Yeah. So, I mean, I kind of again, I flip flop on how, let's say, harsh I wanna view this in terms of whether I view it as just a legitimating discourse or whether I wanna view it as kind of something that has some value, but maybe they're missing something from it just because of their own perspective. Yeah. But, I mean, I I certainly think that this is very common within the blockchain space, and so that talk in particular. And that that was the first talk for the whole conference, so that really kicked it off. And and I'll say too, he had he had a great camera set up and his slides were very, very nice. So it He did. It looks very professional. So I have to give him credit for that. But it's essentially this idea and again, going back to the notion of, kind of classical liberal view of private property and private property in the self and so on. And so this idea is that anything that restricts the ability of you to do what you want with your private property is oppressive. Right? And so, basically, in this case, he was talking about how Bitcoin can be a positive thing for human rights by essentially allowing for a non state controlled currency that would allow all these people in various so called oppressive regimes to escape those regimes or escape the poverty that's created by their policies or whatever. You know? He he gave a lot of examples. Now to me, that's kind of a classical liberal view of the sense that anything that restricts you from doing what you want with your private property is inherently oppressive. And that's something that, again, if we go back to a lot of the writing around the emergence of capitalism and various authors, that were part of that process, you know, Montesquieu, people like, sir James Stewart, You know, they essentially argued the same thing at the time as well. And it's it's actually remarkable. This will be in an upcoming paper that I'm writing. But they essentially make the same argument. They're like and the argument is that movable private property, in other words, money for the most part, it's it basically restricts the sovereign, the king, from being able to seize your property because you can start to maybe you're you're you have it in lots of different places. Right? It's not just in, like, your one vault. And maybe it actually isn't even in terms of coinage. Maybe it's in terms of interesting financial instruments. Maybe it's debt that you're holding that someone else is. You know? And what's the king gonna do? Come and seize, like, a fictional piece of debt paper that you have? Like, that that isn't gonna fund a war. Right? So it's very fascinating hearing a lot of those earlier authors make the exact same argument that essentially private property in or movable private property is a new property form that's going to completely change governance. And they make that argument that as a result of that, that kings and their their courts and thus the kind of proto state that emerges at that time essentially has to change how it governs its subjects because it can no longer rely on just seizing what it wants. You know, like, let's say I'm the king and I have a very expensive war. I can't just go to the goldsmiths of England, go into their vault, take all their money and be like, thanks. Thanks for the the gold, guys. Appreciate it. You know, and that's, of course, the goldsmith examples, one of the earliest of the creation of a state debt, right, where essentially the king was going to seize the vaults and the bankers or the goldsmiths being smart were like, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, last last second. How about, like, we'll just give you what you want, but then it's the state's debt. It's not your personal debt. And the state just has to pay us back over time. And the king was like, great. It's not my money? Yeah. Okay. Sure. And then he takes his money for his war and, you know, goes about his business. And then all of a sudden you have the creation of a state debt, which then of course, the goldsmiths can trade and they can create markets and state debt and so on, which still exists to this day. I mean, we often wonder where governments get a lot of their money while they borrow them from financial institutions. Right? That's kind of one of the ways in which capitalism operates today. And that's kind of where that came out of, is that earlier need for the sovereign to find money to finance lots of wars, to get territory, to increase their own wealth, etcetera, etcetera. So I think then that when you relate all this back to that talk, it's kind of a new version of that older kind of discussion about using new, you know, we might not think about it in the same way, but new technologies, in particular, financial technologies to avoid the state, to get away from the state. And so I thought that was really inherent in that talk is that kind of earlier classical liberal view. And I mean, all of that is still based on the primacy of private property. You know, like, if if you watched it, you'll notice that nowhere did he speak of anything related to, you know, other things that might be human rights issues, like health care or shelter or having enough food to eat or things like that. It was just being able to have money so that you could do what you needed to do and that anyone restricting the movement of that money was inherently oppressive and should be fought. And I mean, it should also be mentioned that the Human Rights Foundation that that gentleman belongs to is was created and funded by a, expat Venezuelan billionaire. So, I mean, they are also yeah. Kind of weird how that happens. Right? So I think they're it's kind of that's, you know, where I would get maybe the more cynical pessimist side of me saying, okay. I think all of this is just a legitimating discourse that actually has a bigger role of trying to, again, in a new sort of way on a global plane rather than just the national plane, kind of restricting what the state can regulate the areas that the state can touch. And that by creating this thing that is kind of inherently runs without a state and that it's very easy to kinda hide it from states and to move it without those restrictions, that it kind of allows for that sort of so called freedom to exist. In other words, it's gonna be a promoter of human rights by being able to do that, which to me is a pretty narrow view of what human rights probably should be.

I guess, yeah, having money to your name. Yeah. Or or just generally the protection of private property. Because, I mean, in the liberal view, pretty much most of the what liberals would call human rights. And we should also make the point that, you know, and other people have made this point that human rights, like, the language of human rights and what we consider human rights emerge with liberalism. It's inherent to the creation of capitalism. And that language is one that we've continued up to this day. Like, even if you look at the United Nations declaration of human rights and all these sort of things, they all are speaking in a very liberal way. Right? They still, rely on private property, you know, these sort of things. And I mean, most of the things that we consider human rights tend to be civil and political rights. It's kind of notable that, for example, social rights somehow, you know, despite the fact that, of course, having social rights to education, health care, food, clean water, shelter, and so on. You know, I think, you know, just in a common sense level, we could say, of course, those things are all very important for human rights. And yet, we don't anywhere see declarations of kind of a social right to those things. Right? It's kind of mentioned maybe vague vaguely if it all and tends to be, like, you have the right to purchase that thing, not you actually have a right to it directly. You know? So that's kind of You have the right to purchase private health care plans on the Obamacare markets. Exactly. But but I think but but that's actually an important point to bring up because I think for a lot of people with the liberal conception of human rights, that's actually, even if they don't, if that's not what they're thinking in their head, that's kind of their line of thinking, what it actually leads to, right, is that you can purchase that. Because I mean, if you think about even just existing civil rights in many countries, like the freedom of movement, right? Okay. Sure. Within a particular territory, I'm free to move. But, you know, if I don't have any free public transportation option, my right to move is mediated by my ability to purchase a car, which for pretty much everyone that isn't extremely rich means I need to use credit because I can't just buy a car. You know? And so there's all these things that mediate our access to those things. We could say the same thing about freedom of speech. Right? Yes. I have freedom to say certain things and so on. But is my freedom of speech the same as, let's say, Rupert Murdoch's freedom of speech who owns Fox and Fox News and all the various, you know, subsidiaries and newspapers around the world? I would argue that his right of free speech is one that gets expressed to a much higher degree than mine ever will, you know, even if I have the Internet and so on. Right? So I think that's the more kind of what I would consider, like, a Marxist or leftist kind of critique of liberal human rights, is that they miss the way in which most of those things that they call human rights rely on private property. Like, you need to have private property first to actually adequately express the rest of those rights.

Mhmm. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, like, there's probably lots of different ways to express a kind of, let's say, a socialist or communist or whatever, understanding of human rights. But to me, at least, kind of fundamental to that would be, like, again, kind of getting away from individual rights and, again, away from viewing the individual as a form of private property. Because, again, that's, like, we have to remember that that's where our understanding of civil and political rights and, thus, human rights comes from, is that earlier struggle, the the liberal struggle to kind of enforce private property at a really deep level, to legitimate it on the basis of a God granted or natural granted right that we have just as being humans. So I think fundamentally you would recognize that we are social entities. We are not individual atomized entities. Instead, we are meaning and kind of full expression of our life is only through other people as well. Right? I mean, we even, like, there's lots of ways that we can take this in a more scientific way in terms of even just how we, come to understand ourselves as humans, as children, which fundamentally relies on other people and our reflection of ourselves through them. So there's a good book called Social Selves by Ian Birkett that, talks about this. But so to me, that would be the fundamental beginning, would be recognizing that we are fundamentally social creatures. We are not these atomized individuals that existing forms of political doctrine and kind of that eventually gets tran translated into policies and governance, that we're not that in reality. You know, that that's a fiction and that it leads us down a particular understanding of what are human rights. So if we take that other view, then I to me at least, it would kind of go the other way in terms of, social rights. Right? And how do we create a system of rights in which everyone is included? You can't exclude people from these rights. You know? And what those rights are probably would have to do with the things that allow us to, reproduce ourselves as a species and at a much, smaller level individually and as a community or as a family or whatever, you know, unit you wanna use. But I mean, like, a good example is even, like, for example, in The United States during the, like, kind of after the second World War, or I guess while it was still ongoing, but just at the end, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a second bill of rights for The United States. And that was never put into practice for a lot of reasons, but he essentially argued that political rights that are guaranteed in the constitution and the bill of rights are not actually proving adequate to ensure the sort of equality in the so called pursuit of happiness that, you know, the one of the American governing documents kind of starts off with. Right? That you have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Right? You have that freedom to kind of follow your your dreams, so to speak. But, of course, that again relies on having enough private property to do so. So that second bullet Small prints. Small prints at the bottom. Yeah. Someone went through the terms and conditions too fast. They were but I mean, if you look at what those rights were, and I'm looking at them right now, they were the right to employment, to food, to clothing and leisure with enough income to support them, freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, a right to housing, a right to medical care, a right to social security, to education. So these are things that people typically consider economic rights or social rights. And, of course, we know that they form the basis for, social democracy and not necessarily socialism, because that's kind of where they emerged as a kind of way to balance the the violence and inequality that is inherent to capitalism by providing these rights. But, of course, that's only if you keep private property, right, in the means of production and all those other things. So if you actually make that into common property as well, just like these other things, then to me, that's a kind of expression of a, let's say, a socialist view of human rights. And, again, one that I think we could actually extend beyond humans. I don't think we need to be human exclusionary, and then we could say all things should have certain rights, you know, to things. Like, for example, there's lots of animals and other insects and lots of other things that are very important to our ecosystem on the planet that basically have no say in anything that's happening and are getting literally killed by us. And we we could actually transform that, right? And we could do that by putting into law some of these values in terms of systems of rights. So to me, that that would be kind of an alternative. But again, for some people, that might not be radical enough, and they might say you're just trying to transform capitalist rights into something else, you know? But I think fundamentally that's a really easy way to do it because it's it literally, like, you know, if we wanna break this down to its most abstract thing, everything that we're talking about centers around the problems of living together as a species on this planet with lots of other species and lots of finite resources that are also very precarious. And so to me at least to kind of be able to do that appropriately and hopefully sustainably so that we can keep doing it in the future is understanding that we we can't keep restricting everyone from the things that they need to survive. You know, none of us chose to be born in the place that we are or in the income level that we are. No one chooses to be born into poverty, and these sort of things. And these are all things that are completely within our grasp to transform. But it requires us to actually kind of enunciate a number of principles or values in the same way that those early, you know, those early capitalists, they enunciated bill of rights that said, I want freedom of private property. I want freedom of speech and freedom of association and freedom of movement. Well, I mean, it's not that hard to do the same thing on the left as well, and we could equally do that. And, I mean, you see some examples of that in places like Bolivia, where, you know, they tried to enshrine, like, environmental rights and create a kind of environmental bill of rights to give the environment rights to be able to actually legislate against that, right? Because of course, all this comes down to what do you do when someone, like, kind of, abrogates those rights or they try to take them away or they interfere with them in some way. Right? And so if you all of a sudden have a system that enforces a common property right that says, hey. Like, y'all get clothes, you know, and then someone's, like, trying to steal extra clothes to sell them on the side or something, you can be like, hey, no. You're you're getting fined or you're going to some other community jail or whatever, you know, much more beneficial socialist form of punishment we wanna think of. But ultimately, you still have something to be like, hey, that's not right, you know. And that's that's like a wrong value that we wanna have in our society. So

Sure. So I'll maybe start from the kind of, perspective that we're particularly on the left probably all familiar with already and, you know, given to us by older Marxist historians. And, of course, this is the story of capitalist revolution, right? That, you know, regardless of how it happened, whether it was the accumulating of capital over time to a certain degree where the earlier feudal restrictions on the movement of that capital or the use of it, became frustrating. But we have this older model where that happened and then capitalist caused some big revolts, the big merchant revolutions and so on. And they overturn these monarchies, and then they create a new systems of laws that enforce their private property rights, and they put those at the basis of their constitutions, and the rest is history. Now, certainly, there are elements of that that are very true, would like many histories. But I think we tend to having had that story kind of stop there and we focus on those revolutions. Right? So there's been lots of work over time looking at, you know, the class content of those revolutions and then looking at other revolutions and saying, you know, who who's the class that this revolution is for? These sort of things. But of course, when you actually look at the the actual history and the times when these things are happening, they involve typically lots of different classes. It's not just one class. And they also tend to circle around particular problems or these kind of matters of concern, right? So they're not necessarily enunciated in the way that we have come to understand them after the fact, right? So, for example, you know, at the time when we might think capitalism was emerging during, let's say, the seventeenth century, and you have first the English Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution, and then roughly, you know, almost a hundred years later, you have the kind of American and French revolutions, and then all the revolutions in, Latin America and so on. And we think about all those kind of bourgeois revolutions. But we kind of neglect the fact that, you know, it wasn't like they knew that they were creating capitalism. Right? Instead, they were fighting against certain things that were problems for them much more locally and specifically. I mean, Adam Smith writing in the late eighteenth century called the thing that we now call capitalism the society of perfect liberty. Right? So, I mean, the term wasn't even invented then. So how could you know, if we look back, we're kind of we're kind of putting what happened later into the mouths of these earlier so called capitalist revolutionaries and understanding that history. Where when we actually look at how that transition happened, it happened a lot earlier, not necessarily in the transition directly from feudalism to capitalism, but the sort of property relations and in particular, let's say struggles or problems that surround those relationships, the dynamics that would be caused by them, that then eventually over a few 100 years play out to the degree that they do where there's some revolutions. So for example, you know, we can look at much earlier enclosure movements, you know, that started in the twelfth century in various countries, like places like England, where you started to have the privatization of certain forms of land. Certainly, we have this view that feudalism consists as well of, you know, not really a money economy, but rather a more kind of economy in kind, so that peasants might pay their, their lord taxes in the form of goods and things like that. But of course, when we actually look, we find that this transformation to, both, like, leasing land from kind of early capitalist farmers happens way earlier than we think. It's kind of, you know, already in the fourteenth century, certain countries had almost no form of kind of in kind, tax payments and things like that. Primarily were paid in money. Churches, for example, which we often think about, you know, we think about the restrictions on usury and things like this, interest, lending. We think about that as kind of the heart of the feudal system and the church was inherently against all these practises. But yet, of course, we find on the estates of the church, because the church is one of the largest landowners, during the feudal period, no, they're engaging in profit making activities all the time and consistently find that when they have a surplus, what do they do? They don't just give it to people or they don't exchange those things. They sell it. And the this act of profit making happens much earlier and starts to kind of transform in the whole system in lots of different ways. So one of which happens very closely at even the level of the arrangement of estates and where, for example, peasants were located on the estates and who's who had rights to what land. Because, of course, once money becomes more important, lords wanna make more money because that allows them to buy these new luxury goods that are starting to emerge, which only they can afford. And, of course, conquest, becomes more difficult and also frustrating for those lords that are doing pretty well, you know, because the knights themselves at a certain point, they kind of, you know, there's not not really anything to conquest. There's no lands to take over. There's no places to pillage. And they're kinda getting frustrated and bored. And so it's quite interesting because you start to see even from the kind of the monarchies that are emerging, these absolutist monarchies, that there's a process where they they have to actually create new kind of regulations and rules to keep these knights from really, you know, screwing it up for those of them that are doing really well, you know, and making lots of money. And so at the level of the states, things like wine, for example, that were long held as the kind of the Lord's most kind of important thing that he was growing. And so usually the vineyard would be very close to the Lord's own manner and would be something that he owned kind of directly himself. It wasn't something that was like, you know, he was just taking a bit of it. He would take, like, that was his. And then increasingly, you find some of them start to be like, oh, wow. I could actually you know, I'm growing really good wine here. I'm growing good berries. I I could sell this for money. And so they start selling. So then that makes that vineyard much more important. And a lot of wine was created in regions all across Europe that we would not think would typically be wine producing regions. So that's another shift that starts to happen because, well, jeez, if I can just buy some really good wine from that guy over in France, why are we spending all this time and labor on my shitty little vineyard here in England, you know, and I, you know, they have the good stuff over. Why don't we just buy it? Like, what can we do to make money to then buy that stuff? Right? So there's there's a whole host of examples like that when you actually go into the very specific histories of different countries in Europe, throughout that period that we call the feudal period, where those transitions are happening a lot earlier. And so a few others, of course, are the rise of towns, you know, where you have a system of rights emerge that are kind of almost protected. But then, of course, as some of the merchants in those towns make more and more money, and the monarchs that rule over those towns realize like, hey, I can tax these people and get a lot of actual money. And that actually having these towns in my territory is making me rich. I want these towns, you know. And and interestingly, that's kind of a conflict between the monarch and the other nobles that own a bunch of land, right? Who maybe they don't have a way of making money as easily or whatever. And so there kind of becomes interesting alliances between the merchants and the the monarchs against some other nobles, depending on the country, plays out in different ways in different areas. And, yeah, kind of all these things play out in this way where much earlier, you get even attempts to kind of, as I I think I referred to it earlier of kind of trying to kind of think of ways to fit in these existing, let's say, we can call them profit making, but, like, we might understand them now. It's just economic activities. Mhmm. But to fit them into existing systems of laws, because, of course, again, there wasn't at that time one national law. Like, we're we're used to the rule of laws applying to everyone in our territory. But back then, you had six or more different bodies of law. The law would change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and that jurisdiction would be much smaller than we're used to because they depended on smaller, lords and their territories that they potentially, governed. Similarly, some monarchs in some cases ruled over people and not territories. And so you had a lot of overlapping jurisdictions. And so again, there's multiple legal systems at that time. And depending on what you were doing and how you were doing it, your activities might apply to different legal systems, or you could actually say, no. I wanna be tried in the court of that lord because that's where I'm originally from or things like this. So it's a lot more complex actually than we're used to, even today in the way we understand our own legal systems. But so in looking at that, basically, what you find is that very early on, there's these interesting examples and kind of cases of trying to fit, like, to try to use older forms of Roman law, which was kind of rediscovered in, the feudal period. But then to mishmash it with, like, ecclesiastical law, canon law, these other things you start to get. You know, lots of people talk about merchant law, but even that is kind of over exaggerated. You know, merchants didn't have this one system of law that they used, you know, across Europe. Instead, they just would kind of usually be tried in a variety of courts. And then Right. Essentially, that merchant law, whatever existed of it, eventually, depending on the country, gets kind of embedded in the existing system of laws. So that, for example, in England, much later, you have judges saying that essentially the merchant's law is the common law. Right? And it's like they're the same. And so it kind of gets brought into that existing system. So for me, I'm very curious about all these things because I think, again, they play out in similar ways to things that we're seeing with the blockchain today. And that by focusing on some of those smaller transformations that eventually led to these big revolutions and big transformations of whole political economic systems, that we might be able to kind of learn some lessons from that about what's happening today and then kind of be able to orient ourselves to the future a little bit better.

Yeah. It's like move from the It's like the sorcerer's magic that he can't control at a certain point. Right? And, you know, like the the Disney thing. But I think yeah. Because you you have so many examples as well of those merchants. You know, if they really were so antagonistic, you wouldn't see them constantly trying to get, for example, noble titles to buy noble titles to become nobles themselves. Yet, of course, we see that all across that period, right, is those people actually wanting to enter into a class that they were barred from. But slowly through different measures, they were able to purchase titles, depends on the country, the extent of which that happens. Of course, it also depends on religion and things like that. Because we can take someone like the the Rothschilds are a good example of this, right? They made lots and lots of money, lending money to monarchs back in back in the day and eventually get to a certain point where they're so wealthy that they're they're much wealthier than many of the monarchs that rule the countries that they're operating in. And of course, they split up their families. So they're operating in all these different countries at the same time. But then, even then, despite all that power, despite the fact that they're wealthier than the monarchs in the countries in which they're living, they still want the noble titles. And, for example, in England, they struggle and they try so hard to get a noble title. And, of course, they're Jewish. And so that adds an extra complication given, you know, the the English monarch's kind of religious, Protestantism. And so you kind of get to this point where finally they're able to kind of purchase things. But, like, even even after this period where they had become nobles, like, they're even trying to become, like, MPs, you know, like, just a member of parliament. And even that, they were barred from doing because of their religion and things like this. So all this to say, it's just a lot more complicated than I think a lot of existing narratives of this transition, lead on or give us. And that we bring some of that complexity back, like, some of what I would consider the actual reality of how those things happened. It it allows us to actually apply it to our existing complexity in in a little bit more of a straightforward way where we can start to see some of those similar, like, threads happening. Like, so again, I mentioned earlier, you know, by the time you get to the kind of sixteenth and seventeenth century, you start to see a big discourse emerging about, you know, it's actually beneficial if the state can't seize money. And, you know, there's kind of a mix of people saying, like, hey, the state shouldn't take our money and so on. And then also other people saying almost trying to convince the monarchs and so on to be like, hey. If you stop seizing our wealth, we can make you really rich. Like, you can just tax us a little bit and you're gonna be even wealthier. And you kind of have some of those arguments and kind of trying to convince. But again, they're also joining into that noble class or at least trying to in many cases. And similarly, you know, you go back even further. And, you know, I talked about this transformation of laws that was happening where they're kind of adding in different aspects of Roman law that related to kind of exchange and trade and property and things like that into this kind of religious law and other forms of law that existed. Well, who are the people that are actually doing that? Well, it's this new class of kind of lawyers and people like that that are working for these kind of proto states, you know, working in the courts of the monarchs. Well, where did they come from? Well, of course, they're the children of merchants and this merchant class, right? So they also embed themselves in the state and work to transform its laws that hundreds of years later, it pays off. Now, do they know any of that was gonna happen? No, of course not. They weren't conscious of this grand plan to create capitalism when they were doing it. That's something we've given them after the fact. So I think it's really important to bring that understanding and complexity about those actors when they were doing all those things in the world that they were living in to try to apply it to the situation today. Because, of course, you know, when you look at, for example, the way that blockchain technology is emerging, you have lots of people involved. It's not just a capitalist class doing this. Right? And it's not something I would argue that's even necessarily happening just from above. You know? Like, a lot of this is happening from below and just a lot of people that for whatever political reasons or whatever the technology speaks to them and so they wanna develop it and develop it in their own understanding of what they think freedom is or liberty or all these things. And yet, all those things could have, like, wildly interesting consequences down the road for our whole makeup of our society and how we understand ourselves. So that's why I think kind of going back and complexifying those earlier transitions would maybe do us good, you know, to kind of, take into account some of that. Because at least it allows us to, again, get away from what I think happens with some of the more critical blockchain literature where everything is just the result of capital and capital. And it's like, well, yes and no. Like, yes in the sense that, you know, private prob obviously influences all of us in the way we think, and those relationships have some meaning, but it's not, like, this dominating force. Because otherwise, how could we be having the discussion that we're having today. Right? There's lots of different viewpoints and so on. So

I I think he might have been made one later on, but but, yeah, you're totally right. Yeah. You see those,

residue of the past, so to say. Yeah. Well, like, we just have so many examples, in that sense. Right? Where, you know, again, I think part of this older narrative that we've kind of been misled by is that this, like, you know, if you think about Marx and you think about these revolutions and emerging capitalist class and all this stuff, it's like, well, who are these capitalists? Right? Who becomes the industrial capitalist that is the main, let's say, actor in Marx's narrative and other writers that kind of look back at that period of time? Well, you know, again, we we have this older narrative if it's just these merchants that they eventually get enough money and then they start getting into banking and finance and more complex stuff. And then, but wait a minute. When Marx was writing, he said, no. The the financiers are these parasites. And that really is the industrial capitalists that are doing something productive. Right? And so they're the interesting actor. But you're like, wait a minute. Are these two different groups of people, or are they actually the same people? And in some case, are they also actually nobles? Because we have lots of examples of, you know, back then what might be considered progressive nobles saying, yeah, I want to do that with my property too. I have all this land. I would love to divide it up and sell some of it because I could make a bunch of money. And And in particular, I'm looking at all these wealthy bankers and merchants, and they're saying, hey. Like, we would love to sell your property for you. Or, hey. We have all these complex financial instruments that you can now start to use. Right? Like, the emergence of, like, insurance. Right? Things like that. All these type of new kind of things happen. And, you know, I'm a little bit more familiar with the Canadian case being from Canada, but we have this long standing debate in Canadian political economy over, you know, whether Canada's capitalist class is we're all kind of, a merchant class and thus financiers and thus dependent on, you know, foreign companies, mainly, you know, first British and then American coming and having branch plants and really they're the ones that because they're producing stuff that we just siphon off some of the money for our own capitalist class, but really the value is being taken out of our country. Or are the capitalist class in Canada themselves kind of, imperialist, right? That they they really are their own independent capitalist class and it's just kind of a historical accident that they all end up in banking or the commercial sector and not in production, like in industrial activities. But again, when you go back to the history, you find so many examples of these early merchants and financiers trying to get into industrial ventures almost anywhere they could. Right? They were just throwing money like, oh my god. You wanna build a sugar refinery? Yeah. Here. You have a bunch of money. That would be great. And then of course, there's just failures everywhere, right? Or maybe the area where that production occurred moved. So it moved from this region to this other region and the capitalists in that region lost out or whatever, right? But all this to say, yeah, it's so much more complex, and the class cleavages between some of these groups that we've come to solidify is, like, real different groups. In reality, it's not that easy. Right? Class is a nice kind of, let's say, sociological category of analysis that allows us to look at certain movements in certain ways. But when you actually look at how class plays itself out in some of those struggles, it kinda changes the direction of how we consider that maybe movement to be. And I mean, again, I think we see this with blockchain. Right? It's not Yeah. It's not a project of the capitalist class. So

Even though it's being co opted and whatever. Right? You know? Yeah.

it I think it's one of the few things that's I mean, it's very difficult to call it a a project of the capitalist class, but the capitalist class wants in on it. Of course. Yeah. Just just as the nobles wanted in on the, you know, that sweet tax revenue from the merchants and the towns that you know, and they were like, great. Let's hey. We we can have a deal. But in in those deals, you end up complexifying kind of their relationship with one another and then eventually, of course, the whole global political economy.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. It's impossible to predict the future. So it's tough to know whether the things that I might be saying are good examples are actually leading us into, like, a way worse dystopia or something like that. Yeah. But Yeah. I will say that I think a really good first step that we're starting to see emerge is the basically, the rise of kind of, platform co ops, you know, particularly blockchain based. And I think that's a really good start because, you know, it seems like as much as everyone uses Facebook and Uber and Amazon and everything else, they also hate all those things. Right? Like, even people that are kind of supporters of the idea, you know, I have people that I know that are like, taxis were the worst. Like, yeah, I hate Uber as a company and their business practices, but, like, man, it's so much more convenient to just get my phone out and I can grab an Uber and whatever. And it's like, if we can as we're seeing with all these kind of co ops emerging, if you can just do that and take out the Uber, I think that's an easy transition for a lot of people. Right? And particularly for those who maybe have, some sort of negative feelings toward co ops for whatever reason, you know, maybe historical or otherwise. But that's a really easy win. Right? Like, I think that's really low hanging fruit. And so I I see the kind of widespread emergence of that and hopefully adoption of that on a much wider scale. If that happens, that would be really positive, I think. Because I think to me, those sort of things are the things that start getting people to think about, like, well, wait a minute. If we're doing that with Uber, like, why don't we do that with everything, you know? And then Yeah. Yeah. But I also think I wanna clarify too that while I think that's a good step, we also have to be careful of this kind of idea that we're all gonna be, like, individual entrepreneurs and that that's actually the freedom that we want. Because I think inherent to a lot of that coop model is that, like, you know, I'm still working and someone's just paying me directly. Well, that's not really socialism to me. Right? That's almost what we would consider if we wanna use Marxist terms, like, a form of petty commodity production. Right? Where it's, like, the the original view of people like Jefferson and The United States and so on is a a nation of small land owners that are working their own land, and that's you know, and then they sell their stuff to each other, and that's freedom. Well Mhmm. Yeah. I don't think that's freedom, at least the way that I wanna imagine my utopia. Right? So that's kind of, I think, one of the drawbacks and dangers of that, and that I think is also really inherent to the blockchain space. Also, because a lot of people work as individual contractors, particularly in tech space. That's a much more kind of popular way of working than it is otherwise. And so I think people see a lot of freedom in that, and then even maybe having certain co ops being able to kind of maybe even soften that a little bit more. But to me, all that kind of stuff, you you know, it also takes away from, you know, for example, things like benefits. Right? Like, lots of people get lots of health benefits from working for some big company. Well, okay. Then can we think about a different way of doing benefits rather than being like, oh, the goal is to have all of us working in, like, these kind of peer to peer co ops and things like that. Right? So I think there's some I think the co op kind of way that things are going is, like, an easy first step and a logical logical kind of transition. But that's where I think we're we're gonna have to start to see emerge if we, let's say, wanna have some sort of socialist society emerge, is then starting to think about, okay, how can we use blockchain to mediate actual common property and not just some things that we're exchanging for either money or cryptocurrency or even other services, but rather for nothing. You know, like, literally going to that maximum of, you know, everyone gets what they need to the best of their abilities, sort of, to badly paraphrase Marx. Right? Where, you know, I don't want my ability to purchase housing or clothes or shelter or food or etcetera etcetera to depend on, like, how many times I drive for the, you know, ride sharing co op. You know, I actually just wanna have that stuff as a right of being a human being. And so that's where I think it becomes interesting and something that I'm not seeing a lot of in a blockchain space is interesting ways of mediating those sort of that sort of exchange. Right? Like, how do you use the blockchain to mediate common properties? How do you use the blockchain to mediate, for example, a system of health care? How do you use the blockchain to mediate a system of universal basic income or something like that. Right? So or let's say water. How do you use blockchain to manage common property resources and water? How do you use it to share electricity and internet amongst a lot of people, not for monetary gain, but for just making sure everyone has it. Right? So that's something where I think that's gonna be the struggle, and that's obviously a struggle because we live in a capitalist society and you need money to do all those things. So, you know, it's not a big incentive for people to be like, oh, I wanna drive in the ride share for free. You know? Like, I don't wanna drive my car into I'm just driving people around all the time for free or whatever. Right? So I think that's the bigger thing, and that's you know, we've talked about other times about how a lot of this stuff has to do with developments that are outside the blockchain space. Right? They're much bigger transformations. And so that's something that I I kind of see a need for, to hopefully kind of start thinking about new ways that we could use the blockchain that would actually kind of aid that transition that isn't just a world of co ops. Right? Because I mean Yeah. So to again paraphrase Marx, you know, the corporation, the joint stock corporation, at least in its modern form, was really just emerging as Marx was kind of dying. And, you know, if you you look in Capital, you have a remark, I think, in the third volume of Capital where Engels, who, you know, edited and finished the third volume, has a little section where, you know, because Marx said, like, basically, it's kind of interesting because it could allow for worker co ops. But because it's emerging under capitalism, it's probably just gonna turn into a tool for capitalists to have, you know, they they own individually their shares, but the management is done on behalf of the owners of the shares, and those shares probably aren't gonna be workers. So that's gonna be tough. And then Engels has to make this note that says, yeah. Actually, since the time that Marx wrote this joint stock, corporations benefit in capital have become, like, absolutely huge and, you know, only within a couple years. So, yeah, it looks like he was right. So I think we're kind of maybe, at least in terms of the blockchain, there's kind of that similar, potential for error or potential to be misguided a little bit and seeing the emergence of all these co ops. It's like, oh, this is it. It's actually happening. And you're like, no. Yes and no. Like, ops, I think, are a really good first step, but I don't see that as, like, a final step or somewhere to rest our laurels on.

I mean,

Yeah. And I mean, just kind of thinking on that note, like, I I'm always reminded of an older, comment by Noam Chomsky talking about, you know, like, he's he's identifies as a, I believe, a libertarian anarchist, and which is to say a leftist anarchist. And, you know, he someone asked him some question about the state and how can you support the state or whatever. And he was like, well, I obviously don't support the state. But he's like, you know, if you don't create some alternative institution to take care of some of those things that the state does, like, you're you're just you're going directly into almost a worse form of society. Right? Because I mean, like, again, I live in Canada right now. I have access to universal health care. Now that health care could be a lot better. There are a lot of changes that could be made to it. It's not the best. But at the same time, I I don't wanna give that up. You know? And so I don't see any other, for example, institution and especially in the blockchain space, thinking about how could we replace those things that the state actually does. Because right now, it's mainly focused on things like money or work. Right? How could we make kind of more cooperative models of those things? But there's a whole bunch of other very material things that have to do with, again, shelter, clothing, water, food, health care, whatever, that no one's really doing a lot of work on or at least that I can tell. And, you know, I I want the state to die just as much as the next, you know, full blooded anarchist. But until we can start to create alternative institutions that basically are a better model and show people that this would be a way less exploitative and violent existence, I don't wanna get rid of the state. You know? Yeah. Because until that happens, well, then, basically, you're just calling for a kind of no holds barred society of, you know, all That's nice. Yeah. Exactly. Right? And I think there's this idea that it's like, oh, well, that's necessary to then create the utopia because then we need to start from scratch. And I'm like, I don't know. I'm kind of I'm wary on that, kind of trajectory, let's say. Because, I mean, you know, anytime you you start something like that, it's has to be at least, historically, the models that we've seen have been pretty violent and exploitive even under the guise of doing it on behalf of the working class or the people and so on. So I'm kind of suspect of that model. Yeah. But we'll see.

Yeah. I mean, I just have, like, a small website that just has some of my papers and things on it that people can go to if they wanna read more. It's just on Google, like a Google Sites page. So I think if they just search for my name, Joel Gerd, it should be one of the top, things that come up. So

Yep. You as well. I hope hope things are well. And thanks again. This is really fun and it's always really nice to be able to kinda talk about a mix of, you know, classical political economy and blockchain at the same time. So I don't get to do that. So this is great. But you're always welcome to do it here. Perfect. Alright. Well, when my next paper comes out, maybe we'll have another chat about that and we can go from there. Definitely.