 Is it a mistake to imagine that equality can be engineered by socialist planning? Should we be sceptical of those wrapped in fine ideals? Or is there a form of socialism that can deliver on the dream? That's what we're going to be discussing today. So here on the panel we have Leo Panic, who is a emeritus professor of political science at York University in Toronto. On my left here I have Yaron Brook, who is chairman of the Iron Rand Institute. And on my far left, literally anyway, is Cemi Fadenock, who is a conservative MP for Saffron Walden. So Leo, over to you. Thanks, Marianne. In one of Barbara Kingsolver's remarkable novels, a woman asks her lover, did you ever dream you could fly? He replies, not when I was sorting pecans all day. And she presses on and says, but really, did you ever fly in your dreams? And he answers, only when I was close to flying in real life. Your dreams, which you hope for and all that, is not separate from your life. It grows right out of it. Terry Eagleton, the great British philosopher who wrote in a volume I edited on unnecessary utopias back in 2000, that the only authentic image of the future is the failure of the present in its inability to redeem glimpses of our potential afforded by our own experience. And if you'll allow me finally, and I think this comes straight out of the previous two quotations, Marx once said, socialism is not a state of affairs to which reality will have to adjust itself, but a real movement which abolishes the present state of things. So just to make it clear where I'm coming from, socialism is not a model. It's not an economic model. It's not an abstract utopia. It's not Thomas More. It's not even the much greater Robert Owen. Socialism is always the warm element in human life, which is aiming to unleash human democratic, sympathetic reciprocity in our lives. It is certainly not, as is most commonly and mistakenly claimed, a state versus market. I'll stop there. That's interesting. OK. Ja run. So the first thing that comes to mind when I saw the title, Socialist Dreams, is nightmares. Socialist nightmares, because that's the only thing humanity has experienced when it has adopted socialist dreams. It's experienced a nightmare. But it's not just that socialism has failed everywhere that it has been tried, from the gulags to Mao to Venezuela right now, to the kibbutz in Israel, but that ideologically, as an ideal, I think socialism an inherently corrupt ideal. It is based on an inherently corrupt moral philosophy and therefore has to fail, because it is antagonistic to human nature and antagonistic to proper respect for ethics. Socialism is based on the philosophical notion, not that we should be nice to one another, not a reciprocity, which is the hallmark of capitalism reciprocity, of the idea that the individual should be sacrificed to the group. And you can fill in what the group constitutes. You can fill in if it's the Polaterian, or if it's some other form of group. But it's the idea that the individual at the end of the day does not matter. Though what matters is some kind of social utility, some kind of well-being, some kind of mystical form, platonic form of the good that is not actually attainable for any individual, but somehow we have as a group. And to me any time you want to sacrifice an individual, you want to literally do human sacrifice, which is what socialism has always done, that is evil. That is the essence of what evil means. So I oppose socialism not only because it obviously has been a dramatic and overwhelming failure in practice, but because it has failed because it is so incompatible with human morality, with the strive towards individual virtue, and with the focus that we have had in the West since the Enlightenment on individual flourishing, individual freedom, individual liberty, which I think is what the West, and now beautifully globally, is the essence of a civilise of civilisation, the idea of the sanctity, the sanctity of the individual and placing the individual first as the end. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Ann. I think there's something in that yarn that I can agree with, because I am someone who does believe in individual liberty and personal freedom. That's what my philosophy is about, and I don't think that it is compatible with socialism, but I'm coming at it from a different angle because I've actually been through it where I lived, we had socialism. They didn't call it socialism. I grew up in Nigeria, and this, I think, is one of the greatest tricks, with apologies to Chris McQuarrie who wrote the usual suspects, that the greatest trick that socialism ever achieved was making people think that it hadn't been tried properly yet. That's why we keep having the conversation about it, even though we have seen time and time again what the results are. We've seen, in fact, two countries split themselves into, by that I mean Germany and Korea, where they tried the two different models, and the socialist model always ended up with people trying to get out and getting shots for doing so, literally wanting to escape it, and I think that that is what you will always have with socialism. But the question which we were given was, can it ever work? Actually, it's probably very controversial. I do think in a very, very limited set of circumstances, which I'll elaborate on later, you can have it, but I don't think that you will like what it is that you see. And I think that the tragedy of some of the discussions we're having now is that there's a new generation that's never really experienced it, certainly in this country or in the US, and they have an idealistic sort of utopian view of what it could be if only people just got it right, which is where my own personal experience comes from. I think in particular people say that Nigeria wasn't socialist, that the problem with it was corruption. One of the greatest tragedies of African, when African countries got their independence, was that it was in the 60s when socialism and that philosophy was in its heyday. And almost universally every African country chose a socialist model, whether it was Julius and Yuri in Tanzania, whether it was Crimea, Ynchryma in Nigeria, in Uganda, even in Nigeria, in Senegal, everywhere it was the ideal that they looked for. And it caused so many problems where if you look in Asia with other countries, they didn't necessarily go down that path. And what happens when, and I know Leo says it isn't about state versus markets, I'd be quite interested to hear more about that, because that's not the socialism which we were taught in schools and that's in the textbooks, is that when you do have the government being the owner of every single thing and being in charge of everything, it does foster corruption. It gives them an unlimited power which is so dangerous and it crushes the individual. Okay, so what we're going to discuss to start with is whether we can achieve equality through some form of centralised planning which is generally what socialism is about. I worry is that you have almost defined socialism out of existence in your pitch at the beginning by saying it's not about Marxism, it's not about state versus market, it's purely a question of affinity. But I mean we all feel affinity with each other, we can all be socialists, but we need to talk about socialism in action, socialism in public policy, socialism of our governments. And so if you've defined that out of existence, how can we even talk about it? Well I hardly defined Marx out of existence and it was Marx who said that socialism is about, as John did John Stuart Mill, the full realisation of individual capacity. So by what means? And the notion that Marx or any socialist believes that the existing state, the pre-capitalist state or the existing state in the capitalist society is the institutional structure through which people would be able to realise their democratic collective potentials. It's absurd, no one would claim this. Indeed in not only the Marxist tradition, but in the social democratic one, in the liberal one for that matter, the state is seen as an imposition on society, not as an expression of it. So let's then go back to this question of central planning. Central planning was introduced in capitalist societies during World War I. It was the mobilisation of all resources by the state in order to prosecute the war. These were capitalist states, although pre-capitalist ruling classes, landed classes were still powerful within them and in my view that was an element in what produced the war, although obviously capitalist competition for colonies, not least in Africa, which most of which were secured and turned basically into capitalist societies as colonies and remained as such in Nigeria after independence as Shell Oil indicates. That's where central planning was introduced. It is true that Lenin looked with admiration on the German post office, but he did not look with admiration on German central planning, with its direction of labour, its conscription of trade unions and labour, et cetera. If you want to understand how that evolved in the Soviet Union and it was not something that was a model that they imposed, you have to understand it in the context of the Civil War, the invasion of the Soviet Union by the forces that were victorious in World War I, and it was an unfortunate response to that Civil War, and I think as Isaac Docher pointed out, the great historian of Stalin, the journalist for the economist here in Britain, what happened during the course of the war was that the anarcho-syndicalists turned out more popular than the Bolsheviks when you had competing parties. So parties were done away with because it was never thought by socialists that once workers had been one to socialism, they might no longer support it, and they responded disastrously, disastrously by closing off freedom of expression, competing parties, et cetera, were criticized immediately for this, most famously by Rosa Luxembourg, why she's a hero of the democratic socialist left. Not only do you not have liberty when you don't have competing parties for even association, what especially matters in a socialist society is workers develop ordinary people developing the capacities to govern, and you can't do that where you have bureaucracy closing that off. So yes, the crack existed in Soviet socialism. It was resolved by 1924. You're quoting from Leonard Cohn. He's thinking of this. There is a crack in everything. Let's ring the bells that still can ring. But he thinks, and I think, there was also a crack in social democracy. Let me just finish with this. What Eagleton says, it is the failure of the present in terms of redeeming our possibilities. This is what redeems the socialist vision and the attempt by us socialists, as democratic socialists, to find a way for that not to happen again. And it is, as opposed to what we just heard, the appalling failure, the appalling failure of neoliberal global capitalism to realize most people's potential as we see in the way the gloss is off of it everywhere. The tragedy, of course, is that the failure of Soviet socialism, much more importantly, the way in which social democracy, the third way, Blairism, all the European social democratic parties embrace neoliberal globalization, leaves them now bereft in terms of speaking to their own constituency. OK, I'm going to cut you short there, but I want to ask, so we've had now 101 years since socialism was first introduced in government, if you count from 1917 onwards. In what country, in which country in that century, has there been successful democratic socialism with, as you say, freedom of speech? Again, we're not talking about our model. It's been tried all over the world, so where is it worked? It's a model that's been imposed. It's an outgrowth of particular societies in particular times in conflict internally and in conflict externally. You say socialism in Cuba didn't work. Did capitalism in Cuba work? Socialism in Cuba didn't come out of a model. It came out of the failure of capitalism in Cuba. And what happened to socialism in Cuba cannot be understood beyond the fact that it's based on the periphery of the greatest empire in world history. Did socialism in Mozambique work? No. But one has to understand that, obviously, in terms of the conditions of Mozambique. It's social resources. It's place in the world. I can point to 100 capitalist societies which we could say fail. Fail in Aaron's terms. In terms of liberty. Look at the number of capitalist dictatorships in history. Indeed, my fear today with Trump, with the xenophobia that people are being appealed to is that just as it was said in the 1930s, he who speaks of fascism without speaking of capitalism should remain silent. I fear today that he who speaks of capitalism without speaking of fascism should remain silent. It may be we will turn to socialism because the alternative in the name of individual freedom is to treat everyone else as an asset. So you're basically saying it's the least worth, OK? Cemi? No, it's not necessarily. It's what we can do to realise our potential once we free ourselves of being treated as assets by people with property. Where has it actually worked in a democratic way with freedom of expression? I'd like to come back on a couple of things that Leo has said. There is a general conflation between capitalism and free markets. They are not the same thing. One of them is a method of ownership. The other one is a method of exchange. You can have free markets without having the capitalism if you want. For example, if you look at the John Lewis partnership, for instance, Waitrose, that's not a capitalist model. All the employees have a share in the business and they all have a share of the profits. The co-op down the road is another example. There are loads of different types of models that you can have whilst still having a free market system. So the issue around capitalism, what Leo I think is calling capitalism is what I would call corporatism, where it's about corporations, rather than, for me capitalism is the small business, you having a bakery, being able to buy and sell your own goods. That's capitalism too. So when you talk about, for instance, Shell operating in Nigeria, it's something I lived there when all of this was happening, when Ken Sarawil was killed, Shell was basically an extension of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. They worked together. The people had nothing to do with what was going on. That's right. The price of oil is set by the government, which is price controls. It's a tenanted socialism that you have to fix. It's about price fixing, price controls to make sure that people don't overcharge. And all that happened was that the oil price globally went up and the Nigerian government took money from poor people and subsidized the price of oil, which was mainly used by the wealthy because they're the ones who had the cars, they're the ones who had generators and so on. It always has these sort of perverse incentives where there will still be a top class of people, whether you have capitalism or not, you bring the socialism in, and still there's a ruling class. It's all with Stalin and Lenin, a ruling class that still manages to be above everyone else. So I'm very suspicious of it. I'm also very interested in Leo's definition of socialism, which seems to be able to morph and move. It's very ethereal and we can't really grasp it. It's more of an emotion rather than a definition, which then gives it that out that it can never ever be tried because anyone who tries it gets it wrong. If they don't call it socialism as we had in Africa, then it hasn't really been tried. Or as we had with national socialism in Germany, the Nazi party had it in the name and people said, well, that's not socialism either. Yet we see the same results over and over. Individuals being squashed and crushed and the idea is more important than the people and that's why I will never subscribe to it. When you talk about the appalling failure of neoliberalism to realise individual potential, where else in the world is individual potential realised more so than in the West? To the point where millions of people from all over the world are desperately trying to come here because this is where they feel that their ambitions and their individual potential can be most fulfilled. That is what they say when they get off the boat, when they get off the plane. We talk about immigration as people just coming for economic benefits. It's not just that. This is not a dormitory where people come to work and make money. There's a lot more about what we have to offer and it is about that individual liberty and personal freedom. People do not rush to social estates, any state that has done it. There's no one beating their doors down to go and live in Cuba or Venezuela or North Korea or any of those places. For me, look at the evidence. Look at the evidence. I think that's all you need to do to know that this is something that can't work. There doesn't seem to be any place in your ideology for fairness between people because not everybody is born with the same intelligence, with the same attributes, with the same abilities. The great thing about socialism, surely, is that at least they can get a decent education, they can get decent healthcare, they can lead a reasonable life, whatever disadvantages they're born with. Well, if you go to some public schools, particularly in the poorest parts of England and the poorest parts of the United States, I don't think you would call the education that kids get that decent. Well, actually, in some of the poorest parts of London, you get some of the best schools, places like Newham. Well, granted, maybe I should argue about London, but certainly in the United States that's not the case. Public education is a massive failure. Yeah, charter schools have improved things, but charter schools is exactly what the socialist inclination would argue against. But they're still free and publicly provided? Yes, and I think we could improve dramatically over that as well when we don't make them free, it don't make them publicly provided. But I have to comment on this neoliberalism's failure, not that I'm a neoliberalist because I think they're way too moderate in the support of markets. But, I mean, to look around the world today and see darkness is to have shades, to be women's shades. I travel all over the world. I've spoken in 60 different countries. When I go around the world, when I go to Eastern Europe, or I go to Asia, or I go to China, or you go to Vietnam, or you go to any of these countries, what you are seeing is that the creation of markets, the ability to have free markets, even in limited circumstances, brings out human potential. People are so hungry to be free as individuals, so hungry to be left alone from the state dictating every single aspect of their lives. And as a consequence, a billion people, over a billion people, have come out of extreme poverty over the last 30 years. And you can ignore that, you can say that it didn't happen. But globalization has brought more wealth to the world, has helped poverty, the poor, more than any other theoretical abstract system in human history. Over a billion people over the last 30 years have come out of extreme poverty. There's a middle class today in India and in China that did not exist 30 years ago. 30 years ago, 30% of the planet lived on under $2 a day. Today, the number is under 9%. Now that should be something we should be celebrating and asking the question. How did this happen? This is indeed a beautiful thing. None of it happened because of foreign aid. None of it happened because of the exploitation of Marxist ideology. We already had that. It's indeed the rejection of that Marxist ideology. It's the rejection of central planning. It's the rejection of the idea of the proletarian that has brought this around. It's the fact that Deng Chapeng in China, as evil and the bastard that he was, was willing to say, look, it worked in Hong Kong. Maybe we should try this in the area around Hong Kong and see what happens. We'll just leave them alone. And when you leave people alone, when you leave people free, then they create things that exceed our imagination because you are liberating the human potential. And that is true. If you go back 250 years ago, 95% of humanity lived on $2 a day or less. Imagine your own lives on $2 a day or less. People tell me we have a lot of anxiety in life today. Think about living where you're growing your own food and half your children are dying before age 10. That is the world before capitalism, before free markets. Capitalism is the greatest liberator in human history of the poor, of the 95% who used to be in adjunct poverty. It is the greatest system we have ever come across and the antagonism towards it. I find mystifying because, again, human life has never, ever, ever been better than it is right now. And it could be a lot better, that we'll agree on, because I don't think we're capitalist enough. We don't take our capitalism seriously enough. And there's a trick in your question, right? Because you have equated fairness with equality. But fairness never used to mean equality. Fairness means getting what you deserve. And I would argue that equality is not what you deserve. Some people deserve more and some people deserve less based on the value they create. But how do you define deserve? I mean, suppose you're born with special educational needs and it's very difficult for you to hold down a normal job. Do you just deserve to be poor because, you know, something was a little bit wrong with your brain when you were born? In a sense, so let's flip that around. What makes it because you were born that way, what gives you a claim against what I produce? What gives you a claim about my effort and my values? That is, I might help you because I care for you and I care about human beings. But what gives you a claim against me and the right to use violence against me in order to fulfill that point? I never suggested violence. Well, taxes, what is redistribution of wealth? Is not violence against some for the benefit of others? No, it's not violence. Well, try not paying your taxes and see what happens. Of course it's violence. No one's going to hurt you. Can I respond to that? You know what's going to hit you. Even I have a different response to... Let Leo come back. The peroration to capitalism you just heard, you can read in the whole first half of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. It is absolutely true. And that's why we're talking about not a model, but historical conflict and direction. Movement. Of course capitalism has been the most dynamic, the most productive, the most competitive, the most successful economic system in human history. The bourgeoisie has been the most revolutionary class in human history, much more than the proletariat, absolutely. And if Marx was wrong, he was wrong in thinking that at a very young age it didn't have very long to live. The book I've written, the Making Global Capitalism, is about how remarkable it is that 150 years after the Communist Manifesto, which so brilliantly predicts what we came to call globalization in the 1990s, was realized 150 years later, exactly in the terms we just heard, where every social relationship on the face of the earth is commodified, where every social relationship on the face of the earth is treated as a derivative asset. That's the world we're in, and it is dynamic. Very true, right? And it does produce enormous wealth. It also, of course, produces enormous inequality, even when it increases the standard of living of those at the bottom. That's very true. So all of these societies that have become capitalist in this period, above all Nigeria, the notion that Nigeria ever claimed to be socialist, the notion that national socialism, the first thing that national socialism did was to imprison the trade unionists, the social democrats, let alone the communists. The only reason they took the word socialism was because of the appeal it had to a very strong German working class. The whole emphasis of fascism was anti-socialist, and it's obvious from who didn't go to jail, and who did, who didn't go to jail, were the capitalists. That's not who violence we're using. I think the Jewish people might disagree. I want to make this point. That's a very heavy remark to history. What I was referring to with the failure of neoliberal globalization was not what you're describing as its capitalist successes. The failures are the delegitimation that has come after 2007 but up to today. The largest number of strikes in the world are in China. By far, 200,000 a year. By people whose standards of living have gone up, who support their extended families in the villages. That's the largest number of strikes, the largest number of suicides, the largest number of occupational deaths in the world. The same is true of India, where there is a massive middle class. Absolutely true. But the massive increase in impoverishment in alienation and destitution is enormous, especially in the massive cities which you're connected with when you connect with someone in Chennai and you think you're calling up BT and it's actually some educated Indian on the line who is giving you advice about what to do to get your phone fixed. In that very city which I've been where 200,000 women have recently organized against Nokia by the Indian Trade Union Federation, the impoverishment is stunning. It looks like Manchester. The point is this. It looks like Manchester in 1948. In 1848. No, I totally agree. That is not to say therefore that capitalism is over. What it is to say is that the conflict that capitalism has always produced, the aspirations it's always produced are not going to go away. The 21st century will be a century again of socialist movement and aspiration. Whether we will get it right will partly have to do with the degree of dogmatism on the right with regard to giving space to do it because they have the military, they have the city of London and if there is not space given so a democratic socialist government to try to turn finance into a public utility to try to extend the co-ops you were speaking of to use a national investment bank and regional investment banks to provide an infrastructure for those co-ops then we could indeed face a dictatorial capitalism or if Jeremy Corbyn totally transforms himself as a human being which I don't think he would. Yes, we could face an authoritarian socialism. We're going to go on to the future in a moment. Hang on a moment because what I really want to discuss here is which system goes best or against the grain of human nature because you're saying that capitalism makes us feel alienated and dispirited and suicidal. Human nature is not one thing. I know it's not one thing but equally when socialism has been tried in practice it also seems to go against the grain of human nature because people seem to want to have an incentive to work and therefore in collectivised farms and that sort of thing hardly any food got grown when they got in Cuba when people were allowed to grow their own food and farms suddenly production went up. So I'm just wondering whether there's something about human nature that perhaps doesn't work with a collectivised system. We have to unleash the many dimensions of human nature. The care that a mother shows for her child. The sensitivity we feel to a human being in suffering is part of our human nature. The competitiveness that he thinks is the goal of all human life. The protection of his property is also human nature. What we need to do is try to develop those aspects of human nature that realise individuality in a social way. Not in a selfish greedy let me engage in a tax haven way. And to hell with the rest. This is a caricature. It's a complete and utter caricature. The idea that all human relationships be commoditised. My relationship with my wife and my children is not being commoditised. My relationship with my friends is not being commoditised. My relationship with my social circle and maybe for some of you your religion is not being commoditised. The idea that these relationships are being commoditised is propaganda to make capitalism be what it is not. All capitalism is and we're going to disagree a little bit about capitalism and we're certainly going to disagree about what capitalism is. Capitalism is freedom. Capitalism is the freedom of the individual to live his life as he sees fit free of coercion. Free of coercion of the state and free of coercion from his neighbour. Ask a miner in a Welsh mind that question. Free of coercion from the co-op. It's not what we have today. We don't have capitalism today. We have elements of capitalism. But the reason there are so many strikes in China today is because China is not capitalist. But there are elements of capitalism in China just like there are elements of socialism in China. But what makes China rich, what allows the individuals in China to achieve their human potential and to live up to their human nature is the capitalist element. It is the socialist element that is actually suppressing them and causing them to strike. It is in the state-run enterprises that you're seeing the strikes. It is not in the private sector that you're seeing the strikes. So it's a perversion to describe capitalism as fascist. Yes, the capitalist, so-called capitalist, the people with money, and not everybody with money as a capitalist, the people with money who wanted to cooperate with the Nazis didn't go to jail. The people with money who didn't want to cooperate with the Nazis did go to jail. To make this about class warfare, fascism, particularly Nazis, is a complete and utter distortion of history. Certainly there were rich families in Germany who cooperated with the Nazis and they should go to hell for that. But it is not true that every single person with money was a Nazi and that money defined their cooperation. Many of them refused and many of them went to the concentration camps, certainly if they were Jewish but even if they were not. Fascism is the antithesis of capitalism. Fascism is far more similar to socialism than it is to capitalism. It's the edges of socialism, communism and fascism. Our brothers, yes, the Nazis got rid of their political enemies, but they imposed the same kind of central planning as the socialists did in the Soviet Union. It just had a slightly different form, both the anti-democratic, both the anti-freedom and both went to sacrifice the individual to some grand view of humanity, whether it's for the sake of the proletarian, the working classes or for the sake of the race. But let me make one other point about spiritual values or whatever. I mean, when I look at the 19th century, when I look at somebody like Beethoven who was born, if you will, under a feudal system and grew up into a more capitalist system, I see an artist going from a position where he was completely 100% dependent on aristocrats for being able to create his music and put on performances. By the end of his career he's doing live events, public events where the new bourgeoisie are paying to come and see him perform. And what you see throughout Europe is a flourishing of self-expression, a flourishing of the arts, a flourishing of diverse, a massive diversity, artistic, spiritual, ideological, wonderful debates and discussions and salons and the arts just explode during this period and they're being democratized in a sense that they are now accessible to the masses. Hardly. Kenny. In the 19th century. No, no, no, not Kenny. Why they ended today. Well, thank you, Marianne. I mean, I think for me a really poignant moment in this discussion has been, it's what Yaren just touched on, but Leo's saying that the capitalist co-operative of the Nazis and then completely forgetting what happened to the Jews whose property was confiscated and what happened to them and it resonates for me now because when we talk about a rise in anti-Semitism that we see, I think it is actually linked to it's linking capitalism and being Jewish. There's something about that link that's coming up and then the anti-Semitism in its own way is an anti-capitalist expression that's come out in a particularly ugly form. Like that mural that Jeremy Corbyn improved of. Do you know, I'm not even sure if he really understands exactly exactly what is going on, but I don't think it's a coincidence. Some people think that he understands it. Do you think I said something that didn't refer? No, no, no. I think that we get these... Excuse me. No, no, Leo. Listen to what I'm saying. You've had your chance. There are blank spots which people tend to have when they're talking about socialism and capitalism. They see the very best in their own motivations and opinions and the very worst in their opponents and then they forget things the bad things which have happened by people on their own side. It's interesting. You're talking to me about Nigerian capitalism, this myth of Nigerian capitalism. It really saddens me because I lived it. I grew up in it. I went to a school, for example, where you had to take exams and depending on what you scored, your entire life was decided. These are the subjects you're going to study. It was known as the 11 plus here in Ribbon. No, no, nothing like that at all. It's not the 11 plus. This is about if you score above a certain amount, you've got to do sciences. It's why, for instance, you find more African and Asian women in engineering courses. I studied engineering because it's state-designed. I had an exam which was similar to the 11 plus and what they did was they took all the scores of everyone who was there who took the exam and they sprinkled us around the country because they wanted us to be equal. They didn't want us to go to the school that was nearest home. They wanted everybody to understand what it was like in a different part of the country. Can you imagine taking an exam and then being told that the state is going to send you to a school 500 miles from home? State boarding school, it had to be. We had to do manual labour so that we could learn about these values, these social values, learn about the land that had a machesi. That can explain. That is the challenge because people go there and they see markets and people buying and selling and they call it capitalism. The state defines how much the currency is worth. You can't buy foreign exchange, for instance. A black market is created where the real value of the money exists. If someone like my mother or father wants to come to this country, if she wants it quickly, she buys it off the black market. If she wants it at the official rate, she goes to a bank and writes for permission to change her own money at a rate that is viable. That is what the wealthy people do. It always fosters corruption. People don't understand this. They confuse the ability of someone to sell trinkets and maybe set up a business as capitalism. When the entire structure is actually about state control, is about state intervention and telling people what they should do and how they live their lives, you can't do anything on your own without having that permission. I think you make my point that capitalism as a real historical system has existed far more with dictatorial governments than what we call democratic ones. I disagree. Capitalism is about individual liberty. By definition, a dictatorial country, it is not a capitalist country. I think what it is is that dictatorships are so common that you will find capitalism in dictatorships. You will find socialism in dictatorships. When you look at the impact on other people's lives, when you look at the bare facts of do people want to live in these socialist states, no, they don't. You can't argue against that. I think it is just an objective fact and I'm not taking sides here that there are more democracies that are capitalist than democracies that are socialist. But Leo, because you're the only socialist on the platform, I'm going to give you five minutes now to tell us how you would make socialism. There is not a political... Please let me finish my question to you. I'm a chair. I will give you three or four minutes to explain exactly how you put socialism in action, retaining all the democratic freedom of expression, that sort of thing, in a way that would work in a country like the UK. The democracy that we enjoy, the very limited democracy that we enjoy in the advanced capitalist societies and political scientists of every ideological strike agree with this, cannot be understood, apart from the formation of organizations of the unpropertyd, who demanded that they be included in the state despite being unpropertyd. The form of elected representation we had before Jacksonian democracy in the United States first of all in 1835. Actually, I don't want any history because you only got three minutes. If you were Jeremy Corbyn, what would you do? I think this is related to it. It was the development of labour movements and the development of feminist movements after that, supported usually by these labour movements, arguing that the unpropertyd or human beings were considered the properties of the men and their family should be able to be members of the state. And the democracy we have, which is a real, valued and important thing, was won by those struggles. It didn't come out of an abstract model. It didn't come out of the beneficence of the old state ruling class. It was won everywhere, and this is entirely agreed in political science. There was a great deal of socialist yearning, often associated with this, but not for the most part. That socialist yearning, that yearning for collective protection, collective expression, an attempt to democratize our society, to democratize the enterprise, to allow what happens on the hospital ward to be a matter of discourse and discussion of a democratic kind, to allow what happens in the mine to be that, was what people were also seeking for. That has not been achieved. That has not been achieved. We have a free national health service here, which is free. I was speaking of the democratic aspiration. What we have is a society in which the decisions about what is to be produced, where it's to be produced, what's to be invested, how it's to be invested, is not determined by states. It is determined by the massive corporations that control the economies. They do so, of course, in close conjunction with the states that protect their property, that codify the rules of exchange around the world. We have a bit of important democracy, but we have a yearning, which Corbyn expresses, for a much broader, a much deeper democratic economy, democratic society. That's what socialism is. What's it actually for? If you read The Labour Manifesto, it begins with developing the co-op system, providing an infrastructure for it through regional investment banks. In my view, eventually, although this would meet enormous opposition, not only from the city of London, but I fear from parts of the British state, which are the repressive apparatus of the state, to turn what we all need so badly and are now so stuck into, to turn the city of London into a public utility. This is what all of our resources pass through. Right? And without access to that, we can't democratically decide what should be produced, how it should be produced, whether the NHS should be marketized, which is what's happened to it. I'll start there. Right. Good.