 So my name is Justin Kanza, I'm a former master's student at SOAS, Study Development Economics. I'm also a member of the Black Economist Network, which is focused on connecting the disparate black economists across the world. Today's talk is titled The Hocom of Neoliberalism, revisting Sivanandan's political economy. It's part of SOAS's 2020 and 2021 to 2021 economics webinar series, which is titled Intensifying Inequalities and the Limitations of Global Capitalism. The aim is to bring together perspectives that extend our understanding of inequalities and how they take root in our societies and economies and how these relate to the crises of global capitalism. So these will include contributions from across the spectrum within and without economics from feminist economists, racial inequalities and economic imperialism. Joining us today, it's our pleasure to have Dr. John Narayan and Professor Gargi Bhattachaya. So John will be, John is a lecturer from in European and international studies. His most recent research is focused on the understudied transnationalism of US and British Black Power and the political theory created by groups such as the Black Panther Party. Gargi is going to discuss after John's speech and she is the Professor of Sociology at the University of East London. Her research interests are in the areas of race and racism, sexuality, global cultures and the war on terror and increasingly austerity and racial capitalism. Her most recent book is Rethinking Racial Capitalism, Questions of Reproduction and Survival, which was published in 2018. So just some housekeeping of how this webinar will go. So John will speak for about 40 minutes, followed by Gargi's discussion, which will be about around 15 minutes. And then we'll take questions from you guys watching for about 20 to 23 minutes. So if you want to ask a question throughout the speech at any point, just type it out in the chat box and then at the end I'll relay them to our wonderful guests. So I think, you know, you didn't come here for me. So without further ado, John, whenever you're ready. Okay, thank you. Thank you for the invite. This is going to be, I've got some slides just basically to remind me of what to say. They're not really for you. So bear with me when they seem to disappeared. So what we're going to talk about today is, if I can get this to load, is Sivanandum's kind of political economy and the title of the talk is entitled The Hockham of Neo-liberalism, which plays on the title of one of Sivanandum's famous articles. So I'm going to try to share my screen with you guys. There we go. I'll go full screen. Play from the start. You all can see my screen, right? Yeah. Gargi, can you see that? Yeah. No. I am apparently screen sharing. I can see through you. Thank you. So we're going to, we're just, this is a kind of brief introduction to the kind of political economy of Sivanandum and then we'll talk about some kind of cool stuff at the end about how evil Britain is. And then we'll just have a discussion about race and class. That's the kind of way we're going to go today. So where do we start? Let's start with Sivanandum's biography because I know many of you essentially may not know who Sivanandum is, although looking at the people in the room, a lot of you do know who Sivanandum is quite closely. So Sivanandum was born in Ceylon in 1923, was an ethnic Tamil, left Sri Lanka due to anti-Tamil violence in 1958 and walks into the UK into the Notting Hill riots in 1958, which radicalizes his idea of what race and racism and class is doing in a kind of brief, truncated, big kind of biography. Sivanandum joins the Institute of Race Relations in 1964 and with others would transform what the Institute of Race Relations, which was essentially a kind of government funded think tank, although I see Jenny Bournes in this and maybe she'll give us more of the history in the Q&A. And with others, not him, because I saw that the Institute for Race Relations corrected a Guardian article recently which seems to say Sivanandum was doing it all, but a whole bunch of people, they essentially liberate the Institute of Race Relations in 1972, losing all of their funding, but transforming the journal that was attached to the old Institute from race into what became known as racing class and many of us have kind of read this for years. And ultimately that journal was dedicated to the kind of liberation of the black and third world struggles, which were happening in the 1960s onwards. And how I like to kind of see Sivanandum is in some ways the kind of conscious of British anti-racism and what that means is that those of us who come through university or through activism will come across Sivanandum's work, will come across them as first principles about what anti-racism should be, how we should approach race and class. And in many ways, those principles, those first principles that we get from Sivanandum stick with us throughout our entire kind of careers, struggles or whatever they are. And that really because he's the kind of best narrator in both in form, in the way that he writes in essays and lyrically, of the kind of British anti-racist experience, which we can trace from the post-war era into the emergence of kind of black power in Britain, to the emergence of power-lism, which essentially transforms Britain's idea of its kind of racial hierarchy and what it meant for Britain to have an empire or not have an empire anymore. To the emergence of British black power with which Sivanandum was tied to movements like the British Black Panther movement and activists like Darker's Howe. The focus against immigration laws, which were racist, and the kind of emergence, even of struggles beyond that era, moving into black feminism, the kind of early work of Olive Morris. And all of that is encompassed in these histories that we have written down by Sivanandum. For me, my first experience of picking up his work was that the wonderful essay was charged, the kind of movement from resistance to rebellion, that outlays all of that history for four readers, both then and now. Right, so that article was written in the 1980s, it's still read today. I gave it to my first year to read only a few months ago, and they'll get it, they'll get it again soon. And so we have these kind of collections of writings that I said is Sivanandum is the kind of conscience of British anti-racism. And apart from what is essentially a biography and autobiography, Sivanandum is also authentic in the sense that there is no real monograph. There are interventions in race and class and in other places, which show you the kind of urgency of what the writing was for. The writing was urgent, so it was in essay form, so it was easily photocopied. Many of Sivanandum's articles became kind of underground classics because they were photocopied and passed around meetings. In fact, my kind of first encounter of him wasn't via kind of a proper text, it was a photocopied essay that someone had given to me at a kind of, I would call him an activist meek. So you have these wonderful collections of urgency. And of course Sivanandum is the ultimate one liner in British anti-racism, he's the ultimate coiner of phrases and kind of lines. So we carry our passport on our faces, we are here because you were there. And my new kind of favorite is whatever else Brexit means, or does not mean it certainly means racism, right, which is always good to bring out at lefty meetings that are for Brexit. And so we have this kind of sense of who Sivanandum is for many of us. And one of the things I've kind of been thinking about as I've been working in the kind of area of political economy and international political economy. And the theorization of kind of class relations is often the idea of race and racism and exploitation is and racial, how exploitation kind of works through that nexus is kind of like an afterthought. And everything that I had read it already done had already outlined that for me and Sivanandum's political economy is largely neglected by that field, both of economics and both of political economy. It's not cited at all within the literature. And it's kind of interesting you can kind of bring out a couple of Sivanandum's phrases in some of these places and people are like oh what does that mean. And so, as early on as 1975 Sivanandum would write capital requires racism, not for racism's sake but for the sake of capital, racism changes in order that capital might survive. And I tweeted this I think about a year ago, and then someone wrote back going I've been working my whole career on trying to summarize this relationship, and he's just done it in two lines and that's the beauty of Sivanandum's work is it's in one way so simply written, but in other ways it's so simply written in a complex way. It's simple complexity. So I want to talk about this kind of political economy by work of Sivanandum which is kind of I think neglected. All right, so let's start with the article that I'm not actually going to talk that much about I'll return to it but I'm actually going to talk about other stuff first, but just because I feel like this is a meeting point of where to start. In what the article claims that it's published on the 1st of January 1990 but it would have been written in the late 80s. Sivanandum publishes a piece called all that, called the Hockham of new times right which is a, which is a kind of in anti racist causes what you could see a kind of conflict between him and Stuart Hall but really is a conflict between Sivanandum the Institute of race relations, an idea of race and class, and the theorization that is happening in it in what is essentially the old journal of the Communist Party called the new times right which had been run by Martin Jacks, Stuart Hall, and a bunch of others who were re theorizing, re theorizing what the left should be in the emergence of factorism and how factorism a decimated traditional left wing politics and needed there was needed to be a finding of the Labour Party and the Labour movement itself to deal with the kind of fractions and fissures that neoliberalism had caused right and this is the kind of the classic theorization of factorism as authoritarian populism the kind of idea that you are fascism without fascists. And you have a new set of scenarios for the left to deal with in Britain, because it was no longer the kind of old organized left that could simply walk up organized, unionized, organized walk out and kind of defeat capital that way. And Siva's piece on this is wonderful polemic but it, what it does is to kind of castigate this new times movement in for doing a number of things right. What Siva says is that although Hall and Co talk about kind of changes in the global economy which are fragmenting the kind of old idea of class, and that the subject is reemerging in modernity across multiple forms of identity. That misses the kind of real change that has happened from the late 70s onwards which is the massive change in the global economy, the new international division of Labour, and the process that we could call that we will call globalization right. Written into this kind of critique is Sivananda's kind of critique of the new times is the idea that class itself had started to kind of disappear, or itself was only another form of identity. And this was linked to the idea that essentially there were new social movements linked around issues of identity such as ethnicity such as gender, sexuality, the green movement, which were now the kind of main pushes of a potential resistance to neoliberal market imperatives. And Sivananda saw this really as accommodating neoliberal tapes which try to dismiss the idea of class. Finally, no, predominantly. Also there was a refusal to see the kind of naked power of the state and the state itself wasn't kind of taking a backseat to capital but itself was becoming an interventionist state in the interest of capital. And this was all premised hiding in the background of the kind of critique of the new times project was both the visibility and invisibility of the third world. Right and that largely is non white peoples. And Sivananda's basic argument was, is that there was a methodological nationalist focus on on what had happened in Britain, the changes that had happened to the economy, how that impacted left wing politics had largely made invisible, how the masses in the third world had started to be integrated into the global economy. And his argument was, well, the only time they're actually visible, and Hall and Cole would sometimes celebrate this was in kind of charity events like Band-Aid, Live Aid, right. And his argument was what actually the real invisibility of this is what what's happening in the global economy. And that's the kind of loose critique of this but that critique that happens in the start of the 90s is really the culmination of at least two decades of work on British political economy and global political economy, which Sivananda has kind of excavated this in really simple terms, going across a number of essays just to get to a hint of what really he's getting at when he's critiquing Paul and Cole, and also what we can kind of recover for our contemporary moment in Britain and the globe today. All right, so I'm actually going to start back at another essay. And in the mid 70s, this is way before the Hockham of new times, and it's an ethical race class in the state, right, we're written in 1976 dedicated to Wesley Dick, who was one of the protagonists in the spaghetti house siege, if you don't know what that is Google it. And especially that power activists attempting to gain money to actually further black liberation. Some people say it was just people robbing a set of restaurants but that's actually not true. If you read this essay what it does is it narrates British immigration control via an idea of political economy. It takes the immigration acts of 6268 and 71, which narrow Britishness which linked Britishness conceptually to whiteness, which tried to take the best aspects of powerism which is a kind of dismissal that Britain itself had an empire or had responsibilities to those people who were once British subjects. And it traces this in it in the manner of saying well what is the economic relationship to this and seven and a kind of goes through the idea that there was a era of laissez faire immigration that allowed people in because it was, it was to the interest of capital and the rebuilding of British society. And once that kind of interest drains off, and the state can no longer accommodate what he calls set list because people were coming as British subjects rather than as immigrants. You have to turn this up and seven and a says to put it crudely, the economic profit from immigration had gone to capital, the social cost had gone to labor, but the resulting conflict between the two be mediated by the common ideology of racism. And so here we have an straight away theorization of how immigration, capitalist social relations and racism are brought into play to mediate by the state to mediate conflict, right, and this is the kind of first of how British political economy and its immigration are tied together, and we'll return to this at the end because I think it does massive, it kind of reveals things that we think are simple policy choices are actually really path dependency locked in by the state and by the historical foundations. And what seven and a dozen this article, and I've got another article which is another whole different talk is he reflects on a whole I think five to six years of narrations of Britain's entrance into the what that means for British immigration policy, what that means also to how the idea of the proletariat in Britain is constructed. And in in this article he has this wonderful graph, which sits as my Twitter background now. Where he talks about essentially the kind of dissection between the working class between the idea of indigenous workers non indigenous workers. And we see here Britain's kind of colonial and neocolonial endeavors in that kind of stretching of the two right and the reason I'm showing you this is going to come back at the end and say, SIVA's work basically explains why we have these crazy racist moments with the British state even today, right. So this kind of typology of the what becomes the British proletariat is a pivotal moment in the kind of political economy of Britain, because by entering into the EC by limiting non white immigration by transferring the status of what were British subjects and citizens into immigrants into contract workers into visa workers eventually. SIVA now basically charts the kind of change in British political economy, a really big change where Britain now, as he says has two reserve pools of labor in the undeveloped south of Europe, and in the underdeveloped part of the third world, and he basically says, One is for unskilled or seasonal workers, one is for skilled and professionals, and both peripheries now provide Britain with these with these essential workers. And this in a sense is going to become one of the key points of what neoliberalism is going to do to this relationship and we'll get to this right at the end. Okay, now we move to the narrative on the two foundational works that Sivan and the news is in the Huckum of New Times article are his subsequent work on imperialism imperialism in a disorganic development in the silicone age in 1979. And in new circuits of imperialism which is published in 1988 if I'm right. There's a fulcrum of what he's going to say is happening to the global economy. And as we'll see that little transformation of British political economy also is affected by by this kind of big transformation in global economy. This is a narration of what we could call neoliberal globalization. What happens when not just neoliberalism in the nation state or neoliberalism in the global arena happens. And these two articles which I've seemingly read over and over again in the last few years are so brilliant because they're really ahead of their time. And if you think that Sivan and is talking about a global reorganization of labor in 1979. Most of us only really started getting on to that trip into the 90s. So they really are wonderful essays, and just to give you a flavor. What Sivan and is basically showing is the relationship between a system capitalism, a process that he calls globalization, and the project which of course is imperial extraction. The basic argument is, in those two, across the decade of those, where those two articles are written is that technology, the emergence of information technology has allowed a reordering of the center periphery relationship that had dominated modern capitalism from maybe 1492 right up until the midpoint of the 20th century, where you have raw materials and human capital in the periphery, and you have the kind of processed high end manufacturing and labor in the center. And his basic argument is, as we've come to know that what that all changes so in 1979 he's saying the real big change is that capital is fleeing. It's fleeing the West fleeing advanced economies and setting itself up in what we call on advanced economies developing economies. And that kind of global south global nor first world third world divide is starting to kind of transform, but then he pushes this argument even further, and he says, actually within the third world now are actually hierarchies of production that work together. It's not like you just get first world conditions in the third world and third world conditions in the first world. What you actually get are hierarchies of production in the third world where newly industrializing countries start to come up a bit. They provide commodities to a kind of consumption based first world, but within the third world, it's not like everyone enters into that new industrial phase. There are people, there are nations and peoples that are seemingly just raw raw materials, simply human labor, and they feed into this new system so there's hierarchies of production within within the system. There's also hierarchies of labor, a kind of hierarchization of where labor takes place and who it takes place with, and also the exploitative elements of that. So in a kind of simple level we can say that industrial capitalism shifts to the global sound. Yes, we can say that. But at the same time when industrial capitalism moves to the global south, all of the safeguards that had been fought for all of the rights that had kind of not stopped because it doesn't stop that's capitalism but mediated elements of surplus value extraction had been kind of, had been got rid of and you end up with a kind of more naked version of imperialism, but also the elements of that super exploitation start to really emerge in the first world as well. So the whole project is done, is not an organic process but is actually a process of policy and imposition and this is done via debt via the IMF, the World Bank, structural adjustment programs, and the kind of formal idea of what, from Western advanced economies that can kind of dominate the globe. One of the things that people don't talk about when they read these, these wonderful essays is that he also has a wonderful idea of what we call disorganic development, which is if we take the idea that the biggest transformation in the last kind of three decades has been what we call disarticulated fordism. So the breaking up of industrial commodity chains across the globe, in order to kind of destabilize the ability of labor to hold capital to account. And then it takes all of that on board, narrates that as well but also says that when these processes happen in third world nations or the global south today as we call it. This is actually a disorganic process, because the societies of where these industrial capital sets up, don't have like I said any of the safeguards of democracy, and in fact don't actually match up with the kind of cultural imperatives of those nations. And what happens then is we get the rise of a authoritarian state, normally by backing by the West, and you get authoritarian states you get ideologies of populist fundamentalism, and these are the natural kind of processes that would emerge from this. And then this big moment is what we call the emancipation of capital from labor. As you and I and many of us here are all looking for the emancipation of our own labor from capital. In fact the inverse has happened. Capital does not need to pay for your labor living wage to abuse itself. It does not need labor on a long time basis. In a sense this is really naked capitalism going on in the third world at this point. All of the safeguards are kind of gone. And all of the ideas of the social wage, which you and I are fighting for and hopefully still fighting for today, are just simply taking away. And those would be the kind of popular ideas of sweatshops and super exploitation. But of course there's after effects of this, the movement of capital into these places the disruption of ecology the disruption of culture and the disruption of just peoples creates what seven and then calls the kind of float some of refugees migrants and asylum seekers this these are the kind of real victims of well of later day imperialism, the underclass of what seven and then calls the silicone age of capitalism. They're expelled from their home and when they end up here, when they end up back in the center in Europe, in, in the US. They become super exploited once more. So no longer not only super exploited in where capital is moved to the global south or third world, but when they, these people voyage, all the way for a better life into the kind of advanced economies. They themselves once more exploited. And this kind of new phenomenon of this will transform in some way seven and then his idea of racism a bit later that we'll get on to. And so what the big debate for seven and them was and I think what the debate, he was trying to have with hall, and there's a debate to be had about whether they were misreading each other, which I'm sure others can chime in on. And the idea that the working class or that class relationships have disappeared was inherently incorrect for seven and then capital was still dependent on exploiting workers for profit, but that now that most of that exploitation took place outside of the peripheral region of the West. It took out. It happened in the third world. It happens at the, at the kind of back end of the commodity chain, and we end up with the commodity, rather than seeing the violence that has gone into the commodity. And many of us are doing that today as I'll talk about the end why just having this zoom call. We all know where these computers came from and we all know where the lithium came from for the for the batteries. You can talk more about that. Yeah. And this is a basic critique of Eurocentric ideas of Marxism, which kind of took the idea that this transformation of the international division of labor was really dissolving the working class. But seven and then also theorizes what happens to advanced economies such as the UK and other places. So the emancipation of capital from labor wasn't simply the kind of movement of the working class from the advanced economies to the third world or south, but really was a dispersal and fragmentation of labor. So you end up with the emergence of service sector work in advanced economies. But that is tied to deindustrialization de unionization is all neoliberal imperatives. We have the hollowing out of democracy, but importantly not state power. So seven and it was very good at showing how the emergence of factorism the emergence of neoliberalism did in some ways take the remit of the state back, but it did not transform the state into a kind of weak, meek player but essentially turned it into a very strong arm of capital. So we have anti welfare, we have the ideas of being pro individuals, the ideas of pro individualism. And also, it did another thing. It lost status for industrial workers in advanced economies. And it did a crucial thing that we don't talk about enough today, which is seven and as is wonderful idea that the neoliberal process disaggregates and segregates the working class in places like the UK, along racial and ethnic and it gives a wonderful example. In poverty is the new black poverty is a new black in 2001. Well, he talks about how in northern mill towns which should become at that point the focus of the kind of collapse of British multiculturalism. What happened in the deindustrialization process wasn't simply that say white workers had become deindustrialized and didn't have jobs anymore. Actually they were accompanied by specifically Asian workers in these places and as deindustrialization happened. The working class which was a cross racial comprised of a cross racial constituency was actually disaggregated right. It was torn apart, and then the Asian component of that working class in those areas found its new vocation and new livings in service sector economies, whether that was the restaurant trade whether that was cabing, or what this did was break any of the working class solidarity that once existed in those places. And chiefly for us, historically, we don't now then see ethnic minorities as being part of the working class. They're headed somewhere else the working class is in the imaginary white, it's deindustrialized, and maybe it doesn't have anything to do it doesn't have any jobs. But Sivanana is quite clear that neoliberalism actually segregates the British working class along these lines. I'm not going to get too much into the last point which is the breakdown of anti racist solidarity because that's a different talk but we can talk a little bit about that in the Q&A. Just in very simple senses for Sivanana and then the emergence of neoliberalism would destabilize the anti black struggle, the black struggles, the anti racist struggles of the 1960s 1970s and 1980s, which had unified all non white communities, or parts of non white communities across Britain and break everyone into ethnic enclaves whether that was Asian, whether that was black Caribbean African, or any other ethnicity that could be conjured up. And in response to this, Sivanana coins a new term, which is Zeno racism, because he starts to make the argument that neoliberalism in Britain actually in response to these changes and migration the emergence of asylum seekers and economic migrants, really there was no difference between them and that the old color coded racism that had defined the 60s and 70s had given way to an even larger form of racism, because racism for Sivanana never stands still. And this was what we could call Zeno racism. This was racism, which was based on xenophobia and on color coded old ideas of racism. And this is quite powerful because what Sivanana is reflecting on is how the political economy of what we first started off in Britain in the 1970s starts to crumble on the neoliberalism and gives off new forms of racism, which are not so simple to just simply get right. The hostility shown to say Eastern Europeans in the 2000s is not so easily reconcilable with a traditional idea of racism that deals with people like that maybe look like me. And what Sivanana says is as well, actually the neoliberal phase, this transformation of the global economy affects British political economy by transforming the state by by getting rid of certain forms of statuses, but that the migrants and economic migrants to asylum seekers that will come for all of these processes now are dealt with via racialization via xenophobic racism. And he just gives a really nice definition where he says, where the national state works primarily in the interest of multinational corporations, where the national bourgeoisie collaborates with international capital, where the middle class is a fear and self serving the working class disaggregated and dispersed by technology has lost its political clout. This is the context in which we have to adjust to the changing nature of racism and from that conversely, to kind of changing nature of the society we live in. Right, so Sivanana's idea is that we need to kind of in response to this, and I think also in response to the work of Hall and the others who were trying to theorize how you bring new social movements together was we would also need to re theorize what this neoliberal moment meant for Britain. And this neoliberal moment for Britain is in a sense a moment of what we could call racial capitalism, whether Sivanana would use that term I don't know, or that we did hang out with said be Robinson. And this main argument here is we had to deal with the institutional expressions of this anti racism was integral to dealing with the kind of machinations of a neoliberal global economy, because the anti racist struggle around what was happening to migrants what was happening to asylum seekers was happening to refugees, but also what was happening to this idea of class. This idea that it was the aggregated and segregated with key to dealing with how neoliberalism was kind of playing out in Britain. And then to kind of give this all and this is a bit of a sprawling presentation because Sivanana's work is literally too big to contain in a 40 minute lecture. His argument goes on in the Hocken piece and in pieces throughout the 80s and 90s that the changes in British political economy and a global economy also make changes in how we was kind of theorize and deal with resistance. Loose ways Sivanana didn't think that organized labor in the West was was the primary agents of resistance to capital now because it couldn't be because of this articulated fordism because of the hierarchies of production. How could it be, and whether it should have been in the first place is a totally different issue that we can ever talk about in the Q&A. The apparent new arrival of social movements, which were really just along lines of ethnicity and gender and sexuality which had been theorized in the 70s and 80s. And of course of what the Hocken of New Times is a kind of response to is not Sivanana and dismissing those as identity politics, but asking for them to be re theorized as communities of resistance. And this is where resistance to neoliberalism or the market state now had to take place. It was via these kind of fractured identities, but it was saying, what is the class component of these identities? How does class apply to this? And the reason that is is not to give a primacy of class because Sivanana was never about that. He was about expanding the horizon, but it was the centering what it was that you were resisting. Which should be what Sivanana called the market state, what you and I would call the neoliberal state and the neoliberal global economy. And as late as 2013, Sivanana kind of points at where he was looking at and he was looking at these kind of what you call less spectacular resistances. And this was in response to austerity, but we could do this throughout the 90s, throughout the 90s. He took solace in the idea that amongst the kind of rank and file in in battles over health education and welfare housing and community. There was an emergent resistance in these places, smaller community struggles. And in many of the essays he writes he talks about them talks about the kind of anti anti migration watch movement. He talks about Broadwater Farm, the Broadwater Farm estate struggle. He talks about layer on anti austerity struggle. These struggles, which were really in the community, right, which were where people were really struggling where where he found some solace, maybe less so in organized labor, maybe Gargi might want to talk about that with me a bit later. And what he saw in that was a kind of emergent awakening from the public around the idea that there's no alternative to neoliberalism, even if there wasn't a program or a goal beyond the kind of immediate goal of simply defending one's community center, or fighting against cuts in one's local community, or fighting for better standards of housing. There's no other chance to build together. Right to open up the horizon. And we don't have time for this but one of the reasons seven hours making that argument, I think anyway is is to kind of get over the pitfalls of an old kind of class reductionism, which is very white and male. All right, I'm just going to end this kind of talk. I don't know how much time I have, but I'll come to the end in a bit, and I just want to pick out some of the things that we might want to look at why this is really interesting. I haven't been able to give it justice in a small time I have here, but why this is really interesting for me and why it could be really interesting for us why seven hours work is I think the conscience of all anti racism in Britain today. I'll give you some examples so when we think about anti racism in the present. If you're watching or reading you may fall into kind of weird debates around acronyms, right, like, don't call me, babe. This is the rejection of the idea that we can be homogenized together, and which really goes back to the idea of political blackness, which united not my communities in a kind of common struggle against the British state. Or, you know, we might want to talk about kind of Oxford and Cambridge graduates and whether we could get specifically Afro Caribbean students into Oxbridge these are all in some ways. Where should I call them worthy causes they are worthy I'm not going to dismiss them, whatever, but they are not in a sense, my causes of what anti racism means, because anti racism should have a. And Sivananda tells us an appreciation of how capital and exploitation are wrapped up in it, as he would say we need to differentiate between the racism this is discriminates and the racism that kills and maybe the racism that kills is the things that we really have to kind of focus on. And that will bring us back to the face of the British state, which is, I guess, pretty but very not pretty in its actions and processes. And what does that mean. Well, it means we can take Sivananda's work and we can look at things like the Windrush scandal. Right. I'm doing that because that's what the British state has called it a windrush scandal. But really, if we read Sivananda's political economy. This isn't a windrush scandal. This is actually just the normal machinations of the British state. And it's kind of crunch point in the mid 70s, between two forms of colonial relationships. It's called empire, and it's new expansion into Europe. And so, at the height of this year's craziness, which was a coronavirus pandemic. And just before that to events happened and I want you to think about this in February. There's a big struggle on the ground against the deportation of Jamaican citizens, what the British call Jamaica citizens, what really many British citizens who are being deported, right, on a charter flight. So charter flights out. When the coronavirus pandemic hits. And the British food system and its food chain starts to fall apart. There's charter flights in of Romanian fruit pickers. These events are not coincidental. They are not, they are not kind of just random policies. If we take Sivananda's idea of the political economy of the British state and how race and capital are fed into each other. They are actually built into the state. Now Britain's political economy works. It wants to, it's wants to deport bits of its old colonial possessions, because it doesn't want to admit that they were ever part of Britain. It also wants to extract people from Europe. And I could add another slide here or how it still wants to extract people from its old colonial possessions to fill its national health service. Right. So Britain's political economy is still driven by the kind of racial histories that underpin it. Well, of course we can go further because we're going to have Brexit soon and we're going to have, you know, the reinstatement of Britain, a great Britain, right as Boris running over a little Japanese child just to show you how great we are. What does this mean though, well we're still dealing with the after effects of what Sivananda called the disaggregation and segregation of class. And you'll see in the last couple of weeks we've had many a talking head on TV, normally a political science professor who likes to eat books on TV, talking about how working class white boys have, don't have white privilege and anti racism is bad because it thinks all white people have these forms of privilege. But at the same time, right, that this is being made, and the idea that essentially BME people are actually not part of the working class and you can talk about working class boys, and you can talk about BME populations. We have things like the boo hoo scandal, right. So, back in July, boo hoo, which produces a lounge where I think I'm not really a partaker in it was done for modern slavery, right. There was a scandal around modern slavery, South Asian women and South Asian women and Eastern European women basically being forced to produce garments for less, way less than the minimum wage at three pound 50 an hour according to undercover reports. Listen, with we take Sivananda's work and we talk about the kind of idea of how class is dispersed and exploitation is just kind of dispersed in Britain. This is not a shock. Sivananda writes in 1989, he talks about capital being able to take up his factory and walk anywhere where it proves less costly to produce things. Right. And he gives a number of examples he talks about Ford heading out of the UK, and heading into into Europe he talks about the movement into Southeast Asia, and then he says this, and in the midlands Asian garment makers have combined new manufacturing techniques with cheap Asian female labor to undercut garment imports from Asia. Sound familiar. There is nothing new about the racialized economy of Britain and this kind of the aggregation and segregation of the working class. It's built into British political economy. Sivananda's work does that very well for us shows us that it's key there that race and class are entwined into the British state and its economy. And then finally, we might want to look at why Sivananda and for anti racism was so pivotal to dealing with modern capitalism. Right. So, last couple of weeks. Critical race theory has been given more airtime than ever. I don't even know that many people in Britain who do critical race theory it's a very American thing we have our own tradition of anti racism, but the British state cannot shut up about critical race theory. Critical race theory apparently has been taught in schools, universities, it's anti white. It's the devil incarnate. It's also anti capitalist, which is quite funny because one of the kind of critiques of critical race theory is that it doesn't really have an economic component but anyway, and we've seen. Can we band up on TV saying black lives matter is anti capitalist. Sivananda's work is wonderful in in in appreciating why the British state is going through this thing. Right. In the race and class and state essay, he writes, the anxiety of the state about rebellious black youth stems not from rhetoric or professional black militants whose dissidents it can accommodate and legitimize within the system. That's politics that it that it can generate in the black underclass and all the discriminated minority groups like minor migrant workers and perhaps the working class as a whole, particularly a time of massive unemployment and urban decay. Just say, sounds very similar to where we are, because race and class are entwined into the British state, it's labor market, and also how the effects of any forms of cuts play out. And I just want to end with a couple of things about why anti racism, Sivananda and for anti racism was such a good tool. And why is theorization of race and class is really why we should be recovered today to some of the same kind of a massive surge in in anti racist activity both in the US and the UK in in a kind of reckoning with an older empire and older ideas of restitution of reparation and Edward Colston being thrown into into the into the dark at Bristol kinds to sum that up. And in many ways that is a wonderful reckoning with Britain's past it's a reckoning with the erasure of the value given by the enslaved by also the colonized and by other kind of exploited groups within the British Empire. But what Sivananda's work kind of tells us is that relationship doesn't stop and it hasn't stopped for the last two to 300 years. Whilst we have to pay respect to the singularity of chattel slavery and its contribution to Britain, and we should make arguments for its restitution and reparation. We must also understand that those processes, which link race and class together have not stopped and continue to underpin who we are. And like I said, that's just kind of evident via the platforms that we want today on the batteries in in our laptops to the child labor that produces them to the super exploited labor that produces them in in China. And the idea that the intellectual property is generated in the US to you and I buying them at extortionate prices these commodities here today the violence, the racialized violence of exploitation that underpins all of that is still very much with us and Sivananda's work points to the fact that if we really want to be anti racist, then we have to be anti imperialist, we have to be anti capitalist. So can we band up maybe is right, you probably do want to ban us because that's what we want to bring down. And this will become even more prevalent. As we see the kind of after effects. I say after effects because we're still living through of the COVID-19 pandemic where race and racialization super exploitation of racialized minorities and death, which is the ultimate kind of end of all super exploitation has shown to be in Britain and the US over representation of minorities in in in deaths in the UK is largely driven by their racialized labor market by the by the de aggregation of segregation of the working class that's happened in Britain over the last 30 to 40 years. And in some ways we're going to have to put those communities back together. How do we bring those struggles together. How do we bring the kind of struggle against the wanton euthanization of people by the state with its racialized ideas about who should actually die first with anti racism with the struggle against what will be mass unemployment in the next few months with when furlough is wound up properly in December with the cuts that will eventually come to pay for this. And also with the global imbalances that the system will create. So we already know now that countries in the global south will struggle to finance themselves as debt skyrockets in the global south that the old north south divide will also be locked in further. And in some ways, the bananas work kind of compels us to think that's what anti racist struggle should be about. And I just want to end with this quote from seven and just to kind of get at what I'm getting at. I think gargoyle might take issue with a bit of this but anyway we can talk about it in in theorizing the kind of new times of neoliberalism and what he thought was the nonsense of the theorization of people like Stuart Hall. What he was trying to get to do was not deny that new things had happened, but actually how we went about kind of dealing with these new sets of circumstances had to be read for any any ends. One of his articles by saying what we have learned from the labor movement what we must hold on to are not the old ways of organization, the old modes of thought, the old concepts of battle against capital. The traditions that we've hammered out on the smithy of these battles loyalty solidarity camaraderie unity all the great and simple things that make us human. And then he goes on later on in the essay and he says we have cultures of resistance to create communities of resistance to build a world to win. Now is the moment of socialism. And I particularly like these words, and I think we need them right now, and capital should have no dominion. All right, I'll leave it there. Thank you, John. That was really enlightening so gargay if you're ready to take over with your discussion just start whenever you're ready. Okay, can you hear me. Yeah. Okay, thanks so much for that john it really covered loads of ground. And you only want me to talk for a few minutes don't you so I'm just going to have my phone out. I think I'm just going to raise, raise the points I always raise a little bit. I think some of the questions that we might take up in the discussion. I think some of the things that John is describing are about civas writing of course an earlier moment about the idea of the displacement of where the labor who can be maintained in life was that certain that earlier moment in the kind of 80s 90s all my screens went all over the place don't know if that means you can't see me. We're living through a much more uncertain and even landscape of who can live and who is surplus. And I think that's also, you know, because it's 20 years on 25 years on about where the centers of manufacturing and other economic activity are we're seeing that we're seeing that also in where the centers of labor organization are. And I think that doesn't change the argument but I think it makes a different question for us or different set of organizing challenges. So that's, you know, this is all historical isn't it. So what Sir is predicting, we've kind of lived through that. That's that brings us to here of and boo hoo aside. We know that actually there are plenty of places where capital requires labor to just about live. And some of those places are in the global south, but not evenly so. And that's the vessel of where the labor that can live and the labor can be let die is located I think all that kind of. That's both a political analytic and analytic question, I think for us I just kind of think it's interesting, and it makes a difference to how we narrate what an anti anti imperialist politics might be for us now. And the links between class organization and anti imperialist work. There isn't there between what big figure rights and then we all can't talk about it and then what we talk about next, at the very least, I'd say it probably is not to our benefit and perhaps not even quite true to all of the writing to act as if the disaggregation of the working class along racialized lines is a movement away from a former unity. I'm not, I don't think really some of them is writing about a former unity of the working class in this country then then is disaggregated. It's no different things happened. But for Britain, the working class is disaggregated through empire so you don't have to see those other people because they're being working class somewhere else you know capital is collecting this stuff across the globe. Then suddenly we show up. Oh no, that wasn't meant to happen. So, and then we have a moment of crisis which is kind of the just the moment before zero is writing about, oh, you know you weren't meant to be in the room with me. Two techniques of disaggregation happen both through state violence and also to reflect shifts in the economic base. And I only say that because I think always and perhaps now, particularly, there's also dangers for even for the left to be kind of nostalgic for a moment of unity that's been lost. That's not what the game we're in I don't think and I think it's important for us to say that to each other. That doesn't mean that unity is not still the game in town. But what we do is somewhat different if we say it, if we say oh they used to be left unity and then we're all fragmented and then and then we all became my identitarians that leads to a different politics than to say capital is an incarnation that's ever been known has disaggregated the working class, but through different kinds of technique and violence. For us to fight it, we must at least understand the technique of disaggregation and the, and it's particular violence for our moment. Not because there's something to go back to, but because you need to see the beast as it is, not as you wish or imagine it would be. Yeah, that's a tiny point, but I hope will move us on to what I always want to talk about isn't it where we're going to go with this. And I guess the small other thing I'd say is some of that idea of races being such an organizing factor is also a kind of reflection of the self organization of black and brown communities. Not completely not shaped by it, but something that makes that terrain is about the ways in which community organization articulates itself, not only as races class as well, but then how that then becomes a dialogue, especially a dialogue with the state and I think we've all been through the critiques of the ways in which. Easy to say in hindsight, but really cul-de-sacs around engagement with different state structures. I always think, you know, it's a bit easy, isn't it to say how we've always lost before. Oh, I wouldn't have been so stupid. I don't think anyone in the room would have been wise enough to think. Oh yes, after the Lawrence inquiry, what we'll do is say oh no no to engagement with the state. Now that set of engagements was not a liberal set of engagements. It was a multi-pronged set of engagements, but frankly, I think it depleted and dispersed anti-racist energies. In a way that we are still trying to recover from. Who could have known? You know, I don't. I say that only to say that the reasons why dispersed movements take actions which then in hindsight seem like oh what a loser set of careerists you were are often for the best collective analysis and that there's something about trying, but it takes for us to have the collective analysis to lessen the chances of that and we still might be wrong, or we still might get outplayed. Because the point is not to be right in the seminar but to win, which is always the point I'd like to end on. No solace in organised labour, you know. There's nothing I hate more than the British Labour movement and yes it and yet it is kind of the heart of my life over the last 30 years takes half of my time. Still is something I think could be remade to be a different thing. And I would say that, again, to have no false nostalgia for an organised labour that never existed, but not equally not to imagine a collective future that does not include the role of organised labour, even if that is not quite the role of organised labour imagined by the TUC. Even a disaggregated working class with fragmented class identities precarious work gig economies, maybe most of all at that time, the question of what labour organisation means as a collective class project is not one that we conduct. And so I say it because, you know, if old blokes aren't we don't say it or bloke of the labour movement who is going to say it. But so, of course the questions for us. They're kind of always the same questions but how you populate the question becomes different with the analysis of the moment. Still, now then probably for some time scalability remains a challenge doesn't it. As does the kind of organisational vehicle available. I don't think there's much disagreement amongst a whole range of people broadly on the left broadly in progressive politics, some of whom are calling themselves anti-racist some of whom are not. About the need to mobilise a broad front which recognises the intertwined violences of race and class, which recognises the violence abroad and the violence here, which recognises how cheap our lives have become. In an echo of how cheap many people's lives have been for centuries. You know that that's all within our collective analysis isn't it. Saying it is like well when what then is our idea of what it would mean to organise together. And I think we still kind of lack. We lack the habit and the skill set, but I think we even lack the language of how to speak to each other to make the scalable organisational vehicle speakable to each other. And so I think that before I die I'd like to have that conversation. I wanted to say just one more thing about that. Practice isn't just oh I saw a street campaign didn't you my street campaign is better than yours. I'm as guilty of that as anyone else but you know we need to do a little bit better than that because they're killing us near John's told us they were always killing us and now they're not even ashamed to tell us. At the same time there is a kind of role from revolutionary imagination. And that means we have to open ourselves to the ways we speak to each other in terms of analysis in terms of scholarship in terms of creativity, but also in a way that we might be able to be mistaken, because we're being taken towards a common goal which is our collective freedom. And I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but I hope someone else want to take up that that blood in. Okay, is that too long long enough anyway long enough. Thank you. You guys can start asking questions and they'll keep coming through so I'll pose some of these questions to you to both of you and you can answer them you can answer them and discuss. I thought your point about the disaggregation, kind of morphing into a different form of disaggregation was really salient and I think we got a question which touches upon that so it says, if a disaggregated working class was never aggregated in the UK, as Gargi noted, is there any hope given the visibility of minority death, at least at the start of the pandemic that the COVID could lead to some aggregation, or some public consciousness though the working class is more than just white. John go first. I don't know. And there's my dog, my dog went first. Okay. That's Ross isn't it that's what that's my Ross who's asked that question. I love you Ross. Okay. I agree with that point and then totally Gargi's point about the idea that they were that the class politics of Britain has never been together is correct right I don't think seven and is arguing for a nostalgic moment of alignment but I do think he's arguing that there was a there was an organic process of some form of unity in those former mill towns right I mean we've got to take the idea that I'm, I'm taking essays totally out of context and driving them together for you so it's, it's difficult to get at. Is there hope for unity. Yeah, of course otherwise we wouldn't be here right. I mean, like, come on we wouldn't none of us would be here. If we wouldn't be here. And there are ways of doing things together that necessarily can bring us together around these kind of sensible ideas of justice equality and other things and sometimes they come up in really innocuous ways I mean like. I really love to say this because I don't like. I don't like the practitioners behind it, but look, is no coincidence that the white working class academics the ones who bang on about the white working class boys had nothing to say, really about markets and restaurants campaign about free school meals. Right, they didn't have anything to say about it. Right, but you would have thought that they would have been front and center of it well they didn't want the idea that you could try and create unity between kind of poor dispossessed school children, right. No I don't technically agree with with, you know, the idea of recreating the big society and all these things but we there are platforms and ideas that will do that and I think even with COVID COVID offers the kind of idea where is the unity so I'm not sure. I'm not a big believer that all white people are the devil because I don't and that's clearly not in seven and analysis racism doesn't work that way it's an institutional structure so we there are ways of bringing us together but we'll have to. We'll have to, we'll have to work on these things together. That's my key on. And I wondered if that was actually the question not are white bricks so racist that there's no hope. But is there something about pandemic, which moves the locus of where we think about who lives and who dies, which, despite itself and despite the Johnson government and settles those racialized lines which I think we're already living through. And then there's the question of what it would mean to organize and what our political vehicles are which might be more than one political vehicle in, you know, if ever any what people groups, you know, a generation of people lived through what seeing state neglect as authorized death at different parts of this world, we are those people. So, and we have a whole analysis of that. What we don't yet have although I think people, as always people try and piece together bit stuff but I think that's when you talk about momentary unity in the northern area that, and that was a momentary unity I'd like to say using the most old fashioned tools of organized labor. That's trade unionism wasn't it, but it's fragmentary and kind of momentary. Equally, I think there's something about pandemic, especially as it rolls out. And the level of dissatisfaction with official and state responses is so widespread, it's both dangerous because you can see a kind of neo fashion element coming in, but there's also a political movement for different kinds of languages of mutuality and what survival in an anti state model of survival which is pretty exciting I think could come about. But, but none of this is about stuff we say to each other it's about our ability to translate those ideas into organizational structures, even if they're small momentary organizational structures in the first instance. So, you know, try out something small but it has to be in the first instance otherwise. Yeah, and there's been there's been movements like right and some of these things are half measures as well so when the dropping of the NHS surcharge which hasn't actually properly happened though for extracted migrant workers, right. Me and Roz work on that together about how the NHS is really partly an imperial system. That is a kind of push towards a form of internationalism right. Right, even if it's a halfway house, but like you have to work with it and push, push further. So it should be. Oh great yeah like we don't want the surcharge to apply to migrant workers in the NHS. Oh and by the way we just want to get rid of the surcharge. I feel like there's there's that pushing right and the pandemic offers does offer these spaces for that, but also there's a retrograde. There's also a regressing moment against these things I think. Can I just say one more thing and just because I'm interested to talk to John about it and I don't know everyone else in the room that I think also for us to speak to each other, which understands pushing as not just making a claim, because making a claim assumes a functioning state that could be our liberal interlocutor. So that, which I also think is part of our, our need to develop a better shared language. And I'm not saying you're doing it but just you've given me an opportunity to say it was one of the things I wanted to say that pushing might instead be mobilise with some health workers about the loss of the surcharge. How does that also allow a different kind of mobilisation with a slightly bigger slice of people about something else. How do you put those slices of mobilisation together. That is what building a vehicle that both is scalable and has an organisational hit means, but those skills. I think of a devalued in this country and probably across the left. I think zoom makes it worse because you can see that kind of work here. And, and we lose them in every generation, people get burnt out and think so some, there's something about even people who read and write a lot and I'm one of those people about retrieving valuing sharing creating parallel for doing other things as well as this, not not do this, but as well as this. I think in Sivananda's work that that's actually key to all of it. So I think that is the communities of resistance project. Right, from my reading anyway. Yeah, and I think we've got a question which kind of does touch on kind of forming resistance in the way capital has changed in the way labor has changed. Now, what does Sivananda say about forms of resistance outside of the workplace. So the, where are the non workers located. Oh yeah I saw that question by non workers I mean a day. I'm guessing you're getting a people who are not normally employed right we're talking about the gig economy and. Yeah yeah that's what I'm seeing from there. Yeah, well I mean look there are there are just today is a day of celebration for that movement right. We all know about the cleaners being brought in house that you are well. Yeah, I mean like they're with that hey I don't even need to even answer this one there is already people doing that. So those workers will organize themselves. I know I don't think that I mean I look I look I get the whole you might think civil is against organized labor I think what is just what games and you get this in. And I think it's part of that literature in the 70s that emerges on radical black for both in the US and every is that the post 40 space where you want to call it globalization will mean that you cannot just simply organize, whether you could do in the first at the workplace, because the workplace disappears for large people and part of what neoliberalism does is to take away spaces of organization. So, traditional ones right like your union, like it's really hard to organize in a union if you don't have one. So, I don't, I don't necessarily feel like there's a, we have to go at evil or with this thing I think you have to the idea would be that you would organize in those communities of resistance so. And I think also includes would include forms of work that are not normally recognize this work, which I guess will be harder to form those communities of resistance in those sense. Yeah, yeah, but I mean we are seeing. We are seeing movements around say care and mutual mutual aid. Right, I mean those are forms of resistances as well right like they are the kind of shoring up for survival. What we call survival programs that many of us are doing in the local neighborhood are in one way resistance because they refuse to let our local communities literally died coming. What is the ultimate resistance right, but to stop death, I don't know. But also, you know, that's to recognize that the politics of care is a very, very long history for a range of communities black brown white as well. There's a whole feminist agenda around that there's a whole queer agenda around that, and that there's something about, again, pandemic, which refocuses that battle around care, I agree absolutely with mutuality, but also, we're seeing much more intensified bottom up analysis of who care is for which care am I doing that because the status shafting me which care am I doing to stay alive. What are the what are the different models of care between those moments, which does suddenly come a bit back to claims where do you make a claim for care, where do you build an alternative community of care and I think that's all kind of it in play but undecided. I also have a big be in my bonnet about, yes, there are highly gendered models of this, but much of the language we have of gendered models of care doesn't altogether reflect the different ways of which reproductive labour is, is itself fragmented now, and kind of acts as if gendered roles are much more solidified and even than in fact they are. And I think that, but I think that also that shake up, shake ups always a bit of an opportunity because different people come together suddenly think, oh yeah I'm that as well I'm a carer. I think that's Yeah, that is a really good point. So there was a question for you gargoyle about the role of labor unions for workers outside of organized or formal labor. It's not necessarily new. And so does this speak to the notion of a labor aristocracy. Right. Oh, so I can't see the questions I'm relying on your very kind reading of them. So, again for you so the role of labor workers outside of organized or formal labor is not necessarily new. Does this speak to the notion of the labor aristocracy. I can really hear what people say with that and just in case people know I don't know the ages of the people in the room. So some of those terms like labor aristocracy. I don't know if younger people even know what it means when I was younger in the 70s. The idea of the labor aristocracy is that there are certain kinds of working class jobs are highly unionized, and both have quite a lot of clout in the workplace but actually quite a political clout because of the role of large powerful still then powerful unions in relation to national politics. So the idea of the labor aristocracy is that you might be working class. But if you're a steel worker or you're a car worker, you, you get a kind of a kind of wages of being of the recognized fraction of the working class, and then everyone else is like cleaner and precarious work. So precarious works nothing new of course but it's just more extended now. You don't get those benefits of being part of the labor aristocracy. I think what's changed of course is that the core sectors in which we used to think of the labor aristocracy have both been smashed apart in terms of organization and smashed apart in terms of actual practice. That was mainly heavier industry, mainly male workers, mainly white workers, you know, a whole kind of remaking of the economy in this country. That doesn't mean that there aren't similar fractions of the labor of the labor in other places because I still think actually organ if you make something that is very profitable and quite expensive to make and you have a certain amount of skill in order to make it your chance of organizing in your workplace, you know, they, they kind of extend a bit don't they so you can see in some places as a battle battle going on with that. Right now in Britain, who is the labor aristocracy, we have a problem that most people in trade unions tend to be overall, overwhelmingly in the public sector very much under attack. Very odd kind of place to organize in terms of how we might implement our labor demands for a bit fragmented in a different way from other elements of working class often, you know, agents of the state. That's a bit tricky if the biggest labor for unionized labor force in the country of teachers, you know, because being a teacher is a funny kind of role isn't it. And I think we have to rethink that I think labor movement is having to rethink that by force. It's having to rethink it because of how non aristocratic workers are organizing outside formal, you know, the usual formal structures and new unions and the different kinds of emergent glitch filled exciting ways of organizing, but also because being a labor aristocrat ain't what it used to be. Of course is it. So all those. I'm sorry that's a big round the houses thing of saying, maybe, but this might be the last gasp of that pretense, and the people in the labor aristocracy don't don't feel like doesn't feel like privilege to them, because they're, you know, health workers would be one. That's an example, but look, look at the BMA that's a thing. What a radicalized union now because dying. Yeah, that's a great point. I think dying makes us all a bit radical right. I think so. I would just add there is there is it's about what are the intentions of those. I guess what the radicalism is generated by. So like take KG that you see you as one, you know, is a big union or last big ones left. So which one. The one we belong to is quite a big union. Our union. Not powerful. It's not powerful. And it's also not clear what the imperatives are of its struggles, even it struggles against marketization, precarious work and all that. I'm not having been in it. It's not clear that everyone is against these things. No, see, right. So, you know, it's not clear that the aristocracy has disappeared. It's just I would agree that what I would, you know, in another article called the wages of whiteness or whatever that that's some of his disappeared. It's not, it's not great, but then the imperatives are what does that radicalization then push you towards does it push you towards an anti imperialist politics, even in the immediate sense or does it what what happens to you. Do you want to go back to what it was. It's not for grabs, isn't it. So again, like nothing happens to you automatically. What happens to you depends on what people in concert are doing around you and, and politics. It could make you lots of people in our sector. Their response to marketization is an unashamed nostalgia for an aristocratic university. I think even quite a lot of the so-called left of our union think that, oh, if only universities were like they were in the 70s when people like you and me would not be here frankly. Exactly. But that's, that's a struggle isn't it it's not decided. No, no, that is a struggle. And I think on the point I think you made a point earlier about COVID and how it's created an opportunity but also an opportunity for, you know, on the on the right. And someone asked a question about what, you know, seven, seven London's take could be on the failure of neoliberal neoliberalism and the emergence of populist far right movements and if there's a correlation then how class comes into that. Yeah, I mean I look at the theorization of how diverse theorization of how Islamic fundamentalism turns up is quite simple right is a response than the far right elements. They're not really a response they're normally an excuse right to the excuse for continuing Trumpism is the excuse for the continuation of the system just in in very visceral racist means doing right. So, you know it, or we will reference the US election even though I promise not to. Right. Think about it. Trump's being hopefully going to be rejected. But what Biden did was to offer basically quite a lot of what Trump already does. So you didn't need to vote for Trump this time around right. Do you want to do you still want to fund the police, you still want your border control. You might even have a bombing campaign in the global south I mean Trump didn't really give us that so he might he might give us that right. So you can, the reality is is that they are, they are ways of managing the narrative. I mean, I think Sivan and his article on on the kind of the kind of rise of Islamic fundamentalism he was quite optimistic that actually that that that that phase would would die out, and there would be a reformation in the Islamic world around kind of anti imperialism. I don't know anything about as much but no these these are fantasies these right wing fantasies of taking control and normally they're not really populist they're elite driven and I think Sivan and them was very good at understanding that that they were elite driven in in the state. I mean Brexit for me is an elite driven project based on resentment in certain groups, but also in certain groups who who are not materially dispossessed in the way that we think they are. It's not really about Trumpism and Brexit but I actually didn't mean that kind of right feigned right populism from above. What I'm saying is that the moment of actual crisis does open space for right innovation from the right from below. Again why we need to ramp up our ability to speak to each other sensibly in a way that could mobilize and have organizational cloud, because actually we know how the elite killers, you know we may or may not be battling it. In my lifetime we've not really had to battle except in small skirmishes a battle for the terms of life from a kind of insurgent rightist element that has the potential to be a mass movement. You know that and that is, and if we don't think that's the battle of our time we should look at all the places that we all come from and see how it's already playing out there. So that I think is why we need to up our game again. Yeah, I think you make a really good link actually because someone did talk about India given the example of India and how neocolonialism and perpetuation of colonialism is still very prevalent there with domestic capital and how I think also in Nigeria you can see how the working class in those areas are being treated out of the visibility of us here. I would say that's part of this disorganic development in the global south right that's part of what Simon Adam theorizes that's why it turns up like that. Yeah. So, a question so this is a reference to the labor times you mentioned early john. So, a reference to labor times relate to these towns as both the site of working and living. So, so now we're saying that in their experience of working with migrant construction workers in India, in India demonstrate the challenge of collective action. So, I think that's kind of another example of the challenges of collective action outside of this labor aristocracy kind of that you were mentioning. Yeah. I don't know if that's a question is a comment. Yeah. Maybe someone wants to talk. You can talk. We are meeting. I don't like this idea that we don't talk. Can we, can you talk. He's got headphones he can talk. I tried to unmute myself but this control in zoom that doesn't allow you that freedom. I was just thinking that in a face to face seminar you can talk to the people next to you and you can heckle, which you can't do under these conditions but now I just very interested in some of this work and trying to look at how the replication of the kind of processes is being domesticated by by kind of decolonial practices by new colonials. And that speaks to, for example, Alpasha's book on ground down by growth, which looks at Dalits who are no longer at the bottom of the agricultural hierarchy, but they are now at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy, they're working in poultry and tanning and so on and so forth. So the mobility has been sideways rather than upwards, and your colonialist financial capital and the state are using the ideas of colonialism and imperialism and using it with the with the vengeance. And in a way, we're trying to speak to some of those groups but yet we are we are unsuccessful. And the point I was making about collective organization in my work on migrant construction workers, where the workplace and the residents become combined in labor camps. It's almost impossible to think of forms of collective organization so those are the kind of questions I had in relation to. Where do we take the, the object of analysis now it's not just disorganized capitalism these are this is a concerted effort to maintain those various structures that enabled these various expectations to take place. Okay, you want to go first guy I think it goes back to Gargi's point about language. And how we talk to each other right like how we develop those. How do we develop the kind of ways of talking to each other and and relating to each other on an experience level that that create forms of solidarity and I don't think we've. You know, covered elements, and I do think history shows us that we can do that. There is was a viscerality to organizing in the in 34 years ago that would have really been quite useful now. What it is about how do we create common forms of languages and discussions around injustice and maybe using the kind of pivot point of the current crisis is one way of doing that. But I think it's a, I don't mean there's an easy answer here I think. I think my point was my point was perhaps how the emphasis on racialized forms of exploit and so forth kind of almost ignores, not just the exploitation in the working place, but the actors behind it. And I think it's almost like colonialism doesn't exist in the South anymore kind of argument or we're talking about if we're talking about events in the past and reparations and all that when they're actually it's alive and well and it's thriving. You know, but I would argue, I mean argue, I mean I'd like to suggest that the analysis of racial capitalism only makes sense. And that was only useful as a way of trying to understand the constant and ongoing violent disaggregation of the working class in many locations, and it might not be articulated as race but races the way of arguing that how bodies are organized around an arbitrary division, and that I'd say what you're describing is as much racial capitalism as what the previous thing is, but what I really the thing that of the many things that keep me awake at night. One that I think most of all is that I don't think we have ever seen an effective mass mobilization against industrialized fascism. We've seen a kind of inter power war, which didn't stop it. We are now seeing. So here, when I hear what you're saying that, you know, who from the subcontinent could not think this, and not only from there as people said look at what's happened in Nigeria in the last month, but a willingness in many different centres of capital to mobilize really mass murder and genocide I don't want to say genocide lightly, but at least the run up to genocide in the interests of absolutely containing and wiping out some sections of the population for other kinds of relative ends you know I don't know how else to describe it. Now that seems to me something that we have no model of how we and I mean we our side, because which is also about how we speak to each other, the small differences between us as nothing as compared to this that we are living through the never again and we are not not even able to say it to each other yet. I don't have the answer but I certainly think that we must start to say that the question in these terms to each other because otherwise, what are we otherwise. Yeah. Yeah, I think that'll be a really good point to leave us to think, as we end this session as unfortunately our time has run out. Thank you very much to both John and Gargi for coming to speak. And to all of you for for listening. Join us. In the next talk, which will be on the 18th of November 5pm on Orientalism in economic theory. Thank you so much to both John and Gilbert. So, yeah, thank you very much. And yeah, I hope you've absorbed all that information and we can try to find a new language to be able to speak and try to create a point of unity moving forward. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me.