 Well, labour has been normalized again under Kirstammer. The establishment is breathing a major sigh of relief because under Kirstammer, labour is not a threat to its hegemony, to the hegemony of the triangle of authority, which is on the one hand the city of London, secondly the media, and thirdly a part of the corporate world, which simply relies on the kindness of the Bank of England and the state to survive. Janis, what an honour. Hello. Hi, Owen. It's an honour on this side of the pond as well. A huge honour to always be in your company. You're in Athens right now, that's right, isn't it? No, no. I'm on top of a hill on a small island and now I'm very right from Athens. This is where I live. I live on an island. Of course you live on an island. I mean, obviously the most British thing in the world to do is just fall back on the crux of talking about weather, but I would presume you have slightly more idyllic conditions than those we're currently enjoying here. Indeed, and they are also enjoyed by expats from the UK. So my next-door neighbours people taking refuge here from Newcastle. So there you are. I can't escape you guys. You can't. It's very difficult to display it to escape the English. I had many friends who fled to Greece during the period of lockdown here. Indeed. Very easy. Right, let's go straight into it. I'll start with what we'll always do, I think, is try and leave the audience with a bit of hope and optimism, but that will mean probably taking some pretty depressing detours, so we should be clear about that. Let's just start. At the beginning of the second half of the 2010s, there was this moment of political possibility and hope in different parts. There was there was the rise of Corbyn's labour, there was Syriza in Greece, there was Podemos in Spain, there was Bernie Sanders 2016 in the United States and we now in a situation where Corbyn's labour was battered. Syriza, after spending it... We're all battered. We're all battered. Very well battered. Everyone got battered. Syriza Podemos is actually in government, but originally they were that's the end of it. Well, I want to hear about that. What has gone so badly wrong for all these political projects? Well, firstly, I think it's important to place this wave of radicality in its historical context. You will recall before the crisis in 2008, where the first spate of uprising globally, more or less, with the World Social Forum, remember the Bologna demonstrations happening in Brazil as well as in Argentina, that was the first global movement against globalization, against effectively the unshackling of finance and financialization it culminated in the opposition to the Iraq war and it fizzled out. Then we had a major crash of 2008, the financial crisis and all the movements that you mentioned from Bernie Sanders, Syriza, Podemos and so on, they were a response to the new fangled regime that was imposed after 2008 by the G20, which I described very simply as socialism for the bankers at a very few on the one hand and austerity, universalized austerity for the many. The reaction to that, especially the repossessions of homes, the serious shrinking of social security provisions, the austerity in Britain under George Osborne, the repossessions in the United States in particular that ended the second social contract between working class and the powers that be, which was based on financialization of homes. That gave rise to initially the Occupy Wall Street movement very soon after that, the Indignados in Spain and the Aganaktismeni in Sintagma Square in Athens and if you look at the Bernie Sanders political revolution, the Podemos movement, the Syriza rise from 3% of the vote to 40% of the vote, all those were the electoral manifestations of that left-wing progressive reaction to socialism for the few and austerity for the many. What went wrong? Well, the system, let's call it that, the liberal establishment got its act together. It started in Greece in 2015 because we were the first occasion when this movement and its electoral manifestation managed to win government. I spent six months in that government as a minister of finance of Greece and I witnessed it. I witnessed the manner in which the minds of the powers that be concentrated on crashing the government. I was a finance minister that had the onerous task of negotiating with creditors who didn't want their money back. Just try to contemplate that creditors who didn't want their money back because they were far more interested in crashing our government even if that meant that they wouldn't get their money back because for them that was a decent investment into securing the crashing of similar rebellions, electoral rebellions in places like Spain. Let me just remind our viewers, listeners, friends of what happened when my prime minister at the time Alexis Tsipras surrendered to that cabal of the establishment. After many hours of being in a room, he came out and he actually signed a surrender document, a proper surrender document. In other words, his left wing government accepted the onus of imposing the worst austerity in the history of humanity upon the people that elected him to end austerity. What happened the next moment was so aglaringly significant. The Spanish prime minister who represented the right and a government that had imposed similar austerity willingly as part of the establishment, fearing the Spanish Syriza, which was the Podemos movement that was going up in the polls at the time, came out of that building, holding that piece of paper, the surrender document signed by Alexis Tsipras in front of the Spanish cameras saying, this is what you get if you vote for Spain's Syriza. Well, very soon after that, Podemos started going down, Podemos made a very big mistake of supporting the surrender by Syriza, so the radicality left just disappeared, and now they're just a junior partner in a coalition with an establishment Social Democratic Party. I remember that very summer, and I remember being in Brighton at the TUC conference, it was just after Jeremy Corbyn had been elected, and I remember standing up, I had John McDonald, my great friend and comrade, and I'm sure he's yours as well, sitting next to me, and I congratulated both John and Jeremy for effectively taking over the asylum in the Labour Party. But I finished my speech saying, comrades, beware, the system is going to try to jettison you. You are a clear and present danger for the interests of multinational companies, of the city of London, of all those who want to continue with privatizing the land, water supplies, the NANHS and everything, and your worst enemy is not going to be the press, it's not going to be the Tories, it's going to come from within the party. This is where the coup d'etat is going to take place, because when I was going through this six month fight, in the end, the people who actually stabbed us in the back were our own comrades within the same party, who ended up in the end implementing on behalf of the establishment of the austerity policies. And the same thing happened in the United States. Look at Bernie Sanders, who over through impeded Bernie from winning the primaries. It was the establishment within the Democratic Party, who preferred Donald Trump to any radical takeover of the Democratic Party. This is too long an answer, but I don't know, it just came out. It was a very, very eloquent and well thought out answer. But isn't the danger that we end up then with a fatalistic conclusion that demobilizes people, that any left project in any context, any country, is inherently doomed because the forces of the establishment will always conspire to destroy them. And if that's the case, why don't we just give up? Not in the slightest. Not in the slightest. When you fail, you try again, and you try to do it better. You remember Tony Benz's infamous and wonderful expression, there is no final victory comrades, and there is no final defeat. Every generation, I believe verbatim his words, every generation is condemned to fight the same struggle again and again and again. And that's a wonderful thing, because I don't know about you, I'm sure that applies to you too. Life is wonderful when you get up in the morning and you're fighting that struggle. And by keep pushing at that huge vessel, at some point, we are going to start moving it. And that will be a wonderful moment, worthwhile living to see it. Give me your political analysis of Keir Starmer's labour. Well, labour has been normalized again under Keir Starmer. The establishment is breathing a major sigh of relief because under Keir Starmer, labour is not a threat to its hegemony, to the hegemony of the triangle of authority, which is on the one hand the city of London, secondly the media, and thirdly a part of the corporate world, which simply relies on the kindness of the Bank of England and the state to survive. That establishment had a scare when not only did Jeremy Corbyn win the leadership of the Labour Party, but in 2017, he got a higher proportion of the vote that Tony Blair ever did in his two election victories. That was a moment when the establishment thought, oh my God, there may be a government that nationalizes the railways again, and not in the way Boris Johnson did, but in a way which is in the interest of the many, not of the privatized companies, a government that reverses the process of insidious undercover privatization of the NHS, a government that actually takes 10% of shares of corporations and gives it to the workers, or to a public equity fund. So Keir Starmer now has defunded all the radicality from the Labour Party. I read the recent document on the Green New Deal that they came up with, which was a rehashed version of the 2019 program. There is nothing particularly green in it, all new, and it's certainly not a new deal in the sense that Keir Starmer has succeeded in making Boris Johnson's green industrial revolution, by the way, isn't amazing that Boris even stole the term that Jeremy Corbyn introduced. Keir Starmer succeeded in making Boris Johnson look more green and more radical than the Liberal Parties. On that, you're touching on this wider phenomenon, which is a new form of right-wing populism, which is not that new anymore, but if we look at Hungary, for example, the regime of Orban, if we look at the regime in Poland, what they've done is raided aspects in rhetoric and sometimes in substance of left-wing economic ideas. In Hungary, the regime nationalized the pension funds. In Poland, they talk of welfareism, of polarization in terms of public ownership of banks. As you say, in Britain, we'll talk about what will come next after the pandemic, but they're raiding things like the green industrial revolution. They didn't stand on a platform of austerity in 2019, unlike Theresa May and David Cameron. What is that political phenomenon? How dangerous is it and how do we fight it? We forget, Owen, what fascism was. Fascism in the 1920s and 30s was a movement, the purpose of which was to offer a new social contract to the working class. So when Benito Mussolini stood up on his soapbox and addressed the public in Italy, he said to them that the time when the ruling class was treating you like cattle is over, their impunity is over. Vest in me, dictatorial powers, make me the overlord, give up on the right to unionize, on the right to elect your representatives, and I shall make you proud again. And that includes giving you a guaranteed wage, which is much higher than what you have now. Let's not forget that Benito Mussolini was the first European leader of a government that introduced a universal pension system. It was not the Labour Party 1945, it was Benito Mussolini. So I will look after you in a kind of patronizing, paternalistic, authoritarian way. I will make you proud to be Italian again, or British, or American, or Greek, or whatever. I'm going to turn you against the Jew, the gay, the lesbian, the refraff, the German, the Greek, the Muslim, it doesn't matter, the other, whoever the other might be, we can invent others as well. And so this is it. I will empower you with more money and nationalist pride, and you will empower me with all political decision making on your behalf. Now that's what Mussolini did, and this is what the Hungarian government is doing. It's what the Polish government is doing. It's what the Greek government is doing as we speak, because I have some bad news from this neck of the woods. Greece is the third illiberal democracy using Orbán's term. For a year and a half now, I had a right-wing government that took advantage of the fact that Syriza had, in effect, betrayed all its promises to the people of Greece. So the right came back. The first thing they did was to end the right of students to have conferences and congregate and have meetings in universities without the police having the capacity to break in. That's the liberal part. At the same time, a major backlash against refugees, against anyone who's brown on the street. The Coast Guard being given direct orders to violate international law, and whenever they see a flimsy boat full of refugees to push it back into the waves and effectively risk the lives of those people in order to create a fortress, Greece. Last week, we had the demonstration in Athens, and our members of parliament of Merit 25, we were effectively placed under illegal arrest because the constitution supposedly gives members of parliament the right of freedom of movement. So we have this illiberal wave, which is founded on not so farcical recapitulation of the fascist techniques and tactics during the mid-war period. By the way, I must say, Yannis has got this brilliant new book out, which is called Another Now, which charts an alternative. We will come on and talk about those, but I must read, do go and get yourself a copy. But in terms of the crisis we're now in, the pandemic, in terms of the economic consequences, how do you judge them compared to, say, the 2008 crash, the Great Depression of the 1930s? How much of a lasting economic, the lasting economic consequences are? And what do you think the political consequences will be? I always try to convince people, friends, comrades, audiences, that the pivotal moment was 2008. That 2008 was our generation's 1929. 1929 changed the world. It came at the end of a decade of irrational exuberance, the roaring 20s, with financialization together with mega corporations and network companies like Ford, Motor Company like Edison and so on, going berserk. And that period of, effectively, financialization coupled with a neoliberal logic crashed and burned in 1929. That created fascism, Nazism in Europe. It gave rise to the New Deal in the United States in the end, an alliance of the New Dealers and the Soviet Union crashed the fascists and who had about two decades between 1950 and 1970 of the golden era of capitalism, because capitalism, effectively, was planned. It was placed under very strict restrictions on what bankers could do and what they could get away with. Banking became very boring, plain valenda. That system was overthrown in the early 1970s and we had the second period leading to the new 1920s, in the 1990s and 2000s. And that led to our generation's 1929, 2008. And then what happened was quite astonishing. You had, unlike in 1929 when the Federal Reserve central banks didn't know what to do and did nothing. In 2008, 2009, the central bankers of the world and our political leaders led by Gordon Brown, in fact, in April 2009 in the summit of the G20 that took place in London, they coordinated and they together put the printing presses of the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Sweden and so on. Altogether, they were churning money as if there was no tomorrow, giving it to the financial sector. Only in the United States, especially after Obama got in place in power, they handed over around my estimations $12 trillion to the financial sector, only in the United States. Add to that the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, you have a tsunami of cash going into the financial sector to refloat it and refloat it, they did, while at the same time practicing austerity everywhere. So the little people austerity, financiers socialism, socialism and the money tree. They're accusing the socialist of having invented the money tree, but they actually created a gigantic money tree going all into the financial sector. Now, the reason why am I saying this in the context of your question about COVID-19 and the pandemic? Well, because COVID-19 came and joined forces with a process of stagnation that started back then in 2009. All this financial liquidity created a magnificent growth of asset values, share prices in the stock exchanges, but never translated, never, never translated into serious investment in good quality jobs and the green transition, which society and the planet needed. So between 2008 and 2020, we had this remarkable incongruity. The largest amount of money in the history of capitalism circulating in the financial system, savings, if you want to think of it simply, and the lowest level of investment in jobs and the green transition and technologies compared to the amount of liquidity available. Now that cousin disconnection between the supply of money, because this is what I'm talking about here, and the demand for money for investment purposes, what supplies much greater than demand, the price of the thing keeps falling. The price of the thing is the interest rates. That's why we have negative interest rates. Now, this may sound a bit technical, but it's not really what this shows is that we have a situation where capitalism has more or less transcended itself, profits very low, dividends very low, investment very low, the wealth of the capital is gigantic. So you have this strange phenomenon. That was before COVID-19 came. So people are there, the middle class in the United States, in Britain, in the European Union, they could see their children were going to have a much worse life than they did. So that created this content, anger, that fueled nationalism, it fueled Brexit, Trump, Orban, and so on. At the same time, you had corporations that didn't really need to make a profit in order to survive, in order to do well, because they could take money from the central bank, go to the stock exchange, buy their shares. The share price would go up, their bonuses depended on the share price. They were laughing all the way to the bank, literally. And then COVID-19 comes. It attacks both demand and supply, because factories and companies and restaurants had to close. So supply was restricted, demand, because people were locked in, like we are locked in. So demand went down on average. And what did governments do? They were the same old. They printed more money, gave it to the same financiers, the financiers gave it to the same corporations, the corporations bought back more shares, but didn't invest. So my view of COVID-19 is that it is a turbocharger. The existing crisis of capital is from 2008, this secular stagnation that started in 2008 has been turbocharged by COVID-19. So that's the bad news. The good news is that people can now see that government has a lot of power. They can tell you, you're not going to step out of your home. I mean, I'm not against the lockdown, because we need to contain the pandemic. But up until 2008 or 2020, to be more precise, most of us, even speaking personally, we thought, okay, now what power does the prime minister have? What power do the ministers have? All power is invested in the city of London, in the Royal Bank of Scotland, Goldman Sachs and so on. But now people can see, including ourselves, how much power the state has. So maybe our combination of our analysis of this socialism for the few and the state for the many, with a realization also of the immense power of the state has acquired during COVID-19. It's going to make us a bit more ambitious about what we can do with power in order to empower the powerless. In terms of the European Union, I mean, a question Professor Stephen Keane wanted me to pose to you. You may know him, he's an economist who predicted the economic crash back in 2008. But he asked, do you see any prospect for the overthrow of the EU fiscal rules because of COVID and what are the prospects for European level treasury after it? And more broadly, I suppose, how could, what is the impact of this crisis going to be on the EU and the eurozone in particular? Well, hi Steve. Steve is a friend from a very long time ago. Look, it all depends on Germany. So for the benefit of our viewers who are not afraid regarding the economics of the European Union, we are all in a kind of straitjacket imposed by the rich countries, by the surplus countries. So Italy cannot spend more than a certain amount, Greece, the same thing, austerity is institutionalized as part of something called the fiscal compact. Effectively, when you hear the words fiscal compact or fiscal rules in the EU, this is the institutionalization of austerity for the many in the European Union. Now they had to suspend that. And they had to suspend that, of course, because we are now in a precipitous fall. So it's impossible to ask the Italian state at the moment or the Greek state or the Spanish state or indeed the German state to balance their books when the private sector is in free fall. So because the German regime, establishment, government, whatever you want, had to relax the fiscal rules for themselves, they had to relax them for Italy, Spain, Greece and so on. So the, you know, 10 trillion euro question is, when will Berlin manage to balance its books? The moment Berlin manages to balance its books, the email will come out from Berlin to Brussels and say, okay, we're back in fiscal compact territory. And then an email or telephone call will go from Brussels to Rome to Madrid to Paris to Athens saying we're back in austerity mode. And that is going to be such a tremendous shock to Europeans because as we are getting out of the pandemic and some businesses start breathing again, austerity is going to hit us and it will be disproportionate because the fiscal deficits will be much greater in a place like Greece or Italy that have been hit much harder due to the flimsiness of our public health systems, of our economy, of our industry. We are going to have a lot more balancing of the books to do than the German government does, which means a lot more austerity in the countries that have been hit more by the recession. So the centrifugal forces tearing Europe apart are going to be multiplied and reinforced by, you know, what's coming, unfortunately. In the United States, Donald Trump's obviously, he's gone. I think we can safely say Joe Biden is now going to assume the presidency. We don't know where things will stand in terms of the Senate, probably though the Republicans will maintain control. But nonetheless, what's your analysis of where Biden's administration, what political cause is it likely to pursue? And now there is a U.S. left, the so-called squad of progressive members of the House of Representatives are now expanded in the recent elections. How much power, how much leverage do you think they will have and what their role will be in the coming period? Very little, I'm afraid. And the reason for that is that Biden won, thankfully Trump is out, but he won without controlling the Senate and by losing seats in the House of Reps. So remember, Biden did not want a Green New Deal. Biden does not want Medicare for all. Biden does not want to confront China or other countries regarding climate change. He has all the rhetoric about it, but he's in the pocket of big business in the United States, Wall Street, Exxon Mobil, all those companies. And now he has a fantastic excuse of reneging on the agreement he had with Bernie Sanders and the squad. He had an agreement with them, unlike in 2016 when Hillary Clinton thought that she could win without the left that was disproved. Biden realized that he needed the left. So he made an agreement with the left. The agreement was the Green New Deal in particular. But now that he doesn't control the Senate and has even less of a small majority in the House of Representatives, I know for a fact that he has already turned around to the squad, to the left, and said, folks now have to do business with the Republicans. And he's reneging on these agreements. So our comrades in the United States need all our support to keep fighting the good fight. I very much fear that the fact that effectively the United States government is an automatic pilot, this constitution of theirs, which more or less ensures that no one is actually in control of government. You have the White House moving in one direction, you have the Senate moving in another direction. Effectively, it will be business as usual. This business as usual is going to mean a long recession in the next year or two. And who's going to take the blame for that? The Republicans are uniting beyond belief under Trumpism, not Trump, but Trumpism. They have this false sense, but a very strong sense that they were being robbed, that they were robbed during the election. The Democrats are split between the establishment representatives, the representatives of Silicon Valley, of big business, of big of Wall Street, that's Biden, and the left. And I very much fear that everyone's going to turn against the left and blame the long slump that we are facing ahead of us on the left. This is something that the Republicans of Biden are going to agree on. I fear. The climate emergency, we mentioned the Green New Deal. Is capitalism capable of overcoming the existential threat to human civilization posed by the climate emergency? The short answer is no. But capitalism is not a monolithic thing. Remember that in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt, who was not a socialist, he was a patrician. He was very conservative, really. But he understood that capitalism was its own worst enemy. And that in 1929 and between 1929 and 1932, it was effectively undermining itself. It was creating a crisis that it couldn't overcome through market forces. So he stepped in with a new deal and seriously curtailed the capacity of bankers to make decisions, effectively nationalize them. For 20 years after that, after the Second World War, the new dealers ensured that the bankers were diminished figures. They had very heavy constraints placed upon them. So it is possible as a stepping stone towards policies and institutions that are true to the needs of the planet and of humanity, it is possible to constrain the more deleterious and malignant forces of capitalism in the context of a new deal, to make a very quick difference when it comes to emissions, to climate change practices and policies. But in the end, we cannot civilize this beast. This is why, you know, I wrote the book that you very kindly plugged. Because I think we start, we socialists, we have to start re-envisioning what socialism must mean in an era where capitalism is already, as I was saying earlier, transforming itself into a post-capitalism, a dystopic post-capitalism. I mean, we don't live under capitalism anymore. It's something far Western capitalism. I call it techno feudalism. If you come to consider the fact that 90% of companies listed in the New York Stock Exchange belong to three companies, Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. That's not competitive capitalism anymore. This is a pure oligarchy with occasional elections that are bought by the oligarchs. And, you know, a central bank, a state, effectively keeping those oligarchs alive. That's feudalism. It's a techno feudalism because now it's high tech. We have apps and we have Facebook and we have Google and we have Amazon and all that. But nevertheless, it is a dystopic post-capitalism. So we socialists have a duty to envisage a utopic post-capitalism. Before we end on the optimistic vision of the book, which I will keep plugging, a lot of people obviously are bringing up fascism, and which you've already mentioned, and the threat posed by fascism in this period of crisis. What's the left strategy in terms of an anti-fascist strategy? And more broadly, because it's not just fascism. In this country, we've seen the metamorphosis like the Republicans into a more authoritarian breed of right-wing populism. What are the prospects, do you think, of the likes of Boris Johnson or Orban being toppled in this crisis in favor of something different? I think the strategy of progressives must be to engage with the people who are susceptible to the fascist narrative, to do exactly the opposite of what Hillary Clinton did, which is to refer to them as deplorables, and therefore to deliver them straight into the hands of the fascists like Donald Trump. It is to do the opposite of what the hard remainders did in Britain, which is to treat those who voted for Brexit as if they were vermin in a zoo, and to engage with people, to understand that people in the north of England, in the coastal areas, in the Midwestern United States, here in Greece, even when they vote for an ultra-right-wing xenophob, it's an act of desperation, to have sympathy with them, to have empathy with them, to discuss with them, to explain to them why they are, in a sense, empowering somebody who is going to turn against them, who is going to give them a few crumbs of their table in exchange for perfect and perpetual servitude. I personally refuse to abandon those people to the sirens of the fascists. It's essential that they go out there and humbly debate with them, explain to them, learn from them, and do what they do. They are either very good at community organizing or speaking to people as equals. The left has failed spectacularly to do that. We must do it, and we must do it at an international level, at a global level. In terms of in the bloc, what you've tried to do is answer the perennial objection to people like us, which is you know what you're against, but you're less clear on what you're for. One of the things you explore, for example, is cooperative models in terms of companies. In terms of just flesh that out a bit, in terms of the economic alternative more broadly, and what someone cost us has submitted a question asking, how such a novel economy deals with or prevents economic crises? I try to answer this in the book. And because I try to be as self-critical as I can in the other now, which is a market socialist world, I even conjure up the crash of 2022. I imagine that the socialist society has an economic crisis, and I try to imagine what kind of economic crisis would it be like, and also how does that system manage to respond to it and heal itself from it? Because you know, all societies have crisis. I'm sure socialism is going to suffer economic crisis as well. But to give a whiff of the essence of the kind of economy that I envisage of a democratic, liberal, market socialist economy, if you can put all these things in one. Two points. Number one, who owns the corporation? I envisage a world in which you get hired to work in a company, small, medium, large, doesn't matter. And the moment you enter, just as when you enroll at university, you get the library card, which you cannot trade, you cannot rent, but you can use, you get one share in the corporation. And nobody can get a share unless they are employees. And that share allows you to vote for everything in the company. You don't have to vote, but you can vote. And once you leave the company, you go to another one, you give it back, and you take another library card, another. So it's the principle of one person, one share, one vote. That doesn't mean that everybody gets paid the same. What it means is there has to be consent, democratic consent amongst members of the company for pay inequalities. We can all decide that, you know, Kate needs to pay a lot more money because she's adding a lot more value to our collective, to our corporation. And if we don't pay her a lot more money, we will lose her. But we all decide, even a janitor and a secretary consents to Kate getting, you know, twice, three times the salary that we get, the rest of us. So that's the moment you do that, you have no share markets because shares are not tradable, like votes are not tradable, or shouldn't be tradable, right? And secondly, imagine if the central bank, the Bank of England, in your case, opens a bank account for each resident, a free digital bank account. Suddenly there is no need to have commercial bank accounts. If, in other words, you take out of the market system, share markets and commercial banks, you end up with a market society that is post capitalist and where power is not concentrated in such few hands with, you know, the greatest problem of this power being that it creates inefficiency and a tendency for the system not to be able to generate enough demand in order for people to be able to buy the things that society can produce. So finally, you've presented a very, you know, a coherent optimistic alternative. But we look back and make sure we're going to try and end on a wave of optimism here. But we look back to 2008 and back then there was a sense of hubris on the scattered remnants of the time of the left, which was part of the problem, that the that neoliberalism had self-evidently been discredited by the financial crash, and that from the rubble of that crash, the left would naturally return with its narrative, once again, revitalize. And of course, the problem with it was, I mean, as Milton Friedman, who I like to quote, once put it, you know, when the way you get change is through a crisis. And then the politically impossible can become the politically inevitable, but he warned it depends on the ideas lying around. And obviously in 2008, because the left had been so defeated, so much in retreat for so long, ideologically institutionally as a movement, social forces in society, that it didn't have a mass base and a coherent alternative. And the right wing, the neolibbles did, they had their think tanks, well funded, they had their institutions, they had the economists who dominated the academy with the Keynesians purged over the generation before. What do you think the prospects are for this time? For avoiding what, you know, again, once again, you know, Boris Johnson said there won't be a return to austerity, this government are already talking about a de facto pay cut for the key workers who were applauded out of windows by government ministers, who'd spent a decade attacking their terms, conditions, pensions and jobs. But what do you think the potential is for the left having a coherent alternative that can resonate with people to avoid with yet another round of austerity after 10 years of austerity that has ripped the social fabric apart of entire nations, not least Greece, but other places as well? What are the prospects? How do we go about it? And what are the dangers if it's austerity and once again, that is victorious, to that the majority pick up the bill for this crisis all over again? I think we have the opportunity. I think the prospects are excellent. And I'm not just saying that to end on an optimistic note. I truly believe it. What we didn't have in 2008, and we didn't have it in 2020 either, but maybe we're getting better at it. What we didn't have, we didn't have a transnational movement with a common organizational structure and a common plan for what we want, an international Green New Deal and a vision for a progressive kind of democratic socialism. That kind of internationalist organization is what the fascist had and the bankers. It's called Davos. That's what Davos is. It's the international of the bankers. They have it. They have the organization and they have the blueprint. We need that. We didn't have it in 2008 and we didn't have it in 2020. But the reason why I'm saying the prospects are excellent is because a couple of years ago, Bernie Sanders and I inaugurated something we call the Progressive International, which is this idea. And now as we speak, we are fleshing it out together with, you know, comrades like Noam Chomsky, like Arundati Roy from India, Lula from Brazil, Jeremy and John are part of it. So are members of the Green Party and so on. And we're doing this in Nigeria and in Kenya and so on. So the reason why I'm optimistic is because once we put out that call, now we have 80 million members or organizations whose membership exceeds 80 million. This Black Friday, this Friday, we start our first campaign in this context. We are not announcing it fully until the Thursday. We are going to ambush public opinion. And we are going to ask people around the world simply to desist from visiting amazon.com for one day, while at the same time, the International Trade Union Congress and many other trade unions organizations are going to be staging strikes in warehouses of amazon under the hashtag make amazon pay. This is a kind of global international campaign of solidarity, including workers and consumers, citizens in the context of a vision of how we can operate internationally and act in local solidarity to particular suffering workers, small businesses that are being closed down by amazon. This is just one beginning. But the objective should be to have a greener deal for the world that we work transnational towards. I think that is what we have been missing in 2008 and the reason for our defeat or sequence of defeat since then. It has been absolutely a pleasure. I could not recommend this more in terms of if you are looking for a sense of optimism, a sense of political possibility, then this book is very important because these are difficult and trying times, not just to be a leftist but to be a human being in a time of tumult and crisis which is profoundly unsettling, disturbing. But Yanis, given I think people who watched a something to be optimistic about, so thank you. Well thank you and you're doing it too. Well I certainly needed that and I hope you got a lot from that as well. Very eloquent, very persuasive, a lot of realism thrown in by the optimism. These are difficult times and we need to have a hard head look at where we're at if we're going to work out where we're going to go from here. I'd love to hear your thoughts so please do leave them as ever. I'm sure you will whether or not I ask you to or not. 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