 A few weeks ago, we hosted our annual political school on the beautiful island of Lustybeg in the county of Fremanna. We invited left activists and trade unionists from across Ireland to talk, to debate, to listen with a range of brilliant speakers from across Ireland and Britain, where we looked at the issues of Brexit, the border and the opportunities that this crisis offers for progressive left politics. This political school is part of our ongoing programme to reintroduce radical political education into the labour movement and into working-class communities, because we strongly believe that we're losing the political battle in part because we're also losing the battle of ideas. In the mainstream, the role of pundits, preachers and political leaders is to do them as impossible any radical change to the economic system, and even in the spaces where you'd expect to find radical ideas have themselves been colonised by free market thinking, the academy, large parts of the labour movement and large swathes of the traditional political left. The lesson it seems is that capitalism is all there is. It's our common sense. It's the only way to understand the world. But facing climate breakdown, radical inequality across the globe, the rise of the right, rising authoritarianism, global financial instability, suffocating levels of debt, it's our responsibility to articulate those alternatives and indeed to build them. In the mainstream media, all we find is a zealous defence of the status quo. When you turn to social media, you're faced too often with the lunatic ramblings of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, anti-taxers, fascists the alt-right and indeed the pernicious influence of the corporations themselves. Radical political education based on core understandings of left political economy offers a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. It demands political education programmes that have as their sole purpose the building of collective identity of leftygemony and ultimately working class power. And that means meeting people where they are, both politically and geographically, in their workplaces, in trade union spaces and most importantly of all in communities. Radical political education gives us the tools that we need to interpret, to understand and of course change the world. So over the next few months you'll be seeing some blogs, some articles, some video posts addressing the pressing need for radical political education. And of course, if you see a seminar or a workshop or a conference offered by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or indeed by trademark Belfast, get your ass along to it. We'll see you there. Slang or foil.