 Many people here are thinking about what it would mean pretty soon, perhaps, to have a left-wing Labour government. And those questions about international solidarity and the way our movement exists across borders is going to be really, really important because these questions and the instinct of the labourism, historically, is to contain itself within national bounds. So this conversation couldn't be more important. And so we heard a lot about the State and I'm going to hand over to Elif, who is going to talk about somewhere where there is quite a strong deep state and some pretty dark goings on as well. I think your microphone is on, so... Hi. Yeah, there we go. Elif, sir, I can. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Before I begin, especially on the topic of anti-fascism and a struggle against it, I think it will be meaningful to commemorate all of the revolutionary anti-fascists who have sacrificed their lives and have set precedent for us to be here today. I want to particularly commemorate an heroic anti-fascist Anna Campbell, 26 years old, from Lewis, who went out to fight against the fascism and the invasion of the Turkish state alongside the YPJ. And I also want to commemorate my beautiful comrade Mehmet Aksoy, who, on the 26th of this month, it will be a year since we lost him in Raqqa as a result of ISIS fascism. So I think it's interesting that I go after our comrade speaking about Germany, because one of the inspiration that the roots of fascism in Germany took was from Turkish fascism, actually. Hitler once said that Ataturk, who is the founding father of the modern Turkish republic, he said, Ataturk is my master and Mussolini and I are his students. So, you know, the roots of the Turkish republic are essentially built on fascistic principles with one nation, one flag, one language, one religion. So any diversification from this has, especially the past 100 years, been seen as a threat to Turkishness. And so what we see with Erdogan today isn't anything new. And I think this is, you know, this is why it's so important to talk about our anti-fascism being international, an internationalist, because, you know, it comes to our agenda when it starts happening in Europe again, and, you know, generally in the wider West, but, you know, our people in many parts of the world have been experiencing fascism for, you know, decades and decades consistently, and they have been profound resistances against these that means we don't have to reinvent the wheel. You know, we have examples of resistances and of struggles against, you know, particularly fascism. And so, you know, everyone knows about the despotic authoritarianism of Erdogan, and I just want to, you know, for the purposes of the time limit, I'll just, like, parts of my talk will just be in, like, bullet point form just so we can fit some parts in. So Turkey at the moment is the largest prison for journalists. Turkey, Erdogan's Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than the rest of the world put together, not to mention imprisoning academics who literally signed a peace petition, calling for peace between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state, and this was seen as terrorism. So they have either been forced into exile or they've been imprisoned or just lost their jobs in universities. Not to mention that elected members of parliament, of the People's Democratic Party, the HDP being imprisoned, including the two co-leaders, well, now the two former co-leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Fagan Yüksekdar, this party was elected into the Turkish parliament with six million votes and constitutes the third largest party in the Turkish parliament. But despite this, many of its MPs, including its leaders, have been imprisoned and thousands of its members. And so this process of what we see now and especially of the change of the constitution and Erdogan concentrating more power in his personage deepened after he collapsed the peace process between the Kurdish movement and the Turkish state and therefore started an aggravated isolation against the Kurdish people's leader, Abdullah Öcalan, who has been on a Turkish island prison for 20 years and was kidnapped illegally at the Greek embassy in Kenya as a result of the operation by the CIA, Mossad, EU, and of course Turkey. And so he's been kept in isolation on a prison island guarded by 1,000 soldiers. He's the sole prisoner on this island. And so this process has, you know, gotten more and more fascistic over time and now has, in January, kind of, I guess, for Erdogan, bad fruit in his invasion of Afrin. And so on January 20th this year, they invaded Northwest Syria. So, you know, they crossed their border, apparently in the attempt to protect their borders. And so, you know, this I think shows to us that fascism is an empire of fear. You know, it's motivated by fear and therefore our solution, our alternative, must be motivated by hope and for love for a better world. And therefore, you know, we see and I wanted to talk about this stuff because fascism certainly comes in many forms and, you know, it's certainly way more divided than we think we are in the left. I know we fight a lot on everything, but, you know, we certainly are way less divided than fascism is, you know, because, ironically, many Turkish fascists will be supportive of the Palestinian struggle. And this is what I... And, you know, whatever their motivation may be, there are expressions of solidarity for, you know, the just and the legitimate Palestinian struggle, which is why we need an international and internationalist solidarity that can reject every form of fascism, because that can be our only solution. And, you know, we've seen this all over the world and, you know, we've unfortunately seen certain expressions of support for the so-called... The Kurds, you know, apparently fighting Islam when the defeat of... While they were defeating and fighting against ISIS, you know, it's important to understand that there's 40 million Kurds and majority of them are Muslim. So, obviously, they wouldn't be fighting against Islam, but rather the fascism of ISIS. So, you know, we saw in the most practical examples in the last few years that it wasn't fascism that defeated ISIS. It was the YPG and the YPG led by Kurdish women and motivated by direct democracy, peace, freedom, and women's liberation that defeated ISIS. And so, of course, the struggle continues. And I just want us for a moment to imagine a society, a land where two world systems, two ideologies, two future projects are clashing on a colossal level. While one is based on women's liberation, ecology, and pluralism, the other is made of misogyny, masculine domination, monism, and exploitation. One shines with all colors of life while the other represents darkness. And this place is Afrin, this place is Rojava, and this place is Kurdistan. And so, as the Kurdish people's leader, Abdul Urshlan, has said, a society cannot be free without women's liberation. So we can't be anti-fascists unless we're against patriarchy, unless we're against capitalism, unless we are anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-nation state as well. And so, our solidarity with each other must not be charity, but solidarity, deep, internationally solidarity, seeing our struggles as one and not just giving each other, giving each other charity. And, you know, when it comes to our alternatives, we don't necessarily, I mean, you know, it's 2018, so obviously certain aspects of our, the way we've done things throughout history, of course, you know, need to transform. But it's important to understand that for thousands of years our peoples, you know, whether it's in the Middle East or other parts of the world, we knew how to live together. And yeah, nothing was perfect, but nothing, you know, ever needs to be perfect. But the idea is that we know how to live without the plague of sectarianism, without fascism and without capitalism most importantly. And so, I think when we talk about a solution before everything, we really need to tap into our collective memories and understand how our people and our ancestors have done things and of course, you know, allow that to transform our understandings as well and therefore be able to take it forward from there. And you know, as many people probably know, that some of the most radical revolutions in the world have been revolutions that have been deeply embedded in their history. So we really need to recognize our history and if we don't, then our anti-fascism really will be missing something. And I just want to start to conclude with there's a campaign that was launched by the Kurdish women's movement called Khwabun Khwaparastin. And Khwabun means to be yourself and Khwaparastin means to defend yourself and it means you can't defend yourself unless you learn who you are and to be yourself. And this isn't just in like the narrow terms of identity politics, but the wider understanding again of what our histories are and how we can also take that forward. And it's also based on the understanding that nationalism can never be our self-defense or our resistance. Our self-defense and our resistance must be inherently pluralist and inherently based on the principles of direct democracy, gender equality and particularly ecology, a harmonious relationship with our nature that of course feeds us. So just to end, we could go on about this for a very long time, but I just want to really urge people. Millions of Kurdish people see Abdullah Ujalan as the very person who could negotiate a peace process for 40 million Kurdish people. This is including his most critical opponents and including the enemy, the Turkish state. So I would really urge people to engage with his ideas of democratic nation, of democratic confederalism and most importantly of the Kurdish women's liberation ideology. Thank you very much. Thanks very much. I think really important to say many of you in this room will have heard of a now-former Labour MP called John Mann, friend of the AKP, Stu Javadouan, very pleased that he's left the party. But that kind of thing I think should never have had a place in a socialist party in the first place and I think that's something to be very clear about. We have, as a movement moves towards power, perhaps a tendency towards a kind of conservatism, particularly on foreign policy. I think it's something that we need to think about much more clearly. I would also note, as well as those who died fighting ISIS, there are people who have returned to this country and are facing prosecution for having gone over to support that struggle there. For instance, Jim Matthews. It's hugely, hugely important that the movement turns out and makes some noise about these prosecutions. He has won his case, but there's another one going through now. There's another kid who's back and they don't win without the kind of support. There were big demonstrations outside the High Court for Jim's case and I just urge you to keep an eye on that stuff. So we've had a bit, and I guess one of the questions you've had over our, sorry, exactly where those boundaries are between the state, the government, fascism, racism, stuff like that. I want to hand over to Gary now to talk a bit about that, a bit about the ways that we think about those things. Yes, I'm going to be pretty brief. I wanted to start just what I think is a need to reflect on what we mean by fascism, that we've had a long time of it kind of almost being an epithet, you know, oh, he's just a fascist. But we are now in a moment where fascism is a mainstream ideology across Europe and I would say in the States that it's at the centre of power. There are fascists in governments and so it behoves us really to understand, have a clear understanding of what we are dealing with and the things I'm going to say, they're not particularly revelatory but we have to understand that fascism, we shouldn't mistake or confuse fascism and racism. There is racism in fascism of course, but fascism is about something bigger, it's about what not bigger necessarily, but it's about the undermining of democracy completely, it's about the centralisation of power in the state, it's about authoritarianism, it has kind of very, very dangerous versions of kind of both masculinity and whiteness and that does shape what we do about it because it means that we both have the potential and the necessity for kind of quite broad coalitions to fight this thing because a range of organisations, whether it's trade unions or civil liberty organisations or whatever are going to be affected and will come in under a broad anti-fascist agenda, I think it's very important, following up on what you were saying about challenging fascists in the streets, where we find them, I also think it's quite important not to fetishise those clashes with fascists as some do, I think, which becomes kind of wrapped up in a certain kind of machismo and I mean, when they're there, you have to confront them, I don't have any problem with that, I don't think it's about kind of just doing what you can, I think you have to do what you have to do to get those people off the streets. There's a difference between embracing that and fetishising it as though it is the supreme goal to run around and find them and physically kind of attack them for the simple reason that that's not ultimately how this job is going to be done, it is one facet and I would argue not necessarily always the most important. I think then if we talk about broad coalitions then the issue is who's leading that coalition, you know what I mean? I'm happy to march alongside a whole range of people so long as the people at the front are the people whose agenda I'm kind of quite keen on in a broad sense and that demands an understanding of this moment that we didn't get here by accident. The neoliberal globalization, that force without a face has undermined democracy to the point where it's really kind of people see it as a performative act, they don't trust politicians to actually get anything done, it doesn't matter who you vote for, capital gets in, it's everything operates according to the golden rule and that's those that have the gold make the rules and so people get pissed off, they get very legitimately angry and it's up for us to kind of shape our understanding of how this has happened that when just to take the issue of refugees and migration it's for us to say look we bombed them and now they're coming and that's why they're coming, we undermined their democracy and that's why they're coming, we exploited them, we colonized them, we did all these people who you think of as in some way having nothing to do with you they have everything to do with you that we have created a situation where in which this moment can happen there are policies, our government, the things we buy in stores that leaves people exploited that we have to give that global framework in order for people to understand where we are now because there are legitimate grievances there are legitimate grievances which the fascists play on now those grievances are people feeling that they are not in control of the world they live in that their high street doesn't look the same as it used to that they can't get a job or they can't get a house or they can get a job but the wages are too low, the benefits are being cut those are all legitimate grievances the issue then is who you blame because it wasn't the Roma that traded in credit default swaps and crashed the economy it wasn't Syrian refugees who were bailed out by public money and then took loads of bonuses it's not women in jabs who are closing libraries and underfunding schools and in the absence of that broader global understanding all kinds of hucksters can intervene sometimes posing as more left than us sometimes posing as though they have the interests of the poor and the working class at heart when they don't and which is why it's important and I think we saw this in France with Macron against Le Pen where there was a real concern that look fine Macron wins but then what? because Macron's victory and the policies that he's going to pursue means that next time round they're going to be even bigger and what the hell are we doing breathing a sigh of relief that an open fascist gets 30% in an election that is an absolute disaster which leads me really to my final point and it echoes points that have been made here which is that people it's all very well for example and I think Labour has generally, generally not always but generally understood that racism is a bad thing what they didn't understand was that anti-racism was a good thing that yes this hopelessness is a bad thing but therefore give people hope that we need an agenda that isn't just about fighting fascism but is also about giving hope and giving solidarity and giving a some alternative to the place that we are because in the absence of alternative that is where the Huxtas will reside that's where they will pedal their wares they're actually being much more successful about that than we are right now and I don't say that with any joy in my heart at all we are going to have to do a lot better that an awful lot of the people who they are galvanising are people who should be with us and so we have to go while we are fighting the fascists we have to convert their followers thank you Thank you Gary I think that's so important it's one of the things when there is a kind of certain history of anti-fascism that gets trotted out about those sort of episodic street battles being the high points to them but actually you start to look a bit closer you see neighbourhood organising committees you see tenants organisations and that kind of deep stuff that's really not so easily imagined as a kind of cathartic moment but actually it was probably the motor that drove that stuff away of course I think your point about history is hugely important until we start thinking of the British populace as implicated or part of or linked to all of these other peoples globally and until we realise that the history of Britain despite what is taught in schools isn't just some Tudors and then a rather noble war between 1939 and 45 we won't have a real sense of where we are in this country I want to hand over to Nelini Stamp now who is currently living in a country where norm erosion is the norm and where those questions between racism, fascism, between state and movement are really, really active Nelini Nelini, thank you I do this thing because I come from black southern even though I'm not from the south organising traditions so I'm going to make everybody sing I'm going to sing them so if y'all just like come on just like tap low feet wait let me say but I need y'all to have some rhythm which one are we going to do I woke up this morning with my mind say I woke up this morning with my mind say it on freedom I woke up this morning with my mind say it on hallelujah alright just bringing us together I think some of the ways that we need to come together talking to the points before is through other forms of communication not just like dialogue but like connecting culturally and spiritually so yeah the US where do I start so just like kind of taking on what people were saying I definitely think that the US is in a point where we've said a lot of times like even Donald Trump it makes me throw up people are like oh fascist fascist fascist fascist is using the word over and over and over again and until recently I didn't really I wasn't a believer I just was like we're just throwing out the word we're just throwing out the word and with some of the stuff with the recent border crisis that we've been having where as soon as Donald Trump got elected the entire immigration system was just ripped out under us Obama was the deporter in chief he had deported 2 million people he's still my black president but he still deported 2 million people it's complicated all in nuance but at the same time there was a system a system which folks who have been working in immigration had known had been able activists and organizers were able to actually still combat a new playing field as soon as Donald Trump got elected into office the playing field was wiped particularly with stuff like the Muslim ban and you know people just starting to show up at check-ins and just say oh you're on final deportation notice so I say that all to say is that what we're facing in the US is the exact point of 10 years after the financial crash when people were struggling my family lost our homes black folks in the United States were lost 60% of the wealth combined with all the wealth we lost because you know slavery and shit and so it's just like keep going and you have people who are struggling you have stuff like NAFTA and jobs we're taking away from like millions of people outsourcing all of these things and you have that combined with the tension of having a black president combined with the tension of people rising up and protesting on immigration reform and saying not one more deportation to Obama and protesting our criminal justice system which is the worst in the world right so you have all these tensions flaring up at the same time and you have a vast majority of people who wanted an anti-establishment candidate but what they were sold was fascism and in the worst part because people were just trying to get by right there's a lot of people you talk to who you talk to some Trump voters and they're like well I wanted Medicare for all I'm really sorry you thought that was going to happen with Donald Trump but the reality is people you know since we don't have healthcare we don't have you know basic rights people were just trying to find a way out now I do I think that to get to the point especially in the US and to get to globally we have to have movements that are connected and making sure that we're making the case that there's an alternative that is rooted in anti-racism that is rooted in destroying the patriarchy smash it that is rooted in a class struggle and we cannot no longer separate them a lot of folks say we'll just focus on the class things all boats will rise with the tides and if we continue to focus on that we're going to lose a majority of people and we're going to allow the fascists to continue to say oh well you're losing your job because of immigrants or you're losing your job because black people are lazy or you're losing your job because X, Y and Z we have to actually make the connection and tell people that this is the way forward and I'm going to talk about Steve Bannon because I'm obsessed with him and he's gross he makes me want to vomit when I look at him a lot of people do but Bannon is coming for broader European elections how many people are afraid of that but Bannon is coming and it's actually freaking scary because people are not ready for it because Bannon's ultimate goal is to unite the working class I know but still it is he's coalition we are really lucky and one of the fights that we worked on at the working families party was to defeat an infrastructure bill jobs in infrastructure which would create millions of jobs it would probably create like two it was an infrastructure bill that would mostly go to corporations trickle down economics but to regular folks who need work it would be an infrastructure bill people would say oh great infrastructure is shit in the United States excuse my language it's really piss poor go to the deep south go to Mississippi anyway his goal was to create this coalition a white supremacist rich republicans like the Koch brothers white working class folks in the masses and to push forward an infrastructure bill so that they would be in power for a really long time and we fought back by saying that's not going to be a real infrastructure bill it's just going to go to corporations and people were resonant folks who desperately needed jobs understood that corporations weren't in their interest so there's an opening there but as long as we on the broader left in the world and as folks said we don't always agree as long as we don't actually face that we need to be completely anti-racist and not just like say we're anti-racist and be cute about it actually live anti-racist values right put your bodies on the line and I'm also not about fetishizing stuff because heather higher died last year right heather higher died last year a white lady they killed a white lady when you start killing white people in the United States you know you were in trouble and I told me to make light of it but she died killed, murdered and we need to start to make sure that we're putting our bodies on the line but not over fetishizing it because it's not about just the clashes in the streets as Gary said but we need to actually come up with that alternative and that vision and until we actually have white people on the left other non particularly in the United States non-black folks, non-migrants on the left who are actually taking anti-racist values and standing and saying actually we cannot have socialism without destroying racism then we're not actually going to get to the point where we can beat back the fascists because they're using these divides they'll see them right they're using the divides and the cracks that are already in our society and they will take advantage every single corner and they will use it through social media all the cool things hashtag this, hashtag that and we need to just make sure that our people to say woke but like I hate that term but like you know our people are actually attentive enough right our folks are learning even if you got to meet people where they're at because I fundamentally believe in that I'm not going to just quote Marx and just shout Grampsy at you I'm going to meet you where you at right because everybody don't got college education and so now I'm just rambling but I will the last thing that I'll say about banning about fighting anti-fascism is that it takes also a level of to speak to Gary's point about the broad coalition the whole meeting people where they're at we really can't just be shouting at people and just saying like oh well Marx said this and Grampsy said that because if you would have said that to me eight years ago I would have been like I don't give a fuck like at the end of the day I was trying to just get paid work a nine to five or work some shifts that I was working at at the time and we need to just we need to say what are you going through how is your liberation bound with mine and how are we actually going to get out of this together thanks I just wanted to say that also thank you for opening with singing because it seems to me and one of the things I often say is that for a political movement to thrive for it to survive it needs to have a certain kind of social thickness to it it's not just discussions about you know what this economic policy will do in terms of this that or the other it's not just a kind of dry question of electoral mathematics it's about those kind of thick warm social experiences that bind people together and inspire them that's really fundamental to building a political movement I wanted to just put a question to the panel and bring it up to the floor and if we can keep our questions you know resembling questions that would be cool yeah so for me I guess there's always a practical question about all of this you know these conversations about international anti-fascism and it takes kind of two forms right one is that question of of how you know how to act because the old dictum is that you act against your own government because that's where you have the most power right and then the question and it's a question that I've kind of been touching on throughout throughout this panel is that question of the kind of compromises you make when a movement gets near power and that's going to be different I guess right like so in the US you have this kind of what's the famous saying you know one party but two forms although maybe that's changing right and here you have a Labour Party where it's always had a tradition of you know socialist organizing and it's had anti-racists in it it hasn't been an anti-racist party that tradition is perhaps now more dominant than it's ever been but the nature of those compromises when you're heading towards power over a state what does that fit with our anti-fascism thought I'm going to take anyone who wants to jump in I do inspire in questions clearly so for us it's not only to make compromises it's like kind of a strategy to work with other people together to work to make kind of collaborations, alliances on some subjects with parties, with unions with NGOs to make the anti-fascist fight widen it up and then we have big demonstrations, manifestations blockades and something and that's not like we only make compromises we want to build a big, big anti-fascist movement in Germany and that's what necessary we think so I think the question probably has a bit of a double answer in a sense where there's immediate unnecessary situations that we need solutions to what the Tory party has done to the UK and obviously as a Kurdish person to be some main labelling 40 million terrorists is obviously very scary for us because we see what precedent it's being, what precedent her and her government are setting in terms of you know, racism obviously but I think there's two things, how to act I think more than where we're trying to get to the method is more important than where we're trying to get to and this is what I think is potentially what we can learn from the Kurdish movement is that in the birthplace of patriarchy women are liberating themselves so clearly in terms of method it's done something right and I think it's important because what you say is what you said about meeting people where they're at that's exactly one of the central methods of the Kurdish movement is that historically a lot of Kurdish society is quite conservative so you know, the first strategy and duty that the Kurdish movement took upon itself was to gain the trust of its people and gain the trust of its base and it's certainly undeniably done that you know, when even in the UK someone I was speaking to said you know, when the Kurdish community centre calls for a protest you know there's going to be a protest and you know we've been here for about you know the Kurdish community has been here for about 30 years and still it can continuously mobilise its base and you know, I think it's really about staying in touch with that but in terms of the compromises I think parliamentary politics can and are useful in certain ways but as if we're trying to build an anti-fascist anti-racist, anti-captainist, anti all of the stuff I already said movement, we that can't be our main focus parliamentary politics should and can be seen as a mere tool in assisting what we can do but that should not be the main focus so in terms of compromises you know, it's inevitable that entering into the power of you know the UK and therefore like parliament as a government, as a left socialist government unfortunately there's going to be compromises made because the system is not set up to serve exactly what we want it to serve so therefore we can let those people do their parliamentary thing but our focus has to be our communities and our society and our base Gary Well it really just follows on from there really important distinction we have to make between the electoral and the political which are often people talk about them as other than the same thing and they're not and I'd like to see a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn, that would be a fantastic thing and when that government is elected we will have to put a huge amount of pressure on it to make sure it does the right thing and that's the political and so you know power concedes nothing without demand we are if our principle is anti-fascism and you know and we're going to do that in a certain way then if we don't advocate for that then who will and so it's really a question of there are elections and when there are elections we do what we need to do and then there's politics and in politics we do what we need to do and there's no I don't feel that there needs to be a contradiction in that we give critical support to those who give a certain amount of support to us yeah thank you really briefly I agree with everything's been said I would just like there's always going to be different people who are in charge there's always going to be new governments and folks who get elected and it is the job of people to always hold them accountable nobody's perfect people like say in the states if only Bernie Sanders he said that reparations he doesn't know about and honestly we're not going to get free unless we have reparations from all these countries over here and so the reality is that nobody is perfect and if you look it's not about it's there's a saying in the states where it's like people over party and I just fundamentally think that that is a value that people need to do no matter who's in charge it's like what are the people's needs and always confronting it