 Gweyf yn ddod i'r stathiaeth. Mae'n ffraid gael gael gael Paul Mason yn ddod, gan gydag hwn i'r ddysgu, a'r hyn yn ychydigig i'r disgustion, ac yn ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod i'r dyfodol. Rhan o'r pethau o ddod i'r ddau'r ddod o'u cyd-degon o'r ddod i'r defnyddio. Mae'n mynd i'n ei gweithio amddangos i'r cyffredinol, a oherwydd o'i gynnig wedi'i gydag i ni i cwng-dynch, ers y gallwn yn gyfnod o'r ffordd i'r gweithio i gydag i'r gweithiool a gweithio'r freig i'r rhaglen i'r llai. Felly, rydyn ni'n bwysig i'n bwysigio allan o'r byd. Felly, rydyn ni'n bwysig i'r gweithio ar y gweithwyr, ..on any part of the discussion and debate. We need you to talk into the microphone for the recording. Before you raise your question or make your contribution, please wait for the two people with the microphones to come to you. Could I have a show of people who want to contribute... ..or ask questions straight away? I'm falling down on my gender aspiration. OK, so we've got someone here at the front... ..up there as a second. So if we could start here and then move over to the back there. Where's the second microphone? And another one over there. So where's the second microphone? OK, thanks very much. My name's Chris Knight. I've been heavily involved since October the 15th with the Occupy movement, particularly Occupy London. I get the feeling that the recommendations from the platform in so many different ways kind of imply... ..we've got to rely on this, that or the other... ..parliamentary forces, politicians. And I'm just saying... ..what's wrong with the idea that a lot of us are beginning to come to... ..which is so much simpler. Occupy London is all power to the 99%. That's the agenda. And then another slogan that suggests the mechanism. And it's extremely simple. Occupy everything everywhere. And I would suggest that rather than ask lots of intellectuals to give us... ..I'm really interested in all this. I think it's very important to understand stuff. But essentially we've got to boil it all down to something simple. And what's the objection to what we're doing now around the world? Just get hold of everything, get hold of every building, any factory that's been closed, any bank just occupied the thing, reclaim it right around the world. It has the advantage, doesn't it, of simplicity? Thanks very much. There was somebody here who... Yes, I wasn't going to ask a question, but since you said woman, Ken, it's a question for... ..and it cost us. You mentioned this war time and there was a default in Greece that there would be war time measures. My question was about the situation in particular of agriculture. We know that Europe has been subsidizing the periphery to not be agriculturally productive anymore. And it seems to me that it's more successful, you have a more successful default and a more successful independent industrial economy if you have agriculture. I think not having food production under your control is difficult if you devalue the currency, so that's my question. Well, if you turn into drachmas and you don't produce your own agriculture and you have to import food. Okay, thanks very much. There was somebody over here. Thank you. Really interesting discussion, really timely, thank you. It's interesting with all this news from Brussels that it seems everyone's forgotten what's happening down in Durban with the COP of the climate negotiations. So one of the things that environmentalists have been saying for a very long time, not just environmentalists as well, is that growth, GDP growth, is not the only measure of benefit. So if we now have this situation where it looks like we're not going to be getting a lot of growth anyway, plus we need to be starting to revamp the way that we organize ourselves in order to, well, one, cope with the climate change that's probably already happening, and two, look after the resources, the biodiversity, et cetera, that we have to sustain that and maintain diversity and maintain the cultural diversity and the grassroots level work and organization that we need to just be resilient to survive in a good way through this time on an ecological level, which in the end does come before all this economic stuff. So I'm just wondering if you have any ideas there about how we can bring together these two discourses, which many people do bring together, but here have so far been kind of kept a little bit apart. Thanks very much. We've got a question or a contribution right down here at the front if we could bring the microphone down here. Thanks. Hello, my name is Paolo Chiochetti. I just had a general question to the panel. There is somehow an idea from the different contribution that there is a kind of kinesian way out of the general crisis, either with more deficit spending or with devaluation and the reconnection of the industrial base of the country. I wanted to ask if it's really so. I agree very much with the conclusion of the reports, but I'm a little bit puzzled by the idea that we can get simply a way out of the crisis by deficit spending, because first of all, that was what was done in 2007-2008 and that produced the sovereign debts. So I'm not sure if it can be done afterwards and secondly, because during the Great Depression, the way out of the crisis came only after massive destruction of the fixed issues and the real capital and the destruction of... completed the section of means of reduction in Europe. So that was my question. Thanks, Paolo. There's a question here. Just one point and two questions. George, you mentioned... spoke about the potentiality for the rise of xenophobic fascistic forces in Europe as they did in the 1930s and I think it would be like-minded in the extreme to rule out that possibility on a large scale. At the same time, I think Stathis is right that this threat of nationalism, of xenophobia, of anti-minority prejudice and so on is not in the future and coming simply from the far right, but is built into the crisis ideology of the European elites and of the European states now. When you read in the best-selling Austrian paper, which is not a Eurosceptic paper, it's a paper which is for preserving the eurozone, Greek and Wales, Greeks out, not even Greek and Wales, not even Greece out, but Greeks out. You just think of one syllable difference on what it connotes, plus all the anti-migrant labour measures which are taking place and so on. That's important because the kind of approach which Stathis and Stathis and others are arguing for is often characterised, certainly in that UBS report, as opening the door to national chauvinism and so on. The national chauvinism is upon us and is upon us from the very people who were meeting in Brussels yesterday and yesterday and this morning, despite all the cross-estations of a greater, deeper Europe and so on. So that's a big observation. Two questions. One, I also don't have faith in Francois Hollande or in the SPD to return even to the days of Andreas Papandreu or let alone to something which is more radical. Do you think that is primarily because of the ideological buy-in to 30 years of neoliberalism, the idea that there is no alternative and so on? How much of it is that and how much of it do you think is structured into the very nature of the contemporary crisis and the way in which it is refracted through the mechanisms of the European Union? In other words, there isn't really the wiggle room for that. I'd like all the panel to say more about what they think are the social and political forces that can be, not sucked out of anyone's thumb, but potentially can start to impose this kind of solution given the fact that at the elite level and amongst the political classes in Europe, it's not something that they want to turn to. How is it that we can impact on the political situation in order to have meaningful political effect? Thanks very much. I'm going to take one more contribution then we're going to have a comeback by the panel and then back to the contributions down here on the... When we're thinking about solutions, we need to be clear about what the solutions are. The ECB have plenty of money. In fact, the Fed could possibly bail out the eurozone. They got $3 trillion stashed in various accounts. They bought $50 billion worth of European debt just the other day. There's no shortage of money, but there's a political imperative to reduce the working conditions of the workers outside of Germany. Therefore, in that sense, there is no alternative for the ECB. Therefore, when we're looking at what are the alternatives, I think we've got to be clear. I think I largely agree with Kostas' analysis, but if you're saying that you're going to seriously break with the eurozone, break with the ECB, break with the euro, if you're going to wipe out all of debt owed to those banks, to the ECB, to those governments, you're going to have to break with capitalism. That is an anti-capitalist, socialist, revolutionary agenda, and I think we have to be quite explicit about that. This is really, you hear it often on the left, there is no alternative, blah, blah, blah, all the rest of it. We've been around a long time, we've all heard those stories, but when you look at Greece, you can honestly say there is no capitalist alternative that is going to solve the Greek problem, if you want to put it like that, in the interests of the workers. And even UBS, I mean okay, it's exaggerated, blah, blah, but if you read their report, it's quite clear, it says, there's never been the break-up of a fiscal union without civil war quote from UBS. So the capitalists are quite clear what it involves, and I think from our point of view as socialists, if we're going to be serious about the alternative, we also need to be clear about what it involves. It involves a socialist anti-capitalist alternative. Thanks very much. So we've got a very wide range of contributions covering agriculture, occupation, climate, Keynesian deficit spending, xenophobia, ideology, and whether there is a solution to any of this within capitalism. And each of the three panel members have got two minutes each. So, Coster, since you started off so magnificently, maybe you could deal with all that in two minutes. Agriculture is a very important thing here because it is a pressing issue in Greece. The policies that have been applied to the country the last two decades have been disastrous. Greece used to have food cell sufficiency, it doesn't now. It imports huge amounts of food. Let's say, isn't this a bad thing necessary? It is a bad thing now, we now know it's a bad thing. And reliance abroad for food isn't necessarily a good thing, but this country might discover it in the coming years because Britain is also dependent on huge food imports. So how do you deal with it? There has to be rebirth of agriculture and I think exit is necessary for that. Exit is necessary for this. It would allow Greek agriculture to come back to life and it would allow actually food production perhaps to become cheaper. Food is actually very expensive in Greece. It's a very expensive thing. It's one of the peculiar things of entering the Euro. It hasn't been cheaper. The imports have not actually worked out in relative price. Quite why that is, is a difficult question of political economy, but it definitely is expensive. And it's actually more expensive than Britain in absolute terms, never mind relative terms. And if you put it in relative terms, it's phenomenal. So exit is important for agriculture to, in a sense, recover, revive, and cheapen food production to improve the conditions of working people in a domestic context. I think that would be a benefit of exit, not a problem. Green growth is also very important. That's probably more important elsewhere than in other countries of Europe than Greece. It's obviously a path of development. It's obviously a path of jobs. It's obviously a path in which it appears mature. Western economies have got a comparative advantage, but this would require the right alliance or social forces to make it come about. You know, do something about houses, improve the green properties, do something about production of clean energy, and so this requires a different alliance. And that is a growth area in which a transformed society could give, to which a transformed society could give far greater emphasis than private capitalist interests could ever do, I would argue. Now these are the more practical questions. Now let me come to the ECB. Just say one thing about the ECB. Theory says that the central bank does what it does because it relies on a state. The central bank has got fear. It issues its own money, and this money is accepted generally, not because it's disembodded power in midair, but because it relies on a state. The power of Bernanke comes from Obama. It doesn't come from Bernanke himself. The power of, you know, Mary Wing King comes from Cameron. Cameron, that's where it comes from ultimately. In other words, the tax-collecting powers of the state are ultimately the backup for the capacity of the central bank to issue ffiat money. It would take the state away, the central bank cannot do that. Now the ECB has been a bit of a juggling act all this time because there is no state I can do that. It's an alliance of states behind it. It's got problems. When you ask it to replicate what Bernanke is doing, you come against the structural differences between the ECB and the central bank like the Federal Reserve, which has a federal state, or like the British Central Bank, which has a unitary state behind it. That's not an easy thing to resolve because the states that back up the ECB have got their own differences. They're not allies. They fight it out. That has to be factored in. It's no use asking the ECB to do what other central banks do and think that he can technically and easily solve it because he can't. There's a political economy in which we've seen it being played out all the time. If it was so easy, why is it that Draghi doesn't see it? If it's so easy, why isn't the Tricia doesn't see it? Are they stupid? No, no. There are interests behind, which are very, very important, which we've got to factor in. We've got to analyse. I can't say any more. Now, I'll probably run out of my two minutes. You have, of course. Just one thing on... I'll come back to Social Democracy possibly afterwards. One thing I want to say about the alternative. Yes, we are arguing about an anti-capitalist alternative here. We should be clear about it. The issue for those who wish to propose different things, alternative things in Europe at the moment, the way I see it, is as follows. We've got to put across ideas that solve the crisis. That must be paramount and solve it in the here and now. Not in three months or three years or a decade from now. In the here and now, people want a solution now in the way in which the crisis affects them. It affects them very differently in Germany to what it does in Greece. We must propose solutions that work in the here and now, but these must be part and parcel of a broader programme that actually transforms and changes society and economy and makes for growth, makes for jobs, makes for greater equality. In my understanding of it, an anti-capitalist work doing things. It's actually a way of reversing neoliberalism, reversing all the trends that we've observed the last 10, 20 years. That's what's at issue. That's what really is in front of us. The sooner we start thinking about in those terms, the better for all of us. Thank you, George. I don't know. I could give a very short answer and say the gentleman over there is absolutely right. Socialism is the answer. Full song. Problem is that... Yes, yes, now. So it's a crusty old socialist. I believe that. And I've been standing up for socialism and democratic socialism as opposed to social democracy for many years. Nevertheless, one of the things I have to recognise is that so-called actually existing socialism as we knew it in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is dead and buried. And so are many of the institutions which helped sustain a socialist or even a social democratic tradition. Primarily trade unions. When I was young, I used to go on marches. There were trade union summer schools and there were socialist summer schools and whatever. All of that seems to be gone. Now, forget about my youth. Let's just come back to the here and now which we were talking about. Some of the people I say in touch with quite closely over the European question are the European TUC people in Brussels. And the sort of arguments which I put about looking at the neoliberal underpinnings of the euro as we have it present and working on a long-term strategy to change that are the sorts of arguments which appeal to them and cost us your work will certainly fit in with that view. Unless you've given up totally on existing trade unions, unless you've given up totally on political parties or whatever. And here I just want to come back very quickly to a point someone else made about the 99%. Yes, yes, occupy London, occupy everywhere, if possible. The person who argued most eloquently for extra parliamentary politics, ironically, was Ralph Meliband, father of young Ed. What have we got now? People sitting and Ed appearing at parliamentary question time doing a little song and dance act which is largely irrelevant to the questions of the day. I'm deeply disturbed as I think most of you are. Nevertheless, we've not got any easy answers. We've not got any ready solutions and we have to keep plugging away, defending certain interests on the left and trying to build the institutions that keep the left movement going. That's all I can say. Thanks, George. Of course there are still trade unions summer schools. Staffers, would you give your two minutes in response to the six questions and the 45 points raised? Right. One thing about agriculture which in Greece is absolutely obvious, the European Union has destroyed agriculture and has paid people not to produce. It had a deeply corrupting effect in societies by on the one hand conducting a violent capitalist concentration of agriculture and on the other hand by softening this capitalist modernisation by making somehow former farmers or agricultures into transforming them into social parasites into people just expecting to receive their cash from the European Union. This deeply corrupting and corroding effect of the European Union, especially in Greek society hasn't been commented upon. In order to be corrupted, you need someone to corrupt you. The European Union has been a much more powerful corruptor I think than most actually Greek politicians. Now, the discussion about kinesianism, socialism and so on, there are two ways of putting things. The first is to say what is specifically kinesian in the agenda costs us and other people are putting forward. There are some elements which could somehow bear a family resemblance with kinesianism. For instance, the idea that state intervention is needed in order somehow to reconstruct a productive infrastructure in countries which have been deeply damaged by those dynamics of the polarized development I've been talking about before. This is integrated into a framework of changing social relations, of changing the social balance of forces and first and foremost, it is integrated into a framework which poses in a very concrete way the terrain of the confrontation with the strategy of the adversary. For me, this is the essential point. If we are to be serious about socialist politics, I think that we should abandon this narcissistic radicalism of much of the discourse on the left. Personally, I'm really absolutely fed up by the type of discourses saying that I am more radical than you, and that socialism is the solution and so on and so forth, because the point with all those things is not that they are in a way intrinsically wrong, is that they are intrinsically abstract and therefore irrelevant. To put it differently, socialist revolutions didn't happen to realize immediate socialist aims. When one looks at the immediate, immediate aims of the big revolutionary upheavals in history, let's take the Russian revolution, for instance. We are astonished many times by how modest the objectives of the revolutionaries were. The Russian revolution was about immediate peace. It was about land. It was about workers' control which, as Lenin emphasized, didn't mean at all socialization of production. This is something that came much later in the course of the Civil War when the socialist had shut down all the factories and so on and so forth. So this upheaval didn't start with presumably this abstract radical slogans you find in brochures or in books. It started as an immediate answer to the terrain where the class struggle and the divide between opposing forces was happening. This is what we have in a way to reinvent now. Where is the demarcation line? For me, Costas and his work are tremendously important because they show this is where it is happening. This is the demarcation line now. This is where the confrontation, the real confrontation happens. There is much, you know, one of the reasons there is so much confusion on the left in Europe today is that because it's absolutely fine to talk about socialism, et cetera, I can say that the Greek left, I mean the majority of the Greek radical left are absolutely fine to talk about class struggle about socialism, anti-capitalism and so on. But a large part of those same people say, exiting the euro, oh no, no, no, that's really not possible. I mean starting a confrontation with the European Union, but this is pure madness. I mean how can you say this type of things? Even, I mean, much more seriously, the French radical left, I mean, is totally unclear about such a fundamental point such as the legitimacy of the debt. I read all the programmes of, you know, the main candidate of the radical left, Mélenchon and his left-tron, which is an umbrella with the Communist Party and other forces of the radical left in it, and they have no clear position about the sheer legitimacy of the debt. So this is, I think, where concretely speaking, socialist politics is at stake today, and that's what we have to work on. On an agenda, on a transition programme which is adapted to the requirements of the current situation, actually, and which opens up really a possibility of a concrete break with the current logic. How far this break will go, this depends really on the level of the class struggle. But what is politically urgent and analytically urgent for us to think where it happens, to see the points, to see where, you know, the knots, actually, of the whole problem. Thanks, Dadi. Okay, we'll take another batch of questions. We've got one up here at the top. Hello. My name is Jaya Breckie. I'm not a socialist, so I don't have a problem with narcissistic radicalism, hopefully. I'm curious, though, about the, and I haven't read the RMF report yet, so I can't say... I can't talk with that much about, or a response to that, but I am curious about the general comments tonight that seems to be placing mainly a focus on, well, kind of the causes and solutions of the crisis being solely within the EU, and also that there seems to be a focus on the welfare state as the kind of limit of imagination for any alternative. Yeah, I mean exiting the euro in order to re-establish a strong redistributive state in order to create a competitive country where you'll essentially have uneven and diverging competition on a global rather than EU scale does not sound exactly anti-capitalist to me. Okay, thanks very much. Hang on to this gender question, though. We're failing. Okay, up there. Thanks. Yeah, just picking up on what Sathys said, which is what he described as narcissistic radicalism, one of the things I do think is important about the work we've done with the RMF is that it is absolutely necessary in the crisis to get beyond the point of saying there is a crisis of capitalism, therefore you need socialism, and just making a grand declaration about it and getting down to the brass tacks of what are the steps that are necessary now to address the questions that people are actually confronted with. And the most obvious one, anywhere inside the EU, anywhere really inside the developed world where this is being applied, is precisely on the question of austerity, which means in the first instance, presenting a case for, actually, the defence of the welfare state as it exists, and a light to that, I think, also, a defence of democracy as it exists. And yes, of course, you want to then say, well, actually, we can do this better. There are other things we can do. There are other steps we can take, but these two things are absolutely central. It seems to me absolutely critical at the moment that the big historic gains in Europe since the end of the Second World War, which are a kind of form of parliamentary democracy and a form of the welfare state are in serious danger of being undermined and lost and torn up and torn to shreds. And if we have a left that sits there and says, well, you know, this is a big crisis, hey, let's talk about anti-capitalism, let's go and talk about something else entirely, let's not address the specific questions that we're now being confronted with, then we will fail. And there's no reason to suppose that, in the midst of what I'm quite certain is going to be a worsening and developing crisis that is going to get a lot worse before it gets better for anybody out of this, that if we're in the middle of this thing, simply washing our hands and making rather crude, abstract propaganda about it, then we're not going to get anywhere. So what's absolutely critical about the RMF reports, at least in my reading of it, and I confess to having some input into the thing, in a rather small sense, as one of the tables used earlier, but in the midst of this thing, we have to say what are the steps, what is the mechanism, what are the movements, what are the social forces we talk to, how do we get out of this, what are the practical things we do, and that shows us a strategy from where we are now, rather than just a declaration of where we'd like to be. Thanks very much. I've got someone in the back row. Thank you for the opportunities created by agenda discrimination. There's a flicker of a feeling across some journalist's maps. I think Larry Elliott said this on one occasion, that behind the Eurozone crisis is basically a tax strike by the very rich, and I'd like to dwell on that for a moment and ask the panel what they think of the notion of a once-off levy or a continued wealth tax. Various commentators have suggested recently that a 2% wealth tax would wipe out, for example, the British deficit in a relatively short space of time. If it was levied on the richest ex-people in Britain, I think ex was the thousand, another suggestion has been a sort of emergency levy of 20% of the asset holdings of an equivalent slice of the wealthiest people in the country. If that sort of solution was applied Europe-wide, it would perhaps be a correction of this tax strike effect, which of course also extends to big companies, as we've seen in the Rowsabout Vodafone and so forth. I'd just like to know what the panel think about that. Thank you. Thanks. We've got someone quite close by. Hi. Yes. I think George is right to point to some of the problems we have on the left, but I think he's overly pessimistic when he says that we don't have trade union marches anymore. We've just had a week ago of a largest strike in Britain since 1926, and I personally was on a 20,000 strong protest in Manchester, mainly formed of trade unionists. If you look across Europe, there's quite serious resistance in Greece. There was a general strike last week, a very large general strike in Portugal the week before that. Worker struggles and resistance has formed part of the backdrop to what's going on, and it's not much so that Sarkozi, although I'm sure he's exaggerating, does say if we don't get it right at this summit, we will face an uprising by the people. I think there's an element of truth to that. That's one of the things that they have to factor in now in the discussions is the resistance they face. The second thing I wanted to say is that I think there is a bit of a danger of a false counter position from some people and what staff has said and what other people have said. You see, on the one hand, it's absolutely clear that the left has to provide practical leadership. The great strength of what Costa says is that it's absolutely clear to me if you look at what's happening in negotiations today, by talking about entrenching and enshrining the right to do to Europe what they've done to Italy and Greece. That we have to be absolutely against this and have no illusions in Europeanism and all the rest of it. We have to fight very hard and give practical solutions. However, that doesn't mean that we're not interested in talking about socialism and I want to defend a little bit narcissism on the left as well. It's absolutely true that the Russian Revolution was fought over peace, bread and land but the fact that there were thousands of people prepared to advance those slogans required there to be a group of people who won to revolution in socialist politics and at the moment alongside developing resistance there's clearly a large minority of people who are questioning capitalism. I don't think we should be ashamed of saying that capitalism is part of the problem and beginning to talk about what a socialist solution to the crisis of capitalism would look like as well. Great. Is someone down here? I would also like to kind of follow on from the last person who spoke to say that I'm finding this distinction between supposedly practical in the here and now and non-practical to be delayed for the future quite problematic and for me it's fundamentally important that one of those practical in the here and now questions is how do we organise, how do we relate to each other, how do we socialise, what does that mean and I don't think it's narcissistic to address that because if we are talking about what's close to a war time economy with an incredibly strong state then those questions have got to be continuously addressed in the way that we try to do that because otherwise there's a very kind of potentially scary future in such a strong state too. Thanks. We've got a couple of people down here if we could bring a microphone down here. Thanks. A couple of historical quotes. David Ricardo said the big, words to the effect, the big restraint on government is fear of the people. The other one is what the Duke of Wellington one of our finest soldiers said on viewing some recruits to the British Army in Spain he said, I don't know what they do to the enemy but by God they frighten me. Well looking round this room this evening and listening to what's being said I don't think the British ruling class is going to be afraid of you at all. You're very good at talking but when it comes to actually getting down to some concrete action you're very weak and that is one of the problems with the left and that's why I'm proud to say I'm not part of the left. Lenin put forward three slogans it's been correctly pointed at Peace, Red, Land. Well what we've done in Lewisham is put forward a three word slogan people before profits we're not a socialist group we've got left wing people in this but thank goodness they don't dominate otherwise we'd never get anything done. We've contested council elections we've written a manifesto on which we all agree by consensus and do you know the words capitalism the words socialism and the word democracy don't appear in it once and we've contested elections and done quite well in one ward in a by-election we pushed the Tories into last place we got 8% the Tories have previously got 10% in that ward only got five so we can take votes from right across the political spectrum and what we've done just recently we're a South London group but we're not afraid to venture north of the river and we've moved into Heston Feltham and Heston in West London and I had the privilege of being parachuted into the constituency I'm the first candidate to be parachuted into a constituency without the benefit of a parachute we've got no organisation there I don't know how we're going to do we managed very quickly to get a leaflet out we're pushing out another one tomorrow I think we need to bring the Lewisham points to an end what I'm saying is we are setting up a movement we go out and talk to ordinary people about issues that affect them we have policies we have a website I think we've got that people before profit lovely, thanks very much now we're going to just take a couple more especially if anyone wants to make a point that hasn't been made in any similar form before honestly ok, so I'll take one down here and one other with a genuinely new point ok, we'll have to just pick it around a moment it's just on the issue of Europe as far as I know it's been attempted to be united before under Hitler and that was a sort of military attempt it didn't actually work out this time round it's been attempted to be united again under a political attempt so the issue is that they're trying to create the United States of Europe but if we go back in time Lenin did actually argue that the United States of Europe would either be unrealisable or it would be reactionary I think we are living through the reactionary phase of Europe now the question to the panel is is that America's role in all of this seems to not actually appear I mean the two characters installed in Greece and Italy belong to the trilateral commission they are both Bilderbergers and we have got a crisis of the dollar in other words since the Lehman's crash can you wind up because we are a bit short of time America's been frightened that big investors would leave going to the Euro so therefore we have a lot of instability within the Euro fantastic thanks okay one last question over there hello Peter Logan I don't represent anybody but me a couple of years ago Wilkinson and Pickett's book The Spirit Level had this sentence in it something like this it said that nowhere is there a popular vision of how to create something to the benefit of the vast majority now in recent past this word vision has popped up loads of times I have been aware and this is what to my mind is lacking we do not have a vision and the problem with visions which has been partly articulated from the table is that you cannot translate a vision into policies this is why politicians are unable to have vision because they have to deal with it every day vision is a long term thing but we do need our dreams I mean after all when Martin Luther King his speech about the dream it wasn't what are we going to do about that it was to the whole point of that is that many people will then share that dream that is to bring people together in the same dream now I have all sorts of problems but just one thing I want to say here is that there has been a fair amount to talk about job creation this is obviously a problem all over the place we need to wind up a bit the huge problem I have with the notion of job creation is that most of what we do already is a total and utter waste of time ok thank you very much apologies to anyone else who wanted to make a point to ask a question but I think we've come to the end of our time so I'd like to ask the three panellists to give a final summing up and if possible to address some of those points and raise cost as fast I will be very quick I think that in the coming years labour movements, intellectuals and others will face three major problems in Europe and we've got to be clear about them there will be a problem of debt first of all you've got to be clear about it the problem of public debt is going to be with us it's just started to emerge the awareness of it in Europe is very low that's going to be a major problem in the coming years we've got to default on the debt dealing with it and defaulting on it that's going to be with us and you've got to realise default on the debt is an anti-capitalist thing because it challenges property rights it basically says to the creditor you're not going to get your money back and you're not going to get your money back because I say so if you're asking me what is anti-capitalist that's anti-capitalist and of course it can happen in many different ways and that's for us to decide to work out what is going to be with us is inequality inequality has become gigantic and the effects of it are beginning to be felt across Europe and dealing with it is going to be a major issue it already is a major issue it will become even bigger and that of course ties in with tax the point that was made previously because tax has been a key way in which inequality has increased risking the rich from paying tax basically so if we're going to do something about inequality we're going to do many things but one thing we've got to do is reform restructure the tax system redistribution of income and wealth in this way that's going to be with us third thing that's going to be with us is of course unemployment unemployment is very serious unemployment is of paramount importance because employment is what defines workers you cut workers off from employment they become a mass, they become nothing if you cut them off from the norms the habits and the systems of work they become nothing but a paramount task for people who think about alternative organisations of society is to protect employment job creation is of great importance in everything we've got to do so these three areas will be with us in the coming years we've got to devise alternative ways of handling them and of responding to them what's the vision in doing that, the vision would be to propose ways of dealing with this while shifting the balance of power against capital and in favour of labour that's really what the the near term vision should be shift the balance in favour of labour change the balance in society in favour of labour and of course that's why exiting the eurozone and defaulting on the debt is a key way of doing that if it's done the way in which I described it or in similar ways shift the balance against capital in favour of labour for the first time in three decades it's right in front of us can we do it? I'm not terribly heartened the reason is the left has been terribly battered the last two three decades it's been battered organisationally and it's been battered intellectually and in terms of ideas and concepts where is the confidence I observe this audience and other similar audiences where is the fire where is the confidence where are the ideas where is the desire to take on the capitalist world and do something about it I don't see it and where is the awareness of the problems that have got in front of us it doesn't exist as powerfully as one would like to see therefore the task we've got in front of us unfortunately and that's for those among us who are hot headed the task we've got in front of us is one of rebuilding the confidence of the movement and of the left becoming capable of answering the real problems of society not the problems of the amphitheater not the problems of the small group in the pub where I can win the argument against you and I can have 15 people while you've got 12 that's not the issue the issue is to be able to put across ideas, proposals measures inspired by a vision that can persuade large numbers of people who are not there yet and we've just started the rebuilding of this capacity to do so Thanks, Coste George, what would you like to say as your two minutes? Yes, I'd like to follow very briefly on one of two of the things that Coste has said and one of two of the things mentioned by members of the audience I think the point about defence of the welfare state was extremely important I think the whole notion that in the post-war period the working class both in Britain and on the continent throughout continental Europe won a post-war settlement which is now being dismantled is absolutely central to any political project including this political project and I'd say Coste is perhaps one of the ways we need to shift our thinking isn't focusing a bit more on that right? Let me take up a point about Leriaria text strike and all that The problem is not so much about taxes the problem increasingly is about the rich not paying their taxes I don't know how many of you follow a chap named Richard Murphy who's an excellent blogger he's one of the founders of the Tax Justice Network Take Britain How many of you have seen those posters talk about scroungers people who hang around and live off welfare the treasury estimates that we lose perhaps one billion pounds a year from welfare scrounging at a maximum What we lose from tax evasion and avoidance an official estimate is up to 70 billion pounds a year So if you want to talk about redistribution you have to start about talking you have to talk about really enforcing the tax system we already have as well as making it more progressive I've written various things for compass about that but that's another story We do have one good thing at the moment coming out of the meeting in Brussels and that's the acceptance of the FTT the financial transactions tax at even the limited version of the financial transaction tax accepted by the Eurozone which excludes Forex transactions even that limited version would be worth would raise the European budget by about 40 to 50% it's worth about 60 billion euros per annum Final point about trade unions resistance and that kind of thing and this ties into all the points made about socialism on its absence My point was really about the institutional foundations of ideology Why is it that there are not more people on the ground and in the marches who are fighting to defend the welfare state and to present Why is it that we have the most reactionary government that I can recall in my lifetime people like Osborn and Cameron who are the very they represent the ruling class what better representation could you have of the kind of naked arrogance of power part of the reason you have it is because there are not the institutions there to fight against it we used to have something like 40% of people employed in industry in this country and many of those who trade unionists today only 15% of the workforce is in industry the rate of trade unionisation in Britain is miserable I believe you with one final thought if you go to the Nordic countries you find that between 90% and 95% of the population belongs to a trade union whereas in Britain I think the comparable figure is 18% I think it's a bit higher than that but anyway between 18% and 25% one of the great successes in the Nordic countries in the 1960s and 70s when they had hegemony was to hand the whole pension system to the trade unions to administer not to the city as under Thatcher but to the trade unions so if you want a pension and in the Nordic countries you get genuine pensions, real ones you belong to a trade union and that's one of the things that keeps the system together I shan't go I mean there have been a lot of points raised I'd love to go into them in more detail but costless has covered much of that already Thank you Jude Staffers could you wind up, conclude and tie up all the loose ends in two minutes Of course, of course, of course That's exactly what I'm going to do We have to be lucid I think first of all about the level of resistance if we compare the level of the attacks their gravity and the level of resistance throughout Europe I don't think that the image is particularly positive first point Greece is a specific case because the gravity of the Greek crisis is just incomparable with the rest and even in Greece, despite the very high level of resistance and actually an ongoing popular upheaval this is what exactly is happening thinking in terms of political alternative is very, very difficult actually because there are all kinds of reasons blocking things on the left about which I spoke previously very briefly the second thing is that by themselves resistances do not provide the solutions even at a quite significant level they may very well end up being defeated Just to give you a recent example France for instance has been characterized in a full decade between 95 and 2006 broadly speaking by a very high level of resistance to neoliberal projects and some of those mobilisations were partly successful in 95 and 2006 for instance However, the final outcome of this was Sarkozy by far the most neoliberal president of the post-war period being elected in 2007 so the political terrain is of course of paramount importance Last reflection on this we really have to think about the lessons of the Argentinian experience especially from the standpoint of Greece for two reasons the first is that I think that the deepest reason why no one comparable even remotely to a Kehna has appeared or might appear in the foreseeable future in Greece is the fact that Greece is different from Argentina in that it's not a country in the periphery of the world system it's not a kind of national or even regional crisis it's a small country yes but which is part of the very centre actually of the advanced capitalist countries of the core capitalist countries which means that the Greek ruling class and the Greek political elite are organically linked to the ruling classes and to the capitalist project of the European Union so you see the level of confrontation is at a very different level this is what prevents I think in a much deeper way a Greek Kehna to appear The second lesson from the Argentinian experience is that you can have relatively spontaneous popular movement as successful as kicking out a president of an elected president out of office however if you don't have an alternative you end up by at the very best and the Argentinian solution is not the worst thing that might happen but you end up certainly by having someone from within the system which just accepts a kind of minimal level of compromise to get out of the situation The final lesson of the Argentinian experience is that the left wing forces which did exist and do exist actually even now in Argentina have been completely overwhelmed by the very forms and the very ways popular protest and popular movements occurred and this is something we are witnessing now I mean actually what is happening is that we are realizing that a whole series of social sectors are organizing or acting in ways that are completely different from the traditional ways of the workers movement and the traditional ways to which the left is used to and this poses all kinds of new organizational issues this poses new kind of intellectual issues and we really have to work on that to reflect seriously on that reflect strategically on all these issues and the time is pressing Thanks very much Stathis That brings us to the end of the meeting I'd like to thank Costas, George, Stathis and Paul Mason in his absence and thank you to all of you for coming and participating in such a successful meeting Thank you very much Chinese style, everyone applause