couple articles already up on strange matters.coop uh we have a, Steve wrote an amazing piece explaining some very, uh, in very layman's terms, some arguments about what inflation is and why we should care about it. You know, very good. Yeah. Very relevant right now. Uh, we have a truly delightful, um, review of, of very contemporary, very recently made cyberpunk works, uh, by Elizabeth Sandifer, author of Neo Reaction of Basilisk, which anybody who listens to this podcast needs to read Neo Reaction of Basilisk. Uh, and she did us the wonderful favor of doing a pop culture review

for us. Uh, we've, yeah, we've also got a work, uh, by the editors, uh, words for our present reality about what, how, how can we discuss what actually exists in the world? And what are the shortcomings with our current, with just like the basic levels of our discourse and how can we advance beyond, beyond this difficulty? And it's, you know, it's something that sounds like it's supposed to be this very high level philosophy, but we've been, I think I don't want to take too much credit for this because I was not the main writer on it I think that we've successfully

managed to bring it down to a lower brow level you know to a level that doesn't require you to have 18 letters after your name of various college degrees we also managed to publish a piece by a Russian

dissident, and I'm very excited for the works that people are going to see in the future from us. We've got a history of Black cooperative movements. I wrote a nice little ditty about colonialism in modern board games. I'm very excited for people to get the chance to read these, and

it's all kind of in the service of us creating a more of us democratizing the socialist world and making it meaningful, making it useful and also making it pleasurable

for people to be socialists and to fight for a freer and more equitable world. Yeah, do you two want people to find you on social media, and if so, where? You can say no to this, people do sometimes because first, hell site. I don't have social media, so...

Kyle's not really on social media. I am on some social media, so am on some social media. So you can find me at capim in Wacom. And I'll spell that out because it's kind of confusing. At C-A-P-M-N-W-A-C-C-M. Spelling your own username. Oh, boy. misspelling your own username yeah so strange matters is our campaign will run through this month and it's going pretty good so

far but we can use uh every little bit of support goes a long way so yeah find find us at our website and also the fundraiser yeah we're we're, we're not getting paid just to be clear. This is the, we, we need to pay the authors. We need to pay for the printers, but you know, this is not us trying to make a quick buck.

This is us trying to make sure we are not willing to accept paying our writers substandard writing. We're going to pay our writers higher than market rate as on principle, because we think the market rate is just too low. It really is. Yeah. And and um oh and by the way our we're i think i mentioned it but we're a workers cooperative so we're 100 worker owned in control there's no there are no levels of employment or ownership we're all horizontal yeah yeah so yeah go go check out strange matters um yeah thank thank you to both for thank you both for joining us it was a wonderful time chris thank you thank you for having us yeah and uh if you want to find more of us uh we're at happen to

your pod on twitter and instagram i keep saying instagram i've never actually i'm not on instagram so i've been told we have one i've never interacted with it uh yeah and uh cool zone media has our other shows go listen to them uh they're good and we work a lot on them all right bye-bye. Bye-bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources

for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin

America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba?

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.

Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything.