I'm excited to introduce, Little Dee. He's a fellow member of NetaDAO and, the creator of NetaDAO Academy. So earlier work with NetaDAO Academy focused on the relationship between perception and being and kind of use the history of the Internet to explore that relationship through cyberspace, or through the concept of cyberspace. And his more recent work has focused on economy as part of a larger argument that is still unfolding. Although his background is in psychoanalysis, he

of approaching topics that tends to transcend disciplines. Yeah. Loidit, the floor is yours.

Okay. Can you hear me? I sorry. I'm bad at I'm I'm bad at technology, but I'm gonna be talking about it.

So I hope you can also see the screen. So philosophy, as as you probably know, begins with an apology, Plato's apology for Socrates. And I will honor that tradition by apologizing upfront because despite my best efforts to abbreviate and synthesize some of the lines of argument that we've been developing in the Quainting Reason seminar, What follows is somehow too long and at the same time too scant. But I realized that there's a lot of kind of heavy duty machinery sort of on the theory side that's going on, and I don't know exactly how steeped, everyone here is in that. So at the yep. So I I I've tried to present some of that. And if it's boring, if you all already know all of this, then please please interrupt me and say move on. So as as those of you who perhaps labor with psychoanalysis and philosophy already know, this is a vocation that bears all the hallmarks of of an ancient curse. That is to say it's it's too tedious to master quickly, too trifling to be profitable, and, unfortunately, too beautiful to quit. So while today's seminar will not be as practical regarding governance as those I've had the privilege to recently attend here. The other side of that coin is that theoretical work allows for practice to be put back into question. The impossibility of what Freud called the impossible professions, namely psychoanalysis, education, and government, derives from the fact that each is, in the end, a practice of concepts rather than a practice of tools or things, and concepts are always up up for dispute. So Deleuze and Guattari may be right that the ultimate goal of theory is the production of concepts. Not not all agree with this, of course. Alain Badiou has has dismissed their work as pestilential gibberish. But it's

Not yet.

Go ahead and move on.

There you go. Yep. So, anyway, these are a bunch of text which I don't necessarily they they sort of form a background. I'm not gonna go into each one there. But so if theory only reveals obscurities or dark spots, difficulties in our present thinking, I think that that that is also valuable. That is also an advance in our knowledge. But but I will try to produce a concept. Okay. So although consensus algorithms have proliferated, the primary reference for discussion of governance and blockchain is still proof of stake. Unlike proof of work, proof of stake tokens entitle one to participate in the stewardship of their underlying chains, usually. For this reason, proof of stake chains have been called community ledgers. As Lynn Alden has somewhat caustically put it, a major fault line in these chains relative to the grander promises of crypto anarchy or blockchain utopias is that proof of stake is legacy tech. It's what corporations and banks have run on for centuries. It's outdated and oligopolistic. Consensus mechanisms that don't involve work instead involve governance. Work is the only thing that can reduce or eliminate governance. Now, Alden's comments here reflect a sort of tenet of classical and neoclassical economic theory, which Marx inherits. Namely, that there's a separation between economy and society, between production and what Marx calls this ideological superstructure of politics, religion, culture, and so forth.

the objectives of the research I'm presenting is to show you why this economic determinism is misguided and Marx and why that division of Economy and society is misguided in in the classical neoclassical and mainstream economic schools The details of Alden's claims are in fact a bit fuzzy. I'm sure everyone here knows that the forks of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, demonstrate that governance is still a major part of proof of work systems. But But if you squint, you know, her argument works. Unlike proof of work, proof of stake tokens generally confer ownership rights over the network and consequently intensify both the necessity and pressure for governance based procedures and outcomes. But in the absence of additional guardrails or provisions, these chains can rapidly succumb to oligopolistic or plutocratic forces, if indeed they ever escape them to begin with. So while proof of stake recapitulates proof of work with a greatly reduced carbon footprint, it's uniquely vulnerable to the predations of capitalist economy. What I hope to share with you today is some effort to come to terms with what capitalist economy is. As a concept, capitalism has always left me personally a bit dizzy. Surely, the feeling of uncertainty about whether to draw lines or where to draw lines around capitalism is part of capitalism itself. And so far as its proponents have framed their assumptions about economic behavior as quasi biological species imperatives, The supposedly biological necessities of competition, selection, efficiency, etcetera, dovetail with economic necessities of the same. In these accounts, capitalism is therefore natural and has always existed, cannot be historicized. There are only capitalist economies and failed economies. No alternative is possible. There may be some irony in the fact that the proponents of capitalism is a theory of competition and the sinister influence of monopolies have smothered all existing competition. Yet, one finds an oddly symmetrical situation on the other side. The critics of capitalism cannot seem to agree on its historicity either. Marxist, of course, squabble over shifts in the ownership of modes of production, with some locating it in industrialization, others in the enclosures of waning feudalism, others in the invention of double entry bookkeeping and the concurrent rise of international commerce, and so on. Still other theorists have claimed capitalism as co evolved with patriarchy, the Protestant Reformation, colonialism and imperialism, chattel slavery, ecological devastation, and so forth. And in still many other cases, the term capitalism is invoked as a kind of political liturgical refrain for explaining exploitative or or adv advantage seeking behavior in general, rather than a rigorous philosophical historical concept. Without diminishing or dismissing the valuable insights one from this kaleidoscope of analysis, part of what I'm presenting today is a provisional account of the origin and form of capitalist economy through the psychoanalytic concept of sex. In this endeavor, I follow Jacques Lacan who said back to zero then for the issue of sex since that was capitalism's starting point, getting rid of sex. So a simple simple problem. Consequently, Freud and Marx, as well as their readers, are privileged focal points for what I'm going to be discussing. Just as Freud's work gave rise to many grossly distorted readings and practices which were only exfoliated and pruned away by Lacan, so Marx's work has been the subject for a battery of righteous causes. Marxism, declares the philosopher Michel Henry, is the interrelated set of misinterpretations that have been given concerning Marx. Whereas for Henri, the misunderstood dimension of Marx's work concerns life and the living individual. For Lacan, the misunderstood dimension of Freud's work concerns death or the death drive. What makes Freud and Marx susceptible to so many misreadings is the profound weight of Aristotelianism upon the Western tradition. This weight is in fact so burdensome and omnipresent that to again cite Badiou He's polemically identified the sole task of contemporary thought with the slogan we have to kill Aristotle The Aristotelian cosmos is defined by what Arthur Lovejoy calls a great chain of being in which lesser beings are chained to higher beings, such as individual organisms to species, and higher beings are chained to the highest being, the unmoving prime mover, call it God, nature, what have you, which sets the sublunary world in motion. According to this world view, nature or God is a legislator over the world guiding beings to their ends or telos. Later, enlightenment and especially utilitarian thinkers would break these chains. In these works, nature becomes mute. Teleology is replaced and gives way to utility, ends to means. It was Freud and Marx who, in their own way, pushed this development to its unnerving conclusion. It is not simply that nature is mute, but there is no nature. There is no God. As readers of Aristotle, Freud and Marx object to his thinking in a symmetrical way. Whereas for Freud, Aristotle's theory of pleasure, which was that good feeling leads one to the good, and this is part of a larger Aristotelian motif, only the true is true, only the just is just, and so on. This Aristotelian view was in need of revision in light of clinical evidence to the contrary. There are plenty of pleasures which do not lead one to the good. Marx also found Aristotle's theory of value equally problematic. It is true that with respect to pleasure, Aristotle had recognized a pathological tendency to what he called incontinence. And with respect to value, he recognized a similarly incontinent tendency that he called chromatistics. But these, Aristotle had dismissed as aberrant or exotic deviations from the good and oikonomia. By contrast, Freud and Marx center these supposedly pathological tendencies towards surplus, these surpluses that are gen generated and endlessly and disturbingly pursued, in their respective approaches to libidinal and political economy. So in a previous session of the Medigot seminar, I believe it was Kohado, there was some discussion around the many and the one, which democracy seems to make inevitable. As avowed atheist, Freud and Marx begin by striking down this one. The one does not exist, or as Lacan more subtly puts it, there is no rapport between the sexes There is no relation of harmony And they instead pursue an entirely modern dialectic between the fragment and the fractal Note how often Freud qualifies his case studies as fragmentary. In a 1919 footnote added to the interpretation of dreams, he defines dreams as a fragment of that unconscious background of psychic life, an illusion to it. These fragments are not simply pieces broken from a whole, but are complete works unto themselves. They are produced as fragments. What analysts like Jean Laplanche called the shattering of the ego by sex sexuality, as if there were a preconstituted ego, which sexuality fractures, is in a less dramatic reading, the mode of existence of the ego as such. It is a striving to unify the fragments produced as and by sexuality. The Lekanian Joan Kopczyk will put it as such. Sex as cause cannot be located in any positive phenomena, word or object, but is manifest in negative phenomena exclusively. Lapses, gaps, interruptions that index a discontinuity or jamming of the causal chain. On the side of Marx, the economist Leonardo Ribeiro has recently demonstrated that Marx's thesis on the rate of profits to fall in capitalist economies can be modeled by fractal behavior. And the mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal, claimed that markets exhibit fractal behavior because of the confounding factor of anticipation. Anticipation is unique to economics. It is psychology, individual, and mass, even harder to fathom than the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It is the stuff of dreams and vapor. This fractalization by anticipation explains why prices on markets move in irregular cascades rather than the random walks that statistical reasoning would predict And there's some coincidence here maybe in the fact that one of Lacan's first early papers is titled logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty. So as is well known, Marx designates the logic of commodity circulation with the formula, commodity money commodity, CMC. This formula is the signature of balance, which affects the gravitation to actual rather than nominal prices, that authorizes the classical and neoclassical views of economy. Although the classical and neoclassical economic traditions share a commitment to balance and equilibrium, they diverge with respect to its to its motor. For Smith, it is labor power that underwrites value, while for neoclassics neoclassicist, it is marginal utility. And this this term utility is a euphemism for pleasure, aggregated over the population that grants the economy its stability. What Marx cannot observe and cannot but observe, and I think we're in the same position, is how often and how readily economies are given to extreme imbalance, to irrational tumescent and unexpected flaccidity. To describe this imbalance, which seemed to mark at least as much the signature of the economic system, he proposed another formula. This time for the logic of capital, money, commodity, money, MCN. The problem was this. If the economy at large is a system of equivalences and equilibrium, how then can surpluses emerge? On this perplexity, Marx writes that capital cannot therefore arise from circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to arise apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and not in circulation. Marx spends the remainder of capital making efforts to diagram and anatomize the flows that make possible the emergence and capture of this surplus value. Efforts which his readers or misreaders have elaborated as you can see on the slide. What matters for us today here is the following three points. So in the fifth chapter of the second volume of Capital, Marx explicitly introduces the problem of time. The time of circulation versus the time of production with each modulating the other to a group to various degrees through loops, spirals, zigzags, and reversals. Though for March, the time of circulation ultimately determines the time of production. Moreover, these two temporalities correspond to the two formulas, CMC and MCN, as the circulation of commodities and the circuit of capital. Or again, the time of consumption and the time of manufacture. With surplus value being generated retroactively, Freud might call this retroaction afterwardsness noctroglokite deferred action, of capital on commodities. And this is why Lacan d'Habbes Marx the inventor of the symptom. Second point, although Marx here introduces the importance of consumption, his analysis remains wed to the problem of production. And this is an oversight, that means that libidinal libidinal economies paid short shrift. And third, Marx's keen but no make observation that capital cannot originate from circulation, but also cannot originate apart from circulation signals that what we are after is their point of intersection, a state of exception in which circulation and non circulation or liquidity and illiquidity gear into each other. Putting the question of political economy on hold, we turn now to the problem of libidinal economy. The emergence of surplus enjoyment from the satisfaction of needs, is is the heart of this problem. From Lacan's first graph of desire to its completed version, which you can see here, we see a series of integrating loops, spirals, zigzags, and reversals, not unlike Marx's earlier theorization. For expedience, I will comment only on the first graph taken from the subversion of the subject, where a signifier s moves diachronically towards its signification s prime in the act of speech. Note here though that signification is not the same as a referent. People can ordinarily, anyway, agree on the reference of words. They can they can point from the word tree to an arboreal specimen. But signification designates the idea or the image, that words bring with them. And, whether your whether your image of trees are deciduous or coniferous, evergreen or fruit bearing, and so on is a highly individualistic fact. But this diachronic movement between s and s prime is punctured and punctuated by a reverse movement from this delta, to the to the dollar sign or to the barred s, that Lacan calls the vector of desire, where the delta is a prelinguistic subject of need, the barred us, the symbolic subject of the unconscious. I'm aware that this may seem like explaining the obscure by the obscure. But this punctuating reverse movement is not simply a backwards diachrony as if the reverse of linear time were a matter of flipping the temporal arrow. Rather, it's a strange synchronicity, a suspension, a hiatus, or a lag, a kind of eternity that erupts from within history in which all subjects experience when, for example, falling in love. In her study of Eros, the classist of Stan Carson explains it this way. If we follow the trajectory of Eros, we consistently find it tracing out the same route. It moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him unnoticed before. This ricochet introduces a belated temporality. Again, this afterwards afterwardsness or noctroglokite that characterizes psychical causality in which we notice a hole in our existence only after encountering its fulfillment in a suspension or a scansion of time that rewrites history itself. Freud would formulate this in the terms of psychoanalysis in various ways. He says that in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of our own immortality. Elsewhere, he says again and again, I've had the impression that we have made too little theoretical use of the fact established beyond any doubt of the unalterability by time of the repressed. So this hole in temporality points us back to our earlier observation. Psychoanalysis dismisses nature from the order of causality. Instead of instinct or instinct, human being is marked by tweeb, drive. This is a distinction that Freud rigorously maintains in his German text, but that his English translator James Strachey ignores and obscures. Lacan, who recovers the consequences of this distinction, tells us that the lack of instinct does not ensue from weaning, abandonment, vital lack of love, or affection or whatever. Rather, it concerns man's history in as much as he fails to recognize it. That is to say from the acquisition of language and the enmeshment of the subject in a symbolic historical world. Later, Lacan is more to the point. He says desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn't the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists. This should be taken to mean we do not desire because we lack horses, we lack food, or whatever. Rather, our desire is a product of our lack of being being, meaning the lack of our reason to be. Sexuality names and embodies this lack of our species' specificity. Sexuality, which is a phenomenon of drive rather than instinct, is therefore a symbolic or linguistic artifact. It is not something that is merely spoken about and thus constructed and open to deconstruction or performative resignification. But it arises as a result of the human being's acquisition of language. So not by particular acts of speech, but by the fact of our being speaking beings as such. To enter language, which Lacan calls the symbolic, is to encounter part of ourselves as lost to ourselves, perhaps even the deepest and dearest part. Here then is a source of of profound psychical or libidinal illiquidity. As Joan Kopjek remarks, sex doesn't budge. It is a stumbling block of sense. It is not incomplete, but empty, a failure of signification. But what does a failure of signification mean? To explain this, Lacan draws on Godel's incompleteness theorem to demonstrate that a language or symbolic system is riven by either incompleteness or inconsistency. A language cannot be both complete and consistent, and most software languages are complete but not consistent. Eliminating inconsistency or what is called nondeterminism, comes at the cost of restricting or eliminating various functions and capabilities. So Lacan's formulas of satuation exhibit these two modes of failure. Incompleteness on the left hand or the masculine side inconsistency on the right hand feminine side This is a vulgar but maybe hopefully helpful in interpretation can run as such The masculine position lacks in all It there there is incompleteness on the masculine side, and the prototypical masculine fantasy is the consummation of an all, what Freud calls the primal primal father, the appearance of a god. The feminine position, however, is inconsistent. It is not all. And so the prototypical feminine fantasy is a sort of alter or alternative to God, an ungrounding of the ground of existence. In any case, sexuality arises as a result of the failing or short circuiting, the grammatical, impossiblizing, or impotentiating of language as thought. And what I mean by that is what distinguishes man from the animals is not that we think or communicate and that animals do not, but that we think through the means of our communication, that we have short circuited these functions. That is specific to man. In a radical gesture, we could say that sexuality and libidinal economy are not oriented towards real objects of the world. We don't really want men, women, feet, boobs, piss, whatever it is, but always and only this woman, this scenario, and so on. The height that we find attractive on one person might seem oppressive on someone else. Libido is an economy, therefore, of visibility and invisibility, not directed by language, but set in motion by the misfiring of the word. Sexuality leaks out of these gaps and contradictions and suffuses the speaking body with pleasures it may not want and cannot contain. So this is one one definition of sexuality is therefore this pitched or lived tension, between significations, that always say more and less than we mean, and pleasures that we do not necessarily want.

I'll try to so give me five to ten minutes if you can.

Okay. So so the formula for desire is therefore not I want x, but the lamentation, I don't know what I want. Desire is an encounter with a negative force or an empty space, the virtuality of our existence or even the virtuality of being. Sex opens us up to this virtual part of ourselves, that part of ourselves that doesn't coincide with ourselves, that we can only discover in and through others. Because sex corresponds to the failure of representation that is its incompleteness or inconsistency Sexual desire has no pre programmed object in particular even though it is always particularized for each and every human subject who inherits and inhabits particular representational fields and positions. In the interest of moving very rapidly. So what I hope is emerging in any case is the fact that economy is always accompanied by an an economic surplus that may have a paradoxically negative character. This paradox is manifested in Miguel de de Bestegui's Foucauldian formulation is the subject of desire, qua alienated subject, a product of socioeconomic relations, Or is the empirical subject of capital an instance of a deeper transhistorical divisional structure? So one way you could put this question is, does desire have a historicity? And if so, is it the historicity of something in particular, or does desire point to a thingness of history itself? So I'm gonna discard my notes and just tell you sort of in the broad outline of where this argument is going. So one of the things that we encountered as we were looking at economy and economics is that traditional economic historians make a leap. There's a huge chronological leap in their arguments. They go from Greek oikonomia, which is the private law of the family, up to sort of modern European political economy. What drops out in this, history, is a whole tradition of religious, thinking about economy in both Christendom and Islamic thought, which came to a head in the iconoclastic crises in Byzantine culture. So the iconoclastic crises were a debate about the image. There were the iconoclast who thought that images should not be used, that they corrupted, they were artificial. And on the other side, there were iconophiles who defended the image. Ultimately, the iconophiles won this debate. And part of the part of the way they won this debate, Saint John of Damascus and his three treatises on the divine image, notes that God appeared to man in the form of man, and man is in the image, although not the likeness, of God. But the argument that was one of the death blows against the iconoclastic movement, at least intellectually, was John's argument that the word of God is itself an image. It's given to us in an image, which is to say the book. And so if the iconoclast are correct, what their position entails is nothing less than the dismissal of the Bible and of Christianity itself. This argument, however, involves a notion of image, which is distinct from from the notion of image that we have today. If I can yep. So this this quote from Marie Jose Montaigne gets at some of this, thus the icon made in the image of the image will no longer be expressive signifying or referential. It will not be inscribed in the space of a gap, but will rather incarnate withdrawal itself. So whereas economic historians tend to see economy, the term, as what they call a loose concept, it it mutates and evolves across across time, across cultures and so forth. What we find by paying attention to this Byzantine iconoclastic crisis is that economy is actually a strong concept of looseness. It's not a loose concept, but it is a concept of the looseness of things. It joins together the like and the unlike. It makes chalk and cheese exchangeable. And in the sort of final instance or argument, this religious case, it links the visible to the invisible, the the mortal to the divine, the temporal to the eternal. So okay. So there's a whole section here on images, but, just to to give a taste. So I've I've given an introduction to a talk that I'm not going to give. The point I think about capitalism and sex is what's called the love revolution, historians refer to it as. The introduction of romantic marriage into Western societies and then eventually the world marked a specific moment when the capitalist economy, ended up encountering something that money can't buy. And not necessarily can't buy, but shouldn't buy. And in this way, the capitalist economy has a unique configuration between love, marriage, and prostitution. There's always a whiff or a sense, that any marriage relation might be close to prostitution. We have terms for this gold digger and so forth. But this encounter with what money can't buy, this illiquid source means it points to the fact that money has a convertibility. And Mark's points this out as well, that that MCM, these are not distinct things. They're all expressions of value. And so this convertibility, this this interpenetration of object and subject, directly contradicts mainstream economics where you have, in general, this, like, a social object and an autonomous subject that seeks what they need. And I'll I'll close here in just a moment. So the Adam Smith's sort of paradigmatic figures of the butcher, the brewer, and the bread maker, he sets them into a relation with each other where there's only one form of desire. Namely, the butcher or whoever looks at the other guy and he says, oh, you have more than you need, and therefore I will exchange for that. What's excluded from all the other formulas of desire here are desires such as I want what he has, I want what others to want what I have, I want him not to have what he has. And these these aspects of envy, pride, vanity and so forth, These are part of the economy in the real world as we experience it. So as where Smith and the neoclassical mainstream schools tend to see the economy as a system of equilibrium, You might think of the economy instead as a kind of moving ladder in which every rung, every class, imitates the class above it, while trying to put as much distance between itself and the class below it. And this accounts for the strange fractal like behavior of markets. Because in this moving ladder, what we have are people anticipating, which is to say they're imagining the imaginings of others. John Maynard Keynes gives an example of the market as as a beauty contest. In his time, there would be newspapers would print pictures of, like, I don't know, twenty, fifty, a 100 women. And they would issue competitions. Men would rate these women. And whoever guessed the average would be awarded some prize. And so the participants, the respondents to these competitions, they're not giving what they think is the most desirable woman, but what they think other people think is the most desirable woman or even at a more meta level. You're you're giving the answer to which you imagine someone else imagine someone else to want. And so this this imbalance or off kilter economic system is is, yep, part part of what I'm what I'm approaching. So, yeah, thank you. Sorry to to run long, but I'm happy to take questions.

Yep. So I I would point to Kojin Khartani's work, the structure of world history. There, he mounts a a critique of Marxism and Marxist accounts of history, which tend to emphasize the mode of production or the ownership of the means of production. Karatani says that instead we have to focus on modes of exchange, that we can comprehend universal history by focusing on exchange. And he gives three kinds of exchange. There's gift exchange, which is the form of tribal clan societies. There's plunder and domination, which designates the state. And then there's commodity exchange, which is the capitalist sort of world system. Each of these modes of exchange has a type of money that's associated with it. And monetary theorists, we which I did not get to in this talk, but they they anonymize, like, four types of money or four functions of money, unit of value sorry. Unit of of account, store value, means of deferred payment, and so forth. All of all of these modes of exchange that Kartani focuses on privilege one of these types of money. And so in the capitalist system, we have credit money that is capitalist money. Christine Dessan in her book on making capitals. I'm blanking on the title, but she traces this to a particular historical moment with the Bank of England issuing public debt. And so the question, or I think the challenge that cryptocurrencies, Web3 in general, provide to this universal world history, whatever you want to call it, is that it allows us to unbundle those functions of money. Because one of the problems with the US dollar, in my opinion, is that it combines store value. It combines all of these functions into one. And because of the antagonistic nature of society, there's always an element of domination, which perverts that currency to one type of function at a given time. So cryptocurrencies, if tokenomic systems are well designed, might be able to unbundle those functions and therefore, if not minimize control the forms of domination that take place. The modern political slogan from the French revolution, equality, fraternity, liberty, these correspond to the three types of modes of exchange that Khairatani analyzes. So equality is given to us by the state. The state enforces rights, and penalties for violating those rights. Fraternity is is, the stuff of community. It's what forms the nation. And up until now, up until Web3, the nation or fraternity has always been defined by who's around you and who can defend their borders. And finally, liberty, freedom is obviously the domain of capital. We've seen historically that attempts to sort of counter capital, these three figures, I mean, they form a Bahramian ring or not, to use a Lekkanian image. So you can't really attack one without doing something to the other. And so we've seen the two anti capitalist movements at the most extreme in the West anyway, the Soviet state, but then also national socialism in Nazi Germany. So in attacking capitalism, you either to the state or to nation. And I think that cryptocurrency, because it depends on not so much a nation or even the international as an internetization, if you want, It it allows for us to reenvision what a nation might be. I think Balaji, the Coinbase executive, has called this the network state. But of course, we'll have to also think a little bit more deeply about what what state and capital mean. But, yeah, I think I think crypto has tools for doing all of that. Even if the whole thing fails, I think it has an incredibly powerful role in society because it's held up a mirror to the financial system on the one hand, but through DAOs, through these other types of organization that we see emerge, also to to the nation and to the state. So yep. Sorry. I think I've I've gone off something. But yeah.

Yes. That's right. Quitting reason is a an ongoing, like, public research seminar. So, yeah, everyone can join.

So there were two things I wanted to respond to on that. So, one, you mentioned anarchism, and this is just a shill. So we're organizing a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association's twenty twenty five conference. And I think that the philosopher Catherine Malibu has signaled that she would like to participate. But she has a recent book, Stop Philosophy and Anarchism. And she makes the point there, which I think is often overlooked in anarchist discussions, that anarchism is not so much like let's tear everything down. Because the true anarchist insight is that the world is already anarchic. Nothing legislated that the governments of the world be what they are. And so the true anarchist problem or premise is to understand why the world is the way it is. Not simply to tear it down, but to understand how it has already formed in this anarchic way. And then you mentioned I'm sorry. Can you can you re repeat the question about Honduras?

Because I read

Yeah. On that that notion of, like, a special economic zone, I'm not exactly sure what Honduras has done, but Marx was already skeptical. I mean, not just skeptical, but outright dismissive of the notion that a communist revolution could happen without it happening all over the world. So one country having a socialist revolution, the neighboring countries will interfere in it, and they have incentive to interfere in it. So you have to have some kind of international movement all at once because if it's localized to one one nation or one country, it it won't work. And I think that that you you kind of see this in the First International that Marx formed with Mikhail Bakunin. On the one hand, you had Marx and the communist, on the other hand, Bakunin and these anarchists. And part of what so if you know, the the the Bakunin side, the anarchist side, ended up accusing Marx of being this, like, Germanic Prussian spy. And Marx returned the insult by saying that the anarchists were undisciplined. But the difference between them, I think, is not so much that they both wanted socialist revolution, but they were constrained in some sense by the nation states which they were aligned in. So Bakunin was coming from more agrarian cultures and there was not a desire, there was no need to have an organizational structure to resist capital. Marx on the other hand was coming from Germany, from Britain, where the factory was already in place, people were working and they needed an organizational system to resist capital. So I think this is again just going to the difficulty of of cutting that barramian knot of capital nation state. And to me, it's an open question anyway, how web three can reconfigure it if not cut it. Khartani gives a he he hypothesizes a mode d of exchange, which, hasn't been realized. He relates it to a religious order dimension. But, yeah, that that's where I would like to take the argument.

Thank you. I I hope the presentation wasn't too taxing. But

Have a good weekend. Thank you. Bye.