 Hello, everyone, and thank you for that introduction. I will be talking a little bit about my forthcoming book today. It doesn't have a title yet, so if you can think of any words that pop out during my speech, please let me know. I'll send them to my publisher. So I don't think it's escaped anyone's attention that we are living through this world historic moment right now. We're at the conjuncture of a bunch of long-term structural crises within the capitalist world system. And then we have these kind of short-term exogenous factors that have come in and created this huge conflagration that we're living through today, which we're experiencing is obviously, you know, the conflict that's taking place, not just in the east of Europe, but all over the world, and also this severe cost of living crisis driven by a dramatic increase in the price of fuel and other commodities, as well as the breakdown of global supply chains. And these factors sit at the confluence of these kind of, these longer-term problems and some shorter-term problems. Long-term, we've had the kind of breakdown of really kind of the dynamics of capitalism at the level of the economy, at the environmental level, and at the social level more generally. So if we look back over the last kind of, you know, 10, 15 years, productivity has stagnated and that has been associated in the rich world at least with stagnant growth rates and slowing growth rates in many other parts of the world as well. We have seen increases in inequality within countries and between countries, and that was supposed to be something that was the thing of the past. The world was supposed to be converging thanks to the magic of globalization. And yet we are seeing increasing inequality in the global north and also between global north and global south. And this has really been something that has deepened, yes, over the last two years, but is still a legacy of the financial crisis. Then you've got the environmental elements of this crisis and this is manifesting itself not just in terms of global warming, but also in a kind of breakdown of all of our ecological and environmental systems. So we're living through the sixth mass extinction. There's a breakdown in the global nitrogen cycle and, you know, we are currently experiencing the impact of the way in which all of these forms of systemic environmental breakdown are interacting when we look at the difficulty that many countries are having in just producing enough food to feed their populations. And then there are these crises of legitimation, these social crises, which really kind of came to the fore during the pandemic. You know, most capitalist societies are supposed to be able to promise, at least in the rich world, to be able to kind of provide a certain level of care for their citizens. And yet we've seen over the past two years the way in which that promise has just been broken over and over and over again. And then the short-term, we had the pandemic, we had the war in Ukraine, and we're now living in this moment where many people who have taken for granted, really, the fact that things would continue to get better in the infamous words of Tony Blair, things could only get better, that end of history moment where it really did seem as though globalization and, you know, the end of the kind of big conflict, the big ideological conflicts that had animated the system for the previous several decades, that that would bring prosperity to everyone. And we're really hurtling full throttle into this moment where those promises can no longer be kept. The far right, unsurprisingly, is winning in this moment. There are lots of kind of easy ways of analyzing crises like this one, which suggests that, you know, it's a crisis of capitalism and therefore the left is gonna be able to kind of come through this and convince everyone that capitalism is the problem and the only way through is socialism. But if we learned anything from the crisis of 2008, it is that that is not how things work. Things are not that simple. You know, when we put this together with, when you put together the cost of living crisis with environmental breakdown and the crises of legitimation that we're seeing within the capitalist world system, I think that perhaps the kind of the scariest thing that we could see emerging from this crisis is a kind of fossil fascism, which combines calls for the kind of like reemergence or reestablishment of the fossil fuel sector with demands around kind of keeping refugees out alongside kind of co-option of the labor movement and of elements of the kind of left coalition in demanding for higher wages. How should the left respond to this moment? Because we're gonna need to respond to this moment. We're gonna need to respond to it quickly and thoughtfully and carefully. We've kind of got this, you know, a few options when it comes to how we frame the Green New Deal. One of which is just to kind of reestablish a form of green Keynesianism. So taking many of the policies that we had during that period of stability following the Second World War, of kind of investments, greater role for the public sector and saying, you know, we're gonna insert some environmentalism into this. We're gonna have a little bit more state planning and the state is going to fix some of the problems that are caused by the anarchy of the market. We're gonna have the state basically saving capitalism from itself as is, you know, central to the Keynesian tradition. Or do we want a kind of green Leviathan? Do we want to empower the state so much that it actually comes to dominate the market as you might see happening in kind of China and some other developmental states? This is kind of often the kind of logic that's invoked when you hear people say, we don't have time for democracy, we don't have time for democratic solutions to this crisis. We need the state to do stuff very, very quickly. Both of these things seem to kind of push back against the default ideological consensus that we've had in the rich world at least for the last 30, 40 years, which is, of course, neoliberalism. The idea of planning of any kind is kind of an anathema to neoliberals who believe that the decentralized market mechanism is the only legitimate way to allocate resources and that any form of kind of centralized planning descends into inevitably into tyranny. And so when you see publications like The Financial Times and The Economist coming out and saying, we need some form of central planning to tackle the climate crisis, people are very quick to say, oh well, this is kind of the end of neoliberalism. It's the crumbling of the neoliberal order and the emergence of something else. Again, generally framed around this idea of kind of green Keynesianism. But I think this kind of misunderstands what was at the core of the neoliberal project and because it misunderstands what was at the core of the neoliberal project, it stands us in the wrong place when we're thinking about what will come next and how we as the left should respond to that and try and move beyond it. Because neoliberalism was never really about shrinking the state, it always involved a level of planning over markets both in terms of the creation, the active creation and construction of markets themselves and active intervention within those markets. So all you have to do is think about the kind of, the multiple crises that were caused by the shift towards neoliberalism over the last 30, 40 years. The dramatic responses to those crises always involved a huge expansion in the size of the state, a huge element of very deliberate planning on the part of most parts of that state, whether that was central banks, which ultimately as we've seen over the course of the last 10 years, came to play an extraordinarily important role in allocating capital in our economies, even as they were claiming just to be kind of operating in order to bolster the free market or whether it was treasuries actively stepping in to kind of bail out these institutions as we saw during the financial crisis. But this is also taking place in the neoliberal era in a number of other ways. We've seen the evisceration of competition law, which has led to the emergence of very large powerful monopolistic corporations which themselves act as planners within the global economy. Financial institutions playing this role of kind of allocating long-term capital, often able to kind of subvert what you would ordinarily see as kind of the free market forces and really just a kind of concentration of power at the top of society that has allowed individuals, institutions to get around the free market. And it's kind of, we're living with this myth that the state has shrunk, that we are living in a kind of market society, but that is really just a myth that serves to kind of try and legitimize a system in which power is so centralized in a few small hands that we say it's free markets, but actually a lot of what is going on is simply the interests of the wealthy being pushed onto the rest of society. So neoliberalism always involved a mix of planning and markets. And in fact, whenever you look around, if you look all around the world, if you look through the history of capitalism, you will always find systems that have this mix of planning and markets. We have this dichotomy that exists in our heads of two ideal types. On the one hand, you have free market societies in which there's no planning, there's small states, markets decide who gets what. And on the other hand, there's centrally planned societies where the state decides who gets what and they're inefficient and authoritarian. But most societies at most points in history have involved a mix of these two things. Neoliberalism is no exception. We see towards the other end of that spectrum now, again, not an entirely different kind of system in China and in some other developmental states, not a system that is of a completely different type to the neoliberal project, but one in which you have a different balance between markets and planning. In China, for example, planning is not concealed as it is within most neoliberal societies. It takes place over the kind of, the Chinese state has obviously control over the commanding heights of its economy. But markets, again, still exist in these societies, which you can see over the handling of the Chinese real estate bubble, what's going on with Evergrande, any attempt, no matter how cohesive to kind of dominate societies in which there are these free market forces, there's always that anarchy that is never fully able to be kind of completely controlled by a central state. So again, you see this tension, this kind of dialectic between the anarchy of the market and the centralized control, not just of states, but of large financial institutions of corporations and also of empires. And this is another element of it, of course, which is that for the last 20 or 30 years, we've had a form of imperialist planning that has really been centered in the hands of one hegemonic state, the United States. And as we move into this new era of an increasingly bipolar world order, we have these two different empires, each trying to kind of exert their will and also push their model of capitalism onto the rest of the world. So we're moving into this era in which we are increasingly being told there are two ways of running the economy. One is this free market system and the other one is this authoritarian system. And this is brilliant for liberals because it allows them to kind of bring back this idea of the clash of civilizations and we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. And of course, exactly the same thing is happening in those countries that are seen as the enemies of the West. But what I would like to argue, what I've kind of been trying to argue is that these two systems have more in common than we would often like to think. They both exist based on this tension between planning and the anarchy of the market. So in this sense, I think the talk of the kind of end of neoliberalism and the return of central planning is somewhat misplaced because all of these systems involve an element of planning. The question is not whether or not planning has taken place and this is the case with the Green New Deal as well. The question is not whether or not we're gonna do some level of planning. The question is in whose interests is that planning going to take place and who has the power to exert their will over everyone else within that system? And this is, I think, where narratives about green Keynesianism and the kind of green Leviathan fall flat, because there is a section of the left that sees basically the problem that we have with capitalism and the environment is that the market cannot internalize the externalities associated with burning fossil fuels. And therefore what we need is the imposition of some rationality over this anarchic system. We need the state to either create markets if you're a liberal or to kind of do more investment if you're a Keynesian. And that is what is going to solve the climate crisis. But this isn't gonna work. Now, on the one hand, if you just look at things like the emissions trading scheme, for example, that ended up being captured by vested interests within the state. So the liberal vision of trying to create markets to do this kind of stuff isn't gonna work on the one hand. And then you look at, say, for example, the more overtly planned model that you have in places like China. There's a very interesting example of the kind of thing that tends to happen when you get just the state deciding exactly what it wants to do and when. It's the example of the Great Green Wall in China, which is its afforestation project. Now, this is often held up as an example of what the state can do if everyone else just gets out of the way and you just kind of trample all over democracy. China has planted loads and loads of trees all over kind of uninhabited, well, allegedly uninhabited parts of the country. And as you know, touted this as an amazing success for environmentalism. But actually a lot of those trees ended up dying before they were able to reach maturity. And they also ended up diverting a lot of water that was being used for productive purposes in other parts of the country in a way that really hurts local populations and local ecosystems as well. So it actually ended up this, you know, on the surface pretty positive and progressive agenda ended up alienating a lot of people who were supposed to be on board with that agenda and not achieving many of its goals. So clearly relying on just the market isn't gonna work, relying on just the state isn't gonna work and relying on some, you know, mix between the two, which is what we tend to do here, isn't gonna work either because of the close links between market and state. And I think a lot of the reason that we end up kind of putting up these two categories of like, you know, central planning on the one hand and markets on the other hand is because we see this really sharp dichotomy between politics and economics, between state and market, that is itself the legacy of neoliberalism. And actually these two things aren't neatly separatable. They are very, very interwoven and interlinked. I think the best example of this and that really cuts through the idea of an autonomous state or an autonomous market is what we're seeing over in the US right now where a Senator, Joe Manchin, who is literally in the pockets of the fossil fuel companies who's been caught on camera talking about selling influence to fossil fuel companies is standing in the way of any kind of progressive environmental legislation that has, you know, that Biden has attempted to pass, what limited legislation Biden has attempted to pass. And I think that really is an indication of a wider problem which is that, you know, you cannot separate the political and the economic in the way that say, a Green Keynesian model would suggest that you can or a Green Leviathan model would suggest that you can. Ultimately, what all of this comes down to is a question around democracy because what the Eastern system and the Western system, what the Liberal system and the Keynesian system and the authoritarian system, what they all have in common is an absence of democracy. Some have the appearance of democracy and those democratic institutions are obviously important but the decisions that are being made within all of these societies, within all of these systems are a function of the balance of power within those societies. And most of those societies are inherently very unequal. In the West, we have a planning process that is dominated by a kind of toxic and corrupt set of linkages that exist between the state, big corporations, financial institutions that end up kind of really undermining any attempts that we may see to, you know, build progressive reform. In the East, you have a mix of, you know, very powerful bureaucrats, powerful kind of state-owned enterprises and some private capital that, again, ends up trampling over the interests and the voices of much of civil society. So what I think this suggests, what these questions of democracy suggest, is that this line that we often hear, which is the only way to tackle the climate crisis is to push for speed, is to push for a big state that is going to be able to do stuff very quickly and that we have this choice that we have to pick between democracy and dealing with climate breakdown, that that is just an entirely false dichotomy. And that actually the only way we're going to see a progressive Green New Deal that not only tackles the climate crisis, but also all of those other long-term and short-term crises that define this moment, the only way that we will actually be able to defeat fascism is by pushing for a deepening of democracy. So by linking up struggles that are taking place outside the state, linking up international struggles, domestic struggles with a strategy for domestic politics, pushing for a democratic renewal, within the state itself, to make sure that a diverse array of interests are being heard, and pushing for the democratization of the economy as well. And what all this is supposed to do is not say, right, we're going to, I don't know, overthrow the state and impose a central plan that will overcome the anarchy of the market and therefore allow us to deal with climate breakdown. It's actually saying we need to democratize our economy and democratize our entire society in order to achieve any progress on any of these aims, in order to fight climate breakdown, in order to deal with inequality, in order to deal with the kind of crisis of legitimation that we're seeing take place within capitalist societies all over the world. And I think finally, this is the only real answer that we have to fascism. Taking the example of kind of the increasing xenophobia and nationalism that we're seeing in the UK, that came under the mantle of take-back control. And on the surface, this kind of didn't really make sense. It's like, why would you want to take back control? In what way do you think that Brussels has taken control away from you? But when you look at the kind of political economic context of the last 40 years and of the structures that have been put in place by neoliberalism, this starts to make sense because power has been centralized in a small number of illiberal, undemocratic, unaccountable institutions. And if you ask most people, actually in most parts of the world, not just in neoliberal societies, whether or not they feel like they're in control of their lives, they're probably gonna tell you no. And for a very good reason, because if they go to work, they're gonna be being controlled by their boss. If they look at what's going on at the level of the world economy, they see lots of kind of abstract forces that are making their life worse off, but no clear way to be able to connect what they can do in their lives with any sort of structural political transformation, mainly because most of the political parties that working people would have relied on historically have enclosed themselves and tried to protect themselves from democratic accountability. Those are the conditions in which fascism thrives, in which you see bad things happening, feel completely disempowered to do anything about it, in which you feel that your life is getting worse and there's no obvious way of dealing with that. There's no kind of hopeful, optimistic, utopian vision of how things could change. That's when you start thinking, right, okay, well, things can only get worse, so I need to protect my piece of the pie. I think the left's only real answer to that. It can't just be give us your vote, we'll make the state bigger and do stuff for you because not only do people not trust that, it doesn't speak to that problem of accountability and of democracy. We need to be saying, we are gonna hand power back and the natural objection to that in the context of the Green New Deal is gonna be, well, things aren't gonna be able to go quickly enough, we need action now, but actually, without democracy, without handing power back to people, nothing is going to happen. We're gonna end up with Joe Manchin after Joe Manchin obstructing democracy because they're being paid by ExxonMobil. So the thing I want, everyone to take away and the thing I wanna discuss today is just the centrality and the importance of protecting and expanding democracy within the Green New Deal. I'm really thinking about how we start to push this idea of democratic planning because I think there have been a few examples of this. Historically, there are a few examples of this that exist today, particularly at a local, subnational level. And going back to the period just before the neoliberal transition in the 1970s, there's one really good example of this that I'll finish on. This was the Lucas Plan, which many of you will have heard of in the UK, which was workers at Lucas Aerospace who were unionized, were being threatened with job losses, they worked, much of their work was to do with manufacturing weapons and there was lots of cuts to state spending and various transformations in geopolitics that many of these jobs were at risk. So they appealed to the state, they appealed to Tony Ben and said, we need you to nationalize this company, nationalize Lucas Aerospace and save our jobs. And Tony Ben responded, we probably can't do that. I certainly don't have the power to do that and then isn't allegedly the money to be able to do that. But why don't you go away and think of a plan as to how you would run this company if it was in your hands? And so first the workers at Lucas Aerospace thought, okay, well, we don't know what to do about this. So we'll ask a load of academics and see what they think. But only three academics of the 50 that they asked actually responded with any coherent plans. So after that, the union said, okay, fine, last ditch attempt, we'll go to the workers and see what they think we should be doing with this company. They got hundreds of responses from people who had been working for decades on the front line, manufacturing weapons for a company that exploited them and which ultimately they obviously didn't really believe in the goals of. And these ranged from we can use this equipment to create dialysis machines for kidney patients. We can use this equipment to build a kind of new green infrastructure that can help us to decarbonize. Just an astonishing array of ideas from people who are usually treated as just inputs to production, not as people who could actually have an impact or make decisions about how the production process would take place itself. One of the workers involved in the Lucas Plan, as it was eventually named, ended up writing a book called The Architect in the Bee, which picks up from a passage in Marx on alienation that divides people's views of workers into are they architects or are they bees? Under capitalism, workers are seen as bees. They're just these kind of, you know, little inputs to the production process. They have no autonomy. They're not supposed to have any ideas. They're just supposed to do what they're told. But actually Marx's view was that human beings are architects. They need some feeling of control over their lives. They need to be able to feel that they are free to kind of create the conditions of their own existence. And this idea, you know, this set of ideas that were put together in the form of the Lucas Plan really validated that idea that human beings are architects. They're not bees. And we live in a world, ironically enough, because we're told that this is a free market system, that everyone has free speech, that everyone is free to choose. We still live in a world in which people are treated as bees. The idea of democratizing the economy, the idea of really creating kind of democratic green new deal isn't just about tackling climate breakdown, it is. But it's also about giving people the capacity to behave as architects and create the world that we are kind of moving into, create the world in which they live. I think that is really the only way that we can push back against the reactionary view of humanity held by neoliberals, held by capitalists, held by fascists, is to restore people's autonomy to counter that sense of alienation as well as constructing an equal affair, sustainable green economy that works for everyone. Thank you. Hello, everyone. Welcome. My name is David Adler. I am here to moderate this discussion. Mazel Tov to whoever in the back just broke a glass. I'm the general coordinator of an organization called the Progressive International, which unites and organizes and mobilizes progressive forces all around the world. And I have the opportunity to work with many of the people who are here in the audience tonight. So it's really a pleasure to spend the evening with you, as well as my dear friend Grace and two very special guests who I'm about to welcome to the stage now. The first is Martin Shridwin, who is a member of European parliaments and co-chair of the left group. Please welcome Martin to the stage. And the second is Sabrina Fernandes, who is a Brazilian eco-socialist organizer, communicator and postdoctoral fellow here with the Rosalux and Berg Foundation. Welcome, Sabrina. So this conference has been about the global Green New Deal, its meaning, its contents, its present, its past, its future. And I think Grace has given us a fantastic tour of the promise and perils of what that global Green New Deal could look like, what a Green New Deal is and should be. One of the ways that I think is helpful to summarize Grace's speech is to think about kind of the colors of the Green New Deal, the colors of green politics. For a long time, we were accused of advancing a watermelon politics. It was green on the outside, but it was red on the inside. The real content was a leftist politics and we were accused of shuttling in the socialism along with sustainability. Now, as Grace mentioned, we're seeing another color of green politics, what some people call avocado politics, green on the outside and fascist brown on the inside. But we're sitting here in Brussels, which has been the home, the epicenter of a new kind, a new green politics that I often call tennis ball politics, the kind of green on the outside, but very hollow on the inside. This kind of relates to what Grace was saying before. We continue to doubt the ability of capitalism to respond to the climate disaster. We say they're never gonna figure it out now. But then they come up with something like the EU Green Deal, which promises to save the planet, protect our ecosystems, while preserving exactly the political economics that is quo. I know we're all worried about fascism. We should be worried about fascism. But Martin and I are just coming back from a couple of days that we spent in Ljubljana in Slovenia. We're on the same day of Macron's re-election. We saw the skyrocketing arrival to power of another Macronist candidates, Golub, in Slovenia, whose vague promises of protecting the environment, a kind of European liberalism, scored him 42 MPs when an absolute majority was 46. So Martin, I want to start here because we all thought liberalism was dead. But liberalism appears to be having kind of a comeback in Europe and the risks are that what we're seeing here from your perch in European Parliament is that kind of tennis ball politics. So I'm hoping you could kick off this conversation by giving us a sense of, I don't live in Brussels. I'm so sorry, so many of you do live in Brussels. But if you could tell us how it feels in the bubble, how it feels from the perspective of the European institutions, how are they succeeding in co-opting that green agenda while advancing a vision that's fundamentally status quo? Or are there kind of cracks in the artifice that would allow us as good leftists to kind of advance with a more socialist agenda in that context? Yes, thank you, David, for the questions. Hello, everybody. Yeah, if you have a closer look at the European Parliament and the balance of power in the European Parliament, then you all have to be aware that there is already a very strong liberal faction of political group in the European Parliament that actually is able to work on majorities. They can influence the whole political process in the parliament by voting either for progressive political, let's say, reports or initiatives or by voting together with the conservatives and the extreme right for rather, let's say, non-progressive political reports or initiatives. And a lot of what is going on in the European Union really belongs, depends on that political group called Renew Europe. That is a euphemism, I'd like to say. They are not really interested in renewing Europe, but they are interested in actually this very influential power game that they are playing all the time. So liberalism has never been dead, actually. Not in the European Parliament, at least. And they are part of the so-called Ursula Coalition. Ursula Coalition stands for those political groups in the European Parliament who voted in the beginning of the mandate for Ursula von der Leyen in order for her to take over a position as president of the European Commission and one of the conditions why they voted for her has also been her promise to deliver a Green New Deal, to deliver something really sustainable and to, her promise was, of course, to, let's say, to bring together the idea of capitalist progress and climate protection. That is more or less her general idea and as Grace already pointed out, that is a rather a tennis ball idea, or you put it, David, this is not going to work. She failed to deliver a political program that actually can tackle climate change. She made a lot of promises with the climate law, but it is not ambitious enough. The Green New Deal presented by the Commission is not ambitious enough. The Fit for 55 package consists of 30 legislative proposals, is not ambitious enough. And with these political approach presented by the Commission and supported by the Liberals and also the Conservatives and most of the time also of the Social Democracy, we will not manage to really change, let's say, the course of environmental politics. So this is from the European Parliament from the inside, but unfortunately liberalism has never been dead on the country. It's alive and kicking there. Thanks, Martin. I mean, one of the things that's so remarkable to see in the ways in which Brussels really, Brussels really pats itself on the back is through green finance, through ESG, through the great package by which we're going to transform the financial system from a vehicle of destruction and environmental breakdown into a vehicle for sustainability. But I think what's really fascinating is in the ways in which those same, let's say, green financiers often get in bed with the very same fascists that they claim to denounce. That's where we end up back in the realm of avocado politics. I really promise I'll stop with these stupid metaphors in a moment, but turning to you, Sabrina, I think there's no country in the world that better represents that kind of sordid alliance between green finance and actually existing fascist politics than Brazil. How has Bolsonaro, for example, but further beyond, kind of marshaled a green agenda, or at least people in his orbit, while, again, fundamentally holding on to an exclusive, in the Brazilian case, genocidal agenda, deforestation, invading, and murdering indigenous representatives across the Amazon? Yeah, thanks, David. Well, one of the things is that for a while, the Brazilian president has been known for destructing the Amazon nature in general, really. But last year, during COP26, something that was quite interesting is that whereas beforehand, the former minister of the environment, Ricardo Salis, who was chosen precisely because he was very corrupt, he was involved in fraudulent situations regarding environmental licenses and things like that, he was replaced by a different guy who was already in the ministry, actually, and he's been in bed with agribusiness for a really long time in Brazil. So for a while, a lot of people are thinking, well, Bolsonaro is really bad for the Amazon, he's bad for nature, but this is part of a different strategy that we have called together with other people in groups in Latin America that have been doing a critique for a really long time around the green economy and this financialization of nature, turning everything into a commodity, like people from the Grupo Cáctez de Belém and so on, is that there's this approach that we call like you dismantle it in order to replace it. So the purpose was to dismantle environmental protections as much as possible in order to replace it with the financialization of things. So agribusiness actually really supported the new minister for the environment. He arrived in Glasgow with a huge team, a huge delegation that involved way too many people who were just there to basically spend public money from Brazil, but the whole point is to say that Brazil was the future of the green economy and it just kind of looked ridiculous when we have all of this data regarding not only environmental destruction directly, but also the criminalization of social movements for a really long time, attacks on indigenous communities and every day we have worse and worse news in that sense. Brazil is currently not the worst place to be an environmentalist, that's Colombia right now, but we're very, very close and Bolsonaro is definitely a huge part of this, but the whole point is that right now they're trying to sell proper land from agribusiness as if they were actually conserving things in order to place them into upsetting schemes through our really frustrating situation regarding Article 4 of the Paris Agreement and the whole situation around carbon trading and how companies have been able to do this and now agribusiness is trying to greenwash itself. So what we would have in Brazil and in other far-right experiences that we find in the global south wouldn't be equal fascism in the sense because we have a very different relationship to borders and extractivism and things like that, so it's different from what we would see in the global north in a more separatist perspective or seem like blaming immigrants for destroying the environment and trying to save things for themselves because in fact equal fascism is quite related to ecological imperialism, but we do have this approach where the economics of these fascist presidents and I'm not claiming here that Brazil is living under a fascist regime but it is living under a president with fascist ideals who has been quite effective in making sure that people die off primarily racialized and poor people in the country and who was betting on more of a far-right renewal in Latin America. Hopefully we're managing to stop that off including Brazil later in the year, but we do know that the economics is there. We do know that green funds are very, very happy to be in bed with the Bolsonaro government, with this minister of the environment and they're very happy to do business with people who are associated with the murder and the marginalization of traditional and indigenous communities in a system that's still very much perpetuating colonialism and they would do that when on the other hand they're going to put big ads on newspapers saying they're like, wow, we're actually helping these communities out so we have to keep an eye for this kind of contradiction. Yeah, and just staying on this question of green finance and no one I know has thought more about the city of London and the arteries of international finance more than you Grace, you spoke about the importance of democratizing the Green New Deal, the importance of ownership, and one way to think about that is of course at the firm level. We spoke about these factories, we think about democratic ownership, whether it's other utilities or indeed firms. But one of the counter arguments I can imagine as we move away from an avocado politics back towards watermelon politics last time is the question of international finance. How do you democratize a structure that's so fundamentally woven through, you might even say it's kind of this circuitry of the international economy, these questions of can the city be democratized. So what is your assessment of the relationship between green transformation and actually existing finance and what is it going to take for us to really challenge the power that as you showed in your first big book continues to grip like a parasite or political systems but where they can say you don't really get it. You don't really understand these flows of capital across borders and how it's difficult to democratize a structure that's international in scale. So yeah, if you could give us both a kind of overview of how you see green finance today building on what was it going to say and where we go from here. Yeah, so I mean what we're seeing at the moment is a real attempt to square the dynamics of capital accumulation with some sort of response to climate breakdown. And again, this all falls under the mantle of kind of the attempt to exert some centralized control over the anarchy of the free market system. And there are plenty of liberals who are kind of getting behind this agenda. You see this particularly among central bankers. So the big discussions are right now have all been around how do we kind of green quantitative easing, for example, which is itself an incredibly anti-democratic thing. It's not just kind of contrary to the principles of the free market and of the near classical understanding of how monetary policy works. It's also central bankers are making decisions about financing particular companies, which is basically what they're doing in buying corporate bonds, which we've seen them do, not just public bonds, but corporate bonds, particularly in this last phase of COVID-19 that have zero democratic accountability, because not only do central banks have no direct forms of democratic accountability, they're also completely insulated from, well, largely insulated from the government itself in most cases. So that, again, has been a pretty anti-democratic move that central bankers now realize has been potentially harmful in opening them up to criticism. So the idea is, okay, we'll keep everything the same, but we'll try and green these programs. So we'll do green quantitative easing, where instead of allowing some of this public cash to end up in the pockets of big fossil fuel companies or the banks that fund them, we direct it all towards nice good green companies. And you see this again with ESG, which is we don't need to change the way that the market works. We don't need to have any sort of fundamental transformation of the financial system. We can take shareholder capitalism and just expand it a bit and make it stakeholder capitalism so that we understand shareholders as not only people who are seeking profits, but also people who are employees and consumers and who are interested in the long-term health of the planet. And so they're going to take up the mantle of disciplining boards, disciplining managers within these companies to pursue sustainable economic agendas. And all of these things fall under this mantle of trying to kind of do a bit more planning within these free market systems without really disrupting any of the fundamental dynamics upon which they're based and which have led to the problems that we're seeing at the moment in the first place. And you particularly see this at the level of the world economy because the crisis that we're seeing right now, the global debt crisis that is really afflicting many countries in the global south. The most obvious example at the moment is perhaps Sri Lanka, but you've got this happening in Lebanon in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Lots of countries facing very, very severe debt distress. And actually many countries were facing very severe debt distress even before the COVID-19 pandemic. It was then after that when you saw capital that had flooded into the global south with interest rates very low in the global north because of that central bank planning, then flooding back into the global north as soon as there was this kind of flight to safety and this fear that took place during the pandemic. And this debt crisis is exacerbating a problem that existed before, which was the states in the global south cannot get the capital that they need not just to decarbonise, but actually to just mitigate the effects of climate breakdown that are already with them. So Mia Motley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, has been one of the kind of greatest advocates of this and on behalf of kind of small low-lying and island nations saying if we cannot access the financing and the funding that we need just to literally stop our countries from going underwater, the President of the Maldives said the same thing, then all of this talk about green financing and the bringing of private sector capital into the green transition, it's all utterly meaningless because our countries are literally going to be underwater. So you have this very obvious disconnect, I guess, between the conversations that are taking place among central bankers, financial institutions, representatives of finance in general, and then what is actually happening on the ground in countries where they're literally already facing the impact of climate breakdown. So how do we respond to this? Well, I mean, first and foremost, many of these institutions which are allocating funding at the international level. So think of, you know, for example, the IMF and its special drawing rights, which were really central in the global response to the pandemic in just kind of kicking the can of the global south debt crisis down the road because it emphatically hasn't been solved, but new SDRs being issued and that moratorium on debt repayments basically kicked the can down the road. The reason that the IMF, of course, didn't respond to this in a way that was in any way sustainable or just or legitimate was because it is itself an inherently undemocratic, not just undemocratic, anti-democratic organization run on the principle of one dollar one vote rather than one country one vote or even more radical, you know, one human being one vote. So the Green New Deal needs to be democratic at the domestic level, but we also really need to think about what democracy means within these international institutions that operate, yeah, to kind of really, like, suppress democracy globally and to enforce the imperialist interests of the states that dominate them in the global north. And I could talk a lot about what that actually means in terms of institutions, but I've already spoken for way too much, so we can carry on. Thanks, Grace. Yeah, so I want to move out of the annals of international finance, out of the banks and back onto the streets to talk to you, Martin, you know, the past few years we've seen these big mobilizations of youth onto the streets. We've talked a lot about this, about Fridays for Future, about a climate-conscious generation flooding into the plazas of Rome, in Madrid, and Warsaw. And yet, many of these first-time voters went to the ballot box and they voted green. Those untrustworthy stewards have the climate agenda. And so I wonder, you know, to return back to this question, you know, thinking about those many times that Greta was invited to speak to European parliaments. There were, you know, Timmermans was inviting a die-in in the hallways of Berlin, Monterey, wherever we were. I wonder, how do we make sense of, you know, whether we on the left were able to capture some of those energies? I mean, if a key component of the Green New Deal is going to be democratic, how can we, you know, succeed instead of expecting, as Grace pointed out in her speech, oh, the climate crisis will, those tasty contradictions of capitalism will yield a new socialist movement. You know, when that fails to emerge, how should we make sense of that? How should we be responding to a generation that understands the Green Agenda not necessarily in socialist terms, not necessarily even in those economic terms, but is willing to maybe entrust some of these Green parties to basically do the job on their behalf? Well, I think that the left started already years ago to incorporate some of the demands of the youth movement Fridays for Future into their programmatic positions, but still the left needs a makeover, a political makeover. And we have to develop answers and we have to give answers to the crises that Grace described earlier today in her keynote speech, but we have to deliver those answers and we have to give those answers to both the social crisis and the ecological crisis in order for us to advocate for a social ecological transition, which of course needs to be democratic. But democracy is a key component of that social ecological transition that the left is advocating for already. But as I said, we need that programmatic makeover. Some of our parties are doing quite good. Also all over Europe, we have that very interesting experience now seen in France. We have some strongholds in Ireland, in Cyprus, in Greece, etc. Also the Nordic Green Left parties are doing quite good. But in general, we see that the left is in a not only programmatic crisis, but also in a crisis when it comes to electoral support. And this is something we have to analyze very carefully and I think first of all, we overcome this and convince voters to vote for us with this political programmatic makeover focusing on the social ecological transition with democracy as a key component. Second of all, I think we have to restructure the left or ourselves. Meaning, not that I go somewhere to a meeting and then they offer me some filter coffee and some cookies or something, but they forgot to give me a microphone and I have to shout into the room for one and a half hours. But I mean really, we have to open the structures in order to attract people and to invite them to participate in the policies we want to put forward and maybe they become militants then of our parties. But at least they become militants in a political movement. And then of course, they bring our ideas back on the streets and this is an interaction and I think this might also be a way forward to attract the young green voters for the left and make them vote in the future for us and strengthen the left and the third. The thing that I see where the left has to be better and where we clearly would reach out to the younger voters as well is that we need to work on our communications. I mean, let's be honest. Sometimes we don't have an idea about cutting edge social media work, for instance. But this is something that we need to do. I mean, they are all somehow on social media. We need to reach out where they are to them. So, and this is what we really need to do, some populist, not populist, some popular language, easy to understand, but also translated into the communication channels where we find those young people and I think these are some of the ideas that we have to work on as European left and we will do so because we are, let's say, we are aware of the challenges that lie ahead of us. You know, sometimes I think that we put a little too much emphasis on youth politics, not only because I think it has a weird messianic tint that kind of the kids will save us, but also because it kind of reeks of a kind of anti-worker, anti-community thing, you know, that we should go around the labor movement, we should go around communities, we should go around popular organization and just listen to the kids, which always struck me a bit suspicious. So, I guess as someone who has done more thinking and theorizing around what eco-socialism can mean, but also as someone who comes from a country with such high levels of popular organization, you know, when you think about who those protagonists are, when we think about eco-socialism, we take seriously Grace's point about what democracy looks like. You know, when you think from your journeys, whether it's in the communities of Venezuela or in the streets of Sao Paulo or wherever you may be, you know, are there modes of popular and democratic organization that incorporate principles of sustainability that are serious about the ecological transition that don't necessarily have to, you know, pin all their hopes on a future generation but are engaged in kind of the active construction of a Green New Deal that aren't waiting around for the big state to say, here's our Green Keynesian stimulus, but are actually kind of building that more from the bottom up in the way that Grace describes. One of the things that tends to happen when social movements get abandoned by the state, when they get criminalized or, you know, they're just completely forgotten, is that they kind of have to figure it out on their own, right? So this tension, social movements, the state, the concept of civil society that's also very broad, kind of complicated to define, and the private sector. There's always a lot of tension. And one of the things that we kind of realize over the past years, at least in Brazil, is that a lot of these movements kind of had to reinvent themselves to, you know, survive through the pandemic. First and foremost, we're talking about a situation of hunger, we're talking about a situation where, you know, over 600,000 people are dead and things like that. And I do think, like, I work closely with the landless workers movement, and it is one of the biggest movements that we have in the entire planet, actually. They've managed to accomplish a lot, though not yet agrarian reform, which is the basic demand. But one of the things that they've had to do is actually, like, just to learn how to live when they don't get support. So, you know, finding ways to work through, like, solidarity economy schemes with people from the communities, finding ways to engage in popular education, which I think is like one of the biggest trends of the movement, actually. Like, they have an international school where people come from all over the world and you go to Colón Nacional Flores de San Fernández and you can be there. And they bring a lot of youth, actually. But it's a different way of thinking about youth, right? It's about engagement that's not abstract. It's about where you're located, what does it mean in terms of production, which movements you're a part of. So it's not this idea that, well, we already screwed it up, so we're going to leave it up for them and they're going to bring us hope. But something that I think we should be aware of is that many times you kind of place the social movements there and then the rest of society are the actual messes. They're somewhere else, right? So you kind of have to build these links of solidarity of, like, the people who are doing things. And the MSC has been around for a really long time, but it's been mostly, like, in the past decade when they really decided to focus on agroecology because the fight against, you know, very toxic chemicals is really big in Latin America, so the fight against, you know, transgenic seeds and other issues like that. They had to have this turn towards agroecology and they kind of became a main voice around it and then you find the role of women there. So we have, like, this amazing march that tends to happen to, like, Masha Das Margarita, so it's, like, a lot of Campesino women who are at the forefront of the struggle and sometimes you find, like, it gets even more beautiful because right before the pandemic, the march of the Campesino women kind of coincided with the march of indigenous women and it was just, like, this powerhouse, right? But at the same time that everyone is sort of under attack. But what we get from this is that these solidarity connections, they're actually quite strong and people kind of understand that they're part of the same situation and kind of to borrow on what Martin was saying here about, like, social media stuff. Like, we found that, like, this is a movement that, well, it's made out of Campesinos and it's made out of people who sometimes don't have, like, proper access to internet, which is part of the issue, but they're actually doing quite well right now in social media and together with solidarity campaigns, they've managed to show part of the situation, like, part of the population who just thought, well, you know, they're invaders and they're terrorists and things like that, that, well, when people in the country are going hungry because there's a fascist in power, here's the social movement that's going to come along with tons of organic, good, delicious food and they're going to feed you. So that's a really good strategy and I think this is where we have to look for the protagonists, not just the people who are seeing, like, new things and, oh, this is very interesting and they look like they're coming out of the system, right? We kind of have to be careful with this because the far right has used this a lot, right? You know, it's like this outsider who's just coming and saying different things and also then when you find out, like, they're really reproducing far right ideas. So sometimes, like, the package is kind of empty but when you're talking about social movements, trying to innovate and find other ways to connect with people, then I think, like, we can find a lot of hope but also I don't want to make a fetish out of social movements here. We're also dealing with a lot of contradictions. We know that, for example, and this is something that was quite obvious last year as well, a lot of these discussions around, for example, sustainability chains and, you know, you've got to get, like, this particular seal on the product or something like that and now they're connected to blockchain and now they're, like, actually grabbing indigenous youth and having them as, like, poster girls and poster boys for, like, blockchain and Bitcoin and stuff like that. And it's another way for them to greenwash things and it's a way also to demobilize. So if we're thinking about the protagonist, it's not about, you know, who feels that particular identity. We have to be quite careful when it comes to the content and it's not always easy to grasp that. Speaking about communication and taking Martin's point seriously that we've got to be better communicators. I wanted to ask this to Grace, you know, Grace, we've been having these discussions about the global Green New Deal but the Green New Deal is a concept and it's kind of a specter in the room of socialism. A word we've heard very little over the past couple of days and a word we did not hear in your speech tonight and, you know, it's something that we see built into conversations around eco-socialism in Brazil. Many people in this room will have come up through the socialist movement so named but it was notable that in your speech, you know, we're talking mostly about democracy, democratization, is, for all intents and purposes, let's say in this great northern block, is socialism not how you would advise many of the party representatives in this room to speak to you, to speak about this paradigm? No, no, no, did I not say, I feel like I did say socialism. Maybe I didn't, I don't know. It's filming here, so it's all... We'll be able to tell later. We can sort this out. We can sort this discussion out. No, I mean, my perspective was about how it is important to bring these conversations about democracy into this discussion about socialism because I mean, if you look back historically to the debates that have animated the left and, you know, this is really speaking to the left in general, there has been this tension between, okay, well, do we need to just kind of take control over the levers of state power and jimmy them around ourselves? Or do we need something, you know, which some people would say, which I would say is a bit more radical than that, which is actually kind of trying to decentralize power in order to build something entirely new. And that debate, I think, is still ongoing. And it's ongoing less between kind of Marxists who think that, you know, we can have a coherent, completely, yeah, like central plan that's going to be able to tell us everything that we want to do with the economy, that's kind of gone. But more within this movement of, like, green Keynesianism, which suggests that there is a way to use the state without much popular accountability to, like, shift the way that capitalism works, to kind of save capitalism from its own contradiction, save it from itself. And, you know, these questions of democracy and democratization are, I think, very, very important for those of us who understand ourselves as socialists, because they speak to the impossibility, firstly, of that move towards kind of just saying, right, we're going to take control of the state and make it do the things that we want. But also, these questions around how we win, because what is the kind of the fascist move to the electorate, the fascist or xenophobic or nationalistic move to the electorate, what is it? It is, I will protect you. Give me your vote and we will protect you. And we're seeing this emerge really, really strongly all around the world at the moment with the combination of the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis, the pandemic, war. All of these seem to be things that people want to be protected from. They are things that people need to be protected from. And the response to the far right is to say, we spent too much, well, it's either to say, right, the eco-fascist response, let's put up walls, things are going badly, so, you know, we need to protect what is ours and keep the other out. Or this emerging current of like fossil fascism, which is saying, we spent too much time worrying about the climate. Actually, it's not really us here who are going to be affected mostly by climate breakdown. Those people over there, so let's keep digging, let's keep extracting fossil fuels. We'll use the money from that to reduce your fuel bills. We'll get rid of all these kind of taxes that are making you worse off. And that's going to solve the cost of living crisis and also, by the way, empower the fossil fuel companies that also tend to be very close to these movements. But it's all a politics of give us your vote and we will do something for you. The left often falls into that trap as well by saying, give us your vote and we will protect you from the baddies, except in this case, the baddies rather than being immigrants are the fascists. And I just don't think that's convincing to people. It's not convincing to people because we've seen, you know, the legacy of, you know, allegedly self-proclaimed leftist governments, which have often tended to be more neoliberal than leftists, but still, those governments that came to power and said, we will make your life slightly better. We will increase inequality. We will, sorry, we will reduce inequality. We will, you know, do things to make your life slightly better. Maybe they did do that in some cases, but broadly speaking, you know, most people did not feel dramatically better off or that society was dramatically more equal after social democratic parties have been in power. So there's a legacy of mistrust there when leftist parties go to the electorate and say, give us your vote, we'll do stuff for you. And I think the only response to that is, as I've said, to say, we're not going to do stuff for you. We are going to empower you to, like, come up with a response to this crisis collectively or empower us to come up with a response to this crisis collectively. And I think the biggest challenge to that narrative is, like, individualism, basically. Like, hearing about what's going on in Brazil, for example, you can see, like, the legacy of, well, the kind of ongoing importance of real, kind of, deep social ties that bind people together and encourage them to fight alongside one another and conceive of themselves as part of an interest group. I think particularly in many parts of the global north, the legacy of neoliberalism has been to encourage people to see themselves as powerless individuals, basically. And that is very fertile ground for fascism because if you're a powerless individual, who can protect you? You can't protect yourself. You can't, kind of, align with other people within your class or within your society to protect one another. You have to rely on someone else out there, someone powerful and strong to protect you instead. So yeah, I think the biggest challenge there is figuring out how we rebuild a sense of the collective. And I think that's a really important role that can be played by social movements, is just showing people that we can rely on one another and we can fight together and build movements together that can really change things. So we're coming to the end of the discussion, and I wanted to put a, kind of, final question to all three of you in the name of the great Rosa Luxemburg herself. I think often about the Luxemburgian crossroads, socialism or barbarism. And certainly the discussion, that panorama of polycrisis that you gave us, Grace, suggests that we are approaching that same crossroads. But it's been my experience in my very short life that we keep delaying that crossroads. It feels always like a mirage that we find some way, in 2008, here we are, we've finally gotten here. It's socialism or barbarism. And then we delay it. We find some band-aid. We find some special-purpose vehicle cooked up in the back rooms of Brussels that protects, you know, and holds together the European Union and our elites breathe a sigh of relief. So I wonder, you know, is this really the framing that we should stick to in this era of polycrisis? Are we still confronting a choice between socialism or barbarism? You know, there's obviously one critique that the barbarism has always been there. It's always been ongoing. And the conversation that some degree of socialism has also always been there. But I wonder, you know, and we can move kind of in reverse order here, so I'll start with you, Grace. Is that what we are? Are we at a Luxembourgian crossroads? Or should we be thinking about it as being a broader universe of potential outcomes, a rainbow, so to speak, from which voters, our neighbors, our friends and allies are going to have to choose? You know, I think in some ways we're kind of always facing this crossroads. And if we take, like, socialism versus barbarism being, you know, the two extremes of the political spectrum, do we go for kind of democratic socialism or fascism, that choice tends to be present with us, you know, a lot of the time. It's just a question of how visible it is. And in response to, you know, the crisis presents itself, the choice, sorry, presents itself most clearly in response to big crises, when decisions need to be made, when votes need to be cast, when, you know, policy choices need to be made. And as David said, what we've consistently seen is liberals coming up in response to those crises and sticking plasters that extend the status quo in ways that we thought were kind of impossible because it just seems to be completely and utterly unviable. And yet, every time those sticking plasters fail to achieve what they set out to achieve, fail to kind of solve the crises of capitalism and just kick the can down the road, then we are presented with that choice again, you know, a few, an electoral cycle later or a year later or a crisis later. A really good example of this is obviously what's been happening in France, you know, Macron was elected saying, I'm going to reform the French state, I'm going to, you know, reintroduce dynamism and free markets into French society, only for that agenda to be unmasked as one in which, you know, billionaire wealth is untouched and the, you know, the welfare and the social security that French people had fought for over so many years is cut and is threatened. And the response to that is obviously the strengthening of the far right. And we are presented with an election again in which you have this decision between just a liberal sticking plaster and fascism and kind of neo-fascism or whatever you want to call it. And this problem is not going away. It keeps presenting itself, it keeps re-emerging. And the question of socialism or barbarism, the question of kind of socialism or fascism is yeah, obviously very close in the moment that we find ourselves in today. And I think the response really does come down to whether or not we can build a collective politics, build a democratic politics, build a socialist politics that encourages people not to view the response to this question as a vote that you're posting in a ballot box or just a decision that comes around once every four years when we're facing an election, but actually an ongoing process of how we build movements that prefigure the society that we want to see in the current moment today. So for me, the kind of exciting stuff that's going on there is, yes, what you were just talking about in Brazil about the landless workers movement, but also smaller scale stuff that's happening within the UK, things like the Preston model, which is this model that's being built at the local level by a bunch of councillors and civil society groups where they are really kind of pushing back against the neoliberal outsourcing model and saying we're going to use the combined power of social institutions to build up cooperatives, to build a public banking network to really support the growth and dynamism of a local community. I was in a small village in Wales not long ago, which has more social enterprises per capita than any other part of Wales, and this was a really, really deprived area, one of the poorest areas in Wales, and people just came together, started building cooperatives, building these small social enterprises that became the foundation for a really amazing political movement. So, yeah, I think rather than having this big question hanging over us all the time of socialism or barbarism, what choice are we going to make when we are next posed with this question, is just thinking about how are we building alternatives within the system as we see it right now? Sabrina, is it socialism or is it barbarism? Or is the question not relevant at all? Well, eco-socialists kind of updated the question, so we've been saying eco-socialism or extinction, and the point of this is that rather than waiting for the crossroads, and okay, so it's either one way or another, when we're dealing with extinction, we don't have a lot of choice rather than really building the conditions to avoid it. You really have to do it ahead of time. You can't wait to get at the crossroads. So that really means permanent work in terms of base building and planning and trying to really gather critical mass to get things going, and also emphasizing that, yes, we're talking about eco-socialism or extinction, but I'm going to borrow from my friend Daniel Donacoia right now, is that in the end we're kind of dealing with eco-socialism or eco-apartheid, right? We're talking about how we have these clusters of billionaires who are extremely powerful, who are betting, yes, on eco-fascism to make sure that they have these fortresses where they can protect themselves, where they have these really amazing, like we're talking about mirages, right? Really amazing places where they can hide or maybe go up into the space. I still think that's mostly an excuse to get a lot of military contracts and develop technology on that. Also, my friend Paris Marks talks a lot about this. You guys should be aware of the work done by Paris on Tech Want Savas. So I'm going to plug his podcast right now since we're talking about communications. But one of the things here is that if we're dealing really with this question, if we're taking it really seriously, it means that we're actually trying to buy ourselves time. And this is part of the project behind a global green new deal. I am an eco-socialist and I want a more revolutionary approach to things because I know that if you keep just betting on reform after reform, we're actually giving them time to reorganize themselves. And that has been the case for a really long time. We go and we fight and we have all these struggles and we go and we secure some rights. And then there's a coup in some country in the global south or a guy like Steve Bannon comes along and then it kind of just messes everything up in terms of depoliticization and far-right presidents come into power and then in a second we lose victories that came from maybe two, three decades or even more of struggle. So I know we can't afford to just go from reform to reform even though that does seem to be part of the situation right now. We're just alternating here and there. And this is actually one of my concerns for what's going on in Latin America, for example. I absolutely want to get rid of Bolsonaro in Brazil, but I need Lula to be bolder and he's not being bold enough. So this is a major area of concern. But when we're talking about a global green new deal, we're talking, yes, we need to buy time because I could be very ultra leftist with you guys right now and say, yes, we need revolution. None of this is going to work. But if there's no planet to actually make this possible, if people are in a situation of such distress because of extreme weather events because we have droughts and there's not enough food and there's a huge crisis connected to climate migration that for some reason is still kind of hard to define as like climate refugees because people have a very precious attachment to a very specific way of dealing with borders. But we should talk about refugees because that also means rights and understanding status in that sense. But we should be at a point where we think that, well, the global green new deal for us is how we're going to create the proper conditions to not only avoid something worse, so yes, let's avoid a 2.0 degree Celsius scenario, but also to think creatively of what we want instead. So it's not only as an exercise in radical imagination, but as a prefiguration and what can we build today that's going to lay very thick foundations for the future that when we actually go beyond capital, like thinking about mesados here right now, when we actually go beyond capital, we can secure it and not lose it and have the Berlin Wall fall over again. So, thank you, Sabrina. Martin, I've been accused several times of the course of the past couple of days of being a downer and optimist. So I'm hoping you can close out the session with your own take on where we're at, confronting these crossroads, and maybe, yeah, a hopeful... Do you see a way for us to kind of drag ourselves away from a barbaric outcome and towards a brighter future here in Europe and, of course, around the world? Well, if it is socialism or barbarism, then, of course, it is democratic socialism. And, yes, we are facing these crossroads, and I've heard that sentence, by the way, in Athens when I attended the party congress there, and the parties are gearing up in Greece for the next electoral campaign, which will take place next year. And the question raised there at the party congress was it is either socialism or barbarism. It was raised by Alexis Tsipras, and having a look at the developments in Greece, but also having a look at the developments in France, the recent developments in France, clearly we have to say that we are facing this conjunction. And from my perspective, taking into account what happened in France in the last few weeks with the presidential elections, I think we are living kind of on borrowed time now. But those who bought us the time were the left voters who, against their convictions, voted for Macron in the second round in order to avoid Le Pen taking over power. Thank you for the French voters in this case, even though it might be a very difficult decision for many of them, especially for the left voters. But this time that we won, let's say the five years in France, and we don't know what will happen in other countries, but these five years, you really need to make use of. And then it comes to the question, will we be able, together with trade unions, social movements, civil society, NGOs, etc., etc., to implement radical social change, confronting neoliberalism, confronting oligarchs, confronting multinational companies, etc., will we be able to deliver radical and swift climate protection? And will we be able to democratize society? And I think we have still a few years to go, and I'm very optimistic when it comes to democratic socialism and that we will succeed in the end. Well, the work starts now. I want to thank our host, Rosa Lux, Brussels, and thank my illustrious guests here on the panel. A big round of applause for Grace, Sabrina and Martin. Thank you so much.