Shahid Bolsen | The Sufficiency Lectures | Part One: The Captivity Economy

I've said that decentralization is gonna be the theme of this era, but decentralization in the West is precipitated by demolition and by disintegration. While in the Muslim world and in the global South, it's gonna be precipitated by building and by integration. It's very different. The distinction is critical. It it it's somewhat misleading actually to talk about decentralization in the West.

Or, anyway, it would be easy to misunderstand or to overlook what that decentralization is really about really about because decentralization in the West is literally about breaking down components of the existing power structure, components that compete with private sector authority. So it's actually a power consolidation move ultimately by the OCGFC. Breaking down America as the global hegemon, and then breaking down the central authority of the federal government within the country, and then selectively breaking down the localized formal power structures at the state level. Basically, rendering public sector institutions as redundant to make way for private sector control. Eventually, this could even prompt, like I talked about before, secessionist movements, whether literally or functionally, by individual states inside The United States.

Functionally, think it's inevitable. It's inevitable functionally, as the federal government becomes less and less relevant in terms of governance. So you're gonna have individual states in America acting more or less like independent states, independent entities, independent countries, you know, and then some states will even be regional hegemons within the territorial United States. That's already the case, to be honest, I mean, California, Texas, New York, and so on. These are basically domestic hegemons within The United States.

So it's not a huge leap to go from that to individual American States conducting their own foreign policy and so on, and really operating like independent countries. And of course I anticipate something similar to that happening in Europe, as I've talked about many many times, you know, the EU, the European Union will certainly dissolve within the next coming decades. You know, tension and conflict and so forth between countries is already spreading as we speak. In twenty years or so, no one's even gonna be able to imagine that Brussels was ever the seat of continental power in Europe. But again, this disintegration will be and is being engineered for the purpose of consolidating private sector power.

So, yes, what we think of as the formal power structure, government and so on, this is going to be decentralized through disintegration. But the entirety of the West, America, The UK, and Europe, and so forth, are gonna be brought under the domination of the a national OCGFC, the owners and controllers of global financialized capital who are non nationalistic. It's a stateless imperial power that as of right now actually does represent the only real global hegemon. As of right now, the OCGFC are the unipolar superpower in the world today. See, there's been a a creeping capture of state power in the West by corporate power.

That's something that a lot of people fail to notice or to fully understand anyway. You know, throughout the colonization period, throughout the neo colonization period of the global South, the West itself, the colonizing nations themselves were also being taken over. You know, it turns out that the pillagers who looted Africa, Central And South America, The Middle East and Asia and so forth, well, they just turned out to be serfs themselves. You know, it's like a bank robber being taken hostage. You come back from your crime spree in the global South only to find yourself being enslaved by your own accomplices.

That's what's going on. So in a way decentralization in the West isn't decentralization at all, it is consolidation. It's demoting every existing nationalistic power center and bringing them all under the totalistic overarching control of the OCGFC. But as I talked about last time, for the population, there will be or there has to be some sort of ground up decentralization whereby communities build their own localized systems to take care of themselves, you know, and these systems could have the potential of actually breaking away from the corporate control system. In the West, decentralization is the aftermath of engineered collapse.

It's reactive. It's the result of institutional erosion, civil fragmentation, and the withdrawal of legitimacy from governance. But in our context, in the Muslim world, in the global South, decentralization is proactive. It's strategic. It's regenerative.

We are not decentralizing because our states are collapsing. No. We're decentralizing because we are reconstructing ourselves and our traditional ways of governance and relationships of power in our parts of the world. For us, this isn't about breaking the state apart. It's about freeing the state from subordination.

So in the formerly colonized countries and neo colonized countries, there's an element of decentralization in terms of detaching from Western centers of gravity, centers of control, you know, Washington, London, Paris, etcetera. That's within the global context, this decentralization. Our countries are no longer gonna be ruled or co coerced or dominated or subjugated by Western nationalistic powers. America and Europe are gonna move to the periphery of our considerations, Whereas all we have known for centuries was for them to be at the center of our considerations. You know, everyone always had had to think about what America or what The UK or what Europe wants, what they will do, what they will allow us to do and so on.

Those days are over. So that is a form of decentralization. A further form of decentralization will be the fact that we are not going to be orbiting around a single global hegemon, but rather we will, most of us, will be within the sphere of influence of multiple regional hegemons, and those spheres of influence will most likely overlap. In other words, more than one regional power is gonna have a stake in this or that country, and will have influence over this or that country. More than more than one state will have that.

A perfect example of that would be Syria today. Of course, is true of most of our countries to one degree or another already, but I think Syria is a good example. So there there's not gonna be what multiplarity does not mean is a plethora of strong independent countries. The absence of Western domination will not mean the sudden emergence of a multitude of sovereign self sustaining independent states. No.

There will be regional hegemonic powers that share an interest in and an influence over the countries within their overlapping spheres of influence. That doesn't mean that all of those countries will will just be complete vassal states. No. There will be degrees of independent governance, but they will exist more or less in an informal system of collective sovereignty. In other words, their sovereignty will be achieved through the synthesis of multi multiple coordinated cooperating powers.

We serve and protect their shared interests in those countries, the countries within their combined spheres of influence. So again, take Syria. Turkey has a stake, the GCC has a stake, even Russia has a stake, Iran has a stake. So Syria becomes a sort of protectorate under half a dozen more powerful countries, all of whom collaborate, coordinate, and cooperate in concert to try to stabilize and develop and secure and manage Syria. You know, the extent to which any particular country may already independently be strong or strategic or important, that will determine its its its own role within the sort of collective sovereignty structure and how much leverage they have vis a vis the other hegemonic regional powers like Egypt for instance.

Egypt is an incredibly important and strong country. In certain areas, Egypt is a regional hegemon in its own right, in some areas but not in others. But see that's the genius of this sort of system. It's mutually reinforcing, it's mutually fortifying, Because the same is actually true of most countries that we can call regional hegemons. The same thing is true.

They all have their weaknesses, they all have their limitations, and they have their strengths. But collectively, acting in coordination rather than in competition, they can compensate for each other's shortcomings. So like the GCC can give power to Egypt, and Egypt can give power to the GCC. You know, the geopolitical fundamentals of Egypt or say Turkey are far better than The Gulf, but The Gulf has enormous financial power, energy resources, and they've built a remarkable degree of autonomy, a remarkable degree of political reach and connections, and a grid of influence not only within the region but around the world, including inside the the West. You know, it's like BRICS.

By creating a sort of unified portfolio, putting all of the resources and all of the strategic leverage that's possessed by each member of BRICS into one group, that group becomes basically the geopolitical blackrock of the world. They control more resources, more assets than any existing or any imaginable group on earth. They have the most important natural resources, the most important demographic features, the most strategic waterways and trade routes and ports, the biggest grouping of manufacturers, the biggest grouping of workers and consumers and investors on this planet. See, decentralization through building and integration, collective sovereignty. We decentralize not because we've given up on the state, but because we refuse to let our states be given up to foreign capture.

Thus, we circle our wagons, and through multiple centers of power, we become a single power. So in a way, it's it's similar to how decentralization in the West is actually just a mechanism of power consolidation, but rather than dissolving state power, we connect states through synthesis of mutual interests and mutual or shared priorities and a common fundamental value system. And yes, to fortify and to strengthen us against a common enemy. Let me be clear, when I speak about decentralization in the Muslim world and in the global South, I am not at all advocating, and it should not be I should not be misunderstood as advocating a dismemberment of national authority. I'm speaking about multipolar sovereignty.

Nations acting together in concert, intertwined in their interests, committed to mutual reinforcement and shared economic protection of one another. But let me also say that this solidarity and this sovereignty can and should be manifest in many ways, also in decentralized ways. Again, from the ground up, through cross border cooperation among people, among businesses, among economic sectors, through private initiatives and so forth. Because our governments shouldn't have to do all the work. They shouldn't have to do all the work themselves.

This is a very difficult transition that everyone is going through. You have to understand what colonization and neocolonization really mean, what they have really meant for our countries. Colonization means captivity. That's what it means. The global economy has been centralized in the same way that a prison is centralized.

And we've been the prisoners of that system for centuries. And we need to organize a prison break. That's what's going on. In a prison break, need everyone to to work together. Not only work together, but also be be capable of working independently.

Everyone has to do their job. You have to be able to rely on everyone to do their job. You can't negotiate your freedom from your jailer, so you have to tunnel out. And that needs diggers, that needs watchmen for that. You need your tools for that, you need a getaway car and so on.

Everyone's got to do their job and everyone has to be you have to rely on everyone to do their job. So we're drawing a map of our escape plan. The global economy is not open and inclusive, until now most nations in the world are not truly in the global economy, they're inside the global economy the same way that a detainee is inside of a facility. They're embedded within the architecture but not as participants, as captives. Their captivity is imposed through a structure of needs that they cannot meet without foreign permission, without foreign currency, without foreign capital, without meeting following foreign regulations.

It's the illusion of participation. You know, being connected to the global system is not the same thing as being a participant in the global system. Access is not sovereignty. You know, it's like thinking that if the prison gives you access to certain privileges, it's the same thing as being free. No.

Those are nothing but levers of control, control over you. That's why they give you those privileges. The ability to trade, the ability to borrow, to import and to export and so forth. These aren't signs of power or freedom. They're very often markers of dependency itself.

Globalization has made captivity look like participation to a lot of people, but that's not what it is. I mean, the price of fuel, say, in countries like Nigeria or Pakistan. It's not determined by their own production or by their own consumption. That's not what determines the price. The decisions are made in Washington what the price is gonna be.

When the US Federal Reserve adjusts interest rates, the the economic consequences cascade across the global south. In Abuja and Karachi, they feel the tremors before the ink is even dry on the minutes of the Fed meeting. Central banks in their countries scramble to try to curb inflation not in response to any local realities that caused that, but because of the whims of foreign capital. That's captivity. The same is true with food.

You know, nations across North Africa and the Sahid import the majority of their food staples. Their ability to eat depends on container ships, depends on insurance premiums, and it depends on commodity exchanges that are located in cities that their populations will never visit. A disruption in the Red Sea, a bottleneck in the, Bosphorus, a price spike in Chicago, in the Chicago future markets makes them go hungry. Their sovereignty is replaced with dependence and they call it development. Even national economic policies are not drafted for the people of the country itself, but for the approval of ratings agencies.

You know, ratings agencies in New York or in London or what have you, to please Moody's or Fitch or or to please the IMF. Governments are pressured into austerity measures, cutting public services, selling off what little remains of the commons, the right to borrow on international markets becomes just a noose, tightening with every downgrade, with every IMF negotiation, with every foreign investor's quarterly report. And if any country dares to try to break free from this arrangement, if it even attempts to define its own terms, well, the punishment is swift. Access is revoked, just like a prison revoking prisoners privileges. Sanctions are imposed, isolation is enforced, just like being thrown into solitary confinement.

Yeah, you've got solitary Zinzana cells, in the global economy too. The message is clear. If you wanna be a part of the global economy, if you wanna engage with the global system, you can only do it on the terms of the West. So you can't even begin to talk about sovereignty of any kind as long as you are in any form of economic captivity. Economic sovereignty is the prerequisite for political independence.

Economic captivity is the condition in which a state or a region or a people cannot meet its basic material needs, food, water, shelter, energy, health, so on and so on, without external systems granting access or enabling provision. Captivity is when you need permission to feed your own people. When you need debt to build your own infrastructure. When you need foreign investors to provide your people with jobs. You know, when you need foreign currency in order to buy anything even from a neighboring country.

Economic captivity is enforced by dependency. Dependency on imports, dependency on capital flows, dependency on multilateral partners, on supply chains that you don't control, and financial rules that you don't write. That's captivity. And it's when you can be punished simply for trying to live outside of those rules. We don't gain freedom by asking for better conditions inside the prison.

You understand? You don't achieve justice by negotiating with your captors for better rations or for longer chains, and that's what we've been doing. Economic captivity isn't accidental, it's engineered. It's not a failure of development. It's the intended outcome of the system that was built not for your development, but it was only built to undermine and to control you and to make sure that you didn't develop.

The global economy has been utterly and completely corrupted and deformed by Western greed, by Western predation and by parasitic pillage. They have never operated in the world, in fact, like they're even a part of the human family. Let's be frank. They have operated in this world like some sort of alien predator that has just come down to drain the sweat, blood, and tears of the human race and to ransack the planet's resources. That's how they've acted.

Like they have somewhere else to go when it's all been depleted. I mean, we have to be honest about this. We have to confront the the fact that the West has operated with absolute malice, with absolute contempt for the whole world. Not today, not yesterday, but literally for centuries. And there is no remorse, there is no repentance, there's no rehabilitation.

Literally, the only thing that has changed now today is that now their malice and their contempt has made them turn on their own nations. They haven't reformed, they're just repositioning. This is the only difference. There's no change in their character. The a national OC GFC are not our friends just because they're they're they're they're no longer constrained by nationalism.

They're just as predatory and just as vicious as they ever were. They are transitioning out of necessity. You understand? And because of their own insatiable predation. That's what necessitated this transition.

They're transitioning, understand. They're not transforming, they're moving, they're not changing. Their nature is the same as it ever was. And if you take a wide angle view of how the world is shaping up, we're actually not talking about multipolarity, we're talking about two major powers, two hegemons, the OCGFC and the collective sovereignty of the global South. If you wanna put it even more simply, then we're talking about BlackRock and Brix.

Now, BlackRock and the a national OCGFC, are working with Brix, as we know. They're working with the emerging spheres of influence that are building collective sovereignty in the global South. But don't ever mistake that for genuine partnership. You know, these are like scouting missions. They have to try to recalibrate and to to to adjust to the new terrain, the new economic and political landscape that's coming into existence by the transition.

And they're only doing that to look for ways to try to bring it under their control. That's their whole mentality. They have the entirety of the West under their control now. I mean, literally, you can say that the world is gonna be divided now between North and South. America is gonna be the organizing instrument for managing out there under the umbrella of the OCGFC.

Down here, we have to form a sort of conglomerate of spheres of influence that operates like a unified single hegemon. Do you understand me? You see what I'm saying? This is why our governments are gonna need the people to participate in that. They need the help of the people.

I mean, people need to work together. They need to build together. They need to develop together as much as possible. We need to help our countries untether themselves from the West and from Western systems. A lot of that has to do with the population.

We all need to cooperate in this prison break. Okay? So if you're gonna bust out of prison, you need to know the layout, you need to know the blueprint, you need the floor plan of the facility that you're locked in, and the same goes for the, economic captivity that our countries are trying to escape from.