 Well, obviously the title of the meeting suggests the importance of historical comparison. So I'm going to begin by talking a little bit about the importance and validity of doing that, and doing that specifically in the case of revolutions. Because it's by no means necessarily widely accepted that that's an important thing to do, or even a possible thing to do. If you think about the widespread common sense view of revolutions I would say that it runs something like this That before they happen they are impossible When they happen they inevitable And after they have happened they are unrepeable Or at least it's undesirable that they should be yw ti wedi bod yn y credu. Rwy'r grunau yna i'w mewr, iddo i'w gweld ystod yn gwych ar y cyd-eithgareddau i hynny o'r aphesiad honny, oedd y cyd-eithgareddau, mae'r cyd-eithgareddau ar y cyd-eithgareddau o'r miraid o'r amser ond yn y cyd-eithgareddau a'r amser yn y academiau. Yn y rhaid i'w ddweud o ddim o'r ffordd, yn yr hyffordd yn amser gwinio, ac oes ei oeddech chi, i ddelwaith sydd ei angen Fle原因—posibl, yna bod migrate honi. Mynd ysgol, mae'n mynd i chi wedi'i meddwl bod wedi gydain. is absolutely vital because it's neither the case that history simply repeats itself, if history simply repeated itself all you would need is memory. You could remember what happened last time and it's going to happen again so all you need to do is to recall what happened last time round, it would be history as Groundhog Day and that obviously isn't true but neither at the other end of the spectrum, is it true that everything happens de novo, that each day we wake up and we have no idea whether the sun will continue in its orbit, whether the light of day will dawn and set in the evening, that everything that happens is going to happen anew. Obviously what actually happens in any historical process and what particularly happens in revolutions is the combination of repetition and novelty. History does repeat itself but it never repeats itself exactly or precisely. There are patterns in history but they're not patterns which reproduce in all their detail and sometimes in important ways they are very very different from what's gone before but nevertheless the business of historical comparison of the revolution then and the revolution now is absolutely vital if you're to make both any sense of recent historical events but particularly when this is important if you come from the same kind of tradition that I do on the left and a Marxist tradition particularly if you want to be not simply as someone who describes the historical process or analyzes the historical process but to play a role in how your society is developing then the business of comparison and analysis is linked to the question of agency of being able to play a role in transforming society in shaping its development one way or another. Now let me make a couple of points first of all about the revolution I've studied most recently, the English revolution. Now you would think would you not? This is a very long time ago, three and a half centuries and more and more ago but the point I would like to make about it really is this but sometimes when you are making these kind of comparisons it's not always the largest facts of social and economic development which bear the closest comparison or shed the most direct light on contemporary events. Now when I was studying the English revolution and the book that came out of it focuses on the radical organisation of the 1640s, the Levellers and one of the interesting things about looking at that group of radicals is that the kind of narrow business of political organisation rather than some of the larger context of the revolution proved to be some of the most directly comparable to some of our experiences today. Marks and Engels thought that the Levellers were the first communist party as they put it and that's a reasonable thing to say so long as you understand that Marks and Engels weren't using the term party in the sense of a modern political party and they had more in mind what we might describe as a movement but however we define it we were looking at an organised group of activists who were advanced in their ideas and persistent in their form of organisation. Indeed you could make the point that the Levellers were the first democratic political organisation to invent some forms of political organisation and political protest which are still enormously common today so they were very effective users of the political petition and the political pamphlet. From underground presses hidden away in the back streets and cellars of the city of London they produced newspapers pamphlets and petitions not simply to inform but to mobilise so you can see in the Thomason tracks the great collection by the book seller George Thomason of some 20,000 civil war pamphlets you will find productions of level of pamphlets and petitions which say not only give an argument or raise a political issue but at the bottom of they say to be presented at Westminster this next Monday at 12 o'clock in other words they were in the business of political mobilisation they would collect signatures to petitions at Sunday service there would be landlords at pubs in the city of London who would collect in the petitions collate them together and give them to the demonstrators to be presented all at once down at Westminster. They were masters of the art of political mobilisation. Crowds of young London apprentices from the city of London could be brought down to Westminster while a demonstration was in place and these demonstrations were so effective that in 1642 they drove the King, they drove King Charles from his seat of government from the capital city of the kingdom and he never returned until he was beheaded in 1649 and if you think about it political petitioning you think about the internet version of it it's made a remarkable recovery as a political form of activity in the 21st century the levelers would certainly have understood both the fact that number 10 Downing Street has its own petition website and the convention that if you get over a hundred thousand signatures this is then considered for a debate on the floor of the House of Commons and they would also have understood that it's not a requirement and that the MPs can ignore it if they wish and that business of pamphleteering and petitioning of then creating a political organisation around it we have a marvellous account of the leader of the levelers John Lillburn speaking at a meeting down on the river at Whapping and appealing to the crowd for contributions for print runs of petitions that were running into 30,000 petitions that's huge in London which had 350,000 inhabitants in a country that only had 5 million inhabitants at that time 30,000 petitions was absolutely huge an organisation that set up a political structure with subs graduated subs payment depending on how wealthy the members of the levelers movement were so there you see a historical comparison which has some very direct and immediate parallels with things that are still done in political movements to this day some of the bigger things of course and this is the other thing about historical comparison we can learn as much from contrast as we can from direct association so of course some of the bigger social economic questions about the comparison between the English revolution and later revolutions the Russian or the German revolution or the Spanish revolution we learn much more from contrast the levelers were a political movement based on the apprentices the small masters the lesser gentry of English society in the 17th century what they were not was a working class organisation because the working class in a modern form certainly industrialized working class simply didn't exist in England in the 17th in the 17th century some people yes much smaller portion than under a fully blown capitalist society worked for wages but there was nothing to compare with a modern working working class so those things that we find in common are if we look at the bigger comparison with the 17th century transmuted from an organisation of radicals amongst the bourgeoisie that was challenging for power against the Stuart state transmuted into forms of organisation of a class which haven't yet come into existence in the 17th in the in the 17th century so any historical comparison depends on contrast as well as likeness depends on difference as well as similarity and only digging in to the historical detail of the period that you're studying or the periods that you're studying can reveal where the contrasts and the similarities lie they are what show you what is similar about how a society goes into crisis which arises from polarization and conflicts deep in the structural society and the way in which that gives opportunities to political activists to change and transform the way in which the society the society works I guess and I'll conclude with this I guess one way to look at this one way to look at how the experience of the levelers or the experience of the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution or the German Revolution or the Spanish Revolution I know staff is going to talk about the Arab revolutions a huge wave which by the way I think one thing that we should say about that is that it's one of the great examples of how it doesn't do to write off the prospect of of revolution if you think irrespective of their fate they were a multinational wave of huge revolutionary mobilisation just at a time when all the common sense of the society was that this couldn't happen again and this is a repeated this is a repeated experience the French sociologist André Gortz predicted six months before May 68 that there would never be another general strike in Europe the naysayers about the repeatability of revolution are quite frequently and and it seems to be persistently proved proved wrong but the thing I'd like to finish on I guess is about how to think about about living in a period where revolutions are still possible and therefore why the historical experience of previous revolutions is directly relevant and I'd like to put it like this really I'd like to put it in reference to the idea developed by the great 17th century French philosopher mathematician and inventor Blaise Pascal and some of you may be familiar with the idea of Pascal's wager to put it simply it was a wager about the existence of God and Pascal's wager ran like this that you might as well believe in the existence of God even if you were not predisposed to by theological leanings you might as well because if God existed then you were assured of a place in heaven and if God didn't exist you would still lead a virtuous life and therefore it was a bet on either of whom's outcome was beneficial to the believer in God now the great French film director Eric Romer took this idea in a film called My Night with Mord and applied it to the Marxist idea of revolution said you might as well believe in revolution because if you are proved to be right you have played a role in bringing the revolution about and if you are proved to be wrong you're still done the right thing in the great struggles of your day now the only problem with this and with Pascal's original wager of course is that they are objectivist forms of thought they say let us analyse the situation existence or non-existence of God the possibility or not of revolution and make a kind of moral judgment or a moral commitment based on our analysis but really a properly Marxist understanding or reformulation of Pascal's wager won't be an objectivist an observatory gesture because it will be a participatory gesture this is the only bet where you can alter the likelihood of success while the game is in progress the bet on revolution is not just an objective analysis of its likelihood a comparison with previous experiences it's a commitment to altering to playing a part in to shaping the struggles of your own day so that it becomes more possible rather than less that reactionary outcomes are diminished and progressive possibilities are opened up and it seems to me if we have that view then the wager on revolution and the experience of previous revolutions can be brought to bear on struggles today thank you John status so right um I'll do something that is a bit cheeky actually for me and about which I don't feel particularly confident and I will explain you why I'll say a few things a few reflections about the Tunisian revolution despite the fact that I've never visited Tunisia in my in my life despite the fact that I'm not a specialist of Tunisia but I have some let's say reasons some more perhaps personal some other that can be argumented a bit more explicitly the first reason is that the Tunisian revolution is or has been the starting point as we all know the broader cycle of the popular upheavals which is usually called the Arab Spring and which speed over the other side of the Mediterranean there were obvious similarities in the forms of popular action between what happened in Spain and Greece with the occupation of the places and since I was in Greece most of the time during the occupation of Syntagma Square I can very vividly remember the Tunisian flags that were waved by the participants of those occupations and the fact that what happened at the other side of the Mediterranean acted as a source of direct inspiration for what the people in Spain or Greece were doing at the time of course this means that we also have to reflect on the differences of the outcomes of those movements in those specific circumstances and why let's say the way the popular movement confronted a dictatorship in the case of Tunisia and in the other Arab countries was also different from what happened in Spain and Greece via other types of political processes. The second reason is that the Tunisian revolution has been the only perhaps limited in some regards but significant success story of any revolution I'm aware of since probably the Nicaragrian revolution in 1980. What I mean by this are two things minimally we can say that at the very least unlike Egypt or in a way Syria the Tunisian revolution didn't end in a tragedy and in sheer counter revolution but more importantly even the Tunisian revolution succeeded in stabilizing limited but very important gains. Let me mention a few a constitution which is by far the most democratic constitution in the broader area. The existence of important democratic rights, collective and individuals and that played a very important role in the fact that despite the ups and downs and the numerous setbacks suffered by the most radical wings of the revolutionary movement in Tunisia we still find a politicized atmosphere the existence of popular movements and now the anniversary actually what is considered in Tunisia as the anniversary of the revolution the 14th of January the day when Benelli had to leave the country was in a way met by a new cycle of popular protests which is still going on and which will play a very decisive role in the evolution to come. These popular protests were sparked by a set of economic measures decided by the current Tunisian government austerity measures so they are anti austerity protest the immediate reason was the new budget that was voted in December by the Tunisian parliament with very significant tax raises including for goods that are essential for the popular household and of course this indicates the fact that the social demands that were crucial factor in triggering the revolution seven years ago are still with us and have not been satisfied. Now let me go more precisely into my topic by emphasizing two variables that we need to keep in mind when talking about Tunisia because they turned out having some level of structural permanence. The first is about the Tunisian state the Tunisian state as many or most newly independent states of the post colonial era is an authoritarian very centralized state machine strongly intervening in the allocation of material resources which means that the economic mechanism in Tunisia is very politicized and this should be seen from both from above and from below. From above it means that the business elite of the country is continually connected to the state in a way all those capitalisms are forms of state capitalism and what the new liberal turn did in those areas is to allow a level of direct privatization of the state with the state actors becoming themselves in a way beneficiaries of economic resources which is more simply a form of kleptocracy combined there with a preexisting economic structure generating an unprecedented level of corruption which is an absolutely crucial factor to which I will come back in a moment but this role of the state in the allocation of material resources is also enormously important if we see things from below because the state usually in a very clientelist way distributes various forms of benefit to the population and uses this of course to build a whole system of social control and discipline which is essential and has been essential for the perpetuation of the one party state that ruled Tunisia for all that time since independence and up to the revolution of 2011. This is crucial to understand because it means that the state is becomes the adresy of the popular demands there is a demand of a state intervention by the popular movement that shapes in a very decisive way the configuration of popular action and popular protest. Now the second factor I want to emphasize concerning Tunisia is the specificity and the robustness of its civil society. There were many things to say here but I will focus on one which seems to me of a particular importance for understanding what happened in the revolution this is the role of the trade union movement in Tunisia which is exceptional in that in the whole area. The UGTT in French Union Generale du travail Tunisia so the general union of workers of Tunisia is a historical protagonist of political and social events in Tunisia since the struggle of four independence which took in Tunisia a different form let's say than in Algeria with the war for national liberation. Of course the trade unions in Tunisia have an ambiguous or ambivalent relation to the regime we should make a sharp difference here between on the one hand the top leadership which always inclined towards and was forced actually in a very authoritarian framework to find a compromise and with the existing regime and local and regional branches plus combative federations which have always been at the forefront of all forms of political action both on the social but also the political terrain so we should analyze the trade union movement in Tunisia both as a political actor and as a form of social movement unionism. As a political actor the UGTT became during the period before the revolution the refuge for a wide range of activists of the radical left their organizations were suffered severe repression but the trade union movement provided them a space in which they could still organize and set and set actions and the trade union movement in Tunisia approved also being a major actor and innovator in terms of social movement and I will I have to refer here to two important events and because they will directly come in in course of the revolution the first is that in the 2000 years the UGTT initiated a new form of action of a campaign around caravans in solidarity with the Palestinian people so from various places of Tunisia the trade union activists initiated those caravans they were touring they were collecting of course resources and agitating to support the Palestinian people and this in itself had an anti-governmental anti-regime stance implicitly but clearly because as is well known the Tunisian regime even under Boukibab but even also with Menali from 87 onwards was particularly soft to put it gently on on Israel secondly the trade union movement played the central the absolutely decisive role in the single event that can be considered as being the annunciator and the preparation actually for the 2011 revolution which was the Gafsa uprising the Gafsa is an area in the southeastern part of Tunisia and all the economic activity of the area has been traditionally organized around the phosphate mines there which belong to the state and the state of course with the new liberal turn is restructuring them firing off many many workers so what started as a strike became a full-scale mobilization which around of course the strikers and the workers around the local communities to to regroup and created even new forms of organizing that became protagonists of the popular action to follow more particularly the association of unemployed degree holders which is very central in the social problems that Tunisian society is facing so Gafsa those mines are very close geographically they are in the same area with the city of city Buzid where the revolution started properly speaking and then started to to expand so what we can say is that although the trade union movement didn't provide a kind of centralized leadership at a national level for the revolution it certainly played a decisive role in initiating at the local and sectoral level various movements and furthermore giving the impulse for the unification of those movements at a national sectoral and then sorry at a local sectoral and then at a national level the the the culminating moment of that process were the two general strikes of the 13th and 14th of January which directly led to the departure of of Benelli and the toppling down of his of his regime a more complex process to which I'm coming now now let me talk about the revolution itself starting from from above you know that in probably many of you have in mind I can't remember John did you remind the Lenin's famous sentence that revolution happens when those on the top on above the rulers cannot rule as they they used to and and the rules do not want to be ruled as they use as they used to before so this means that a regime crisis is the necessary although not the sufficient condition for a revolution to happen and indeed what the Tunisian case is full confirmation of that the regime crisis because of the combination of two reasons the first is that the material basis for organising consent was put into question by the effect of the crisis of 2008 but also by the fact that this crisis just accentuated the extremely inegalitarian character of the growth that came before the the crisis this inequality in Tunisia is of course an extreme case of social inequality with the majority of the population living in a state of permanent hardship but it is also hugely polarized spatially between the coastal part of the country where all the wealth is concentrated and the inner Tunisia which is precisely the areas where the revolution started but we should also consider another factor which is mentioned by by Lenin and Gramsci has developed it much more in his writings on the so-called organic crisis and the moment of let's say hegemonic disruption and this is the crisis in the legitimacy of the existing state and of the existing regime so a level of moral crisis right and and this in Tunisia was particularly the case and it has to be analyzed I think in in two in two ways the first is that the situation I've been describing before the combination of political authoritarianism and social inequality generated by the mode of capital accumulation meant that this whole idea of modernisation which in terms as the regime put it and framed it since independence and even more so under Ben Ali the westernisation of Tunisia didn't mean anything or stopped meaning anything positive for the majority of the population right because it wasn't associated with any improvement actually of their material of their concrete material life and position or if you like by an increasing gap between what they could legitimately expect because you know the expectations are raised in a way by the discourse themselves and the reality they were living in the second is of course the issue of corruption which as I said before corruption here has to be understood both as the corruption of the top of the sum of the summit but also the whole mode of social control and discipline from below that was an essential part of the one party of the party state actually that existed before so the moral crisis is very and has been very central in the crisis of legitimacy and this entails two important consequences the first is that the demands of the popular masses were framed in moral terms but by this I mean that even the material demands which of course have the value in themselves were immediately framed in something that went beyond those demands and that expressed a demand for living another type of life for instance the demand for bread had a symbolic value which meant that we want a normal life not just food if you like but also it explains the keyword of the masses actually what mobilized them and energized them which was the demand for dignity right national dignity and and a life of dignity were really what the watchwords of the mass demonstrations during the entire revolutionary process so it's not just to get rid of some corrupt leaders actually it's to reshape if you like the social fabric along a different type of moral code and a different type of cultural cement and this is where islam comes in that's the the second factor I don't want of course to make a general point here about you know the the anahdha party which is the political expression of political islam in Tunisia which is the the major party in the Tunisian political landscape after the revolution but what I just want to say is that one of the essential sources of of the strength that islam gained and had in that whole process is the fact that it provided a moral code both to contest the legitimacy of the corruption and the regime and to articulate the demands for fairness and dignity of the popular masses and that if we don't understand this we miss an absolutely crucial point in what gives to this and gave to this movement a particular a particular strength now five minutes okay so I'll be very I'll be very quick in what I wanted actually to develop a bit more which are the forms of popular action in um in in Tunisia um let me put it this way the decisive moment in the revolutionary process was not the toppling of Benali himself as the leader Benali left the 14th of January but he appointed a successor which was one of his a person of his close of his close entourage and the scenario that was elaborated at the time by the political establishment in Tunisia and by all the big international players starting from the US of course and France and other countries that consider that have a stake in Tunisia was the fact that we will have a kind of controlled transition and this is the scenario that has played out all the time in Latin America I mean everywhere where you know dictatorships have fallen the whole thing was to have you know to control the process of transition and to avoid any break that would open a bridge actually not just you know in the top layer of the regime but much more deeply within the structures of the state and the social structure and this scenario failed in Tunisia because actually what happened after the departure of Benali is more or has been more decisive than what came before so what happened after is the new cycle of popular mobilisations the so-called Casbah 1 and Casbah 2 so caravan starting from various parts of the country and ending in Tunis in the capital occupying a very symbolic central place the Casbah and it's only then after the two Casbah movements that the the the puppet government put in place by Benali resigned elections were called for November of 2011 and a constituent assembly would be the outcome of those of those elections so the breach if you like happens happens there and it is at that moment that the real strength of the political capacity and power of the popular movement was was tested was tested and passed the test successfully I don't have time to develop a part which I had prepared on the forms of organisation and leadership that the Tunisian revolution actually provided as you probably remember nearly all the international attention at that moment on the Tunisian events was focused around the role of social media and the so-called leaderless masses concerning the role of the social media this has been clearly magnified and I think that I have suggested already that the concrete repertoires of action that played out actually and and provided you know the real strength of the popular movement were either already somehow designed and practiced by concrete political actors so the trade unions but also political activists of various political currents and they combined with quite traditional forms of popular action of a non institutional of a non institutional form such as rioting for instance which was particularly popular among the unemployed and socially marginalised youth which rioted in you know the local neighborhoods whereas demonstrations of course happened in much more central places of of of the cities so we had a huge repertoire of action combining the already existing with with the new or or the newish culminating with your occupation of the central squares in the Casbah one and two and it's only that framework that we should analyse the role that technologies such as the social media played now telegraphically three points to conclude the first is which are about you know the strategies that kind of strategic lessons that we can take I think from from this the first is that the indicator of the strength of the popular movement that if you like the real test of success for any kind of revolution is its capacity to provide and stabilise institutionalised forms of gains and conquests for the broad popular masses even if those gains or conquests do not amount to a radical change of the social or the political structure even in a more limited way this is absolutely crucial and this goes against I think all those readings and interpretations that you know reemerged and saying that you know we should disregard the state that the state is you know of no importance for us that we should be the spaces that are completely external and outside the state and you see the masses do you know do not care about the states anymore this is absolutely irrelevant I think in the case of Tunisia the second thing is that the key of success of the popular movement what gives them the very impetus and energy is their capacity to build broad coalitions between several social factors which also means that politically lies in the capacity of bringing together and maintaining a form of unity and coordination between very heterogeneous actually political currents right while one of the big differences of Tunisia is the fact that political Islam and in after have been a constitutive part of the political forces which joined the revolutionary movement although they did not initiate it and that the level of let's say political exchange although with a lot of tension now with the rest of the progressive forces was never totally broken and this has to do with the strength of civil society as I developed before and the third and last you know thing we should retain from this is what has been I have heard just a few days ago in the radio or in TV rather by one of the leading figures let's say of the current cycle of popular protest yes we did a revolution in 2011 but you know revolutions are unfinished businesses thank you thanks very much status and john so we have a plenty of time for questions contributions um yeah we'll take them in rounds and there's um there's mics going round as well so just wait for the mic yep paedra thanks very much both my question is a bit more for status but if john wants to come and please feel free to as well status in your talk you highlighted a lot the importance of yeah okay you highlighted a lot the importance of building bridges forming big coalitions institutionalising and so on so forth but you also pointed out to the big importance of extra institutional action and bringing about the revolution and its continued vitality and resort to strikes and other forms of action afterwards which stands a bit in tension with what you're saying about institutionalising and bringing it into the state I completely agree with your point about disregarding the whole change the world without taking power thing but without resorting strikes and institutional action without having some element of difference of heterogeneity one could argue that the movement and the revolution loses vitality so if you could explore a bit how do you see the relationship between the trade union social movements and the post-revolutionary state in Tunisia I think that that would be a very interesting thing for us to comment upon thanks thank you um it's a question for all of you if you want to answer it but I was just wondering about um your thoughts and opinions on the internet uh and how it's affected social mobilisation and whether or not you think the internet has had a positive or negative impact on the way that we today do activism and the way that we today do we mobilise okay um we'll take yep I think it's oh I meant jay actually is that jay yeah thanks very much um both of you for very interesting um interventions I just wanted to raise a question that I think is kind of um I feel is kind of missing from the discussion that is going on uh you know politically around the left at the moment certainly in Britain and maybe elsewhere which is um actually Stathis did did mention which is the question of the state because it seems to me that you know we're in a paradoxical situation where there's a very big crisis not just a political crisis but a crisis of all the institutions um accompanied by a very strong radicalisation it's a polarisation but a radicalisation to the left as well as uh to the right and a moment when um the state is you know there's a huge kind of controversy around the the state under neoliberalism but I think most people would agree the state is at least one thing that's happening to it is is becoming more authoritarian and yet we're in a situation where you know a lot of the left discussion seems to me to be about uh transitioning by you know a fairly simple idea of getting elected taking over the state and then instituting um progressive politics so I just wanted to put it out there that you know I feel quite strongly that at the moment the question of uh the way that the state is structured the interest the state serves the extent to which it's possible to democratise it the extent to which it needs to be dismantled in order for there to be change is a very very important question I'd like to know what the what you know it's a big question but in briefly what the speakers think about it but I think it's something that we need to get out there as a very important part of the discussion that needs to happen at the moment thanks and just hi um yes actually my my question links maybe a little bit to what you said and was to staffers um and and john as well um in relation to I was thinking in relation to the UK the the point that you made at the end staffers that kind of heterogeneous groups working together and working from kind of outside of institutions and within I was just thinking of even to the the kind of limited extent to which this is happening and trying to happen now through momentum and groups kind of further on the left and you know working within the labour party and outside as well there is this um completely unexpected but obviously very destructive media commentary about how it's the hard left trying to take over and that and I wondered what your advice would be as to how how this process can continue without it just becoming hijacked by that media and those interests so thanks and then over here just to rose down yeah thank you for both of your talks my question is directed at both of you and stuff is you said the test of the success really lies into what to what extent the movements can provide institutional gains for the popular mobilizations but in my reading I've always thought that actually to what extent can the movement popular movements create revolutionary organs or new sets of institutions which in the case of the Russian revolutions are the Soviets or in Iran we saw similar occurrences of worker control or in the Venezuelan and Bolivarian experience with with the Comunas and so the question is is like and this also hints towards John's we talk about coordination unity coalition building different forms of political mobilization what form of you know revolutionary institutions do we actually think are viable today will we see uh Soviets in the way of you know workers factories I don't see any factories in London how would those how can that look like and what can we learn from the last 10 to 20 years thanks okay address those and then we can take yes thanks a lot for those questions these are I mean these cover in a way all the issues that are usually go with any debate I think on let's say revolutionary strategy or let me start with I will combine I think the first and the last about yes there is a tension between the extra institutional and the institutional forms of action right but I think that you know any any anti-capitalist strategy has to include both and work out them concretely in specific conjunctures and circumstances first of all as you understand there is a big difference between realities such as Tunisia where we had a dictatorship and the very authoritarian regime and therefore very narrow margin for institutional action right so gaining a space opening up a space in those circumstances is in itself quite quite important right we have more possibilities of institutional forms of action let's say in the UK or in most European countries but but once again these need to be combined with what is exactly extra institutional action I mean you seem to suggest that you know strikes are our extra institutional forms of action which is certainly not the case you know I've been on strike many times as a UCU member and you know the whole procedure particular in this country is very bureaucratised so not only institutional but but extremely bureaucratised and of course very much you know constrained by this so non institutional forms of strike do exist of course the so-called wildcat strikes but you know they are relative law they have been quite rare in the recent years but in any case what we can see concretely is the fact that you know repertoires of action have in a kind of very pragmatic way to be considered as what is efficient in a given circumstances because this is how the popular movements themselves actually and the actors of those movements think about the situation right and and we we should think about you know enlarging actually the repertoire of those actions in a way that really makes sense and and to make sense you need to get a result you know in collective action I mean otherwise you know the kind of heroic solos etc are are of absolutely no interest I mean for you know the broader let's say layers of the population or the people we we would like you know to be to be part of a process of of a social change and that's one thing the second thing is that institutional gains look I mean I'm talking of concrete I mean I'm very leninist in this concrete analysis of concrete situations right so the situation in Tunisia was revolutionary but I tried to explain why the demands and the concrete issues that were at stake were not those of an anti-capitalist revolution right this was just not what was at stake at that moment so if you see things from that perspective the possibility or not of having democratic gains institutionalized in things such as constitutions legal frameworks etc are absolutely crucial I mean the fact let let's see the things the other way around when this doesn't happen for instance it didn't happen in many latin latin american countries starting from Chile you know pinoshet died still as a full general of the chilean army his constitution is still in place and blocks even minimal popular demands such as free higher education so the entire framework of the dictatorship is in place with only marginal or very limited changes and this of course is not only about the constitution it is about you know the deep state and the state structures etc but if you don't open a breach in at at that level you haven't even started the job the fact that you know if you make a comparison once again between Greece okay my country and you know the gains we had after the fall of the dictatorship only port only portugal because they had a more radical process even than us went further with the portuguese constitution of which was almost a socialist constitution actually in in 1975 but the greek constitution of 1975 same year actually was a very progressive constitution this is why they want to change it now you know in order to impose a much more authoritarian and and top-down form of of governance actually in the country which would fit you know the troika the troika rule so it's absolutely it's absolutely essential uh on the on the internet i don't have time you know to discuss fully the issue i'll just say two things here the first is that uh we can talk i mean for hours about what changes with the internet and what are the new possibilities that this opens up and we should look you know concretely at what this means in terms of organizing many times younger people seem to think that you know before before the internet nothing existed but you know i became i became a political activist at a moment where you know we only have phones we were spending hours calling people uh when it was a high school student my mum was constantly shouting because they were spending hours you know calling the comrades and and so on so you know we we still had you know we we still had tools actually to organize that that were relatively decentralized by the way you know the the telephone even before the mobiles you just took your phone and you could talk you know to people okay it was limited okay it was a one-to-one conversation but you didn't have to go through you know a kind of very or pyramid actually to to do things and so many things that now appear as super extra new etc were not that completely to see uh new and decentralized and by the way in Greece because of you know the very long experience of clandestine of illegal work actually uh activists of all the generations that myself but that were still you know very active in the organizations i was in were very trained in acting in acting in a kind of very decentralized way and and you know taking initiatives and all this kind of things so that's one thing the second thing i mean the internet doesn't substitute for the need of leadership and organization we need to rethink important dimensions of that that's absolutely certain it opens up possibilities that didn't exist before despite what i've just said this is for certain but it doesn't dispense us from thinking about organization it's not the ready-made solution to organization it's just a lie to say to people i have an electronic platform we don't need somehow structures organizations of one form of another then i'm fully aware of the fact that certain forms of organizing historically have failed that you know people are totally hostile to them they reject them not only not always for the good reasons but there is certainly a core of truth you know a core of of valid objections to them all this is true but you know this is still a problem that is with us it's not something that belongs to the past and finally those technology those technologies generate themselves issues of power i mean it's a complete illusion to think that you know the internet is just purely horizontal i mean the people who control a facebook page who control a website who have you know who have created a kind of influential blog or whatever they play a very important role they they so these new technological means do provide new forms new times if you like of leaderships sometimes informal sometimes acting in denial of what they are doing but i'm sorry what they are doing are you know a way of leading you know of influencing things of influencing actions of organizing them of you know pushing people of taking initiatives so they are performing functions that are of an organizational actually type and that creates somehow new forms of collective entities and and connections on which we have to think again now the dismantling of the state is of course a recurrent matter i'm not really sure to understand what the dismantling of the state is because what we mean by the state actually for us now is quite different from what it used to be when you know marks or lemon form their first formulations do we want to dismantle the nhs don't think we want to dismantle the nhs we want to change the nhs we want to improve it but i don't think we want to dismantle the nhs the nhs do we want to dismantle the repressive apparatus of the state yes we want to dismantle them we want deeply somehow to dismantle those structures that are a permanent or can become a permanent obstacle to social to social change does this have to go through a process of military armed confrontation it depends on the cases we can't give a general answer to that it might be the case that you know we know that the ruling class when it feels threatened in its power as a class uh can resort to uh can call from to to violent action to violent counterrevolution chili is of course the perfect example of that but you see my point the the reason i mention in Chile here is very important because in Chile the decision to take violent action was not taken by the popular movement was not taken by the Chilean workers it was taken by the Chilean bourgeoisie with the support of uist imperialism they broke their own legality they overthrew a legally elected government and the mistake of that government was not to have fought via elections but to have refused to go beyond you know the very now a very narrow conception of legality and prepare seriously for this type of confrontation which it didn't do right instead of you know preparing for a military coup they appointed generals and even Pinochet himself actually to uh to the to the cabinet so i think that you know this whole idea of course deep social change cannot go ahead without a very deep transformation of the state and this means that you know some parts of the state need to be taken control of change reformed reshaped somehow some other parts need to be dismantled but strategically this depends on you know what are the possibilities you have to get access to forms of political power in situations where the popular forces have the possibility to access governmental power which is not power to coup which is not political power in general well they use it and they are right to do so and and and historically in all cases where this has been a concrete possibility refusing it rejecting it has been a phony you know and and a clear mistake uh by those who thought that you can repeat you know the recipes of the past yes i'm i'm finishing with the last question with the last point um it was mark actually and and the dual power you see that that's my that's my point why don't we have any serious you see um once again we have to learn from the concrete experiences of the masses right Lenin didn't decide i mean soviets he was completely surprised by the creation of soviets in in 1905 even even more so than in 1917 but the soviets or whatever are the creations of the masses why don't we have uh for that type of dual power situation emerging since i don't know how many years because the forms of the state have changed because the organisation of consent and repression actually has changed both remain now the states are still very coercive apparatuses but they don't act like the tsarist state they they don't i mean it's it's a different type of of situation it has to be dealt with differently you mentioned the example of venezuela venezuela is is a very good example of how new organs can be created and have and and and they were created in order to enlarge popular participation in order to install what they call the protagonist democracy right and this is very important of course without those organs allowing you know genuine forms of popular participation that go beyond the parliamentary form uh you you can't go ahead in the direction of social change but this is not at all the same than the old form of dual power strategy because it was put in place by an already existing call it left wing progressive socialist whatever type of type of government that you know was leading somehow things in in a certain type of of direction so we should you know talk concretely about the present and and absolutely absolutely reject you know this kind of mythologising of the past and the idea that you know the solution is somehow in repeating some kind of of recipe but of course taking all the lessons of history as john brilliantly did this presentation yeah i think with the question of institutions you have to distinguish two things one um if you like um in a pre-revolutionary period working through whatever existing parliament whatever existing institutions there are and i think that's always very important you should always grasp every opportunity in and no matter how un revolutionary a body has a platform to make uh to make political arguments this is Lenin's argument of course about using Nazaris doomer as a platform it's what actually in in Egypt for the revolution the the muslin brotherhood made very effective use of the entirely puppet parliament that Mubarak set up on when they were excluded or or denied access by by force they made very effective use of of that fact as well so there's there's that question i think actually that the the more important question though is um the fact that in the course of the most thoroughgoing and effective revolutions um what begins as a spontaneous movement creates new institutions and that's the interesting that's the really interesting question you think you think about it uh in the English revolution um the long parliament um transformed the existing constitution by making the commons dominant and was used as a revolutionary lever um by the boys by the bourgeoisie um as the civil war developed the new model army became an institution of popular power and popular mobilisation in the french revolution the jacobin clubs and the convention in the paris commune the commune itself in the muslin revolution the soviets and in the german revolution and so on and so on so i i think one of the limitations both in tunisia and in egypt was that although civil society existing civil society organisations mobilised um they're never and this was it was almost it was almost hard to believe that it didn't in egypt because you have the so-called republic of tahir um the mass mobilisation in tahir square and it was it was almost i mean i was in tahir square for nine out of the 18 days that brought down the barrack and it was almost unbelievable that at a certain point some kind of democratic structure in which political positions could be argued out and precise forms of action uh described and and articulated and and implemented didn't emerge from that experience but it remained at a kind of in-co-hate level and therefore um could act defensively and effectively for instance on the day of the camels when the the vigilantes tried to break it up but couldn't develop a a kind of offensive um offensive programme so i think that's still very much an absolutely critical question about how revolutions develop can they in the course of their existence produce an institution which allows um both inclusivity um relies on spontaneity but also shapes strategically uh the course of uh of events on which is transparent and and democratic uh on the question of the internet at the end of the day it's a means of communication and they're important and it's important to analyse how they interact with revolutionary processes but they aren't um fundamental drivers in in their own right in the english revolution for instance the printing press wasn't new the printing press has been around for 150 years but because of the breakdown of censorship the ability to produce unlicensed um press was huge you know pamphlet and leaflet production uh exploded increased exponentially and the revolutionists were able to make use of that now that didn't cause the revolution but it did in certain ways manage to educate inform and organise the rev the revolutionaries but sas and sas's point is is is true at any level of development and with any means of communication from the pamphlet to the internet that will take place in a revolutionary environment because suddenly the masses have access to and a purpose for that means of communication which they didn't previously previously have the other thing i would say about it it's it's operation in normal circumstances is new things don't just stand on their own separate from everything else you know this always irritates me about period dramas if you watch period dramas on tv um all the interior all the furniture will be exactly 1930s and all the vehicles will be exactly 1930s vehicles you know they spend a lot of time doing this but you actually look us round look at pictures of the 1930s of course they've got vehicles on the road they've still got horse drawn vehicles they've still got cars from 20 years before the furniture in your house in my house isn't just you know 2000s furniture you've got bits of old furniture all over the place now you think about how the internet works actually what it works by is very often and some of the most powerful pieces are print journalism which are taken and shared across uh off the internet certainly the existing mainstream television networks work very hard to make sure that those little bits of clips of film channel fours bits of clips of film rts clips so you're not watching a wholly new process you're watching an amalgam process and to work it properly you have to understand the amalgam you know it's it's different when Owen Jones takes the guardian column and puts it on the internet to when you arrive just pop whatever our random thoughts that day happen happen to be and that's i think an interesting thing to to to think about um on the existence of the state i think um it's best to assume it's going to react nastily in most cases it does if we get lucky and it doesn't that will be good but it's not sensible to assume that that will be the norm because the norm is something is something else from lcc in in Egypt through to um uh to um the Charles the first state in 17th century England the state reacts with violence to challenges to its power most of the time and it's best to assume that that's going to be the case and to organise accordingly if you organise effectively accordingly of course that's the thing that will actually minimise the ability of the state to react in uh in in in those ways and just to bring it right back to the to the beginning it is precisely the emergence of new forms of institutional power within a revolution which eats away at the capacity of the old state um to be effective in the deployment of uh of of violence um in some ways it obliged it to do that the the power of the puritan cause in the long parliament forced and the popular mobilisation forced Charles the first to raise his standard of knocking and raise an army and try and resolve it by armed conflict the strength of the new model army um prevented him from being victorious that's right oh okay over there and then one in the front and then over there and here no uh the mic's coming around okay thanks um uh John and Sathis for your your remarks i'd just like to hope you don't mind give a bit of reflection on uh some of the forms of organising that we uh i'd have witnessed if that's the right word when we were over in Tunisia i um accidentally ended up ended up in Tunis the night before the second wave of revolution broke out in the Casper um and there was quite a lot going on initially i was invited over um from this by the islam channel to go back with Muhammad Ali who had been exiled for 19 years um and wanted a delegation to go back with him i was one of them as the university of london president having been the student union president here at sauas along with john and a few other people and there's a number of things that we observe while we were there first of all the night we arrived um there was a meeting being held by trade unionists and we thought there was going to be about 30 or 40 people there there was about a thousand women there there was about 100 men as well which was great um but the women were demanding political representation on the committee because the new committee that had just been elected had um i think little or no um women on the on that committee um and there was also no student or youth um representation on it either so the very next day as we were just pottering around we all of a sudden noticed small groups of people with various banners with different um wording which i don't speak much arabic on it but there were sort of from local neighbourhoods um and various other campaigns and so on all making their way to the casper and before we knew it it was absolutely packed with thousands and thousands of people in the casper we heard that day that there were 55 coaches of students that hadn't been able to make it because they'd been blocked by the committee or the government at the time so there would have been even more people there had they been able able to get through these student and youth were um they're um demanding you know youth representation on those committees as well so i think it's important to recognize the role of women in these um campaigns and obviously the role of um students in their student unions and so on later on that afternoon the news from Libya came that Libya would also just toppled the government or the revolution just started the crowd went absolutely wild but they didn't just celebrate for Tunisia and for Libya but they were chanting freedom for Palestine and i think that's the important point there to recognize is that you know revolutions don't just happen for one or two you know one reason but because people have uh you know a history of organizing on lots of different topics anti-war topics economic topics um liberation topics and so on and i think they all came neatly together and just finally the point um about the army's role in that um in that day because one of the signs of a revolution is really which side do the army go um during a revolution and on this day the army definitely took the side of the people the government had sent the army in obviously to try to stop the occupation of the Casper but the the um big army tanks were only just literally pretending to push back the protesters and the protesters were pushing back the army trucks and so that's quite clear that the army had taken their side the one person that we spoke to in the square that day did on the topic of the internet my final point um she did say look there's a huge thing over there that says facebook and some people are claiming that this is a facebook revolution but she says you've got to remember that even if facebook exists it's humans that have the agency it's humans that are making those moves on the internet and it's through those local neighborhood committees that i spoke about and the student unions and so on that they might use the internet as a tool but they still have often already existing forms of organizations so i'd give you those points too thanks and over here yeah thank you very much for your talk and thank you very much for the contribution because i think when we talk about Tunisia it is a bit impossible to ignore women's role in the revolution or rebellion whatever we call it and i have two questions one for status am i pronouncing right and one for john uh you have mentioned that the Tunisian state distributes various forms of benefits which are essential for social control and therefore we had the very authoritarian centralized Tunisian state totally controlling the means of economic mechanisms therefore they become very political uh when we see the regional dynamics in Syria and in Egypt as well those authoritarian states provide some sort of sometimes a little bit strong welfare provisions and like including Turkey where i am from like universities are free and they support in in Turkey for the last 10 years this RKP regime is really providing lots of welfare benefits to the people and you have also mentioned that there is a demand for state intervention from people so when i compare the United Kingdom citizens with Turkish citizens and their demands and expectations from state in Turkey and especially within Syria with Syrian refugees their demands from the state sometimes shift to the territory which is quite anti-capitalist state so normally like in Britain state takes from the poor give it to the rich but in those countries states are very much challenged by the public although they are authoritarian there is a strong challenge and resistance i wonder what you think about it and also i was wondering why those states are providing loss of welfare benefits is it why we have that type of state in those regions is it imperialist intervention but also there is a demand from the public which is shaping the state character in a particular form maybe less democratic but more welfare state sorry this was my first question second question to john it's extinct if you can yes sorry i was wondering this is more clear i wrote it i was wondering if we are taking the risk of confusing the difference between reform and revolution by using the concept of revolution in referring to the contemporary rebellions protests and other revolts in our times thank you thank you and just over here hi thanks for this presentation it was very nice well i have two questions i will be very fast as fast as i can first don't to think that the idea of a social security today in the nhs i don't know a lot about the nhs but for example in france in the case of france the social security was a very good thing that happened but since its institution as a universal social security years after years it was more and more put into questions until today where it's very shrinking and i would like to know if today's social movements are not too much about protecting this compromise that we made with capital and not asking for more and more will be new institutions and maybe the left today should be more concentrated on finding new ways of organizing finding new institution greater than defending institutions that we already lost and my second question would be to react about the soviets in russia i think that maybe i'm wrong and or that's my lecture of history but the soviets were dismantled not by people themselves but they were dismantled by this um by the communist state like lenin said all the power to the soviets and all the land to the peasants but two years after this statement the soviets were dismantled and the land was collectivized and all the power went to the state so isn't in this case the state a real problem into achieve communism thanks and we had one in the front here to be a simple question about the language and the reasons and the rationales and the aims and the tests of success of left revolutions to be approached perhaps essentially by a way of the rhetoric of left revolutions and it seems to me that you might divide the kinds of rhetoric up into six of which the first is freedom or liberty effectively a political aim to be realized and the second is a life to live a life to live for the poorest he essentially material and the third very familiar to everyone is liberty equality fraternity and the fourth fairness or justice which comes in many variants and the fifth one you haven't heard of but you will in the future which i happen to propose is humanity but last of all and the one my question is really about the aim or justification or rationale or essential rhetoric of the Tunisian revolution which was of course dignity and i'm curious as to how dignity stands to those others this isn't any condescension on my part it's real interest and curiosity thanks i should have taken the woman back there first she left now is there any one last question okay i'll be i'll be can do it do we need a mic or i have one yeah okay right i'll be i'll be much quicker than than before as far as i understand because once again i'm not a specialist the Tunisian state like the other states that came out of decolonisation right to put it briefly they came out with all the you know the limitations of the fact that you know they were capitalist states obviously etc but they were the result of a process of struggle of popular struggle popular masses have been active in the process leading to independence and liberation from colonial rule and therefore concessions needed to be made right the material and and and moral and political concessions needed to be made so there was a social contract after the independence and particularly during the bourguiba period which included indeed extensive measures of welfare but also a very active role of the state in the economy itself right bourguiba and his party were supposedly socialist okay but by socialist in Tunisia like in most of the other postcolonial situations what they meant was you know a strong and interventionist in all kinds of way state now there are elements in that and this was put into question of course i mean many of these parts of the social contract were put into question with a new liberal turn of the 80s and later now the difference i think between the welfare state as as you know still exists although you know shrinking in in europe and there is that there was this whole part of mechanisms distributing resources to the population that were to a very large extent informal right that that did not operate in on the basis of you know rights and titles which were you know openly and publicly somehow assumed and and and therefore you know act in in a purely institutional framework it operated through much more micro informal arrangements and this means that you know there was this small scale regime of clientelism favours giving this to this one another to this group to this individual to this family etc in order to keep of course social peace and control of the population this doesn't mean that there are not important paths of the you know of the state and of the public agencies that do not operate according to the principles of you know the universal rights of the welfare state obviously education for instance is crucial here right i mean tunisia has a very successful in its way system of public education a lot of people gained access to that which of course is great and then you know they hold degrees and they can't get a job so this this means that you know that that this generates this kind of distorted by clientelism and small scale corruption welfare state generates all forms of conflict and forms of intense politicisation of the economic mechanism and of the mechanism of distribution of resources because it constantly generates frustration resentments feeling of injustice feelings that you know you have been somehow discriminated that you know all this is very opaque that it doesn't follow the rule so there is a very strong demand for you know fairness right and and moral standards actually not only at the top but also at you know the bottom of the social mechanism the social movements about defending etc i mean look we have to discuss concretely and what what do you mean by creating new new things i mean we i'm very open to the idea of creating new things but i would like to know a bit more about what is exactly new in this i can't really imagine any political proposal vaguely progressive that dispends itself from defending universal free access to healthcare and education this is simply unthinkable for me i don't care at all if this is considered as passe or you know our cake and and and so on but i think that you know there are absolutely crucial battles to defend not everything perhaps in social security but certainly to defend you know the idea of a universal access to free healthcare and one of the battles that have already started actually but still you mentioned france is maintaining you know free access to education well which is currently now very rapidly changing and and will change even more if we do not react so by the way it's since i lived in france most of my life the only thing i'm a bit proud of in generational terms is the 1986 battle we gave against the first attempt actually to institute tuition fees in in france as you know a demonstrator died killed was killed by the police but we won actually this is what became the whole thing almost sacred therefore several decades but you know now it comes back in in the in in the discussion and and we'll have to to to fight again soviets and and and state right look i mean we can't have i think this you know the discussion on you know what happened exactly i think nevertheless that for me this view will probably very be very unpopular in in in the room but for me it was an illusion of learning to think that you know the soviet as such could provide the full structure of the state and to minimize the the necessity of institutions also in communism so these institutions and do not necessarily take the form of the state if by state we mean you know kind of very bureaucratised mechanism that reduces population to passivity prevents participation etc but for me i can't imagine any complex and properly organized human society without without institutions without forms of power that go with it but they need to be thought differently of course than you know the the kind of exclusionary and very bureaucratised mechanisms that that that exists today the idea that you can dispense yourself from that and abolish it in all cases when it has been tried the the soviets are one attempt the cultural revolution in china are the second produced exactly the opposite result simply because it's it's it's it's unworkable and and i think a very important lesson needs to be needs to be drawn from that it's awfully rightist i know it's awfully reformist or etc as a as a position it's not glorious at all but i think that you know if we want to to win and not you know repeat somehow the same mantra a certain number of things have to be changed in in a way of thinking thanks i'm on the question of reform and revolution we're talking about the the arab revolutions um i think obviously in certainly the marx tradition it's it's traditional to distinguish between uh socioeconomic revolutions which are a transformation from one mode of production feudalism capitalism capitalism socialism and democratic revolutions which changed the nature of the the government from an autocracy a monarchy to some kind of parliamentary democracy now um traditionally um it's uh been argued that one could open the path to another that demands that starters demands for democracy can challenge economic inequality and private ownership property and i think that's true but not all revolutions obviously do that does that mean say they aren't um worth supporting no of course not anybody who's remotely tried to or knows people who's tried to work in an autocratic uh or dictatorial regime as opposed to a parliamentary democracy knows the difference and so those revolutions might not achieve all that they could potentially achieve or all that we might want them to achieve or transform the society from a capitalist society or social society are they worth doing are they worth supporting is there the potential within them yes yes and yes i would answer those uh those questions i think the critical thing about the uh decline and disappearance of soviet democracy was that any form of democracy any form of workers democracy can't exist without an empowered conscious and organised working class and that working class small in russia to begin with have been destroyed by the civil war and that um left as Lenin said left the state suspended in the air and once the the real participatory um working class activity that had informed that state had been eradicated by the disappearance that class you've got to remember by the end of the civil war there was grass growing through the cobblestones in st petersburg's industrial districts because they were uninhabited the class that had informed that democracy had ceased to exist as a political actor and so of course a bureaucracy would arise and and overthrow it that was a virtually inevitability by by the mid 19 by the mid 1920s without the revolution spreading abroad on how to shape demands i think the most important thing about thinking what demands the left should fight over and can fight over most effectively isn't the question about what we're thinking to be honest any idiot with a ballpoint pen in the pad can sit down and think up a thousand ways in which the society would be better than it is that's not the issue and if the model is going to be oh i've thought this all i need to do is to tell you about it and millions of working class people can take that's it that's what was missing got the idea right i'm ready to go for it not how it works what's going on in this society right now is this i was brought up in the 60s and my parents had lived through the 20s and the 30s and they thought that i would have a better life than they had they thought i and this was true i was the first person in my family to be born in an hs hospital i was the first person in my family to come home to a publicly owned council house i was the first person in my family to go to university with a full uh with a full grant and with the bursaries paid for by the state and my parents assumed that we were the first lucky generation what they didn't get is we were the only lucky generation and no parent now bringing up a working class child thinks that their life is going to be easier than the life of the previous generation now that's a huge thing it's a massive thing to take that away from working class people so when they start defending especially when the society has reached the point of a tipping point crisis with health provision with Grenfell and public housing with carillion this is now a moment where that sensibility that things ought to be at least like they were for our parents that's a crisis moment for this society and the job of the left is to articulate and mobilise people around that you know people think that um working class people are powerless because they believe i bad ideas given to them by the press and the ruling class actually they believe those ideas because they're powerless and once they begin to move into action once they begin to feel less powerless they begin to shake off some of those ideas as well and i think that's a moment that is now standing before us i don't say that it's a a revolutionary moment but i do think i think Jeremy Corbyn was right about my carillion i think it's a watershed moment i think it's a a social transformation which could get aborted could be held halfway but which is opening up a possibility of quite considerable change there