 and our first speaker will be Yaron Brooke. I'd like you to check out his podcast, The Yaron Brooke Show. His latest book is called Equal is Unfair. And he will be followed by Josh Holroy from marxist.com and Socialist Appeal. And you can get hold of their podcast at IMTV podcast. So IMTV podcast on YouTube as well. And the floor for 10 minutes each, opening statements, five minutes for a butthole, then a ongoing debate for a bit and then we come to you for a Q&A. Yaron, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you all for coming. This is amazing to see such a great turnout out here. Although I have to say that it's a little shocking to me. The very fact that here we are in the 21st century and we have to debate this issue is quite shocking. I mean, it's funny, maybe a bit of chalk. Because my meaning of history is that debate has been over for decades. Socialism everywhere, every time, to the extent that it is practiced is a massive unequivocal failure. And I don't mean just that, you know, higher unemployment or economic growth is slow. I mean, people die. I mean, people, a lot of people die. And to ignore that fact about socialism is to ignore history. Socialism kills. Socialism is killing people right now in Venezuela. Now, I know we're going to hear a lot about how Venezuela is not socialist. So maybe we should define our terms. Socialism, in my view, is the system from an economic perspective. The redistributes large quantities of wealth from those who have, those who are able to those who need. And the system where the means of production are either nationalized or collectivized, given over to the workers. By those standards, you know, study your history, study your facts, Venezuela fits it beautifully. And indeed, what you get in Venezuela is death, starvation, poverty, an utter, complete, unequivocal failure. But that shouldn't surprise everybody, anybody, because that's the whole history of socialism. Everywhere, at any point in time, no matter who the people are, no matter what continent it's on, it fails. Whether it is the experiment of the Soviet Union with communism, or there's the experiment of China, Vietnam, you go on and on, or Sweden. Because Sweden used to be socialist, isn't it anymore? But it used to be socialist. From about 1960 to about 1994, Sweden, nationalized certain industries, increased redistribution of wealth massively. And while in Sweden it didn't kill, the Swedes stopped it before it started killing people. It drove the network. And by 1994, Sweden took a sharp turn away from socialism. They still redistribute wealth more than most, but they privatize pretty much everything. Even schools now, they have vouchers for schools. They have more school choice than we do in America. In many respects, on many parameters, Sweden today is more capitalist than America. So the history suggests, and the present suggests, that socialism has is, and I believe inevitably always will be, completely not a failure. But it's not just the economics of it. It's not just the politics of it. It's the ethics of it. The essential characteristic of socialism and all statist ideology is that the individual at the end of the day does not matter. Your achievements, your creation, your progress, you as an individual don't matter. What matters is the group, the proletarian, if you are a Marxist, the collective, the global collective. You can have the group whatever you want to define it. But socialism's essential characteristic is the sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the collective. And they're very good at sacrifice. They're brilliant at sacrifice. That's why you have the deaths and destruction, the ultimate sacrifice of some for the sake of others. Socialism rejects implicitly the idea of individual human achievement, the idea of desert that what you create is yours, the idea that private property is essential for human life, which it is. And we can get more into this, but so I think socialism is wrong, it's anti-life, it's immoral, both from a practical perspective and from a moral philosophical perspective. But what makes the fact that we need a debate so utterly shocking even more to me is the fact that capitalism has been so unbelievably successful wherever, whenever, and to the extent that it has been tried. Every way and every, in every place, every continent, every ethnic group that has tried even just a little bit of capitalism has been incredibly successful. Now let's define capitalism. What is capitalism? Capitalism is the system in which all private property, all property is privately held. It's a system on which the government protects our freedoms, not freedom as, so our freedoms as freedom as freedom from coercion, where the government protects us from cooks and criminals and fraudsters. It protects our individual rights as luck to find them and otherwise leaves us alone. And in that respect, there's never been a capitalist society, a pure capitalist society, and I acknowledge that. But to the extent that capitalism has tried, it succeeds. You might argue there's never been a pure socialist economy. Fine. But the fact is that to extent socialism and try, it fails. And all you have to do is look at the world around us, the history. 250 years ago, 95% of the globe's population, a Western U.F. population, a globe, it was probably 99% lived on $2 or $3 a day or less, what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty. Something happened about 250 years ago. Call it capitalism. That's what it was. We started limiting the role of government and we started freeing up the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the scientists to build, to create and make. And the consequence of that is that nobody in the West lives on $3 a day or less. And the number of people in the world living on $3 a day or less is shrinking dramatically to the point where, according to the United Nations, not an organization they usually cite, there will not be any people living on that. I mean, any, there will always be some, but any within 20 years. Why? Because capitalism creates huge amounts of wealth. Everybody gets richer under capitalism, not at the same rates. Inequality is a feature of capitalism. Some people get rich really fast because they produce a lot. They create a lot. Other people get rich slower because they produce less. But everybody gets richer. Everybody. At least everybody who's willing to work, who's willing to be productive at whatever level they are. Capitalism worked here in England in the 19th century. And it's sad to me that your study of 19th century is so distorted that most people don't see the magnificence of the industrial revolution. Capitalism worked in a barbaric and primitive and poor place like America that you guys abandoned wouldn't even fight the war to really keep it because it was so pathetic and let the Americans win. And it worked. Capitalism worked today. Over the last 30 years, 1.1 billion people have come out of extreme poverty. 1.1 billion. Now we should be celebrating in the streets. We should be party. This is the best news in all of human history. That number of people have come out of extreme poverty. But we don't. Because what brought them out of extreme poverty? Foreign aid? No. Charity? Maybe both gates did it. Who is charity? No. Who brought them out of extreme poverty? A little bit of capitalism. A little bit of capitalism in China. A little bit of capitalism in India. Even a little bit. A little bit of economic freedom in Vietnam and Asia has come out of poverty. Even if you go to Africa today in Rwanda, Botswana, you see a little bit of capitalism starting to bring Africa out of poverty. Capitalism is the only system to bring anybody out of poverty in human history. But more importantly, and I've got less than a minute, capitalism is the only moral system. And the reason it's a moral system is because it leaves you the individual free to pursue your life, your thoughts, your ideas, your happiness. You as an individual without being sacrificed to anybody. And indeed, if you want to be a socialist under capitalism, you can do it. You can take your friends, you can start a commute, you can take from each according to his ability and give to each according to his needs, and you can live the miserable life that that leads to. And if you don't believe me, it's miserable. Go and study the kibbutz in Israel and you'll discover how miserable communism actually leads to, in fact, in reality, even when it's voluntary. So morality and reality dictate that capitalism is far superior to socialism. Thank you. Okay, thank you for everybody for coming to this debate, which I think is going to be very interesting. I'm very excited for it. Thank you for inviting me to speak in favor of socialism. And thank you, Yaron, for giving us what is satisfied. I would say that kind of the case for the state is closed. And one thing I find particularly exciting if we're having this debate now is that in one sense, Yaron's right that about 25 years ago, basically at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, that's precisely what the world population was told. Socialism has failed. It's over. Capitalism has gone. And yet we are still having this debate. And in America, a recent Gallup poll showed that 51% of people under the age between the age of 18 and 29, 51% prefer socialism to capitalism. In the United States of America, the belly of the beast, where for decades, people have been told precisely the same arguments we've just heard now. The only reason for falling on deaf ears, why is that? Is that because a generation of Americans just have debt for stupid? No. It's because their own living experience is telling them something different. That millions upon millions of people are having an increasingly profound sense that something is not right. But the system in which we live, a capitalist system, and frankly, it doesn't matter where your definition is. This is a capitalist system we live on there. It's not working. And an alternative is necessary. So in the limited amount of time I have, I want to sort out what is capitalism? Why is it working? And why do I think that socialism is the alternative? Now, one part of the definition of capitalism that Yaron gave, which I agree with, which I'd like to continue with, is the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. I think that's incontroversible. So we're talking about the farms, the factories, the businesses where wealth is produced are privately owned in the name. Obviously, under capitalism, the state has actually intervened a great deal, but we can get on to that. But under this private ownership system, production takes place under the ownership of a single person or a company with private shareholders and of course, private, sorry, is an appropriated privately. However, there's a very interesting contradiction at the heart of the system because ownership may be private, but production isn't. Production under capitalism is more social than at any other point in human history. This vision of someone spinning a loom in their own workshop and taking their produce to market, selling it and taking the surplus entirely there, the fruit of their own loom, the fruit of their own labor. That's back from the middle ages, if not earlier. Capitalist production is uniting an army of workers in, let's say, a factory for example. The whole basis of capitalist production, not a single commodity produced under capitalism, comes out of the factory system or comes out of production without having been handled and designed and produced by thousands upon thousands of people. It's a social system in that respect. However, production may be social, but appropriation profit is private. And that causes certain contradictions and problems in the workings of the system, as we can see. Now, that's justified on kind of moral and legal grounds because apparently the workers and the boss enter into a voluntary legal agreement. The worker says, yes, I'm going to work for you and then you pay me and you can keep it. But it's not quite how that works, is it? It's not equal partnership where the worker is paid the value that they produce that they contribute to the good. If they were there, there would be no profit and there would be no problems. Instead actually the worker is paid for their value as a worker. Their value as a worker is basically what it keeps, what it pays to keep them a worker. So that's the means of subsistence. What they need to live, what their shelter, their food, the training they're required to make them a worker in that given industry. And that is much, much less than the total value they produce through their labor. And what's then taken, appropriated by the capitalist, is precisely that. And that is the source of all profit. That is why it's not incorrect to say that the source of all profit is the unpaid labor of the workers. I can give you an example from my own life actually, in a previous life, before I did this full time, I was a lawyer. Now, I don't want to get into debate about whether what lawyers do is valuable or not. But at my desk at my computer, I had a little clock. And this little clock didn't tell me what time it was. This clock told me how much time I'd build. That's how I always make money, they build time and then send us their clients. And so I could, I could see how much time I'd build. But importantly, it also gave me a little calculator that told me the value of the time I'd build, the value of the time the firm was charging on my behalf, my holy rate. But I also know my salary, don't I? So I knew from having done the work and seen this clock, that the firm was charging on my behalf through my labor four times as much as my monthly salary. And, you know, I'd agree with my salary. And that's precisely that difference where the firm's not just my labor, obviously all the employees, is where the overheads are coming from and also the profits of the business and growth, that's the entire basis of the capitalist system. And so what flows from that? What flows from that is that you have the constant creation of a gigantic working class. And we assignment the reputals to come back to this question of poverty, poverty creation or poverty reduction. That's an interesting debate, but I don't have time to come back to that now. What that creates is a system in which the profit drive means that wages must be constantly dampened and hours must be constantly extended because that's precisely where the profit comes from. The proof. The proof is in Britain today. Work is in Britain today. I've seen the longest periods or the lowest periods of wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars is a bit of the 19th century. British history once that was the beginning of the 19th century. At the same time that they visited those, actually, that's by the by. Lowest period of wage growth since the beginning of the 19th century, workers are working longer hours since certainly the kind of the 1970s, 1980s and surveys are pulling them feeling more stressed, more under the cost of work. And the reason for that is to try and squeeze the profit out of them as possible. Why? Because the bosses are not investing in time-saving machinery. They're not actually developing the means of production, but in Marxist terms, which is the only justification of the role of capitalist class in the first months. To make matters worse, capitalism is up to certain absurdities to cherry-pick individual countries. So this is capitalist country, this is socialist country, third country. We live in a global capitalist system. Capitalism by its very nature is international. In order for any capitalist class to succeed and to make profit, it has to venture outside its own borders, it has to find more cheap labor, it has to find resources, it has to crucially, it has to find markets. And what that also means is that the spread of capitalism was accompanied by the greatest way of robbery, of destruction, of enslavement, and death in the whole of human history. At the same time that the British Golden Age was going on, the Golden Age of the Lacy Fair Capitalism, British armies were literally burning down African cities. Look up, Benin City, look it up. Is it a fairytale? And its high civilization was literally burnt to the ground because of the doctrine of terranoidness, the imperialist powers of Europe decided it's okay, we can found our colonies if nobody's there and if somebody's there, we'll just make sure nobody's there. And that's how they made that profit in that case, the colonization of India. Now how were, I think that, you already mentioned that if anyone's willing to work, they can get rich. Well how did people, how made people made willing to work on a capitalist basis? They were forced to make faces. I've said I've already mentioned that I'll go back to Africa, King Leopold at Belgium in the Congo. How did he make the workers want to work? He got off their hands if they're refused. And he enslaved them and forced them to work on his railways. And that made a lot of money for Belgium and the capital of Europe at that time. This is the real morality of the capitalist system, although frankly I don't think this is a moral question. Slavery was moral, feudalism was moral at the time. And there'll be people today who say that the state is co-demoral. That's frankly a distraction from the real question which is what is going on here today? What is going on with the world? And what is going on with the world is that the system's reached its limit. Regardless of whether you think it's moral or not, it's reached its limit. We can see this in monopoly. One of the fascinating things I find about free competition of the capitalism and a good and important aspect of capitalism is free competition. Is it not? In free market? It inevitably turned into its opposite. It turned into monopoly. We've had deregulated free markets certainly in the kind of so-called neoliberal period for quite some time now, decades in time. And actually capitalism as a market competitive system has existed for centuries. And we have now a situation where 10 companies, 10 multinationals are almost all of the food and drink grounds that you're ever going to encounter. How's that a consumer choice? The five media brands are 90% of market share in the United States. Five companies basically get to tell the world to them. And you have a handful, literally a handful of banks that are considered so too big to fail, so big that when they managed to collapse, the state had to come in and bail out. Now regardless of whether you think that that was the correct choice for the government to do, whether that was moral, the reason it's set to, is because it didn't, if a funny and friendly word bailed out, then banks were refusing to lend without government under wraps. In other words, basically the entire economy would collapse. The entire economy was held around some by a handful of companies. Companies which incidentally their executives had a direct line to the White House. This is what we saw in 2008. Goldman Sachs basically got to rig up barric apart and said, you better sort this out. Do we get that? I mean clearly I'm not an American citizen, but do all the American citizens get that? I don't think so. Is that democracy you can vote for whatever government you want, as long as it does what the banks wants it to do? Another issue is you can see this dead out physically in the environment that everybody knows you need to tackle deforestation, you need to tackle emissions and what's going on, that you have 100 companies that are responsible for 70% of all industrial emissions and the world seems incapable of dealing with it. Now I have very short time unfortunately, but what is the alternative to all this? Gerard already mentioned it, collective ownership control of the means of production, distribution, exchange. What does that mean? It's not just nationalisation, it's not just government doing stuff. We have to take the means of production out of the hands of these monopolies, of course, otherwise how are you going to have it in the first place? But then what you do with it, it requires a complete thorough go of democratisation, not only of our politics, but of our economics. What I'm talking about is the workplaces that the main neighbourhoods and the schools all having to say, detaining the priorities of what we produce by whom, for whom, which currently is all dictated by CAOs and boards of directors. Why? One last statistic, actually this practice economy is already planned. Don't be scared of a planned economy, we live on it all. 80% of world trade is global value trains through multinational corporations. They're planning it themselves, but why do they plan it? They plan it for their own benefit, for profit. The difference with a socialist plan will be a socialist plan by society, by the human race entirely to dictate its own priorities on production. We have the means to do this, we have the technology to do this, it's entirely possible. The only obstacle in the way is the capitalist system itself. And so I think to the finish, that we do have a choice here. That's why I'm really pleased that this debate has been planned in the first place. I congratulate people for putting this on, because we do have a choice. We have a choice between a system which is actively destroying the planet or a better alternative and a better future. We have a choice, I would say, not between capitalism and socialism in that sense, but between socialism and barbarism. Thank you. The next speaker is we're now going to go to the rebuttal stage. Each speaker gets five minutes to reply to some of the things that they've heard, and then we'll move into the discussion and then over to you. So five minutes of peace. So that's the first time I've ever been accused of defending the status quo. The idea that we live in a capitalist world is absurd. A little bit of capitalism, lots of socialism. Last I saw a big chunk of GDP of every single country in the West, certainly, is devoted to redistribution of wealth. Beylouts. Beylouts are not exactly capitalism. They are central plan authoritarian dictates that take from some and give to others. The financial system or any system out there is massively regulated. Now let's, I mean you laugh, but you admit it that capitalism is a system of private property. What does it mean to own your own property? It means you get to decide what to do with it. You might like it or not, but I get to decide what to do with my property, went to sell it, who to sell it to, how much to pay employees on it, how much not to play. But that's not true in the United States. The government tells me how much I have to pay my workers. The government tells me what buildings I can build on my land. The government tells me what kind of products I can issue and whatnot, how much leverage I can take on or not if I'm a bank. The idea that we live in some capitalist economy out there. No, there's a ton of problems in the world today, including the lack of rising wages, the lack of investment in productivity, which would exist under capitalism and doesn't exist partially because we tax away the capital that would have gone to that and partially because it's overly, it's regulated to the extent that people don't invest in the means to increase production or productivity of labor. So we might be debating, we are debating capitalism as to socialism, but let's not be under any illusion. We do not live in a capitalist society. We live in a status society. We live in a society in which governments control those multi-million corporations that tell them what they can export and what they can import, what they can produce and what they can't produce and what they can pay the employees. I mean, maybe this is closer to a fascist economy where we pretend we have private property, but that private property is controlled by the people who really pull the strings in our governments. But to the extent that private property is respected, to that extent we thrive, to the extent that it's denied through regulations, through controls, through redistribution, to that extent we suffer. So I'm not here to defend the status quo. I'm here to defend an ideal vision of capitalism where all property is privately owned and where the government has no say, none, zero in how I use my property. Unless I'm somehow harming physically my neighbor. That is what capitalism is about. Cool. She didn't like that. Sorry. She or he. I just want to make one other point because everything you said, we disagree, and I'm sure it's the same the other way around, so I want to make one other point. This idea that labor is exploited is one of the most bizarre ideas in human history. And Marx, man, what a... There is no labor. There is no such thing as labor until they're capitalists, until they're entrepreneurs. Labor is basically a subsistence farmer until somebody has an idea for an iPhone. Somebody has an idea for a steam engine. The idea is worth gazillions more than the manual labor. It takes to actually build the thing. The manual labor that actually gets to build whatever it is is a dime a dozen. That's why it's so cheap. The ideas, the ability to organize a factory, the ability to organize a business, the idea to organize marketing and legal and all this stuff. That is unbelievably rare to become a CEO of a successful company in Silicon Valley, in Wall Street, or anywhere else, is a massive achievement of brilliance. These people deserve every last dime they get, because indeed they create more wealth than they ever get themselves in our hands. I mean, this iPhone, this iPhone won't exist without Steve Jobs. It doesn't exist without somebody having the vision and the ability to coordinate those supply chains that you take for granted. Yeah, there's a supply chain. You know how complicated a supply chain is. You even know what a supply chain is and how it works and what logistics have to go into it and the achievement that's something like Amazon, the richest man in the world right now, the achievement of what that took and the kind of ideas, the kind of thinking, the kind of effort. I mean, that wealth, the amount of creation created by the people act that you call exploitors, far exceeds the amount of actual creation created by all the annual laborers in the entire world. Thank you. Okay, so capitalism isn't capitalism. I think we've got a series here. What are these categories that we use? Are they just labels that we can stick on things we like or don't like? Or are we trying to seriously get to the bottom of this problem? You can't simply say that everything that's good in the world works capitalism. Everything's bad and doesn't work for socialism. It's meaningless and arbitrary. For example, to say like Venezuela where a two-thirds of the economy in the private sector, you know I've saw that Fox News, not a big fan of the Bolivarian government, two-thirds of the economy are dominated by the private sector. Say that's all socialism, that's all terrible. And then in China, where the public sector still dominates, 55% of assets in the Chinese economy are dominated by state banks and state enterprises. That's a success story for capitalism. Let's just sort out what we mean by this terms and then argue that accordingly. I think I've been relatively clear on where I stand on that. And I think if you look at the current system which we live, which is a social system which has evolved over not just 200 years, but many hundred years, which is a capitalist system based on the exploitation of the working class, which has not existed before in history. Exploitation has. Slavery certainly has existed. I'm not suggesting that capitalism invented exploitation, not at all. It refined it. You might say on a more civilized basis, but exploitation still exists. Now let's talk billionaires, let's talk capitalism. Who are the first capitalists? First capitalists were not visionaries who invented new machines. People did invent new machines as part of the development of capitalism. First capitalists were landowners, often feudal laws, who basically started employing people on their land as laborers to produce things like wheat. We say we don't sell on the market, the market that was developing already. Later, what were the first industries in England? Talking about history, who knows that if we went with the first industry in England, wool and then cotton. Now are we seriously suggesting that the British capitalists invented wool and cotton? I don't think so. I think both of those things would be produced for thousands of years between before the British capitalists got their hands on. What they did do was they revolutionized production, which I accept. I accept as a socialist that the capitalists revolutionized production. They didn't have the idea of producing this. What they succeeded in doing because of the concentration of wool that occurred even before is they had the means of throwing in workshops workers together in the kind of situation that I already described. That is the basis of capitalist production. That's the revolution that it rolled into society. It was one of social relations. It wasn't simply people having amazing ideas. And let's face it, okay, for an iPhone to get made, it needs someone to come up with the idea for an iPhone. Okay, it also needs people to make it. And most of the people who designed these products, most of the people who monitor the global supply chain, and every single person who puts those phones together are workers, they're paid employees who get paid a wage for their work. So it all comes down to the basis of the capitalist system still asserts itself time and time again. That is the key point in all this. And to come back on another point that was made, every time the capitalism has been tried to succeed in, that is not true. Now regardless of what you think of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union did collapse. So you can, I think we conclude the Soviet Union failed, did collapse. Following this up, the Soviet Union has a rapid privatization required to turn it into a capitalist economy. And it's putting it by hand. This was fulfilling Yaron's definition of what capitalism is. And it was just a little bit of capitalism. It turned out to be, well, call it shock therapy, I think you can probably interpret what was meant by that. The end result, according to a study in Europe published in the Lancet, is that the Russian population declined by 7 million people. And the majority of that was not people emigrating, it was people dying earlier. The average life expectancy of a male Russian worker in Moscow dropped to about 54 years old. It dropped to about 19 years. As a result of the introduction of capitalism, the Russian economy collapsed to the supposed extent, the ruble collapsed. Even more to the extent you see in Zimbabwe today or elsewhere, people were bartering the bombs of vodka because there was no currency to use. The mafia took control of entire cities. I'm wondering, seeing how, would we describe Russia as a democratic beacon for the capitalist world? I don't think so. I think it's a fantastic example of how capitalism is in pain for moving society forward. It didn't have the opportunity to talk much about Venezuela. As you've already heard, I don't consider Venezuela to be an example of socialism, where the vast majority of the economy is dominated by the private sector. What Venezuela demonstrates is it's impossible to try and apply socialist policies to try and give people pre-education, pre-healthcare, give them minimum wage, cap rents. Those are the kind of policies they'll try and think it's impossible to achieve that sustainably on the basis of a capitalist economy because the market will repel. That is what happens. So all that shows is you can't build socialism with capitalism. Agreed. We have a point of agreement. That's excellent. The point is, which would you prefer? I've already made my case that I think socialism is literally the only way forward. I think looking towards an ideal picture of capitalism, when we've had literally 500 years of development of capitalism, is much more absurd than trying to work towards a socialist future, when the government's world is actually falling apart around our ears. I haven't even had time to talk about the question of the world crisis. Maybe we'll just come back to it. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. We'll just go into some discussions before Q&A. And it strikes me at least that on the one hand, Josh is saying many of the states we associate with socialism aren't actually socialist. And on the other hand, you're really making the case that capitalism, as you would like to see it, isn't currently in existence. But if you each have to choose one state, one society that comes as close, closer than others to your ideal destination, what would it be? Today or in history? Right now. Right now. This is the advantage of being here. I mean, I think that it's a really difficult question to answer, because we live in what I would call a mixed economy world, a world in which there are elements of capitalism. There's some private property, but that private property is heavily controlled by other authorities. And maybe 20 years ago, I would have said Hong Kong, but given China's takeover of Hong Kong, political takeover of Hong Kong, I hesitate because what a horrible place China is turning Hong Kong into by bringing in its collectivization, its collective attitudes, and the inability to speak freely. The places, a lot of places that are relatively speaking, economically free are socially unfree, like Singapore. So I hesitate to even mention Singapore, because I don't support the socialism there. So it's hard. So if I had a pick, I've got my head, the Economic Freedom Index, number one, and number two, we've crossed out for two weeks for China and social freedom. I think number three is New Zealand, which I happen to love because it's the most beautiful place on the planet. And I think number three, number four, number five in New Zealand, Switzerland, and Ireland. And number six is the United States. So I would say New Zealand, Switzerland, Ireland would be my top three that I would choose where you get a good balance of both social freedoms and quite a bit of economic freedom at the same time. And now that Ireland has passed a law allowing for abortion, I'm good with that too. Three for the price of one. Josh, what about you? Well, look, as I already mentioned, first of all, capitalism is the self-employed system. So identifying specific countries and saying that is a vision of the society we want to see is, I don't think it works as a method. I'm going to try and ask that question to everyone. And that applies all the more for socialism. The whole basis of at least my vision of socialism meant, most of the socialist I've spoken to, is socialism is international or it's nothing. That it requires the international cooperation of workers and nations everywhere. And otherwise, it is simply not going to work. So picking a socialist nation, which often the kind of socialist revolutions that take place, take place in formerly colonial subjugated countries, we should try to liberate ourselves. In order to do that, have then expropriated the factories from often foreign owned companies or the mines and so on. And then have had to try and find their own way. Often those regimes have degenerated. Some of them have degenerated extremely quickly and so would hardly conform to an ideal picture of society, perhaps in anyone's mind. Although one thing they have done sometime that often they've actually been able to develop the economy, develop literacy and things like that. Often at quite a big cost, though. But in terms of talking about specific countries, one which currently still exists, which is trying to move in a socialist direction, I don't think it's there yet. I don't think socialism's ever been built anywhere, incidentally. And many of the people who try to build socialism, people like Leina Trotsky explicitly said, this is what we're trying to do. This is not what we have succeeded in building. But in terms of a case study for a country with those caveats, and I will hope that you take those into consideration, I would like to talk about Cuba. Because Cuba is a tiny island with an even smaller economy, basically a tourist and tin economy and production of sugar and whatnot. Just off the coast of the greatest superpower, economic and military, that has ever existed in the world history. Not the best place to really start building socialism, to be honest. They had a revolution in terms of like Castro and his movement. The purpose of their revolution was for democratic independence, it was a nationalist revolution, to kick out foreign intervention politically, to kick out a tater as an entity. Once he'd gone, he didn't take all of the foreign American Canadian intervention with him. And so inevitably, in order to basically defend the revolution itself, they started nationalising and planning the economy, which I think was a step forward. It's not the end's point. It's not that they haven't reached socialism simply by nationalising the economy. And what flowed through the map is first of all the increase in literacy for the entire Cuban population, which was a very low level, even for the region at that time, to basically only a percent, the creation of the best healthcare system in the region, one in which rich Americans believed in Toronto Cuba to have their own operations, which frankly is miraculous as far as I'm concerned. Free education, also including university education, which is better than here, which is quite embarrassing, considering how rich the United Kingdom is. And a political regime, which definitely has a problem, is actually, I would say the whole of Cuban society has a problem that needs to be solved, and I would not consider Cuba to be a work of democracy. But I think we could probably all agree that it was a lot healthier than other regimes that attempted to go in the same direction, such as North Korea. So I would say that is a good example of what can be achieved on a very limited basis. So just think about what we could achieve on a global basis. Okay, well we have reading week coming up, so you can choose between Cuba or New Zealand, depending on where your country is going. Really? I mean nobody has swam out into the ocean in New Zealand to find freedom, but they certainly have from Cuba. All you have to do is look at population flows, and you can tell which is a good country and which is a bad one. So I also want to just ask you both a, we're going to ask you each a difficult question. I'm going to, Josh, I'll even ponder this, because you just finished speaking. So the question I wanted to ask you is, why are socialist parties and social democratic parties, despite everything you've said, doing so poorly at this point in time? The question I want to ask, Yaron, is despite everything you said, why are we seeing some of the sacks that Josh cited about young people's support for socialism, strong support for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, strong support for similar, the demos in Spain and others. What's going wrong there from your perspective in terms of capitalism's inability to win over those reasons? Yeah, let me be clear. I'm losing, not right now, right here necessarily, but in the world out there. My argument is losing, because capitalism is in decline, and capitalism is fading. Capitalism is in crisis, if you want to call it, and the voices of socialism and social democracy are increasing, and they're much more popular than I am, much more popular. If not Chomsky would hear, we'd have, you know, the auditorium would be filled, right, or many socialists would hear. So that is the key question. And I don't have a time to give the complete answer, but I just want to mention two things that I think are crucial here. One is that the socialist side has been very good at attributing every single problem in the world today to capitalism. At least in America, it started with the progressives blaming every problem that happened in the 19th century, and then the big one, the Great Depression on capitalism. No economist in the world, or no, a majority of economists in the world, overwhelming majority of economists don't believe that free markets caused the Great Depression anymore. But for decades, that's what they believed. Indeed, right now, most people think, including I assume a majority of the audience think that the 2008 crisis was caused by capitalism, by bankers, by greedy bankers, which is a myth and wrong for right. I've given an eight hour course on the Great Recession and what caused it, so I'm not going to try to recreate it here. It was caused by government policies and central planning and bad incentives and all of that. But in 10 years, most economists will agree with me, I've no doubt about that. But in the meantime, the story that it was caused by free markets is one that permeates society and the same thing about the Great Depression. You still learn in your schoolbooks that the Great Depression was caused by speculation and stock market. Again, no economist actually believes that anymore, but it takes a while for these things to change. But that just begs the question. Why does the other side get away with telling these blatant lies and that it's not corrected and it keeps sustaining itself? I think because there's one thing about capitalism that is so revolutionary that we're not ready for it. And that is the exact moral argument that we were discussing. Socialism is built on a 2000 year old morality and some of you might think you're on my side will find this objectionable, but it's the fact. I think socialism is just an extension of Christianity. Socialism is built on the idea that the fundamental purpose of an individual's life is to serve others, that the fundamental moral code is a code of altruism, that is, it's service to others, sacrifice, selflessness is what's good, what's noble, what's right, what's just. And we all accept that. Culture has accepted that for 2000 years. It has been unchallenged, except by I think two philosophers, maybe Spinoza and certainly Iron Man, but almost nobody else. Aristotle originally, but he became a focused channel. And so the idea that you as an individual, your happiness as a goal, as an end, as a purpose in life, as a moral purpose in life is just not being accepted by society. And yet what is capitalism? And this might play into the other side's hands, but what is capitalism? Capitalism is a system of self-interest. Capitalism is a system of individuals pursuing their self-interest, whether they put that on the production site, the consumption site, the employee site, in every direction. It's about individuals pursuing their self-interest. And we think self-interest is nasty. We think self-interest is immoral. We think self-interest is bad. My mother taught me when it was this little, be selfless. Don't be selfish, selfish. Oh, that's evil. But the fact is my life's mine. I care about myself more than I care about you guys. I say my kids if they're drowning before I say the nameless kids if they're drowning. My life is more precious to me than yours. My system of values is about my happiness, my success. And I don't think that entails, I know it doesn't entail you being worse off, but it entails me focusing on my life and on my values and on my happiness. Now that is much more controversial than capitalism. Much more questioning the foundational beliefs that we have in our culture because socialism is built again on everything that's collective. Everything is you. Everything is about you. Not about me, not about my happiness, not about my success, not about my prosperity. It's irrelevant. And this is why, this is why when massive people die out of socialism, it's no big deal. It's no big deal. And again, my point is not that socialism is being tried perfectly. I think communism got there pretty, you know, got pretty far. And not that capitalism is being tried perfectly, but again, to the extent that this isn't straight, it fails. And we can talk about Warsaw if you allow us to. So the question to Josh is why are socialist parties, social democratic parties too doing so poorly at this moment in history, you look across Europe, historic lows in many countries, UK, something of an outline, what's going on there and use that as a platform to perhaps elaborate as your rival did? Sure. Well, when we look at political parties, obviously they don't exist entirely in the abstracts and they have their own history and they have a link to whichever people they represent, which other people vote for them. And if you look at the history of social democracy, let's say the last 100 years, that's a pretty good region. What you see is with the history of capitalism, and we are talking about the history of the capitalist system. You see social democratic parties time and time again, adapting themselves to that. In fact, actually the irony, the great irony of social democracy and the decline of social, social parties is precisely the extent to which they have embraced capitalism, they have declined. So if we look at in more recent times, let's look at the late part. So the late history of the late part in the last 30 years is fascinating, because as you correctly said, there's a little bit of an exception to this rule today. But prior to that, I wouldn't necessarily say so. The late party in 1918, under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution, included in plausible part four of its constitution a commitment to the collective ownership of the means production, distribution and exchange. That's a commitment to social democracy. In 1994, that was taken away and removed by Tony Blair and the Legion of the late party, with a commitment to a market economy, a rigorous market economy, or biggest economy in the world unfortunately, but certainly to a market system. In other words, it made an explicit commitment to capitalism. And you can see that in the policies that it pursued as well. When it came into government, it pursued pretty much identical policies to what you could probably have expected the Tory party to carry on, but with some certain differences. I will give them that. I mean, they deregulated the banking sector, which the Tory group certainly done as well. They of course went to war with Iraq with supporting America, and I would consider that an imperialist war, to defend their capitalist interests. And again, I think that's completely linked to capitalism. The idea that all these things like war and imperialism are just kind of an aberration is really just trying to avoid the entire question. In the same way, we talk about individual interests and sacrifice. Surely, the main sacrifice of capitalism, capitalism is a system that has demanded sacrifice, apologies, but the sacrifice that millions of people often forced. That doesn't seem to me to be that interested in individual interests. It seems more to be interested in the interest of a handful of capitalists. And the late party accommodated itself to that, and it suffered as a result. Because of course, if your party is founded on things like the trade unions, if your party is founded essentially on the workers and socialist movement, but then having been brought to power or brought to the cusp of power on the basis of that movement, you then basically start carrying out austerity, carrying out cuts, deregulating the banks, carrying out policies that are very supportive of capitalism and the capitalist system. Then if our system is doing well, if our system is growing and people can keep their head down and make better wages, their lives improve, then they'll leave them to it. That's why you're so actually emptying out all political parties in the period of the last boom, because people thought, well, let the politicians get on with politics. Things are going okay for us. When the crisis hits, and regardless of the course of the crisis, we can accept that capitalism is a crisis-ridden system. We've seen it many, many times. When the crisis hits, again, and you're all the ones in the driving seat, and you're all the ones who bail out the banks and then have to compensate the state by taking out the taxpayer basically in the working class, by pushing through cuts, and when in opposition you are totally incapable of putting forward any kind of alternative to the right-wing government's carrying out cuts, I don't think it's even remotely surprising that people who voted for you or working-class people and people in the trade unions and so on would turn their backs on you. What's fascinating about what's going on in Europe is in every single country, in France with the Socialist Party, and incidentally it's not just in the left, it's also all the establishment parties in France, the Republicans used to be the U.N.P., the old De Gaulle party, they used to be the great U.S. world. You've got a complete turnaround in the political sphere in France. In Greece, the old Socialist party, which had a great deal of tradition and a great deal of support because it played a big role in the revolution in the 80s, it carried out vicious austerity. It was liquidated. I think it basically is. It's getting less than 5%. This used to be a mass party. Syriza, which was nothing, was basically a collection of left-wing sex, became the biggest mass left-wing party in Europe at that time. What it did, it came to the government, it said, we're not going to carry out austerity, we're a Socialist party, we're going to say, no to the EU. They said, oh, can we try and do something different? The EU said, no. And then it just carried out 8 billion euros worth of cuts. So no wonder that there's a boy who's now falling in. It's talking about the new democracy, which is the equivalent of the Tories, Bill and Greece are going to come back in. That's why social democracy is suffering. That's why, because they're incapable of posing any kind of alternative to the capitalist crisis. And what's interesting, and this affects the right as much as the left actually, where political parties and politicians are saying this, what we're currently out of the status quo is not working. This is how we are going to solve it. This is how we are going to bring jobs back. This is how we are going to develop the economy. This is how we're going to make your life better and actually compose that alternative. Then they do the better. And we're seeing that on the left. The reason that so many people are turning to Jeremy Corbyn is after decades, and I speak, because I was born in 1989, and I kind of became more politically conscious when the Labour Party was in government and the Blair government. And so I can say in my lifetime, he is certainly the most left-wing Labour leader in my life. So probably in the history of the Labour Party, probably in some respects. And he is the first person I have ever seen actually trying to pose some kind of alternative to this crisis. That's precisely why it's popular, and that's precisely why the social democratic parties are so important. Well, thank you very much. There's a word that I want to throw out there that Nigel Vee mentioned so far, and I think it's a word that takes us into thinking about some of the challenges that are facing capitalism and we talked about the individualist nature of humankind and also what I think is a big challenge facing socialism. And that's nationalism. And where does nationalism sit now as a challenge to both of your ideas? When I look at Europe, I see actually a lot of parties that are not offering individualist appeals that are predominantly collective tribal movements that seem to have momentum. And when I look at the voters that are leaving socialist parties and some of these movements that are now more working class than many socialist parties in relative terms when you look at their electorate, they're going to national populist parties or they're just giving up on politics altogether. So could you just offer some reflections on where you see nationalism fitting in? Because when I look at surveys and I see 85-90% of people even today saying I would fight for my nation if there was a war tomorrow. I don't see much appetite for a sort of internationalist, borderless capitalist or socialist world yet. Maybe some reflections. Yeah, so I think nationalism is the real alternative out there to the crisis that we face. And we agree that there's a crisis today. I mean, I'm a little jealous of the socialist in a sense. You guys at least have politicians who claim to be socialist. You actually have politicians political parties called the socialist parties. We capitalists are pretty lonely. There are no politicians who represent us and I know you're trying to redefine capitalism to represent the status quo, but that's cheating because you acknowledge that it was the system of private property and we have no private property, not in the false sense of the word today. So we don't have anybody. There's nobody out there on the political spectrum today arguing for what I consider capitalism, which is the separation of states from economics. That means capitalism when the state has no, no role in economy. And then economically, we do what we want. And I think nationalism is what people are emotionally attracted to as a solution to the crisis that exists today. Because clearly there's a crisis and there's immense angst out there among people. And I think it's a horrific and very dangerous trend. It is anti the individual. It is anti freedom. And it is anti capitalist. It is a different form of subjugating the individual, not maybe to the proletarian or whatever you want to substitute for a proletarian for in socialism, but it is the subjugation of the individual to the state, whatever that state happens to be. Or to the ethnic group in a lot of the nationalism, unfortunately also has racist kind of themes to it. It's a subjugation of the individual to the racial group. And I think those are horrific trends. I think it's where the world unfortunately is heading right now. I see those movements in Europe and I see it in the United States with with Trump and with many who were passionate supporters of Trump. I see this inclination. And I, you know, at the end of the day, I stand with individuals. I believe that capitalism, while it can thrive within a border, right, I think it thrives much better with open borders and with international trade and with being a globalized system. And to the extent that we're building walls, to the extent that we're fighting over tariffs, to the extent that we have a concept even of American jobs or concept of, you know, American wealth as if there's something magical about being American. I think that's false. Capitalism is about competition and competition happens to happen in China, Soviet, let it go. That's great. So I think this is probably the most the biggest threat to individual liberty and individual freedom, both on the economic side and on the social side that we face today. And my fear ultimately is that socialism is the only alternative to that. And we're stuck between two alternatives. They're going to destroy the progress that I think has been indeed made over the last 250 years in eradicating poverty and creating the technology we have in the lifestyles in spite of the crisis. Life's pretty good, right? That is going to be crushed by the force of either nationalism or socialism as the two collectivist, anti-individualist perspective. Josh? Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating question. I think that capitalism has a very interesting relationship with nationalism because much of what Yarn said about competition needs to be international and freedom movement being an important part of capitalism is correct. But at the same time, the evolution of capitalism took place through individual national markets in nation states. And the formation of what we consider to be the modern nations, for example, Germany, had lots of tiny little brittialities, effectively, or Britain, our different nationalities, was a progressive part of the development of capitalism. But it seems to kind of run to a halt. And one thing I disagree with Yarn on is that there are politicians who have already called themselves capitalism, pro-capitalist. I mean, to raise the name in our country. She said capitalism is the most progressive force of human and, you know, collective progress in history. She's defending capitalism. What does Elizabeth want in America? You just said that they don't reflect what you want, doesn't make them any less capitalist and they're defending a capitalist system. But what they're also forced to do is that they're also forced to talk about this kind of common interest, you know, we can talk about the common interest between, I don't know, the American boss and the American worker, or the British boss and the British worker, or the white boss and the white worker. That's used in order to defend their system or something. Because if you have a system where you have a tiny minority who appropriate all wealth and you have a mass of workers or employed or in some cases peasants still work here working the land depending on the country, who especially in crisis times are seeing things get worse and the vast majority of people in Britain and America are seeing things get worse as a result of the crisis, which is reflected in the kind of opinion polls we're talking about. Then you have to be able to feed them something. If I'm aren't Luther King talking about the kind of the poor whites, he said that poor whites are nothing to eat, so he eats Jim Crow. That the Jim Crow laws and the kind of reactionary garbage that politicians would come out with were used in order to divide the workers because they knew. I thought something that's incredibly insightful actually, but I think it is actually, I think it's correct that the choice we're going to be given is between this kind of nightmarish nationalist barbarism and a socialist alternative. And so I think that for me, the obvious alternative to that, the obvious answer to that is socialism, because capitalism simply in order to sustain itself is having to divide the workers on these lines. You're having to see this rhetoric, again speaking as a British person, the rhetoric in Britain has been ramped up. I wonder if Britain will only agree, the chauvinism in Britain, not just relative to Brexit actually, but even before that, even at the time of the Red War talking about the army going and killing the bad guys and all this kind of stuff, in the media, in politics, in society, in the papers, look at the sun, the Daily Mail, all this kind of stuff is filled that they put out. They do so because they have their own interests. I mean, Ruben Murdoch is himself a capitalist, he's not an anti-capitalist, I'm sure of that, and each one of the biggest proponents are precisely these disgusting ideas. They do, I mean, I think young people in capitalism is a bit better, I would prefer that to the way of the Daily Mail. But the reason it's impossible is because precisely in a period of crisis, it's precisely when the biggest threat of the workers actually joining up, including across national lines, is a tight. And one part of the question that I thought was very interesting is how do we overcome these national boundaries? Because I think what was said is correct, that we are seeing an increase in chauvinism and workers are being told to look at scams at their neighbours, for example, British workers, to look at fellow European workers and so on, as it's almost like they're in competition with them and they're the enemy. That is happening, I accept that. So how do we overcome it? And I think one thing that we've seen over the last decades, we say, since the crisis is we've seen the beginnings and the potential for solidarity struggle. One thing that I found very interesting is at the time of the Egyptian Revolution 2011, now Egypt is a very different country with a different history, it's a place by Britain and Greece. At the time of that revolution, regardless of the fact that I don't think we can say it succeeded, people looked at Tapuist Square and they looked, first of all, they saw images of Muslims protecting Christians while praying and Christians protecting Muslims while praying, which was inspirational, but also people all over the world were making reference to that movement. In Madison, Wisconsin, if I get the name right, I saw people on strike, occupying the town hall at that time, and they had stitched onto their jackets, fight like in Egyptian. It was also an animal's reference, more importantly, they were referencing the Egyptian Revolution in America. The occupying movement was making direct references to that as well. Later, when Greece erupted, and I told you all about Syriza and how ultimately I believe it failed, but workers and activists in England, in France, in Germany, people I was first speaking to were absolutely inspired by what was going on, and they were trying to learn those lessons, and they were trying to digest heres and make their own sense of it, and they have been doing it. Believe me, every time one of these movements erupts and then fails or subsides, they do subside, they don't last forever, we've seen this, people are drawing conclusions all over the world. You can see this by the fact that later on, often these movements are on a higher political level, instead of the anti-politics ideas of the occupying movement, which of course subsided, later on the Indian-Arabist movement in Spain, when that came back around it so informed of Palemos, which had taken direct inspiration from Syriza. People are looking at each other, people are seeing who's got the right way out of this crisis. I think that's enormously progressive if it can be organized. If we were to organize internationally on a political basis, I think we'd be able to do a lot more to solve this problem. Okay, so we're going to come out to you guys now. I'm going to take questions, just groups so we can make sure people have a say. If you keep your question quite short or if you'd like to make a comment, let's not turn a comment into a speech, if possible, just so everybody can get a foot in. So first round of questions, one here, one behind you, and one over here. Yeah, you just have to say the question quite loudly. Yeah, you talk about like the iPhone being like this in the capitalism, but we've got to acknowledge that the internet is a result of DARPA, GPS is a result of Navistar, microchips are a result of NASA, Syriza is again a result of DARPA, touchscreen was technology by CIA and NSF investment in the University of Delaware. Like this idea that innovation comes from capitalism is on innovation. Jack, behind Yaron, in the past, you said that the Britain, Brexit and the European Union is a growing statinist monster. It's okay to expand that and then obviously for Josh, you had the idea of kind of a global socialism. So if you kind of say something like that. Local socialism and just last thing in the chat in the grade. Yeah, hi, I was going to ask Josh, if capitalism has actually reached its limit and owning socialism is causing any kind of solution to crisis, how is it that Donald Trump's tax cuts of the regulation of business has led to a higher unemployment and higher wages to be higher employment. I mean lower unemployment. So why is Trump's program being successful? So, you know, all of those inventions were useless until somebody with a profit board put them together and created something actually useful that all of us need. I mean, it strikes me as amazing that Occupy Wall Speed and the people in Egypt were using the latest technology created by greedy entrepreneurs exploiting laborers in order to communicate and in order to treat the do all the things that they're doing and that these revolutions couldn't exist if not for those entrepreneurs. Can I come back? The chat behind the EU regarding staff. Yeah, so I mean, there's some features of the EU that I love, free movement of labor, free movement of free movement of goods. I think it's fantastic and I wish the EU had stuck to that. The problem and you know, and I wish more than that, I wish that was global, right? Ultimately, that should be global. But the problem with the EU is they didn't stick to that. On top of that, they loaded up regulation after regulation after regulation, control after control like control, which is a violation of the principle of capitalism because they are trying to control exactly private property. They're trying to manipulate private property, take away the capitalist incentive. And I think in that sense, it is a disaster and it's a growing disaster because the instinct of bureaucracy, the instinct of central planners is to do more and more and more and more and to grow the status manipulation of the system. So if they stuck to those three principles originally, a free movement of labor, goods and capital, then I would be pro the UK staying in the EU. As it is right now, I think you guys have screwed it up so badly, this vector thing that you are probably better off staying in the EU. You're screwed either way. Very nice. So we had a question on Trump, policies, and about the same question to you. And then we'll come back to the audience. Okay, we'll start with the same question. I mean, with global solutions to where to begin. I suppose what I would begin with is on this question that's just been sort of starting, which is not, for example, global socialism. First of all, in terms of the EU, in terms of the history of the EU, the EU wasn't founded as a free trade block, it was founded as a common steel cartel between the biggest common steel manufacturers in order to join up the different European capital nations, which have been shattered by the war. Later, it's developed in this direction. But one thing that I would want to touch on is in terms of these regulations, now, I'm not necessarily particularly in favor of all the different anti-contissional laws in the European Union. But one thing that's worth pointing out is that the reason they exist is for them to be able to guarantee this level playing field. Now, the reason they want this level playing field is because German production, especially within the European market, is overwhelmingly dominant. If they didn't establish a basic level of these bodies, anti-conversive laws, then we, the countries like Greece, would be able to use protectionist measures in order to compete with them. The reason I'm very so, if it's not to come necessarily back to anything people say, it's just, I think it's a really interesting and graphic illustration of how capitalism, as it really exists, and how it actually evolves, ends up breaking its own laws. It also has free marketing and self-protection effects on me. And vice versa. It's very interesting. But anyway, how that relates to socialism, you're probably wondering, is why does the EU exist? Fundamentally, trying to get it right back down to the fundamental, why does it even exist? Because as a necessity, and I think actually we all agree on this, capitalism must go beyond the limits of the nation's state. Capitalism confines a single national market. It would actually collapse. It needs to expand. You need to spread it. You need freedom of capital, freedom of movement. It's a necessarily global system, global system. And so Europe is an expression of that, that European markets that have been kind of relatively independent have become a lot together because actually, look around the world. The United States, it's a continent or a modern country really isn't it? Russia, massive country, China, massive countries, massive markets. Europe has tried to compete along those lines. But it's also created even deeper contradictions where ironically, nationalism and resentment towards the EU and the entire European project is actually increasing, yeah, resentment is increasing rather than decreasing. Now, how would a kind of international socialism overcome those kind of obstacles? International socialism is not a competition between national markets and different national capitalists. And it's certainly not the attempt of individual companies or capitalists in one nation to basically exploit the cheaper work force and other cheaper resources, or just to take it by force at least in many times. It's actually a relationship of cooperation, cooperation between the peoples of those individual nations. So you can actually have these states, these super national states, where the whole point is to raise the level of development of every single country. Because like a country based on geographical reasons, sometimes based on cultural reasons and economic reasons, how different specialities are at the time, how different strong points or weak points. Well, if you actually were to join them together on the basis of a socialist union, then what you could do is, for example, you could use the, to take the example of Russia and Germany, for example, you could have taken the higher level of development in terms of technology, the engineers present, the overall higher development industry and the economy, and taken that technology into a country where it had abundant national and natural resources, which it does, larger work force, but a lower level of technical and economic development. And you could have had abundant food production to help with German industry and the more urban German civilization, like at that time, and also use the benefits of that for Russia. Now, that's a bit more of, that's an example from at a time of really the Russian Revolution. Obviously, both countries are now more developed. To use a more modern example, what's going on between the so-called developed and undeveloped or developing worlds today? The developing world exports net three trillion dollars to the so-called developed world every single year. They are subsidizing us. They are helping us out, which seems to be remarkably unfair, considering the conditions often exist in those regions, and the possibility that we have had us as a species in a global society to sort out many of those problems. For example, for example, climate change is threatening Bangladesh. It's basically just turning Bangladesh into worlds of sea effectively. Now, this is something that's already beginning to happen. Another country, I suppose a comparable problem, a long time ago, the Netherlands, and they bought their built dikes, they built irrigation, and they used technology to pump a lot of that water out and manage to stabilize literally their country, literally their land. The technology exists on an even better scale today. That could be used, that could be exported there, the free and applied to stabilize the millions of people, and also raise the level of development for the world as a whole. The reason it doesn't happen is because it's not profitable for the capitalist. But the social benefit doesn't matter if it's not profitable, we have the technology, we have the means, we have the people to do it, we just need the will. I think the will is there actually, we just need the assistance a bit, sorry. Can we come back? We'll build the Trump question into the next round, so we've got a question here, a question here, and sorry, there's a chat here. Okay, I have a bit of a question regarding this global world view that you can use it to establish. How will you prevent the fact that there are different economies, different rates of pay from reaching a global mean that will be unlivable first of all? Why would I, as an English worker, wish to have to deal with competition from countries where the average wage is three dollars an hour when I can only live because of the prices of living in this country on way more? Why would I want that in my future, for my future? You said that Russia after the USSR was a failure. I would argue that maybe that's what happened and maybe that's what's happening. So you put that on an average then I would say, for example, there's a lot more, it's pretty expensive and that's the one thing we call the capitalism, and many things we do exchange, some of them are useful to actually, generally, they're attributable to nationalization, state of order, it comes from government, it doesn't come from private enterprise, but government capitalism, but every single crisis, and we're talking about literally more deaths than the Nazi government, actively direct the constitution. Okay, interpretation of crises? Right, so I want to ask Mr. Horowitz to explain to me what in his mind is the difference between common capitalism and stateism on one side and actual capitalism, the separate capitalism. Of course, if the group doesn't like the answer, okay, so we have wages, wages over here, interpreting crises, and then yeah, so yeah, the wages, let me just make a recommendation because I don't have time to give the full economic answer to that, it's a book that was published a long time ago, not far from here, called The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, it gives a really good explanation for that, and I recommend reading it. Basically, you're not competing with them, what your set of skills has to do is to be elevated, and we have the capital in this country to elevate your skills, and that's exactly what capitalism does, so the unemployment in America did not increase because of labor in China, indeed quite the country, unemployment, the number of people employed in America has gone up as employment is China has gone up, there more people working today, actually working today than ever in all of human history in production, that the amount produced, the quantity of stuff produced in America, the manufacturing, people talk about manufacturing job, actually America manufacturing is double what it did 30 years ago with half the number of people because it uses robots and computers, so but and of course in America, instead of thinking all your childhood that I'm going to follow my father and becoming a steelworker, instead of that, you go and become a program of the gaming industry, gaming industry has like hundreds of thousands of people working in it, so you elevate your skill level, you're more productive, and you get those wages so that the simple jobs that you are not going to do anymore move to China, don't shake your head because it's just this is exactly reality, this is exactly what's going on, and the fact is in America today, in America today, you have some of the lowest unemployment rates ever in spite of statism, and the capitalism unemployment would be a lot lower, and what you have is the creation, in the value creation, you have Americans producing at a higher level of value creation than the rest of, you know, then let's say China and Asia, just a few words about the crisis you brought up, look if we define capitalism in terms of property rights, then one of the important characteristics of that has to be that there is a government that protects property rights, there is an entity that I'm not an anarchist, I believe in a government, I believe that government needs to protect property rights, one of the things that happened in Russia and the reason it failed is because they never did that, there was no protection of property rights, this is why it turned into a gangster war against war, it was an example of anarchy for those of you who claim to be anarcho-capitalists, Russia in the 90s was a good example, it's an example of anarchy, not of capitalism because there was no protection of property rights, now to me what defines capitalism is not competition and you know corporations of, it's the existence of property rights and a mechanism to defend those property rights through a government and when that doesn't exist in Somalia, in lots of places where there's no socialism, it isn't capitalism either because there's no definition of property rights and there's no mechanism to protect those property rights, if Russia had flipped it, started with a legal system, started with establishing the institutions that protect property rights, the legal system and the judiciary system necessary for that, then I think the experience of Russia post-communism would have been very different, anarchy doesn't work. Okay I will come back to the question about Trump because I am fairly missed out before, I think one thing that needs to be borne in mind is that even at the time, many economists were commenting that the idea of cutting taxes at the same time as increasing spending on infrastructure was only going to be a short-termist policy and in terms of improving conditions for American workers, the increase in employment, sorry increase in employment has not been met with increase in wages that many people would have expected for them, in fact actually real wages in the United States have been more or less stagnant and have not increased since the 70s, which is a remarkable statistic and gives the lie to the idea that Trump is suddenly wreaking in the economy. In terms of the question on Russia why Russia was a failure, the intention with shock therapy was not to get rid of the state, the intention of shock therapy was to introduce and protect property rights, for example on copyright, they introduced copyright retrospectively, that's the property right, and the state was meant to guard and defend it and it did, the state and Russia continued to exist, it's just it rigged, it's rigged didn't run in certain parts of the country, because it wasn't capable of doing so, precisely because of the failure of the introduction of capitalism into Russia, in terms of the famine of the Holodom and the Holodom also, that is an example of tyranny, it's also an example of incompetent state planning, I would accept that, and a failure, but many famines have been caused in history, yes by tyranny and also by market failure and also by private companies, the colonisation of India was not carried out by the British state, the colonisation of India was carried out by the East India Company, a company and I don't think it's just the name, it was allowed to go off and do what it liked in India, and what it did is it hired mercenaries and it bought off local kings and it started trading, it deemed capitalism if you like, and eventually it succeeded in saying, remember the state only took over the operation when it became so enormous and it actually became the company reached the point of collapse, it had to step in to protect property rights and to protect the interests of their capitalists, and what was the result in terms of famines and failures there in India, that in the real number of people killed as a result of the British Raj is unknown because nobody bothered to count, but we do know that during the Second World War in about 1943, four million people starved to death in the lull as a result, in a country this has always been an abundant country as far as food production is concerned, and there were different Indian provinces, especially called states now, which could have brought the food over to to help the people of the Bengalis who were starving, and it was not, that was not done, why, because it was more profitable to send the food elsewhere, that's exactly what happened in the Irish family as well, wheat, when Irish peasants were starving to death because their potato crop failed, wheat was still being exported from Ireland, Ireland was exporting food at the same time their population was dying, why, because it was profitable, because of capitalism, and incidentally the Irish population has never recovered, the Irish population is hard by death and migration, and it's still not reached the point it was in the middle of the 19th century, I would say that that is just as much a failure of capitalism as it is of anything else in the world, one here, one here, and then we've got Lady with a hand up, yeah that's you, you don't go behind you, okay, you, you, to have an answer for my question, the crony capitalism time up, yeah, and we're going to include responses to crony capitalism, yeah Josh has already touched on it slightly, I want to ask Yara, I like to hear a response, one most fundamental crisis today is the issue of climate change, when a primary motivation of capitalist class is increase in profit, for the most part a significant shift towards sustainable sustainability seems impossible for the capitalist system, because it's not in the interest of profit, so how do you intend capitalism or even this kind of pure utopian capitalism you keep talking about, how do you intend for it to solve this issue of climate change? Who's suitable for what, how can capitalism overcome inequalities between men and women, and yeah, and everybody who doesn't identify that way and who isn't as accessible to the market, I think I commit, yeah, Lady over here, are we better at sharpening ideas alone or in a group, yeah okay, so remind me, just one word, just to remember, because I really don't, climate change, I hate these three questions at a time because I can't remember, climate change, oh my god, because unfortunately, unfortunately your generation and maybe other generations, particularly the younger you are, the more this is true, you kind of think that the world is going to end, I know if something is not done, and it saddens me because you're not going to live a full happy life because you're convinced that your actions are going to cause the end of the world any minute now, I don't, whether it's warming or not, I don't, I don't worry, why don't I worry, for partially, for reasons that you hate, we have amazing technology that can solve this stuff, whether it's technology that'll suck CO2 out of the air, or whether it's technology that will build dykes in Bangladesh, and I think the reason by the way that dykes are not being built in Bangladesh, it's amazing to me that of all the topics discussed, including socialism, the only really religious topic is climate change and the NHS, those are the two religions of Brits, I mean we can offend God, nobody would get upset, but God forbid I say anything about climate change, that really gets people going, I believe that there's technology to exist, and I think that is the ultimate solution to it, and in order to use those technologies, in order to be able to access those technologies, we have to allow technology to progress, we have to allow the freedom for people to invent new ideas, to come up with new technologies and deploy them, and to do that you have to be free, I think socialism is anti-freedom, and I don't think technology ever advances under the socialism, we haven't even talked about that, after the fact that socialism encourages absolute stagnation when it comes to innovation and ideas and creation and so on, because it takes away the incentive, possibly because it takes away the incentive, but more importantly, because it dictates how you should think and what you should think for, there's no accident that socialism goes with authoritarianism almost always, so I believe that the solution is technological, why would they be deployed given the profit motive, I'd say a few things, one is I can imagine ways in which we could convert CO2 into something fairly cheaply, and there's work being done in places like MIT and others to do that, where you could actually make money by converting the CO2 in the atmosphere into something usable for human conduct, I also think that people are not only, and I know the supremacists talk to you, not only motivate by money, capitalism is indeed not about money at all, capitalism is about freedom, the essential characteristic of capitalism is freedom, and it's not an accident, that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand throughout the history of capitalism, and it's a bit of a, I don't know what I call it, but to say it's capitalism in India, if you believe it, if capitalism again, I return to, if capitalism is private property, then how can capitalism be in India where the British didn't respect the private property of Indians, so it wasn't, it wasn't capitalism that did what it did in India, maybe in England there was capitalism, but in India there was some form of authoritarian, you know, call whatever you want, statism, but there was no private property in India, so you can't blame capitalism for what happened in India, it's the negation of the rights of Indians to their own property, which caused the great famines and the great destruction that actually occurred in India, it wasn't bringing, if in England in its colonial mission had brought capitalism to India, India would be one of the richest countries in the world today, and indeed India, adopting capitalism a little bit, just a little bit in 1992, has become fairly wealthier compared to when it was abided by socialist policy between 1992, so again, just look at that, look at the history, so I would say the solution to it is the capitalists either finding ways to make money off of it, or doing philanthropic work by building dykes in places, by doing it through charity, by doing through voluntary commitment to the lives of human beings, which I think we all care about, particularly capitalists, because capitalism is the most caring ideology in human history, what was the second one? Oh, gender, capitalism is the only system that is going to bring about any kind of true equality in the sense of equality in the sense, equality of rights, equality of freedom, equality of liberty, no matter your gender, no matter your race, no matter the, no matter your gender I guess, because none of them are multiple, no matter any of that, you and capitalism are treated by the law, by the legal system, equally, and then it took, let me finish, in terms of pay, the best way to deal with gaps in pay is to out-compete them, so if it turns out that it's true, it's not true, but if it turns out that it was true, that if you took a male and you took a female lawyer, and a female lawyer was just as good and just as hardworking as the individuals, as the male, but was getting paid significantly less, then what would be your way under capitalism to solve that problem? Start? No, union is like the promised idea ever. You want to really solve this problem? The way to solve that problem is to create an off-female law firm, and then you would out-compete the males, because you were doing it at a low wage, and you would beat them, and you would beat their wages now. That is the beauty of capitalism, the beauty of capitalism is to reward you for your productivity, it doesn't care if you're cyst, it doesn't care if you're this gender or that gender or this color skin or that color skin, it rewards you for your ability and nothing else. So, all right, third question was, give me a word. Oh, collective, do we do you better in groups or as individuals? It depends, it depends. Some people were very well alone and come up with brilliant ideas alone. I don't think Newton or Einstein was very good at collaborative work and focused groups to come out within theories. I don't think Darwin was either. I think they worked alone in a lab and focused and produced stuff. I think other people were very well in groups, but a group, a good group, a good group that produces ideas and produces products, is a group of thinking individuals, that each one is thinking and encouraging the other person to think, challenging them, stimulating them. So teamwork is wonderful if it's a true team of individuals where you don't suppress your individuality for the group. So I think it depends on your style, on your ability, on the particular problem that you have to solve. I know there's certain problems. I need to go close the door, complete silence and really, really focus on a particular problem and another problem that I want to get a team of the best minds on the issue and collaborate with them. So it depends on the problem, it depends on your style. Okay, so first I want to come back very briefly on the factual point. The British did respect property rights in India. The first thing they did was they bought collection rights from the tax collectors. They also imposed an act called the Zamindar Act in the 1790s which actually engaged private property rights to the Zamindars that before the tax collectors, they introduced property rights as much as India. And then what they did is they completely neglected the upkeep of many of the irrigation systems, step wells and so on, which were the likelihood of Indian agriculture. It collapsed and estimated 30 million people died in the co-bed theory of the British Raj. That is what killed those people, capitalism killed those people. But to move on from that question, what's the difference between crony capitalism and laissez-faire capitalism? Personally, I don't think there is one. I think that the two go together like love and marriage. They are the marriage of the capitalist system effectively. That even during the laissez-faire period, and the way I think of laissez-faire, I think of it more as like a policy or a period in history than a form, a distinct form of capitalism. In the kind of golden age of the laissez-faire period, the government was still acting in the interest of the most powerful capitalist. In fact, the whole of parliament was basically just a hall of manufacturers and landlords and so on arguing about their different interests. Many of the acts that were brought in, even the factory acts actually, this is very interesting. Many of the factory acts weren't necessarily brought in because the workers stormed parliament and forced them to, although trade unions were being formed, the limitations of the working day and the limitation of forcing children to work and so on was among their demands. So the class struggle definitely played a role in that. But one of the reasons why those acts were actually passed was because big manufacturers from places like Liverpool and Manchester stood up and said, you've got to do something about this because my workers are forcing me to limit the working day to 10 hours. If the rest of you aren't allowed, if the rest of you aren't forced to do that, then I'm going to be at a competitive disadvantage. And eventually the tipping point was reached and that's precisely why the state intervened to impose those acts, which actually kind of touches also on what we're talking about with the European Union and this kind of like floor of rights and all this kind of stuff. Now that linked to cronyism because although I actually think the factory acts were a good thing to step forward and that's why they were part of the demands of the labor movement at that time, that we see today for example with the way in which the banking is regulated, the way which the bailouts were carried out because the bailouts were not socialist. I'm a socialist, I won the nationalisation of banks, I won the expropriation of banks. What occurred in American Britain was the nationalisation of the banks' losses and the privatisation effectively of their profits. In Britain, we basically nationalised the Royal Bank of Scotland that then sold it off as a loss. It's basically this isn't socialist and this is the government acting like a really cracked capitalist, like a really ineffective capitalist. And that's not capitalism as well, that's the state as well in that respect. But it's still absurd to suggest that that's in any way socialism. First thing I think that capitalism, even if you settle right, let's settle a perfectly free, free and competitive laissez-faire system. Eventually, as I explained in my introductory remarks, it leads inevitably to monopoly. And let's say your state, defending private property rights, nothing else, notice here with me, all you're doing is defending private property as it exists. And if so happens that you have a few people who are almost forward there, and if they go down, the entire shift goes down, their interests are going to be reflected in your policy. And I think the policy of almost all the world's nations reflect that today. I don't know if I was asking any of the questions later on to Yaron, but I'll let Yaron in. Yeah, just as a quick little explanation, Matthew had to leave to catch his train to London earlier. I'll be taking this in Q&A, we have about 20 minutes later. Would you prefer to do one question at a time now or...? I mean, what's up to you guys? It's working so far. One question. I mean, as long as you're willing to jog my memory, I'm fine. Well, let's do one question at a time. Any other question on the floor? Yaron, good luck. Yeah, we'll go to Jesse. So I think the only ground on which Randon Marx might agree is atheism. And perhaps you guys as well, I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I'm assuming as much. Could you just reflect on the atheism of your respective sides, how it influenced the political and economic theories, or vice versa, how the political and economic theories may have led to the conclusion of atheism, and how it may differ from your opposing side? That's a big question. Look, atheism is not a philosophy. Atheism is not a set of ideas. Atheism is just the recognition that there's no God. That's it. And there is no God. So I'm an atheist. Yeah, I recognize that fact. It doesn't say anything about what other political philosophy I might have or might not have. It doesn't say anything about anything about morality, about anything. It just says there's no God. So I don't think you can derive from atheism anything about a political system. I do think, though, that knowingly or unknowingly, socialists very much will lie on the moral code instituted by Christianity. The moral code of the Michelin Haverter, if you are your brother's keeper, turn out a cheek, all of that. That moral code is very much a socialist moral code. So the idea of individual sacrifice again, you know, Christianity wants you as an individual to sacrifice the God and sacrifice the people or sacrifice for something. And that is that is the highest noble moral thing you can do. I mean Marx just flips out God and puts in the utilitarian way he needs to. And you get the same individual sacrifice. The idea of the individual doesn't matter. What matters is this big thing out there, this mystical. I think socialism is very mystical. It's a lot of hand-waving about how stuff gets happens and how stuff, you know, when it's international, just stuff happens. So I think there's a strong relationship between religion and, look, every ideology out there with the exception of capitalism, I think, is connected somehow with religion. I actually think, again, I know a lot of a lot of my so-called my co-capitalist friends are religious, but I think at the end of the day to be a true advocate for capitalism and to be a true advocate for a morality of capitalism, a morality of individualism, you're going to have to give up at least aspects, if not all, probably all of your religious beliefs. Sorry guys. And that's why, again, that's part of why we're failing and certainly in America you see the rise of statism as the country becomes more and more religious. The least religious people in American history were the funny fathers counted to the stories of the conservatives. The funny fathers were best deists and they were the least, and that's why they could be revolutionary. And the more the country has become conventionally Christian, the more it's become status, redistributionist, regulationist, and anti-capitalist. So again, capitalism to me is a separation of state from economics, not any of the mixtures we have today. Yes, it's a big question, it's a fascinating question. I don't think Marx substituted proletariat for God. I think he substituted mattock for God and the universe in its totality. And he has been following on from the philosopher that may be influenced in more than any other, and that was hate to have time to give you a summary of hateful views. But Hegel was religious, Hegel didn't believe in God. His vision of God was an extremely interesting one. He basically saw in God the totality of everything and everything in constant movement and contradiction, which also meant it was constantly changing as well. It's quite dense and very interesting. Marx basically took a great deal of these ideas but grounded, and this possibly was called dialectics by the way, he grounded this, which is limited to Hegel, but actually goes all the way up to the ancient Greeks like Heraklites, it's fascinating stuff, don't say all about it. Marx took Hegel's dialectic and he grounded it not in the supreme being basically. The absolute idea is what Hegel called God because he felt that there had to be a basis. You could compare it to one of Plato's Platonic ideas, right? That it's the unfurling of this idea in reality, that that is the process of being an ice god. We've got Marx took this and he grounded it not in God, the absolute idea up here, but in matter down here, in real, the verifiable. And he saw matter as infinite and in a constant cause of contradiction and change. In the same way that an atom is determined in some ways, the character is determined in some ways, by that polarity between positive and negative. That's a contradiction. It's also necessary to point out that an atom is in constant movement. There's no such thing as static matter. No, but you will never ever find any static matter. And so that means that everything around us, whether you're religious or not, every single thing around us is in constant movement. It's in constant contradiction and also it's in constant change. I mean, look at history. I think all of us in this room, regardless of our positions, can accept that human society, sorry, has changed fundamentally, many, many different times. We just look kind of at age of Roman society or like put together a society 20,000 years ago during the United States. It's a fundamental change linked to our material conditions. And that was the philosophical starting point for all of Marx's ideas. Marxist socialism wasn't just, we should, I don't know, be nice to each other or fair. There was no halfway in the role. It was actually working out a history of humanity as it reflected the material changes in our conditions. And I think some of Marx's ideas about religion, sorry, are themselves remarkably profound because Marxist criticism is saying that religion is the opium of the masses. But that's slightly a missed quote because that line is in the quote, but if you take the whole of the quote, what he's saying is that religion is the soul of the soulless world. The sigh of an oppressed creature is the opium of the masses. What he's saying is that in a world such as capitalism where exists, where the great mass of humanity are oppressed, are ground down, all of the beautiful things about humanity in the universe is totality which we can all love and worship whether religious or not. They're deprived of those things. They reach out and look for this kind of absolute idea or for a savior thing. These beautiful ideas they reach out as not so much as a sedative or something to make them drunk or high. It's a painter. It's a way of being able to understand and deal with a society that does not care whether they live or die. Those are the profound ideas of Karl Marx on religion and actually that also gives us an opportunity to consider what is the future for religion. And that is another question probably I have time to discuss, but I would say our society changes. If we succeed in overthrowing this barbaric defunct capitalist system and instituting a new system on where the basis of the development of the individual is the development of everybody, which has always been a necessary part of human society actually, then we can see the development of people's ideas. Yara says that people need to be a little bit less religion or religious or they need to take at least some aspects out of that in order for those girls to get ahead. If that's what you want, the only way you're going to get it is by improving their lives so that people aren't reaching out, people aren't setting out this side of the oppressed preacher so to speak. And that's precisely I think what Marx is and what it is. We'll have a slightly less serious question. I know those are good questions. Any more serious questions? So I was just wondering, if you are either a capitalist system, what role would the central bank play in it? And when the concept of power continues to nationalize, would you consider a more free market? Yeah, I mean in my in my world there would be no central bank, there would be competition for currencies and if crypto turned out to be what the market desired, what the market wanted, I doubted. But I doubted crypto as it exists today. I think there's an idea of how you could do crypto in a way that I think would sustain market pressures. Then Soviet, but absolutely. I think one of the most destabilizing things that we've ever created economically is a central bank. I think if you want to study just a little bit of history, study that the free banking system that existed in Scotland during the middle of the 19th century and how it was crushed by the Bank of England because it wanted its monopoly. It wanted the state monopoly, remember the state entities. It wanted to control all those Scottish banks that were doing fantastically well with with real competition. Let me talk to you. Well, I would be in favour as a socialist in the public, the expropriation of the banks as they exist and yes the continuing existence of a central bank, which would play a completely different role, basically the immense resources of the banks and also an incredibly important planning role that they play at the central economy and still play an important role in directing their production. That would be under the control of society as a whole, but basically the ownership of these things would not simply be the state, it would just be a state owned bank that existed under capitalism as well. And it wouldn't simply be a means of producing a national debt, but actually you would have in democratic assemblies in workplaces, in neighborhoods, in schools, people directing saying what they need basically. It would be the most sensitive, the most efficient feedback mechanism ever possible. Actually just to talk about the role of democracy in a socialist economy, not just a question of politics and being opposed to tyranny, but also within the economy itself, Trotsky said that, Leon Trotsky, who works in the industry, said that democracy, worker's democracy, is the oxygen of the point of economy. The reason he said that was not kind of as some high-falutin' craze to say it's a democracy wonderful, it's because that's how you know what needs to be produced at a given time. If you have a purely centralized bureaucratized planning system, then that becomes extremely difficult. And that directing the unified productive resources of society is what my vision of socialism would be. Okay, any other questions? Are you consider that an insult? I consider that a compliment. No, no, I don't know, let's go to the other part and see my questions. For example, why there is no anarchists, right? There is no anarchists in the competition, so the question is for the national people, for no reason. So I start here on refugees, immigrants. If your hypothesis was true, an immigrant for every kind of like, you know, could come here, UK, and stay and produce and work and have any rights he wants, right? These are the problems. So we don't, we don't live in the country for like socialism, right? We have like a political parties who appear to a wide spectrum of people. So we come to people who are like, low paying mothers who are low mothers, you know, that or other kind of immigrants who cannot work because expect for their absolute love, like to be recognized. So like socialism is like, I don't know if you have paid, I wish you didn't, but what I saw in Russia and in Cuba also, because I have Cuban friends, so they can tell me about what's on there. It's not actually sociable. And yeah, for me, I'm international, right? I cannot expect that I have, I have more rights than in Cuba or in England. So for now, right, what do you expect about refugees? Because this is my, this is my hesitation, so So what's the solution about these problems? What do you think we should do with the refugee problem? My solution is that as long as Europe is a welfare state, and refugees can come here and basically get welfare without necessarily producing, and all the wonderful things you said they would do. No, if you're okay, I mean, you're not asking a question, right? You're asking what should be done in the refugee crisis. And I said, as long as, as long as Europe is a welfare state, as long as Europe is a welfare state, doling out chats to refugees in Germany and Sweden, places like that, that's why they go there. They don't stay in other countries. It's unsustainable. It's an absurd model. And therefore there should be a stop to refugees coming over. But in a capitalist world, where there is no welfare, where welfare is zeroed out, that's what a capitalist world actually looks like, as compared to the mixed economy we have, I would support open borders. So I would support refugees coming because the only way they could come is they were willing and able to actually work and produce and make something for them. And why did they win the company? Sorry, sorry, let's move on. There's a lot of people that want to ask questions. I'm sorry. We have time for two short questions. A gentleman at the back, please. Very good. Yeah. Love the short question. In the world we live in today? Well, I mean, well, you don't have to. So I think there are two forms of debt. One, I think is sustainable. One is, you're right, is unsustainable. And I don't think that the world in which we live in today is dominated by capitalism. I think the world we live in today is dominated by the states and dominated by state controls and state regulations and state everything. The only sections of the economy that are left relatively free are places like technology where you get massive innovation. And those sectors of the economy that dominate by the state, you get massive stagnation. You get actually massive deterioration. Healthcare and education need two good examples of that. But in terms of debt, the way you get out of debt is you produce more. And the way you produce small is you free up the economy. That is, you get rid of regulations and taxes and redistribution. You make the economy more capitalist in dramatic ways. The one form of debt that is not sustainable and therefore is going to devolve into a major crisis and will actually cause, I think, major financial crisis in the future is government debt. And governments who are now, you know, starting with Japan at 250% of GDP and the US going over 100% of GDP. And we, you know, that kind of debt is going to cause major crises, whether it's through the printing of money and creating inflation or other distortions that the printing of money does in order to pay back the debt or whether through bankruptcy, although governments don't go bankrupt, they just print. They have a printing press. It's pretty cool. I wish I had one of those. And they just print themselves out of it and we suffer from the inflation that happens. Either way, we get screwed at the expense of the politicians and those in the politicians favor. So I view, I see a big difference between capitalism and there's no such thing. By the way, it's crony capitalism because there are no forms of capitalism. There's cronyism. Cronism is a form of statism. It can only exist when the state has power over us. I want to cut, I want a system when the state has no power over us other than in protecting our individual rights other than that it leaves us alone. And in such a state, there is no cronyism because there's nothing for business to gain because the government has nothing to give them. Sure. Well, I mean, I think the person who posed the question made a point to a very important fact that debt, not just state actually, but corporate debt, household debt is rising worldwide. In fact, the total world debt, I don't think it's just state debt. I think it's total debt is now, I think, 300% of world GDP. So that sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme to me, to be honest. In terms of China, state debt in China isn't a surrender, certainly not a surrender in Japan. You take total debt into account, you take a corporate debt into account, then we look at 300% of GDP. And that's in the second largest economy in the entire world. I'd also like to talk about sub-saharan Africa, which you might remember in the early 2000s, I can't remember the exact date of the question, maybe about 2004, there was an amnesty of African debt. The African states have become hopelessly indebted to other states, European states, and people felt, I think just privately, this was a legacy of colonialism. And it became a lead weight around the neck of these African nations. So the right thing to do, he made it to, still for capitalism, they weren't making it socialist, was to just ignore the debt. And it doesn't kind of start again, start afresh, they've done that. Now, this year, the total indebtedness of these African countries, the total level of debt in these African countries, is now greater than the time before the amnesty. But the problem is, and this is the financial time, which is not on Marxist publication, the IMF and other bodies, again, not on Marxist, are worried, because this debt is no longer held by foreign states, it's held by private owners and corporations, who are going to be much less willing to take a haircut. Because if they take a haircut, then that's going to be very, very dangerous for them and the economies in certain areas. In other words, what we're sitting on, power pay, basically. Debt, it's not an incident. Debt, it doesn't just cause crisis, like if we reach a certain point of debt and we have a crisis, otherwise we've had it already, wouldn't we? Because we're as indebted as we've ever been. What causes a crisis, ultimately, is, well, in my opinion, is when the system reaches a limit, with overproduction. We've seen signs of overproduction everywhere, in the form of excess capacity, in the steel industry, that capacity usage is about 60%. And this is a big, big problem. It doesn't mean that the system immediately just collapses, but it basically means the way the slowdown comes in, incidentally, under capitalism's slowdowns are inevitable. That's why they've always happened at regular intervals. Then, if all these countries, the entire world is hopelessly indebted, the effects of that crisis will be even bigger than anyone before. I think that we are headed towards the world's most assertive stage. I'm not the only one. There are plenty of people that have definitely described themselves as capitalists who are very worried about that, among the INF. And when it happens, precisely because of these outrageous levels of debt, which are part and parcel of the system reaching its limit, then the effects will be absolutely enormous. I think we'll see some of the progress that's been made in places like Sahara, Africa and India, although I think it's limited, actually being reversed as a result of these things. And that's why the last thing that I want to say about this is we can talk in the abstract about which would be the best ideal system, about whether an ideal version of capitalism would actually be better for everyone, or an ideal version of socialism would be better for everyone. And that's what we've done. I think that is a fruitful discussion. It's been a very interesting one. But now we're looking at a system where we've talked about the climate crisis, and she's not going away, and the possible solution. We've talked about the question of debt. We're talking, and I don't think anyone would deny that a crisis is coming when maybe they would. What are we going to do about it? That's the essence of politics. It's the essence of philosophy. What are we going to do is to change the world we live in, because it isn't good enough. And that is the purpose of really, that the reason why I was so excited about this debate, I think it has gone through. Because what I would say to you is that what we have to do about it is not just to come to terms with how we want things to be better, also to think about how we're concretely going to do that, how we're going to organise. I would say that the only way that we can overcome this problem is if the masses of the earth, if the working class actually takes production, takes economy into its own hands, it can be going. But I think that's the only solution. The way we can move towards this, the way we can do this, is to get political activity. To participate in the class struggle, in all these political struggles, and the economic struggles that are going around the world, to educate ourselves, and to devote ourselves to the other side of the system. And I'll have to finish, thank you. So I would say don't get deceived by a trick that I think is being, you know, committed here. And that is to say that there's some ideal of socialism over here, and every single problem that's ever existed is caused by capitalism. Colonialism, that's capitalism. You know, mixed economy today, that's capitalism. Everything is capitalism. So therefore, every crisis, every problem, everything, is therefore capitalism. That is bizarre. What we live in today is a mixed economy, a mixture of certain elements of freedom, certain elements of private property, a little bit of everything, and a lot of state control, a lot of state control. The one thing the two of us will agree on is that we're heading towards a crisis. This mixture is not sustainable. Mixture is never all. At the end of the day, you asked about idealism. At the end of the day, ideals went else. You guys in the middle will lose. We're either moving towards socialism, or nationalism, which I think is a sister of socialism, but another form of collectivism. Or we're going to move towards more freedom. We're going to move towards capitalism. We're going to move towards a system that is purely capitalist, which means the separation of state from economics, which means the protection not just of properties, but all individual rights, which means the respect of freedom for the individual, no matter your gender, your race, your color, whatever, however you want to categorize yourself. It's about freedom at the end of the day. Freedom for you as an individual. Do you want to live in a place that people are swimming away escaping from, because it's so horrific, and where they're political prisoners, but it's called socialism, and supposedly it has good health care. I don't wish any one of you to go to a Cuban hospital. Or do you want to live in a place where you can pursue your dreams, your values, as an individual, you can take your ideas and make them real in existence. You can advance and achieve as much as you are capable of doing, where your life is sacred, where your life is what it's all about. A system that is free, where the government's only role is to protect that freedom that you as an individual have. Thank you. Just very quickly on a finishing note, thank you for all of you for coming. Oh, subscribe to my YouTube channel. My capitalist after all. Well that, but also just thank you for coming. This is really a critical debate. It's good to have these debates. Next week, on Wednesday, this same lecture speech, we have Konstantin Kissen, who was famous for refusing to sign a behavioral agreement for his comedy sketch at Solas. And he was Jewish during the year last year, and he's coming to give a talk about unsafe spaces, about shouldn't comedy be allowed to offend, and whether we should regulate comedy.