 Thank you everyone for making this event possible and particularly thank you to you Yanis for taking the time and we're very very grateful and happy to see you among us. Thank you for agreeing to be with us Yanis. The next set of questions are born out of the complex interests of our community of faculty members and students and given the wide scope of your writing and activity as Adam has just described we will be able only to scratch the surface but we will do our best to cover as much as we can for our community that cares about Palestine, black history, gender rights, workers rights, ecology and decolonization among many other issues. While I wanted to have a structured discussion with you beginning with the academia moving to politics which I hope we still will have we cannot ignore what happens in Palestine right now. A criminal Israeli prime minister who tries to avoid jail pursues a provocative action against the holiest place for Islam in Palestine and the third holiest place for Muslims all over the world in order to ignite a conflict that would retain him in power. In order to do so he aligned himself with the right wing in Israel which today dominates Israeli politics and whose agenda is to judyize fully Jerusalem and the West Bank through means of another catastrophe or nakba. Brave Palestinian youth were able to throw some parts of this plan defending the homes of the people of Sheikh Jarrah and the sacred Al Aqsa Mosque. It was clear to everyone that the Hamas in Gaza would not remain idle against such a provocation and aggression nor will large segments of the Palestinian people who have been living for decades under harsh colonization brutal occupation and subject to incremental ethnic cleansing. We might be in the thoughts of a third uprising a third intifada which includes large segments of the forgotten Palestinians inside Israel living in unrecognized villages which are refused basic infrastructure from the state or in overcrowded towns. This allowed to expend under the apartheid laws of the land regime in Israel with high levels of unemployment as a result of the de facto apartheid imposed by Israel on its Palestinian citizens. The Palestinian Authority is helpless, the Arab regime seek normalization rather than commitment and the West is always silent and I have not heard much of the Muslim world as yet. What can we do right now to you in your opinion should we strengthen our support for the boycott and investment sanction movement should we ask for sanctions by governments what is the next step in our solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine given the unfolding reality in front of our eyes in the last 48 to 72 hours so I don't I hope you don't mind we start with this and then we move to more historical and theoretical questions. Ilan thank you very much for not just the invitation but for everything you've done over the the years the decades to illuminate what is going on and to help me personally me personally understand what's going on you ask me what should we do and you listed the number of things the answer of course is all of the above we need to take this struggle for primarily informing people and also calling upon governments shaming governments into taking a position and not to pretend that this is some conflict between two equals that the rest of the world has the right to look upon dispassionately I remember you know let me just take this for the record I've been following your writings for many many years and I remember something you wrote I think it was 12 years ago something like that I kept a note of it because I have a long archive on the Palestinian question because us was it Edward Said who said that I'm not sure whether it was Ed Said or someone said that until the Palestinians liberate themselves Europeans and Americans are not going to liberate ourselves and I think you had written that and I'll just quote that because I've got it here on my screen it seems that even the most horrendous crimes such as the genocide in Gaza are treated as desperate events unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system this is if you watch the BBC today or listen to Radio 4 or the World Service it's exactly that there is some factually important that so many rockets were fired from Gaza and so many bombs landed in Gaza and this building was demolished and so many people died and so many but it is as if to quote again your brilliant words it is as if the whole thing is unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with it with any system or ideology that is racism in action that's what it is the moment you take just the figures and of a conflict and you take it out of the context of effectively an ongoing project that has been going on now for decades of ethnic cleansing of pushing a native people of its land in order to effectively wipe the slate clean the moment you're allowed to get away without any comments on this underlying project that is focusing on the events that is when you become complicit to the crime that is being perpetrated and you can see that in Germany for instance you know which is a country that is populated by people who are desperately trying to escape a dismal past by being politically correct you can see that today there's zero information regarding what's going on how did it started nobody in Germany that I know of very decent very good people knows that this latest cycle of violence of conflict began when dozens of families were threatened with expulsion from their home and the dynamitizing of their buildings so we need to do so much at every different front but let me now wear my greek political hat just for a moment to convey to you and to relate to you my desperation my deep sense of shame and foreboding you will recall and it was mentioned in my introduction that in 2015 I became part of the government here in Greece it was the most progressive government probably in europe we were the result of massive demonstrations in 2011 you know the equivalent of occupy world street equivalent of the ignanders in Spain a broad coalition of progressives gave rise to a movement that in the end took a small party from of the left of the former europe communist left from four percent and gave us 40 percent and we stormed the citizens of power we became the government part of our agenda was solidarity with the people of palestine anti-racism and fighting every form of racism including of course primarily anti-semitism but solidarity with the people of palestine for six months we put up a tremendous struggle the greek people rose to the occasion and very courageously increased their support of us from 40 percent to 60 percent and on that night my then comrade and prime minister surrendered to the powers that be the powers that be where the representatives of the international oligarchy the international monetary fund the european central bank the european commission now why am i telling you all this because you know one surrender brings on another within weeks after my resignation after that surrender of our government which was supported by people who had shown a remarkable solidarity to the palestinians since the 1920s 1980s and before yasera arafat when he escaped beirut if you remember back in the early 1980s found refuge in a very welcoming greece um that party that government within weeks of the surrender to the international oligarchy were hobnobbing with netanyahu the fortune alliance with netanyahu's government and they planned together to dominate the eastern mediterranean through a series of aggressive moves to drill the bottom of the mediterranean sea and to construct gas pipelines all in association in a very close association collaboration with exon mobil with the french total and of course with donald trump that degeneration of a political progressive government movement uh in whose dna support of the palestinian people was um embedded so quickly into a staunch ally of netanyahu i have to tell you that this hurt me even more than the actual surrender to the troika because you know deep down we all want to give our comrades uh even when we disagree and fall out with them we want to give them the benefit of the doubt so there is no doubt that we were under immense pressure from international finance to buckle now i don't think we should have ever considered buckling especially after that tremendous victory in the referendum of the fifth of july 2015 but you know in the end something at the back of my mind wanted to forgive to give a good cause to my comrades cprs for instance for surrendering but the sight of him hobnobbing with netanyahu the manner in which the so-called party of the radical left immediately forgot its solidarity to the palestinian people let me give you an example now they're in one position of course the green people have attendance quite rationally and wisely to punish every party that betrays its its commitments so now we have a very right wing government that overthrew that series of government now they are still they're in opposition now they're still supporting this treaty with netanyahu i stand in on the floor of our parliament and i address political parties and i'm saying is this not the time at least to recognize the palestinian authorities as a state even though i am of the belief that now this the two state solution is is gone and passed and i think like you i support one democratic state for everyone i challenge them to say what they will do in order to restore greek support for the palestinian people and they look at me even the comrades of the left they look at me in the eye and they keep silent and as we know this kind of silence is the greatest ally of the crime that is being perpetrated that silence is guilty that attempt to take an equal position or actually not an equidistant position not to take sides is simply a vote of confidence for mr netanyahu so our struggle here in greece is to reignite the support for anti-racism everywhere in the world for fighting anti-semitism while at the same time bringing to the court of public opinion the news of the apartheid policies that are being practiced in israel i'm very pleased that the the human right watch delivered their report on apartheid i i i feel personally indebted to batselam and to other comrades in israel for bringing up the question of apartheid this is what we're trying to do is deem 25 in germany in particular where you are almost immediately silenced as an anti-semite if you talk about apartheid so if you're an anti-racist you immediately assume that to be an anti-racist means that you're an anti-semite we we need to fight at many different fronts at all levels simultaneously ceaselessly night and day sorry for being for taking so long to answer but this really hurts because you know this place here used to be at least when it came to support and solidarity for the palestinian people quite solid we are no longer solid we've been corrupted by the oligarchy and by the promise of security alliances against turkey as if this is going to provide security to anyone yes i'm so glad you're saying it because as as you know you know you'll ask the israeli foreign minister or foreign ministry diplomats which other countries in europe which they find are the best allies of israel at this moment in time unfortunately greece would be one of them but i think as i noticed myself when i come to talk in essence in greece the civil society very much being still pro-palestinian and in that respect we still have hope that also politics from above in greece would return to what they used to be because palestinians need every possible ally definitely in the mediterranean and in places in southern europe which are so near to palestine in the struggle of the palestinian so yanis will move discreetly from the topic to topic as much as our time would allow us i think all these topics are connected by your activism and writing and thinking so even if they seem discreet they do have a lot in common before i thought we will begin with the crisis in palestine i hope to actually start with the academia which is the place most of us are coming from tonight and i know that at the height of your political career you would sneak back to the academia whenever you could and examine in many ways the relevance of your former home which was the department of economics or the queen of the social sciences the discipline of economics and you sort of would look at it and to see how much is it still relevant to the reality that you experience yourself versus an activist and as a politician so it seems that ambiguously while you were happy to be in a comfort zone at the same time revisiting your local sanctuary filled you if i understood correctly from what i read uh and and heard filled you with frustration economics the discipline seemed still to be decoupled uh from the economic and political realities of our world it seems that economic departments in the uk in the us and in many other places as you commented several times underwriting the importance of the history of economics are fascinated with purist models examined in laboratories where space time and as you rightly comment that are disturbing variants that will not be factored in in order not to undermine the pretend that predictive power of economic theory the fact that these expert teaching economics have dismally failed again and again in providing any valid prediction in particular on the eve of big spousings in the capitalist system mainly by disregarding ethical and ideological considerations which are painted as disruptive scientific research did not seem to change much in the way economics is taught or researched until today as a historian who is aware that i can easily argue and counter argue with myself and others with the very same facts realizing that the different versions of narratives would stand primarily from external factors such as my moral positionality today i can fully empathize with the humble recognition that economics like the discipline of history are not sciences while both disciplines have crucial elements of empirical study facts methods and models the end product prediction or historical analysis is the outcome of non-scientific elements but as much as it is of the empirical evidence gathered from the laboratory or the archive this is a position which is not easy to adopt divides politics ideology ethics and morality to enter our world of scholarly work through the main door and not claim to be successfully blocked in the gates of the university by academic apparatus such an invitation is still regarded as a heresy in many academic circles either because people believe it is still possible to be objective or because such a stance could dry out funding for our research and governments unwilling to support research contradicting their policy or corporations reluctant to fund research that undermines their interests am i presenting a position that you can identify with and if you do do you see any hope for the discourse of plurality rather than the discourse of proof is being able to guide future research and teaching in economics in particular do you see any change in the way economic is being taught research and what kind of change would you like to see still going on in the part of academia that deals with economy political economy and so many other issues that you were familiar with both of the politicians as a theorist and as an activist absolutely i wholeheartedly endorse your take on economics i would take it further and i will in a minute do i see any prospects of economics academic economics becoming more civilized and more relevant no i don't and i'll explain that as well when it comes to what should be done how should economics be taught i'll answer that question first and then go to the beginning to explain why we are in the state of play that we find ourselves in what i think we should do and this is what i try to do in uh undergraduate teaching year one semester one which is a thing so important to get them when they are young because if you don't then mechanism well is to teach the parallel evolution of capitalism and of our ideas about capitalism to teach those two as two parallel paths to explain you know why did adam smith write the wealth of nations in 1776 why wasn't it written in 100 years before so you you you start talking about the historical necessity of throwing light on events that seemed absolutely indecipherable like for instance the decoupling of political power from economic power suddenly some people had huge power economically but they didn't have any political power the merchants the first industrialists uh then to explain you know why did economists like david ricardo suddenly turn against landowners even though they were themselves landowners the invention of the concept of economic grant why did carl marx become carl marx why was he writing about um you know the fluctuations of the economic cycle in volume one and finally and most importantly why was it that economics became transformed from a holistic organic approach like the one you described where you had didn't matter whether you were left-wing right-wing favor of free market capitalism or a gang's whether you were in other words john steward mill or you were carl marx you approached the big questions organically what is it that gives rise to wealth creation how is income distributed what is the mechanism by which competition leads to innovation innovation leads to capital accumulation capital accumulation leads to investment investment leads to technical progress technical progress leads to social ruptures and so on these were the big questions that the first economists who didn't actually call themselves economists tackled but then at some point in the middle of the 19th century let's say 1860s onwards suddenly you get a species of economics that is completely and utterly different which is mathematicalized which is treating capitalism as if it is a phenomenon very much like the motion of the planets in a utonian sense whereby a set of equations a system of equations needs to be solved so that we can work that work out how the whole thing works operates functions and suddenly you have this professionalization that the academic economist embedded in the great universities in europe suddenly speak a language that adam smith and john steward mill and david card and carl marx and the rest would not recognize you have no time for why why why did that happen the sociology of the profession in other words to cut a very very long story short let me say that i have been referring to economics as a most peculiar failure by that what i allude to is a very interesting inverse darwinist darwinian process in nature according to darwin you have mutations and a process of adaptation that favors the capacity to remain in tune with one's environment in economics you have exactly the opposite the less irrelevant the model is to really exist in capitalism the greater the academic power in parts to the economist who comes up with that kind of theory now how can that possibly be the case well the greatest utility for economic academic economics comes from appearing as the physics of the social sciences the queen of the social sciences as you put it to gain an upper hand vis-a-vis anthropology sociology so on economists found it very profitable to be able to present themselves as a scientist of society to make the distinction between positive economics and normative economics a description of how the of capital of how capitalism works which is scientific independent in the same way that you can have a nazi physicist like we did in the 1930s and 40s and a communist physicist or a you know liberal democrat physicist they can have huge differences of opinion when it comes to politics and ethics but when it comes to physics you know they agree because you know the the way atoms work is independent of our ideas about society and humanity and economists got a lot of power out of pretending that academic economics that they could distinguish and separate the science of economics the description of how capitalism works from our ideas of how society should be structured positive normative now if you're going to be a scientist of society and this is what they try to do you need to emulate the methods of science now what were the methods of science that succeeded in imparting so much discursive power to isaac newton the method where you begin with axioms that could be right or wrong like for instance the axiom of energy conservation the principle of energy conservation newton's idea that energy does not dissipate into nothing it is not born out of nothing but it's constant and simply changes form from kinetic to thermal and so on which you know had no evidence that that was so it was an axiom then working out the mathematical relationship between velocity acceleration mass and so on that would be true would hold if the axiom was right and then go into the laboratory to do the empirical testing if the empirics did not contradict the mathematical form of the theory then the axiom was supported that's how physics works so the economists who became the first professors of economics the first recognized scientists of society emulated that process so they started the game with axioms now if you're going to have a universal axiom about how everything works like you know the principle of energy conservation which applies in britain in palestine on mars in the distant parts of the galaxy if you're going to emulate that universality you have to come up with a very general proposition like for instance you know humans do whatever maximizes their utility function okay now that's a tautology really it's not particularly insightful unlike the principle of energy conservation from that you get mathematical equations describing human behavior consumer choice producer choice and so on and you end up with a system of equations now i guarantee you that if you give a child a high school teacher a teacher a student pupil a system of two equations into unknowns they have an urge unless they are extremely bored with with algebra right to actually solve it to see you know what's x and what's y we have a tendency if we see a simple equation with one unknown to actually solve it and find the value of x and there's a kind of sense of achievement when you actually solve it so a system of equations immediately creates a psychological urge for us to solve it now the problem with the systems of equations that capture the capitalist economy equations that have variables such as prices of things including the price of labor which is a wage the price of money which is the interest rate and quantities you know tons of tomatoes potatoes the quantity of money that is being demanded for investment purposes oh these are quantities so you have equations demand and supply one is one side of the equation supplies the other to equilibrate can we find the prices and quantities that solve this in other words can there be an equilibrium in the capitalist market that would make everybody as well off as they can be without making anyone else worse off this is the principle of optimality of efficiency now the problem is that to solve any such system of equations you have to make assumptions which spectacularly pushed you away from reality let me give you an example of an assumption that you have to make there is no time and there can be no time because the moment you allow time to sip in then changes are being made that make the system of equations impossible to solve so you make all these assumptions because let's face it you have paged these students and if you were an economist an economics professor you pierced a student you would only able to get the thesis defended properly as an economic theorist if after having specified a system of equations that captures the market for oil the market for whatever or all markets as one at once a general equilibrium the only way positing a system of equations is not enough they have to solve it by having this need to solve it and institutionally otherwise they don't get their phd they don't get published in the good journals once they have their phd they don't get their lectureship once they get published there is an institutional drive to close the model to solve the system to introduce in other words assumptions axioms that remove this whole system of thought totally from really existing capitalism really existing capitalism cannot survive without time for instance right so they need to remove that that essential aspect of reality of capitalist reality in order to create a model of capitalism that's why i call it the most uh a most peculiar failure the most successful they are at distancing the economics from capitalism the greater their capacity to get tenure in the good schools and once they get tenure then they get very cushy um research projects and commissions from financial the financial sector and what fascinated me back in the 1980s uh in the 1990s when i was studying all that was that the very same unrealistic axioms that are necessary in order to complete one's academic career were the very same assumptions that finances used in order to close their financial models the models behind the construction by liman brothers and goldman sacks of the derivatives that blew up in 2008 so the the more anti scientific in a sense you wear in order to solve your scientific mathematical models the more you distance yourself from really existing capitalism the more successful you became as an economist the more money you brought to the economics department the greater the opportunities of getting a Nobel prize in economics that is a most peculiar failure it is as if there is a whole system of incentives designed as if designed i'm not saying that there's a conspiracy nobody designed them it's a priesthood that reproduces itself through those particular practices practices that lead to the uh permanent and unbridgeable irreversible disengagement between economic theory and really existing capitalism now is it any wonder that when 2008 happened the queen of england um asked the members of the royal economic society why didn't you see it coming and they had no idea it took them days to come up with a groveling letter of apology saying you know models they couldn't tell us of course they couldn't tell you because they were designed not to tell you they were designed not to have anything interesting useful relevant to say about really existing capitalism and this is why you were powerful so it was you see there is a fundamentally profound difference between saying that you know economics failed from saying what i'm saying which is a very uh specific charge if you want that economics is designed to acquire discursive power in our academy and in society at large in proportion to its incapacity to understand capitalism and that is why i think that the solvent the answer is what i said at the beginning teach the models but in the same way that you need to teach theology the same way you explain for instance you know what happened to precipitate the schism between the catholic church and the orthodox church and therefore to bring on the crusades that destroyed palestine the disagreements amongst theologians regarding filiokve and whether the holy spirit is moved about by the will of god or god and christ and so on you need to embed this in a history of the politics economics the trade clashes between the eastern and western parts of the former roman empire or the roman empire and to embed a theory about theories with a historical account of how the world we live in emerged you're muted at thingy land yes i think the last person who was still teaching uh as a main course or main module as we call it in britain of history of economics was was retired from came to university about few years ago so definitely history is not being part of the curriculum in any way or form uh but i think there's a good example current example to what you were talking about and maybe that's a good moment to move to to a related notion or a related issue that we should discuss and this is the the situation that emerged in the world both the economic and political world uh under the pandemic under covid 19 and in the dystopian mood some of us fear that what you call rightly techno feudalism uh is is collaborating now even maybe replaced or augmented by bio bio feudalism pharmaceutical giants developing research with the taxpayers money producing and selling solutions paid by taxpayers money in the name of public health and under the panic of of the pandemic uh there and other corporation shares rise in the stock exchange markets while the number of unemployed working and middle class people is unprecedented all over the world the same is true about companies that produce surveillance products now what is your antidote that might help see the pandemic reality as a moment of hope rather than despairing about it an optimism that would maybe justify the question mark that you have put on your on the title of your wonderful book and the weak suffer what they must you put there a question mark uh so maybe the weak don't have don't have to suffer uh in a way so do you see an array of hope out of the the reality of the pandemic uh in terms of world economy global economy and uh the near and maybe the more distant future in this respect always I always see hope wherever I look I'm not optimistic because optimism is the poor cousin of hope but I always see hope whether it was a 2008 crisis this pandemic hope is everywhere wherever you look when you look into the eyes of the young who are resisting climate change trades unionists rising up in new jersey in Bangladesh against amazons working conditions hope is always there but I think the the you know just to just to answer your question directly the antidote to this globalized techno feudalism and by the way the bio feudalism is part of techno feudalism I'm not simply talking about digital technologies I'm talking about the capacity of high tech whether it's bio high tech or digital high tech to aid and abet the creation of a new kind of feudalism I'll come back to this in a moment but the antidote is democratic international movements internationalist democratic movements some of us have come together um actually it was a year ago today um in what we call the progressive international uh Bernie Sanders and I kick started that in November 2018 in Vermont now it has been taken over by movements from around the world from Africa from Asia from Latin America from the United States here in Europe and for me that is a great source of hope because let's face it the land you know the bankers and the fascists have internationalized they understand very well they understand fully the power of solidarity they are very solidistic to one another you know Modi Salvini Le Pen Trump Bolsonaro Netanyahu they love each other they show it and they are completely solidistic to one another similarly if you go to Davos not that you should or you will um I'm sure you will find people sitting around the table bankers from different countries from England from Switzerland from Thailand from Nigeria there's no racism there is no discrimination amongst them they're like brothers and sisters well this is the time that internationalists do the same thing just one word one um brief explanation of the term technophilialism the way I understand it you see in at the beginning of the 20th century the rosy view of capitalism as a competitive village like marketplace in which the baker the brewer the butcher these are the three iconic figures featuring in Adam Smith's account of free markets had a little bit sidelined by the large corporations the network firms of Thomas Edison Henry Ford and so on we had already moved to what Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin and others refer to as monopoly capitalism but what happened in 2008 was a structural shift away from that some friends of mine even colleagues of mine comrades of mine um are somehow puzzled by my insistence that 2008 was for capitalism that which for um that for which 1991 did to the Soviet Union in satellites it's the end of capitalism 2008 in the sense that we are no longer after 2008 in a standard monopoly capitalist environment walmart Henry Ford those were the examples of the monopolists that um regrouped after the end of breton woods after the end of the second world war and became what john kenneth galtbraith referred to as the technostructure that is a kind of central planning by a cartel of industrialists that was monopoly capitalism and this was still capitalist it was monopolist capitalist but still capitalist in the sense that the basic force driving the world economy was surplus value to put it in the max in terms it was profits realized from the labor process from the disparity between the value of labor going inside commodities and services by workers and the value of their labor time wages so the standard process of capital accumulation of capitalist production yielding profits profits then driving the system that was maintained even during the phase of monopoly capitalism that people like pole swissie and um my great friends from monthly review in new york were so beautifully mapping out uh but since 2008 that has ended since 2008 when under the weight of the hubris of the financial sector the whole thing blew up central banks came in and started pumping whole rivers of cash into the capitalist framework they wanted to make this temporary to refloat the financial sector but in refluting the financial sector practicing what i call socialism for the finances and huge austerity for everyone else across the world what they did was to zombify corporations and banks and effectively you've got corporations that are doing really very well financially but whose financial health is not related to their profitability if you look especially now and this has been exacerbated hugely in the pandemic but it's not new the pandemics is simply exacerbated it has accelerated it has deepened this process but the process began in 2009 under obama and the very successful attempt to refloat the financial sector the process is now very straightforward central banks print oodles of cash they give it to the private banks the private banks are not going to lend it to the little people to the small businesses because universal austerity means that the little people cannot be relied upon to repay it so what the bankers do is they pick up the phone and they call a large conglomerate like apple in the united states like volkswagen in Germany alstom in france and so on and they say look i have a few billion that the central bank has given to me they've given it to me at negative interest rates so i can give it to you for free zero interest rate and i still make a profit do you want it now these corporations because they can they can also see that the little people cannot buy their stuff are not investing they are sitting on a pile of savings for the first time in the history of capitalism corporations have savings corporations are not meant to have savings households are meant to save and corporations are meant to borrow to invest so when you see that apple has 200 billion us dollars as a saving a saving spiral similarly in europe you think my god something's going wrong here so the reason why they are not saved they are not investing it's because they fear the little the little people because of austerity universal austerity will not be able to buy their stuff so when deutsche bank or bank of america city group goldman sachs societe general called them out and said you know i have a few billion for free do you want they say okay bring it on but they're not going to use it to save to sorry to you to invest what they do is they take this money and immediately go to the stock exchange where they buy their own shares so apple takes central bank money via the private bank and purchases apple shares folks wagon purchases folks wagon shares so the share markets go up you've got this remarkable performance have you noticed that during the pandemic when everything shut down everything shut down you know profits went to deeply into the red everywhere in the world and yet the financial markets were going gangbusters now why because of the process i am describing on the 12th of august 2020 it was a remarkable phenomenon in the city of london 905 in the morning i marked the times as well 905 in the morning we had the news unprecedented news and news that had not been predicted by the markets that the uk's national income gdp fell by more than 20 percent for the first time in the history of british capitalism that was way above what the markets expected 15 minutes later the london stock exchange goes up which means that the finances thought oh that's good news now how can it be good news when you can even claim that this was all factored it was not factored it they were surprised the reason why the london stock exchange went up was because they were surprised by how bad things were now does this make sense yes it does because they understood that we don't live in capitalism anymore that we live in a world which is sitting on a capitalist world which is now being fed by state money produced by the central banks and they think this thinks we're really awful in really existing capitalism which is great news for them because it means that the bank of england the central bank of the united kingdom is going to start printing even more money to give to them why shouldn't they be happy because they know they will that the people of their ilk will take the central bank money the additional central bank money take it to the london stock exchange and buy their own shares so they think okay excellent opportunity to buy this decoupling of financial wealth creation from capitalism and capitalist profits that means the end of capitalism from where i'm standing and also if you add to that the new technologies the digital technologies and you mentioned the the biotech technologies as well but the digital ones are very big at this moment why not only i mean you know Pfizer and Moderna and so on they they now have immense power of a society because they are producing the stuff which saves lives but there is an even more grotesque power by digital platforms like amazon the moment you enter amazon you accept capitalism it is as if you've stepped out onto the street of your town the you know commercial road of your town whichever town you're happy to be living in high street as the english would say or main street in america and suddenly if you look around it is as if you're in a science fiction movie and you realize that every building every shop every house is owned by one person that whatever is being offered to you to purchase has not been produced by that one person but it is being controlled by the one person that one person is sold to you by that one person who determines what you can see what you can buy at what price you can buy it the air you breathe the tarmac on which you walk the bench on which you sit to take a rest they all belong to that one person yeah there used to be a word for that it was it used to be called feudalism this is why i'm saying that since 2008 we live in a techno feudal world now this techno feudal world is exceptionally fragile and unstable and the greatest threat to the many to the demos is that they will mistake this ironclad looking system as a powerful solid system which it is not the power of the jeff bases of the world of the sugerbergs of the owners of feis and so on is the false belief in the mind of the many that they are powerless as individuals what we need to do to bring the demos back into democracy is at the international level to let people into a very large secret things could be otherwise as david greber used to say that they have the power well uh on that inspiring uh final sentence uh we either ensued enough people or made them angry enough but there's a lot of questions so i think we'll uh ianis will go to the audience thank you so much for this i i sorely enjoyed it and learned so much of it of course we as we say we just scratch the surface to try and unpack the world we live in uh from a political economic point of view and moral point of view so i'm handing back the uh the floor to to whom katie to to kali hello hi thank you both thank you for that um i wish it could go on but it would be good to bring in our audience and hear what they have to say um we had nine questions relinked to palestine and they were pointing to the role of the eu the rise of anti bds legislation the sale of the calamata airport to elbit systems the greek parliament links between palestine and kishmir so we tried to cluster them and i'm going to read it question so thank you to everybody who did put those questions in um we've tried to bring them together into one question to both our speakers and it is in the current moment what is the most effective way of supporting palestinians and palestinian resistance and what do you think of political strategies of the left in the eu towards palestine today thank you since you since uh the beginning of the sentence was in the current moment can you allow me to uh give you some breaking news as as i speak now as we speak um less than a kilometer from where i am the athens police the greek police unleashed a massive um attack assault on young people including members of our party who have been demonstrating support of palestine i just felt the need to state that as a news flash if you want so what do we need to do is a lot more of that and i think that and this is you know look we all know what we need to do we need to go out there and make it impossible for the silence to prevail that's our number one duty if we do that then everything else is going to follow the greatest support and ally of netanyahu and apartheid in israel and palestinian lands is silence so we need to break that silence there's no doubt about that beyond that there's nothing more to say i just truly believe that the rest is going to follow but here i i i need illan's uh um council and advice illan i have a question for you on this issue because i don't know what the the answer is and i'm asking you now as a party leader because i need to go into parliament and also to our party congress which is happening next month um and we are going to be discussing palestine and what our party should be doing regarding that now i ever since i read edwards said a long time ago uh and his opposition to the oslo chords um and his view that it's not too late for it to state solution and we need a single states to i believe that i think that he's right um this is a civil rights issue uh you know as a european i want a democratic federation of europeans i don't want borders uh and in a place as tight geographically tight as palestine uh to me it seems very difficult to imagine two states that are worth having i mean you could we could create two states but i'm not sure they would be progressive states um freedom-loving and democratic states so do i propose to our party congress on the fourth fifth of june that we support a single um non-religious secular state in palestine because i have you know palestinian comrades here in greece who say but you don't want to extinguish our aspirations for a palestinian state i need your support your advice on this land uh you're right it's it's a conundrum because on the one hand those who are representing the palestinian people whether it's the pa or palestinian members of knesset in israel or officials who are still connected to the plo still support the two state solution on the other hand uh you're you know five minutes on the ground it's very easy to analyze and to see that this is not going to work not just because of additional to what you have said because also this was never a solution that really dealt with the main issue in palestine which was the zionist ideology the colonization of palestine two states never offered decolonization of palestine and we need as much as it sounds like an anachronistic term in the 21st century but we need to decolonize the whole of historical palestine also in a way that would allow the refugees to return and to build an equitable uh and democratic society for all i understand the the difficulty of taking a position which is not yet taken by the plo on the other hand there is a pace of destruction on the ground and there is a disconnect between many of the institution that used to represent facefully the palestinian people like the plo and the civil society that i think it could be a really uh a very positive contribution uh if you articulate a support for this idea uh and and this could be uh i think really a landmark in the way international politics uh interact with the realities uh in palestine probably a alternative or option b for this is at least to adopt the three points that the bds movement has put forward which is to stress that we are asking for sanctions and boycott in order to respect the rights of the palestinians in the west bank uh not to live under a occupation and the right of the palestinian gaza not to live under siege the right of the palestinians inside israel not to live under an apartheid system and the right of the refugees uh to return because i think that if you take the three rights together it is another way of supporting uh the one state solution but um you know i'm part of a movement on the ground for the one democratic state what we are doing we engage intensively now with all the people who are representing the palestinians whether in ramallah or inside or in gaza or in the refugee camps we really would love to see the palestinian national movement galvanized behind the idea of a one state solution which would make it easier for for people like you for people like you and your party of course to support it but i do think that articulated in the right way this is something that would have a positive influence on the discourse on the future of palestine or the reality of palestine and would include all the palestinians and the whole of palestine in our discussion because what the two state solution does it reduces the palestinians to those who live in the west bank and the gaza strip and it reduces palestine to 22 percent of historical palestine and i think any discourse that is relevant to the whole of palestine and to all of the palestinians is a very welcome uh support and contribution i think to the discussion okay uh we have a next question uh which is coming from abed hawaja from on zoom and abed is asking a question to janice around the way that university economics is taught he notes that professor richard wolf once commented on his own education economics education in in the united states and and said that the top university is basically the economics education is extremely politicized and you have students graduating from these institutions who have never studied marx and abed's question is how can is it possible to ever fix this problem it's far worse than that far far worse than that i remember um what seven or eight years ago i was um external examiner at the university of game bridge in one of the colleges i won't mention which and um you know my job was to assess the quality of education that uh those great undergraduates received in economics and i was a cast to find out that the university of game bridge the answer to the question that i put to the students which was a ridiculous question uh how many of you have read any canes zero graduates of economics from the university of game bridge canes's university marks canes they haven't read off they don't read anything and you know what even the new members of staff i you know the people who swear in the name of you know kenneth aro of gerard de bre the greats of their own economics i doubt they've read aro or de bre ever you know now they do you know we are in in in an academia in an economics academia that punishes people from for writing books and for reading books i remember i was actually applying for a job many years ago um and i was told that my CV is very good and they wanted to give me the job but can we take the books out that i've written for my CV i said what and they said well because you see you know there will be people in the committee who will consider all this time you spend on writing books as being out of focus and the focus that they wanted was articles uh so they read articles and then they reproduce them and the right the right articles and it's all a self-referential pointless merry-go-round so you know it's it's it's it's an intellectual free zone economics departments these days if people are intellectuals they are being intellectuals despite of their economics academics economics um position and let me give you another piece of information that you may not have all those fantastic mathematical economists that've gotten a bell prices you know if you if you go to anybody any financial engineer in Goldman Sachs and you say okay mate now what is your model of the world of capitalism they will say are you the bre this is what they will say if they if they are schooled at all if they know anything about economic theory their own economic theory the mainstream you know liberal establishment economic theory they will mention arrow and the bread now what they will not tell you because they don't know it is that Kenneth Arrow denounced anyone who uses his models you know to explain capitalism and to do policy on that i remember Kenneth Arrow you know that great doyen of the establishment of academic economics in a in a similar in 1991 at the University of New York NYU it was a small seminar room uh Ken came in and presented one of his mathematical models extremely complicated wonderful man fantastic presentation aesthetically your mathematics on the board were beautiful right so he goes from one equation to the other and there is one of the younger professors from NYU and says uh professor uh equation 3a dashed uh makes me think that perhaps when we are taxing business we should be taxing using this tax system rather than that tax system and Ken stops and looks at him and he says my dear young man or sometimes he was quite condescending he said you're confusing that which is useful with that which is interesting this is interesting it is not useful if you try to apply it you're going to do a lot of damage to a lot of people so you know it's like the pope not believing not being faithful all right but going through the motions and then coming out even and saying look i don't believe there is a god right but the second rate cardinals being exceptionally polemic and you know Spanish inquisition like believers this is the the the tragedy in economics now the additional strategy for students of economics is that especially in Britain i hope that this is not the case in xeter i'm sure it is not the case at xeter university right um but i it is definitely the case in place like the lsc they buy series they cannot compete with harvard and yale for the publication record of professors they cannot give the same salaries so what they do is they say to somebody with a very good cv from the perspective of mainstream economics uh uh academia um you know here's a full-time salary you don't have to be here for more than three weeks a month a year so the students never get taught by the person who's actually come up with the theory who usually doesn't because they're smart people they don't believe in in the theories applicability to really exist in capitalism so they end up with a carat lecturer somebody who has been teaching 30 hours a day and goes through the motions of teaching the stuff and you know who won't get 10 euro and who is in a proletarian in the university system that is how academic economics operates today and it is a damn shame we're ready to move to the next question okay i guess this will be our closing question then um so maybe a quick note from the both of you the question there's two questions on the pandemic pandemic one from nulke and the other from zohar yanovichi both on youtube and they ask does the pandemic and vaccine nationalism facilitate a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy if so how can we go about reversing it and what can be done to address the type of structural problems that disadvantaged countries less capable to secure vaccines or for them to argue effectively in the world trade organization or european economic zone well i'll give you a brief answer to this on the first yes absolutely every crisis of capitalism increases inequalities and this one has turbocharged them there is no doubt about that the precarious has become more precarious the rich through the process that i described before through the money printed by the central banks you know they are they're just they're becoming obscenely wealthier in their sleep as it you know not just out of innovation of doing something clever they are just sleeping there and suddenly you know billions and billions are added to the wealth this this is a what we do about it what the first step should be i mentioned that before imagine if the i mean already we've seen a little bit of that with trump first and biden more recently giving checks of you know dollars thousands of dollars to individuals imagine if we all had a central bank account and suddenly you know two thousand dollars or euros or whatever appeared in that bank account without any kind of process of bureaucracy any kind of just give it to everyone and then you know the the the wealthy can be taxed on this at the end of the year that's something you can do really very quickly if you really care about using the printing presses for the many not the few as my friend Jeremy Corbyn would say so this is something really very quick you can do regarding vaccines and the developing world look this whole discussion about patents is really very interesting and and very irrelevant because even if the patents were to i mean i want to see the patents be released to go back to what we had in the 1950s with the polio vaccine whose inventor gave it to humanity as a as a free good which is probably good which it should be but even if today Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca were to give away the patent you know a factory a pharmaceutical factory in india or in south africa it would take them 18 months to produce the first vaccine by that time thousands will have died unnecessarily for me what is absolutely essential is again i go back to the fact that if you look at the money that is being printed as we speak by all the central banks it's just you know a million times more than what is necessary in order to pay for the vaccines you know you're printing all this money well give it to those multinationals to buy huge quantities of vaccines and spread them around the world do it today because i think that the most revolutionary policy is not one that simply sits back and says another world is possible and expects you know the social revolution to happen and then afterwards we will solve the problems the most revolutionary policy is to point out to people out there who are not interested in our visions about socialism and other now and utopia and so on they they are struggling to make to survive until the end of the week to show to them that within the current circumstance the current system you know the parts that we could actually have a vaccine in their in their arm tomorrow without without socialism or without even social democracy just you know they are printing all this money just pay it and send it to them and because only when they realize that things could be very different even today under the present capitalist techno feudal system call it what you might may only then will they revolt i know that we are running out of time cali and you said this is the last question so maybe i will just end by again mentioning Palestine in this connection and i think part of what we discussed today Yanis is about the ethical dimension where we talk about bio feudalism or techno feudalism and the way the pandemic has exasperated existing disparities in society it's good to remind us that another kind of very ugly aspect of this whole crisis when it comes to Palestine is the way that Israel is using the question of vaccine in order to impose another kind of oppression on the Palestinian either withholding it or not giving it or creating a link between getting it and so-called good Palestinian behavior is another callous aspect that we should remember even if today we are and rightly are grieving for the attacks on Gaza on Jerusalem and so on the kind of techno feudalism that Yanis is talking about is supporting the oppression of the Palestinians and that's why we need to work together political economists historians and activists to expose the full picture how the global economic system and the particular oppression of the Palestinians go hand in hand and therefore Yanis your initiative with Barney Sanders and so on shows that only a global solidarity really movement will tip the balance in places such as Palestine and beyond and I hope we we will all be able to contribute in our way to such an international what I called antidote or an alliance that challenges the kind of alliance that makes our life miserable impossible and oppressive and believing our power to change that reality thank you Yanis for taking the time and thank you everyone else I would leave it to Kali to conclude the meeting and thank you again