 Welcome everybody. So bourgeois analysts, reformists and postmodern academics alike are all talking about this supposed culture war that apparently dominates politics today. And as Carla said in her introduction, they describe phenomena like Brexit and also the recent resurgence of that life's matter amongst other things as evidence of a clash between this socially conservative older layer of society on one side. And socially liberal younger woke layers on the other. And as she also said this view sidelines economic class as the main dividing line in society in favor of cultural values, and the culture war is presented as a novel way of dealing with politics in a new era. But in actual fact this is age old denial of class struggle reheated and resold in the language of identity politics, because the truth is class struggle is on the agenda today like never before. In the last year, you had back to back insurrectionary movements and revolution in one country after another too many for me to list. And now the deepest crisis in capitalism's history has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, which has brutally exposed class antagonisms. You've got the poor dying in droves or having their lives ruined their livelihoods destroyed, while the rich get even richer. There's been billions of people to question a system that shamelessly puts profits before human lives, and the workers and youth are increasingly open to socialism and revolution and revolutionary ideas, even in the USA the belly of the beast as we all heard in the wonderful plenary last night, according to a few polls, nearly half the population would vote for a socialist president and the majority of young people would vote for socialist president and a third would vote for a communist president. The mood of anger and desire for radical change in society hasn't resulted in an explosion of class conflict already. That's only because of the bankruptcy of the leadership of the workers movement who have utterly failed at every step to give the working class any sort of lead. So I'd say forget culture war class war will define the 21st century, provided bold leadership comes to the fore, only the Marxist theory of class struggle can make sense of the current period and offer a road out of the nightmare the capitalism has conjured up. So culture war. The term was actually coined by a US sociologist called James Davidson Hunter, and he adapted it from Otto von Bismarck's cultural comp, which was his persecution of Catholics during German unification in the 1870s that exploited religious divisions to divert the attention of the masses away from political struggle and important democratic tasks at that time. So Hunter published his main book, culture wars the struggle to define America in 1991, the same year that Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history. And it's no coincidence that these two analyses came together, because with the collapse of the USSR, the beginning of the 90s, bourgeois commentators were tripping over themselves to declare socialism and class struggle tried and failed. And Hunter argue that the fall of the Soviet Union had caused the axis of political conflict in the USA to shift from left versus rights to traditional versus progressive, in other words, conservative religious Republicans versus progressive Democrats. And this culture war was a continuation of the social divisions over women and gay liberation movements of the 80s, anti war protests and civil rights struggles in the 60s and 70s. And of course this analysis divorces all these movements from class content reducing them to just a battle of differing values and subsequent writers have argued that the culture wars increasingly played out online in the 2000s, with the anonymity of the internet giving people freedom to express more and more extreme reactionary views openly, leading to these massive battles between right wing trolls and so called social justice warriors on social media or message boards and so on. And by 2020 the analysis holds that conservative authoritarians have now entrenched their grip on political power assisted by an online army of reactionaries and also mainstream right wing media moguls like Robert Rupert Murdoch. The analysis points to demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, winning power by appealing to nationalism to racism, blaming migrants minority groups or social problems and so on. He also argues that traditionalists in the manner that was previously described teamed up with right wing libertarians to attack politically correct progressives for controlling what people are allowed to say and think, all while authoritarian politicians curtailed democratic and political rights for oppressed groups. These authoritarians distract the population by creating bogeymen out of groups like anti fair and black lives matter for threatening peace and security, while at the same time supporting far right vigilante to attack and kill them in defense of private property. We also have movements like the so called alt rights which contains clear fascist overtones with shock jocks like Steve Bannon Ben Shapiro spinning conspiracy theories about cultural Marxist undermining Western civilization and the COVID-19 pandemic has also been dragged into the culture war, as we've seen by the likes of Donald Trump exploiting the anxiety of precarious lower class lower middle class. By suggesting that the virus is exaggerated by liberals or by China to undermine personal freedoms. Now, none of this is actually particularly new. We've seen these processes unfold before. Many times in history, the bourgeoisie have divided the population on cultural lines, creating situations where opportunistic demagogues can advance themselves. And I would say that all this recent culture war actually describes is the fall out from the collapse of the liberal center ground in the last couple of decades after the capitalist system it upholds provided nothing but years of rising inequality and misery. The liberal wing of the establishment actually had nothing to do with winning advances for workers for youth for minority groups in the first place, all of this was accomplished by class struggle from below. The system granted concessions in times of relative stability, but that's a thing of the past, we're now in a period of crisis, and the bourgeoisie have to squeeze workers and youth through pay cuts, layoffs, reduction of rights and rising living costs to preserved profits. And when the liberals and the reformists have been in charge in the last period, they've carried out these tasks of the ruling class dutifully attacking workers, while at the same time preaching the values of inclusion and political correctness which has totally changed and amongst some layers those values themselves. After the 2008 crisis, the ruling class was forced to divert rising anger over cuts and austerity towards scapegoats, particularly migrant workers, and now they've lost control over the ugly forces that they put into the surface. And the most degenerate layer of the ruling class is now in the driver's seat people who are happy to exploit the worst instincts of the most backwards and reactionary layers of society, and trample all over the bourgeoisie's own democratic institutions to pursue their narrow interests. Now you see Donald Trump, right now threatening to mobilize the far right proud boys to contest the election result in the USA if he loses. There was a conscious plan by some cabal of authoritarians in the way the hunter suggests these are symptoms of capitalist degeneration and resulting social polarization. That's what's destroyed the basis for the centergrounds. The big bourgeois serious wing of the bourgeois and their mouthpieces are desperate for stability, but their only solution is to promote a democratic establishment that is hated and discredited. And they sometimes try to fight the culture war themselves by disingenuously pandering the diversity like when Disney donated chump change to the NAACP or Sony put a BLM theme on the PlayStation five or Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi war West African can take a lot in solidarity with BLM this disgusting hypocrisy by agents of the very same exploitative oppressive capitalist system and the reformists for their part. Can't see any way else. They're despairing at a lack of results from class struggle. And as a result sections of them have fully embraced the culture war, and this also has precedence. In the 1960s, for example, the Euro communist splits from the Stalinist Communist Party in Britain, influenced by a very selective reading of the weakest side of Gramsci declared that the old class struggle methods were outdated. This was a particularly common view amongst their student wing and more petty bourgeois wing, and instead they turned towards so called cultural politics as they put it, chasing after feminist movements environmentalism community support groups and so on. Basically, activism identity politics divorced from class struggle. They were hunting for shortcuts in effect because they were frustrated with the lack of results from the working class, and the same basic idea prevails today. And having abandoned real class analysis and methods. All the reformists can do is mirror the liberal wing of the bourgeois, you know, tutting about the nasty political climate, fighting back with impotent identity politics, calling on workers and youth to support lesser evil bourgeois candidates and elections, while offering no hope and no plan for tangible improvements. And this class collaboration and tokenism actually empowers the right wing of the so called culture war, because it makes them look like a radical representative to the despised status quo that the reformists and liberals are propping up. You know, Johnson exploited this mood over Brexit, when he was proging parliament and so on, and taking on the courts. He presented himself as standing up from the for the common man and speaking truth to power. Another thing to understand, I would say, is that society is polarizing drastically under a crisis that has hit workers and the middle classes as well, with the worst decline in living standards in 200 years. And in the absence of bold leadership from the left. It's the demagogic rights that has been able to profit from this by appealing in a distorted way to sections of society that are fed up with the status quo, and they get away with it because the left haven't explained the truth. They haven't drawn out the class issues. They haven't pointed their fingers at the bankers and the bosses are failing to invest for creating more job failing to create more jobs and so on. When Nigel Farage was blaming migrants for taking jobs off British workers in 2010 and 2015. What was Labour doing, Labour was agreeing with him and putting anti migrant slogans on its mugs. When progressive Scottish workers and youth voted to leave the UK to stick it to Westminster, what did Labour do? They joined the Tories on their platform defending the Union of the UK. And where there have been political leaders offering consistent opposition from the left, like Jeremy Corbyn, at least until the Blair rights destroyed him, they've proved very popular. Because the class struggle hasn't been overtaken by the culture war. What's happened is capitalism in its state of seen our decay has dredged scum up to the surface, and nobody is offering workers and youth a class based alternative. There's a clear influence of postmodernism and identity politics on the theory of culture war. We've got lots of articles and videos about these topics on on on marxist.com to flesh this out. I just recently called the new working class by Claire Ainslie, who's just recently been taken on as a circus Dharma leader of the Labour Party's new policy advisor. And she starts by saying the following social class is not a fixed concept, but a construct with a purpose dependent on context. Ainslie and postmodern writers that she draws on mainly people like Pierre Bourdeau class is something you identify as alongside race, gender, sexuality, and so on. And from this idealist perspective, the old view of class is out of touch, and she further writes in the days when the working class was politically organized in the form of trade unions, easy to address as a mass in factories and would respond to working class. Democratic representation and communication had a more linear path. Today, any party wanting to appeal to the new working class needs to have a firsthand understanding of the Democrat demographics, pardon me, affiliations and identities of the diverse peoples who comprise this large constituency. As previously noted, the fact that this group doesn't identify as a coherent whole doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it cannot be tied into a convenient identity group. I'll apologize in advance I'll be quoting a lot of nonsense over the course of this talk. But we should say at least the working class exists for Ainslie, which is better than some of her ilk, but it's splintered into different identities, the traditional working class, the new working class, the precariat and so on. She further says, picturing a typical working class person in Britain 30 or 40 years ago, would probably have brought to mind a worker employed in a large workplace, like a factory doing partly skilled manual work. Most likely a man and most likely whites. That has all changed. The new working class undertake hundreds of different types of jobs in today's economy, employed as cleaners, shop workers, bartenders, cooks, carers, teaching assistants, secretaries, delivery workers, and so on. I'm pretty sure all those jobs have existed for more than 30 to 40 years, but there we go. Her analysis is actually every bit as rigid and dogmatic as the old view of class she mischaracterizes. All it does is replace the working class as one static homogenous group with four or five static homogenous groups. And as a matter of fact, Marxist aren't trying to tidy class into an entity group as you suggest. We've never said the working class is one that unitary mass. There are different kinds of work, different backgrounds, different traditions, different levels of class consciousness. There are more advanced and backward layers, more and less exploited and deprived layers within the working class. But nevertheless, we argue that class is an objective social relation to the means of production. If you sell your labor power for a wage, you're a worker. You can identify as whatever you like, but that is a material facts, and there's no new working class. There's just one that is more thoroughly exploited than in the past, as a result of the crisis of capitalism. It is true that the trade union movement has been weakened over the course of years by the portrayals of its leaders. And it's also true that industrial working class communities have been decimated by deindustrialization and by austerity. And all of this has an effect on the class struggle, on the confidence and consciousness of layers of the working class, but class remains a material fact, and it's still in the interests of the entire working class to fight collectively for its shared interests. The journalist, economist, self-described Marxist and now seemingly circused arm's biggest fan, Paul Mason, who I'm sure you've heard of, also embraces the culture war, and he explicitly attacks the orthodox Marx's view of class. He says that the 2019 general election shattered a theory of class struggle that no longer describes reality in which any cultural disconnect between workers in the left can be overcome with left-wing economic policies. And so on. The working class is bifurcating into two distinct and sometimes culturally hostile groups. This is evidenced by the collapse of labour support in small town, ex-industrial communities, simultaneously with its loss of support amongst young educated workers in the cities to the regions, Lib Dems and nationalists. But if we go back just two years to the 2017 election, labour running on a left-wing programme under the same left-wing leader won the majority in all working layers of society. The Tories only beat them amongst retirees. So when the left leaders are for actual opposition on class lines, surface level divisions can be overcome. Of course, eventually Corbyn was driven to defeat, and there are reasons for that that I won't describe here. But the point is, Mason and Ainsley ignore this point. And in fact, incredibly, Ainsley's book came out just after the 2017 general election. She must have been writing it while it was happening. And it barely mentions the fact that Corbyn won Labour's best results since 1945. I can't imagine why. Perhaps it would undermine her conclusions. Okay, so the working class has changed and class struggle is a thing of the past. Why is this? Well, according to Mason and to Ainsley, the period of so-called neoliberalism since the 1980s has destroyed the old basis for an organised working class. These large communities based around full-time work in industrial production. What's certainly true that after the Second World War, the capitalists increasingly went after profitable short-term speculation rather than investing in real production and sold off big sections of industry, and that of course accelerated in the past year. It's also true that the crisis of overproduction has led to an epidemic of unemployment and underemployments. Millions of people are now in part-time work compared to the past and bogus self-employment as well in the gig economy and so on. But rather than offering any resistance to this, the Labour movement leaders rolled over and accepted the new normal, the Blair acts in the Labour Party in particular becoming enthusiastic agents of the capitalist system. This so-called period of neoliberalism is just symptomatic of the capitalist crisis of overproduction being dumped on the shoulders of the working class following the end of the post-war boom, which saw a 30-year relative increase in prosperity. And Mason goes one further, arguing that the experience of neoliberalism has changed the consciousness of the working class for the worse. He asks why, for instance, despite plenty of provocations and consistent attacks on wages and living standards, workers in Britain haven't revolted in the neoliberal period. And he explains, fear of change, political consumerism. How long, sorry? That's fine. Fear of change, political consumerism, weak organisational loyalty and psychological insecurity coupled with multi-generational experience of defeats and four decades of market atomisation have made workers more conservative, basically because they're afraid of losing what they've got. Now, of course, the most oppressed layers of the working class, with the least to lose, can often be the most radical. Look at the Russian Revolution, look at the revolution in Sudan last year. And consciousness, we accept, has always been and will always be fundamentally very conservative. It takes a lot for people to risk pay, to risk their livelihoods and homes, to go out and fight. And more to the point, why would they bother when there's nobody leading the way or inspiring confidence? Again, the rotten role of the workers' leadership over the last few decades has far more to do with this situation than any neoliberal ideology on workers' part. Mason also says that the capitalists have started exploiting workers in new ways. No longer just work, but interest payments, rents, gambling profits, overpricing of goods, services provided by unchallengeable monopolies, the commercialisation and privatisation of previously public goods, services and spaces, and the enclosure of the commons. So, capitalists exploit workers through rents, interest, monopolisation and privatisation. These are hardly new developments. This has been going on for quite a while, like long preceding the so-called neoliberal period. But nevertheless, all of this tots up to an identity that Mason calls the neoliberal self, which is based on individualism, hedonism, fatalism, and where people are defined by what they have consumed, not where they work, almost premised on the idea that the market is an intelligent machine that knows better than any individual human brain. Now, once again, this is not a new idea. And those of you who attended Daniel's talk on academic Marxism will remember his analysis at the Frankfurt School, where you have these petty bourgeois pseudo-Marxist academics in the 1920s, who were basically incredibly pessimistic of what they saw as a lull in the workers' movements, and drew the conclusion that consumerism, pop culture, and so on, had turned the working class into mindless, apathetic zombies incapable of struggle, and actually kind of in love with authoritarianism. Well, I think it's fair to say that a bit more class struggle went on in the 20th century after that. I mean, these were similar to the conclusions that sections of the left and so-called Marxists were making of the French working class. They said they were bourgeois-rified and stupefied by washing machines and hoovers, before they launched one of the greatest revolutions and revolutionary movements in living memory at the time. But nevertheless, Mason goes on to describe the so-called traditional working class, which he characterizes as older people in the north of England's, the Midlands and Wales, who he defines as hopelessly brainwashed and conservative. He says, the former industrial working class in the Midlands and the north has detached itself from the values that are now core to our party. We are now fighting a strong and virulent nativism, the assumption by older white workers that their family history entitles them to go to the front of the cube, public services, and veto over who can live and work in their community. Pardon me. By contrast, he says, the new diverse network workforce of the big cities and their struggles over wages, rents, zero hours, women's rights, migration rights, LGBTQ plus issues and above all the climate is the strongest agent of change we have. Now, if there's a grain of truth in this analysis, there has been a massive and widening economic generational divide opening up in the last period with younger workers bearing the brunt of the crisis of capitalism in the form of under employment and debt. It's also true that compared to the past, the youth and students are increasingly proletarian eyes and radicalizing to the left, but all Mason's analysis really shows is his contempt is really quite toxic contempt for a whole swath of the working class who as far as he is concerned, is concerned, are beyond help. And to be clear, do Marxist think that workers can't have racist views of course we don't think that's course workers can have racist views we don't we don't prettify or or fetishize the working class. But the shared interest in fighting collectively against common exploitation can cut across these prejudices, you see this in any strike, and the unified working class in struggle is the only force that's capable of ultimately eradicating racism and oppression at their source which is the capitalist system itself. And as far as the, you know, the inoculated racist northern working class goes right now with Johnson's election promises abandoned in the north. And with northern towns and cities placed under onerous lockdowns. So is he a rising class anger amongst the so called traditional working class that could be exploited and directed in a positive progressive direction by left leadership if one existed that was willing to take on that task. Accepting all of this, for the sake of argument, how does the left fight this culture war. Ainsley tells us that because the working class is more disparate more atomized and occupies multiple social identities we need, I quote, a shift towards new organizing principles away from social class based on national identity, or progressive values. So basically it's not so much a case of what you're selling as much as how you sell it. This is post modern idealism in a nutshell, the idea that you can change political reality by playing around with words. But okay, what sort of values do we need. Well, Keir Starmer's new head of policy after much thought and research concludes the values the voters rates highest across all social classes in Britain today are family, fairness, hard work and decency, followed by equality and freedom. I mean, this is hardly earth shattering stuff is it. These are completely hollow phrases that could be filled with any content that you like. And then surprisingly she fills it with reformist content, advocating mixed economy of states market and individual responsibility, but we've had that for decades in various forms and looks where it's brought us to precisely the problems she's trying to solve. Jason agrees with Ainsley's diagnosis in the main, but he actually doubles down on the cultural or even harder. He says British politics, and now primarily influenced by values, not single class identities or raw economic interests. We can't reverse our way out of that situation or ignore it. We have to fight our way through it to a more advantageous situation. Now, Marxist accept that culture tradition and so on. We have an effect on politics. We're not vulgar economic determinists, but economic interests are the determining factor in the last analysis, even comparatively inactive layers of the working class can be and are pulled into collective struggle in which really comes to shove. Look at the suburban commuters who triggered the Gilles Jean protest in France recently, for example. And again, this deeply fractured value orientated working class that makes and describes and criticizes voted on mass for labor in 2017. And it wasn't Corbyn's ability to tell nice convincing stories that led to his popularity was his anti austerity program that was presented as a genuine alternative to the triangulation and betrayals of new labor and the Liberals, and also the the the brute austerity of the Tory party in the coalition government. The culture war boils down in the last analysis to reactionary identity politics, abandoning class struggle and fighting on the basis of the same divide and rule created by the bosses in the first place. These are the conclusions of pessimistic solipsistic petty bourgeois renegades who don't understand politics anything but the very surface level. They can't handle the contradiction of workers voting against their interests. So they conclude that just stupid xenophobes, which means that the enlightened petty bourgeois leaders of the left have to create a narrative on their level. So unsurprisingly Mason in particular sees the Brexit votes as strong evidence of his arguments. He thinks that the vote to leave the EU by millions of traditional working class people showed that they embraced reactionary nationalism and abandoned left wing politics, although many of them voted for Corbyn's left wing program in 2017, being won over from parties like UKIP in parts, because later promised to accept the results of the referendum. And these same layers are now rapidly turning against Johnson. Now, we've spoken about this at length and written about it as well. There are lots of reasons to the Brexit votes and racism and anti migrant sentiments were definitely a part of it. There's no question about that. But it was also seen as a chance to give Westminster a kicking after communities in the so called red wall were hit by decades of cuts on austerity, usually carried out by Labour councils as a matter of fact. Brexit was in part a protest against an establishment that was correctly felt to have ignored these people. By accepting a second referendum position, which Mason by the way pushed very hard for Labour became indelibly identified with this hated establishments, and that coupled with Corbyn's weakness and resisting the Blairites who were undermining him is ultimately the reason why they lost in 15 minutes gone. Thank you. So Mason and Ainsley both conclude that Brexit shows that class based economic arguments have failed, and their values based alternative boils down to moving to the right. Basically, it's a case if you can't beat them join them. Ainsley says that legitimate concerns, always a popular phrase over immigration means that a points based system for migration should be introduced, which meets the needs of employers and the public alike. In other words, she advocates reactionary attacks on migrants in her view because the working class don't like migrants. Mason goes a lot further. He says that not only should Labour accept the limits on immigration, but also, I quotes, reassure traditional working class communities that we support NATO, the nuclear deterrence, a well equipped military rooted in civil society, a police force that cares about the victims of crime, and an intelligence service that can fight terrorism effectively. So, in addition to accepting attacks on immigrants, we also need to get behind British imperialism and the oppressive capitalist states at a time when thousands of progressive youth in particular, and workers as well, have recently hit the streets to protest racist police violence, although looking at Labour's abstention on the war crimes bill and the spy cuts bill it does seem that Starmer has been taking Mason's advice to heart. On top of all this, Mason advocates meeting, as he says, the combined force of the right and far right with a class collaboration is packed at the left and the centre, in other words, lining up with the Liberals. This kind of popular frontism has never worked once in history. Every single time this strategy has been attempted, the Liberals have betrayed the working class because their material interests ultimately align with the capitalist system and not with the working class. And that's not a question of values. That's a fact. It's especially absurd as a conclusion to draw, looking at the last five years in which the Blairites and Liberals have led a relentless dirty war against the left. While Corbyn bent over backwards to win them over, to no avail. And now Starmer is kicking all left wingers out of positions of authority in the Labour Party to the likes of the hedge fund managers who financed his campaign. The centre has no interest in allying with the left. Meanwhile, Starmer is fighting the culture war as it were by embracing patriotism, which flows from the empirical logic of the Labour right wing. Well, Corbyn was rejected because he wasn't seen as loyal enough to the country. He seems to be more interested in people who are suffering very, very far away than watching the Queen's speech and bowing to the centre taff. Therefore, Labour needs to outtory the Tories on patriotism, pandering the socially conservative so-called blue Labour values of Queen and country. This opportunism, I don't think it's going to work. All it'll do is push Johnson the Tories even further to the right. But Mason defends this move in terms of the culture war, in terms of talking to patriotic workers in language they understand to sneak left wing policies into the system. Now, first of all, these policies are nowhere to be seen from Labour under Keir Starmer, as a matter of fact, their policy programme so far has been very right wing. And moreover, abandoning the language of class in favour of chauvinism and nationalism won't change the class content of that language. All it does is provide a left cover for these poisonous ideas, allowing them to more effectively distract and disarm the workers. In reality, if Labour did win a general election on the basis of subordinating itself to the interests of the capitalists and their language, that will just mean it will have to obey the logic of the capitalist system from government and carry out cuts in attacks on workers. So, Mason's pragmatism amounts to less than nothing. All it will see, at best, is Labour discredited from within power. There are so many social democratic parties across the world. Marxists have been having similar arguments with opportunists in the labour movements for decades, for centuries even. I was reading Lenin's polemics against the Mensheviks and social chauvinists like Kautsky, who advocated class collaboration and defence of the fatherland during the First World War. Likewise, advocacy of class collaboration, abandonment of the idea of socialist revolution and revolutionary methods of struggle, adaptation to bourgeois nationalism, losing sight of the fact that the borderlines of nationality and country are historically transient, making a fetish of bourgeois legality, renunciation of the class viewpoint and the class struggle for fear of repelling the broad masses of the population. And these, without doubt, are the ideological foundations of opportunism. Now this was written in 1914, but it could have been written about Paul Mason in 2020, although at the very least Kautsky and his ilk, you could argue had heads to lose, unlike Paul Mason. And then goes on, it is from such soil of opportunism that the present chauvinist and patriotic frame of mind of most second international leaders has developed the war has merely brought out rapidly and saliently the true measure of this prevalence. The parallels today with the crisis triggered by the Coronavirus pandemic, which is often spoken about in terms of a war, then as now, the opportunists in the labour movement couldn't see under the surface. Far from being hypnotised by nationalism and defence of the fatherland during the First World War, the experience of that brutal conflict pushed workers to the brink of world revolution. Today, we're on the precipice of the biggest crisis in the history of capitalism, a slump that will dwarf as already dwarfed 2008, that will dwarf 1929. You'll see double digits wiped off the GDPs of the richest countries, tens of millions of jobs to be lost. The status quo turned upside down for billions. The way the ruling class has bungled the crisis in one country after another is creating a huge groundswell of radicalisation and discontent. This won't be expressed right away or all at once. There's always a lag between consciousness and action, but it will inevitably come to the surface. So while Mason Ainsley and the cultural analysts are worrying about how far right they have to move on patriotism and immigration to win the next election, over in the USA, 10% of the population participated in the insurrectionary Black Lives Matter movement, which sent shockwaves worldwide where we saw kids throwing statues of slave owners in Britain, in Bristol, into rivers. And on top of that, you've had a second revolutionary movements in Lebanon. The red October we saw last year in Latin America is starting to heat up again. We've seen workers revolting in Thailand, Indonesia and Nigeria. And in Britain, the reactionary incompetent Tory government has presided over the worst death toll from COVID-19 in Europe, and is now literally stealing food from children's mouths, all while rewarding themselves with pay rises. This will absolutely antagonise people on class basis. It will absolutely draw starker and starker class lines in society. And in my view, this culture war will be cut across very quickly in the next few years. It's already being cut across. I frankly think this kind of language is rather outdated right now. Because the working class won't accept the destruction of their livelihoods, well-being and conditions, just because the bosses and labour bureaucrats wave the national flag. This process won't be a straight line. We will see radicalisation both to the left and to the right in the next period, but class collaboration and nationalist pandering will get us nowhere. This liberal post-modern obsession with values and narrative, all it does is artificially divide workers against one another. It's an admission of defeat and despair by people with absolutely no understanding of the working class whose values they claim to accommodate. So I say, let's let the clever academics keep their culture war. We'll stand on the firm foundation of the Marxist theory of class struggle, which calls for nothing less than the entire working class to unite and overthrow this rotten system. And I'll end with Lenin who wrote that the working class cannot play its world revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this backsliding, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unparalleled vulgarisation of the theories of Marxism. And this ruthless struggle is precisely what the international Marxist tendency and socialist appeal must wage. It's the importance of all of the theoretical discussions we've been having today and over the course of this school. We have to arm ourselves with the real ideas of class struggle, take them into the movement, cut through the nonsense and win the best layers of the workers and youth to our banner so we can build a revolutionary organisation capable of transforming society for the better. And that task, especially in the midst of this terrible pandemic, has never been more urgent. Thank you comrades.