 Literally, a communist. This is your colleague, isn't it, Aaron Bustani, Ash Sarkar? Yeah. And you have produced, rather helpfully, this T-shirt. It's just a prototype, yeah, just to be clear. Just to be clear. I'm literally a communist. Yes, product placement. You can get similar T-shirts. No doubt from everywhere else. Are you romanticising a murderous ideology? No. Well, aren't you? No, I don't think so. The way I look at the word communism is it is talking about a kind of society which is so qualitatively different to capitalism as capitalism was to feudalism, which is to say that it's key features within capitalism, having to sell your labour for a wage, production for profit, production for exchange. These things would no longer exist. Have we ever had a political economy, a polity, which didn't have those features? No, we haven't. So, I'm not talking about actually existing socialism from the 80s and 1990s. I'm talking about North Korea or the Soviet Union. I'm talking about a politics which fits the technological possibilities which we're only just beginning to see, most clearly in automation but I think elsewhere as well. It doesn't say that on the T-shirt, of course. No. I think you probably just need a new word. You know, I feel like I'm sat in my A-level history school. You know, and that's what most people think if you say the word communism, I looked at it on what we're going to discuss today and what? I totally get your arguments and your points, but I think it's quite an alienating word to be using and brandishing. I'm happy with the old word. Communism means state control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It means no private property. It's perfectly clear. As a theory, I happen to think that it's not workable but it's internally coherent. The Soviet Union made a half attempt to practice it and that was unsuccessful, but it's clear what Karl Marx meant. Right, but isn't it an ideology that led to nine million deaths in the Soviet Union? Yes, well, not a communist. No, no. But when you say that you understand the sort of sentiment behind it, but is it trivialising what has been done in the name of communism? I think that if you want to abolish private property and you do want the state to control virtually everything, then you are going to have to use brutal enforcement methods to make people cooperate. And so I think the murders, the repression, the oppression are a necessary consequence of the communist ideology. Right, and you support that, do you? No, I don't know. There was a line in the Economist in 2011 that said what happens when labour becomes capital? And of course there's this hinting towards change in the nation, robotics. And that's a question which is really decisive for anybody who wants to defend market capitalism. In terms of what I think, capital by Karl Marx was called capital or a critique of political economy. He was critiquing the classical political economy of Ricardo, of Adam Smith. He wasn't saying, you know, I'm a big fan of Pol Pot, who by the way Henry Kissinger was. Right. So I'm talking about... But in practice, does it mean violence? I mean, if you say, I mean, Mao Zedong said based on the Soviet's experience, he considered violence necessary to achieve an ideal society derived from Marxism and planned and executed violence on the grand scale, as we know. I don't believe communism, as in something beyond capitalism, was even possible in the 20th century. So there's an analogue here is John Wycliffe, he was a heretical priest, 14th century Protestant. His ideas were more or less the same as Luther. They didn't scale in the 1400s like they were in the 1500s, why not? The absence of the printing press. I think we're now at a moment where there are a presence of technologies which make new political realities plausible. Right. But is it provocative to have, I mean, I'm sure it is provocative to say I'm literally a communist. I actually found it. Maybe that is provocative too. I mean, if there was a teacher that said I'm literally a national socialist, would that be acceptable? I'm literally a fascist. You can't imagine anyone going on national television and saying that, can you? I don't know. It's just ridiculous. Who are you thinking of, Matthew? She's so proud of it. And I really don't think she understands the implications of what she says. It's ludicrous. It's just because we feel that it didn't work. And I think that's what I mean by a new word. People felt it didn't work. And so when you hear it, that's why I said I felt like I was back at school being taught about how communism hadn't worked. So I understand what you're saying, but perhaps a new word. Is it the same, though, as having I'm literally a national socialist or I'm literally a fascist? It is. It's exactly the same. For instance, I wouldn't blame Adam Smith for the Bengal famine or for Cecil Rosen's in bad way. We're talking about a set of ideas which have been criticising capitalism in very specific ways. Mark's talked about technological change in capitalism in the Greenruss in 1858. So I think, actually, the words he uses are perfectly appropriate. I'm not going to say post-capitalism. We didn't call capitalism post-feudalism. It had a new name. So if we're therefore discussing the branding, fine. But there is a clear intellectual heritage here which can be traced back to the ideas of Karl Marx. He called it communism. I think Jeremy Corbyn would ever wear one of those T-shirts. No. But he's also not... I don't agree with Jeremy. Jeremy Corbyn isn't a communist. I'd say he's quite clearly in the tradition of democratic socialism, which, yes, within the Labour Party is quite radical. I don't think he's a communist. No, of course he's not. Probably 90% communist. Well, let's not go on the percentage. What are you 90%? I know plenty of people who are literally fascists. And they ought to be encouraged to declare the fact and put it on a T-shirt so we'd know what we were dealing with. But is it more romanticised to say I'm literally a communist than it would be to say I'm literally a fascist? Well, you do have a very good point that communism, although it failed and failed brutally with an enormous amount of bloodshed, still has a sort of mystique about it, a kind of student Che Guevara mystique about it. And that, I think, is because people who believe in the free market, as I do, haven't been robust enough in defending the things we believe in. All right. Well, look, who wants this T-shirt? Suzanne. It's not my colour. Not your colour? Maybe not your size. I'll leave it here then. On the other side. Or do you want it back, Aaron? No, no, you can have it. I'll keep it here. I won't be wearing it.