 Hello and welcome to the first edition of IMTV. That's the International Marxist television channel brought to you by Socialist Appeal, the British section of the International Marxist tendency. We're going to be bringing you regular news and analysis on current events, revolutionary ideas and today we're going to be having a bit of a birthday celebration. It's the 200th birthday this weekend on the 5th of May of the main man himself Karl Marx and he was born in 1818 on the 5th of May in Trier in Germany but he died not so far from here where we are today in London so as I said this weekend is Marx's birthday on the 5th of May and to celebrate we're going to be hosting a special event, Marx in a Day, hashtag Marx 200 in the very building where we are actually filming right now in University College London where we're going to be discussing Marx's ideas, their relevance to today, his economic ideas, philosophy, historical materialism and to explore these ideas more to explore about how Marxism is so relevant today in the 21st century. I'm joined by two guests we've got Josh Holroyd from Socialist Appeal, a regular writer and on the editorial board and Fiona Lali a student activist and president of the Soas Marx society and recognizable to many as the face of communism in the Murdoch press recently and this word, this idea of communism is as Marx said himself in the Communist Manifesto, it's a specter that's haunting Europe and you see that actually I think in the mainstream press. Just the other day, Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England actually said that communism was going to be on the rise because of the mass unemployment, the wage stagnation due to automation. He said we could see communism within a generation and said that Marx and Engels may again become relevant. We see this all the time obviously in the bourgeois press, the idea that Marx was right I think was a headline in Time Magazine, in Rolling Stone, I think even the Pope was accused of being a Marxist recently and I've also been told that Joshua the owner of a manga version of Das Kapital. It's pictures, a picture says a thousand words. But Josh, why do you think it is that we're getting all these headlines and all these statements from people like Mark Carney? Why is it that Marx is back in the press? What is it that he's right about? Well, I don't know where to begin with that really but I think a big part of the recent headlines and editorials talking about how Marx was right can be found in the preceding period that over the last 20 to 30 years the opposite message was the one that we read in the media all the time that actually after the collapse of the Soviet Union that was categorical proof that Marxism was either always wrong or it perhaps had been right in certain aspects perhaps about Victorian production and now it's completely out of date. And it's really, really startling, amazing really to look at the kind of statements which were coming out of the leaders of the capitalist world and the intelligentsia of the capitalist world about things like the end of history. People will probably be familiar with that from Francis Fukuyama already talking about how basically capitalism and liberal capitalist democracy was the end state of the development of history. And now once we've reached that state all we've got to do is export it by mass bombings of course but once we've exported it across the world then we will live in perfect peace and harmony. Gordon Brown famously said that they'd done away with boob and bust. This was the kind of hubris with retrospect. He was 50% right. They got rid of all the boob. And now I think that there is actually a genuine shock. I think part of these headlines and editorials it's not simply like a cynical thing. I think that the crisis in 2008 and the great recession and the ensuing depression really that we've entered into and the political and social crisis which has come off the back of that has got many figures in the capitalist world and intellectuals, journalists genuinely thinking what on earth is going on and reaching out for ideas and finding none. It's very interesting that I think it was Paul Krugman who was a Nobel Prize winning economist said that the last 30 years of macroeconomic theory have at best been useless and at worst positively harmful. That's not a very good record. And so people I think are seeing crisis looking for some kind of explanation, not finding any from as what you call the bourgeois establishment. And so instead of pointing to Marx, usually with certain caveats that we can talk about. But I mean the fact that Rolling Stone magazine decides, I mean, I'm not that familiar with the production of Rolling Stone, but I thought that was a music magazine has decided to write a list of things that Marx got right, all of which he did get absolutely right, really tells us something about the deep, not just economic, but social and intellectual crisis that society finds itself in. I think that the 2007-2008 crash is probably the most graphic example of the central role of the banks to the global economy in history as far as I'm aware. We had a situation where bankers, they were called bankers, stock market traders and so on. They were called the masters of the universe. That was the title that not only they gave themselves, but they were given by the media, because in a sense, I suppose in a sense they were, in terms of the central role that they played in the economy, banks were too big to fail. And then they did fail. And the result was, first of all, chaos, but then the states that have been preaching non-interference in the economy, the primacy of the market, the perfection of the market, had to step in and spend billions and billions of dollars or pounds or whatever to bail those self-saving banks out. And I think that that has maybe it's taken time to seep in, but I think it's had very, very dramatic. I would even say revolutionary repercussions on the consciousness of ordinary people, perhaps also editors of newspapers, which is familiar. Yeah, and on mass consciousness as well. And particularly, I was going to ask you about this, Fiona, about with the younger generation, amongst young people, students, there's clearly a ferment kind of going on, big mass movements. You were, as I say, in the times, commenting on the kind of rising popularity of Marxism and socialist ideas, revolutionary ideas amongst young people, amongst students. Why do you think it is that revolutionary ideas, that Marxist ideas are gaining popularity amongst, can we say our generation, you're a bit younger than me, but amongst younger people, amongst students? Yeah, no, well, I think with my example anyway, I mean, I was 11 when the financial crash happened in 2008. So my entire adult life, my entire political life, I've only seen decline and I've only seen chaos in the market in the economy. So I've kind of, I've grown up in a system that is clearly not working and those are the headlines that I'm receiving. And that's what I see in the stock markets on the news all the time. And I think also, what's happening in the world at the moment isn't just an economic crisis that young people can see, but also politically. And so many countries are in turmoil with the election of Trump and with the Brexit result in the UK that no one saw coming. There were no political commentators or editors that thought that was going to be the result that we could see. And so I think people can see crisis on every single level of society. And on top of that, I just want to comment on the idea that Marxist fashionable or interesting as an alternative, which is something that's often put towards young people. There's this idea that we don't understand the world. We've not been, we're not old enough to understand all the idea that, you know, once I become old and I've worked for a bit, then I don't want to give up my money or all this kind of stuff. Which I think is, yeah, yeah, which I just think is wrong. I think young people are questioning this economic system because they see it can't work. And they're looking to the ideas of Marx and it's starting to make sense. Yeah. So Fiona, one of the things that you were talking about when, when you first got your press attention was on, as a result of an interview you did for BBC Radio for Today program with John Humphries. And from what I remember, they brought you on because of a survey that had been done showing that young people were more concerned or felt more threatened, if you like, by big business than by communism. And there's been other kind of similar polls showing, you know, the kind of radical mood that's there. We had one in the in the revolution paper that Marxist Student Federation produces, which talked about kind of the mood amongst young people for a rebellion or an insurrectionary overthrow of the government. And I think Wales was up there along with Greece and Italy and Spain as being where young people were, you know, willing to kind of overthrow governments. What do you think these, these kind of polls say? Like, where did, where do these figures come from? Well, I think, you know, for a young person today, if I take myself, for example, I'm going to graduate university with over 40,000 pounds in debt. I'm unlikely to ever live in a secure home that I know I'll be in for the rest of my life. The job market is virtually non-existent for graduates at the moment. And, you know, young people are faced with a situation of no possible future. Even in the UK recently, you know, there are certain parts of the UK that are actually declining in life expectancy. Wage growth in Britain at the moment is the lowest it's been since the Napoleonic Wars. There's no real, kind of, work hard, get a good degree and you'll live a good life. That idea doesn't exist for young people anymore and it's just not a reality. And people can see who is causing these problems. Yes, you're touching on there really this idea of the establishment that, you know, we are the 99%, the 1%. These are the kind of slogans that have kind of come back to the fore, actually. Interestingly, in the last 10 years, obviously Occupy and the kind of no-cuts anti-austerity movements that we see in Britain, you know, employing these kind of slogans again about inequality, the rich versus the poor. I mean, this brings to mind for me the communist manifesto, you know, the idea that all history is the history of class struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors. It's an idea that, you know, isn't that fashionable a lot of the time in academia particularly amongst the kind of liberal media. The idea of class society is something to kind of hush-hush. And for that reason, you often hear this idea that Marxism is kind of outdated. You know, he's talking about a period in the 19th century where everyone kind of imagines workers, you know, being in the kind of the burning mills, the dark satanic mills and the capitalists with their kind of top hats, Mr. Moneybag type characters. And I think for a lot of those reasons, Marxism is kind of, like I say, it's painted as being outdated, old-fashioned, because it deploys this kind of class analysis, you know, calling for workers of the world to unite. Josh, what would you say on that? You know, is it fair to say that things have changed dramatically since the 19th century? Are we all middle class now? That's the kind of accusation that's thrown around by the critics of Marxism? Well, no. But to give a bit more of a developed answer, I think that things have changed since Victorian times, but fundamentally we live in exactly the same social system. It would be, it would be, I think, bending the stick too far the other way to say that nothing has changed in Britain since Victorian times. One major change in British society has been extensive deindustrialisation. And coupled with this has been an extremely, I'd say, a very right-wing reactionary idea that being work in class is someone who works down a mine, who works in a factory, and kind of conforms to these certain, usually very reductive tropes about how a person behaves, the kind of language they use and things like that. And so if you don't conform to that, if you go to work in a suit and tie, then how can you possibly be a worker? And that is absolutely fantastic from the point of view of the state of the ruling class in the establishment, because it leads to, frankly, a very bitter divide within the working class. You can actually see over the whole Brexit, though, the working class was split. And you have lots of people, especially in the liberal media, going on about all these stupid backward workers in places like Sunderland, and basically dividing workers against each other. And really what we need is for the working class as a whole to be unified precisely against those layers, against the establishment. What's happened on a worldwide scale is actually that the working class has never been bigger. Well, I think one thing we have to remember in Britain, we shouldn't have a parochial attitude, that whilst mines and steel mills and so on have been shut down in Britain, they have been opened elsewhere. Heavy industry still exists. It just has been shipped out, because actually it was possible to exploit people on even lower wages than in Britain. That's one of the reasons why that kind of production was unaffordable. But then you've also seen the rise of like things like Amazon warehouses, which many people describe as actually kind of like Dickensian Victorian conditions, right? I mean, you hear these horror stories, was it sports direct, where a woman apparently had to give birth while she was on the job because she was too worried about taking the time? Yeah. And people having to basically like wear nappies while they're working, because they literally can't afford to take the time for a toilet break, you know, it's the choice between eating and pissing. I mean, that sounds to me like things haven't even changed that much in some respects. But the thing I was going to ask Fiona was, you know, you're in the Marxist Student Federation, you're a student activist. There's been big strikes recently amongst the universities. Presumably a layer of society that, you know, 30, 40 years ago would have considered itself quite privileged. I know you were also out on the picket lines when the junior doctors strikes were happening. Again, a very privileged layer until recently. What do you think this says about, you know, the relevance of Marxist ideas in terms of a class analysis? Well, if anything, I think it shows that Marxist ideas have never been more relevant. And it, you know, shows in practice who the working class are and what Marxists mean when we talk about the working class. Because ultimately, it's about your relationship to the means of production. And so when we think of doctors, we think of lawyers and we think of university lecturers, we think of these people as quite middle class and quite well to do, that don't really suffer, you know, the harsh working conditions as people in sports direct, for example. But actually, in the past couple of years, we've seen them all on strike. And that's because I think we've seen the proletarianization of a lot of what would normally be considered relatively comfortable jobs. And that's the result of an economic crisis that we're in at the moment. And it demonstrates how important a class analysis is in order to fight back against these things. Because, you know, people are realizing who the enemy is, if you will, and who is causing all these problems in society. And I think the recent UCU strike is a great example, because we saw, you know, the majority of students supported their lecturers in that strike and all the polls. The majority of students did. And, you know, you had a lot of students out on the picket lines with them. And they understood that, you know, this strike wasn't just about lecturers being annoyed about their pensions. It's linked with, you know, the wider marketization of education. And on top of that, it's linked with the wider crisis of capitalism in society that's also hurting the NHS. It's also hurting lawyers. It's also hurting, you know, it's hurting everyone on all layers of society, no matter what their job is. Apart from the very... Apart from the... Yeah, of course. Apart from the bourgeoisie. And so, you know, it's a brilliant demonstration of how correct Marx is. And I think, you know, students being able to see their lecturers out on the picket lines and seeing them fighting for, you know, better working conditions, fighting, you know, for what they deserve will also have an effect on them, because, you know, they realize that that could be them, you know, in 20, 30, 40 years. And, you know, they recognize the importance of solidarity. I think in that moment, the use-to-use strike has been a brilliant example of solidarity between workers and students who, you know, students typically are a certain section of society that isn't always associated with the labour movement because, you know, they're not technically workers. But, you know, in the use-to-use strike, I think we saw the importance of students and the role that students can play in the labour movement as a whole. So, guys, I think we need to address the elephant in the room, which is obviously communism, Stalinism, because this is really, if you like, the stick that's always going to be used above all to beat our movement with. You know, all these these articles about Marx was right. They always say, you know, they always start by saying, well, Marx's analysis of capitalism was spot on. You know, he predicted the crisis, he predicted the revolution and so forth. But, and there's always a but, there's always a caveat. And he said, well, look at the Soviet Union, look at Mao's China. You know, this is where where it gets you if you follow Marx's into its logical conclusion. You know, Fiona, this was what was thrown at you, obviously, when you tried to defend socialist ideas and Marxist ideas on Radio 4. I think you were called like an apologist for Stalinism or something like that by Orlando Fieges, Fieges, Figs, we're never quite sure how to pronounce his name. If you if you're watching, let us know, type it in phonetically, please. But yeah, you defended communism and the gains of the Soviet Union when you were on Radio 4. And like I say, you were lambasted for this by the Tory press, by the Times, the Murdoch media, by people like Fieges. And, you know, what what would you say in terms of if someone came to you and said, you know, I agree with everything you say, but the Soviet Union? Yeah, absolutely. No, I defended the Soviet Union because I think there's a lot we can learn from it, particularly the gains of a planned economy full stop. And, you know, all the one thing that's often, you know, used to attack Marxists or was used to attack me is obviously the repression and the deaths that happened under Stalin. And first of all, I would point out that Stalinism and the kind of degenerate bureaucracy that came about in the Soviet Union was the result of, you know, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and not, you know, the resolution of it and not seeing it through. And moreover, I think that when people talk about the deaths under the Soviet Union, this is very much selective moral outrage because I would point out that five million children starve to death every single year under capitalism. And also the transition into capitalism that we had, how many people died under the British Empire? How many people died under colonialism? How many people died under slavery? These are all great deaths. How many people are dying every single day under capitalism? And academics like Orlando Fiegers or whatever his name is have made great careers out of slandering the Russian Revolution. Fantastic careers. He's written a lot of books about this yet doesn't have a word to say about the, you know, the atrocities that happen under capitalism. So I just think that point is really important to make when we start comparing deaths or numbers, which is obviously a bit grotesque. But yeah, I think, you know, even despite all of the problems with the Soviet Union of which there were many, you know, if you compare the Soviet Union to what it was at the start of the Russian Revolution to what it became, you know, 50, 60, 70 years later, its industry developed enormously. It became the second largest economy in the world, essentially. And that was thanks to a planned economy. And I and I don't think it's wrong of us to point that out. And it's important for us to point out what a planned economy can do. And also the impact of when it collapsed, right? I think, wasn't it? Someone I've heard statistics saying it was the biggest when you had the collapse of the Soviet Union, which she talked about earlier, Josh, it was the biggest collapse of an economy outside of wartime and life expectancy dropped by several years and poverty figures went up. And obviously what you've got in Russia today is hardly a paragon of democracy and kind of liberalism now under Putin. But, you know, rewinding from that, we talk about 1917 as being the greatest event in human history with the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Revolution, led by Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks. Where did it go wrong, Josh? Like, you know, if that was the greatest event in human history and Fiona's described the kind of the endpoint of after this degeneration, you know, where did that come from? Is the degeneration itself proof that Marx was wrong, in fact? Well, starting with the first question of where did things go wrong, I think it's important to explain why we say it's the greatest event in human history. We don't say it because we think that thereafter everything was just an endless string of joys and everything was hunky-dory. We say it because it was with the exception of the tragically brief episode of the Paris Commune in 1871 where the workers took power in Paris and then were brutally massacred. It was the first time that the workers and the oppressed of society didn't just rebel but actually managed to physically really take power into their hands and try to forge a new society. Something that gave immense inspiration to oppressed peoples, not just workers, but all oppressed peoples, all over the planet. That is an enormously progressive event. Arguably one of the most, if not the most progressive events in all of human history. That does not mean, therefore, that anything that happens afterwards has to be a success. That's something that kind of the Stalinist frauds, really, who turned Marxism into a dead caricature. They tried to use the heritage, the progressive legacy of the 1917 revolution to justify all kinds of crimes not only against the people and workers of the Soviet Union but also against Marxism itself as a theory. They said things like they were building socialism in one country. I defy anyone to go through the collective works of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Trotsky and find a defence of this idea. It was something that was effectively made upon the spot to justify a false policy of a bureaucracy. And that's the key point. Obviously, we probably don't have time now to go into detail about the degeneration of the Soviet Union. It's worth the discussion in and of itself. But it's always important to remember where the revolution took place, where and when the revolution took place. It took place already, economically speaking, in one of the most backward countries in Europe. It's called, you know, known as the Sigmund of Europe. The regime, the absolutist Tsarist regime, was viewed all over Europe and the world as a bastion of reaction, of fascist-like reaction. You have a revolution against that which topples the absolutist monarchy and a process which is clearly leading towards dictation, whether that be under Karenski, the then leader of the short-lived bourgeois republic of Kornolov, an extremely vicious right-wing general in the former Tsar's army, or the restoration of Tsars himself. The Bolsheviks and the workers, clearly the most progressive layer in society, takes power. But that doesn't mean that they somehow are transported to another planet or to a different state of affairs. They had to try and build, not even socialism. They didn't see themselves as building socialism. Marx wouldn't have seen it that way. They were building the foundations for socialism and to act as the spark to set off a world revolution. Marx was always very clear, yes, in the Communist Manifesto he said, the workers had to settle accounts to use this expression with the bourgeoisie in their own country. Makes sense. I mean, they are together in a country. It did not mean that they then build a socialist paradise in that country. Capitalism being a global world system, it throws us into global crises as we're living through. It also requires a global answer. It needs a worldwide revolution. Something that actually began with the revolution in 1917, you had revolutions in Hungary, in Germany, revolutionary events in Italy, it even sleep bailed Britain. Even the Labour Party was affected with the Trump's English Clause 4. All of these things are immensely progressive. The reason it declined and degenerated, which is indisputable, is precisely because of the isolation and backwardness exacerbated by the bombardment, by the invasion of foreign armies, by the blockade, the bombardment and the constant attempts to undermine and destroy the entire enterprise. It strikes me as slightly hypocritical to say, oh, that didn't work when your class effectively, or the system you defend, has spent the last 100 years conscientiously, and in some cases quite effectively, trying to strangle it at birth. It seems to me like a slightly, I don't know, tasteless argument to me. What failed in the Soviet Union was, yes, a nationalised planned economy, which I consider to be enormously progressive and achieved miracles considering where it was. And sat on top of that was an enormous, monstrous, vicious bureaucracy, which not only committed crimes against its own people, but ultimately it starved the economy, led to stagnation and collapse. What exists now in Russia is more or less the same bureaucracy, is now in charge on basically a mafia oligarchic basis, but without any of the benefits of the planned economy. It seems to me that capitalism, its wonderful systems managed to retain the worst aspects of starvation and lose anything that was progressive and worth fighting for. And so we also have to, we have to ask and answer the question of, okay, we reject Stalinism, how could that have been defeated, or how do we make sure that the revolution that we're fighting for avoids those kind of things. And internationalism is the key here. Even at the darkest periods in the history of the Soviet Union, there were glimmers of hope when you had revolutionary events in places like Hungary, which was over the other side of the Iron Curtain at the time, but also in France in 1968 and in Britain. And in America, there were plenty of opportunities for the workers to actually lead the overthrow of imperialism. Let's just stop and think for a moment what the effect in the Soviet Union on the oppressed workers of the Soviet Union under the, you know, the Stalinist jack poop would have been if they'd been a successful overturning France, which was very much on the cards. So we took discussions like this should endow us with a sense of responsibility, that if we want to fight for a genuinely democratic, progressive socialist society, we can't relieve ourselves of the responsibility by saying that an attempt 100 years ago didn't turn out successfully. We have to set ourselves on the path to achieving that in the here and now on a worldwide scale. There are no excuses not to, in my opinion anyway. So coming to today, talked about, you know, the need to put theoretical ideas into practice, to link theory and action. Fiona, you're in the president of the SoS Marxist Society. You know, we've all spoken at Marx society meetings around the country, and the thing I always get is, these days I find more and more, is that people will agree with everything you're saying in terms of, you know, they nod along saying, yeah, brilliant, socialism, Marxism, revolution, sign me up, you know, how, how do we do it? How do we have a revolution? You know, what's the first step after we leave this room? What would you say to people who you come across, young people in particular, who have that burning desire to change the world? Yeah. Well, I think first I'd point out that Marxists don't start revolutions. You know, we don't spark a revolution. A revolution happens when the working class, you know, in its masses, you know, takes control of its own destiny, you know, moves to take control of its own future. And that happens with or without Marxists. There have been plenty of revolutions throughout history. What Marxists can do is, you know, push and give and preach the ideas in that movement, in that revolution, to make sure it's successful and to see it through. And that is what people should be doing if they're serious about socialist revolution. And that's why we put emphasis on the role of Marxist theory and the need to study Marxist literature in order to understand history, to understand how the world works. And so I would say and encourage all students to join their local Marxist society, you know, get involved. You can see, you know, we've just seen, you know, the most militant U.C.U. strike in history, you know, campuses are alive with energy, they're alive with movements and struggle. And that's something that students can get involved with. And I would just encourage all people to do that so that they can, you know, be a part of seeing through socialist revolution in their lifetime. All right, well, I think that's a good place to end for today. Thank you Fiona, thank you for Josh. Thank you to all our viewers and our listeners if you're on the podcast. Write in if you've got any questions or suggestions for topics that you'd like to see discussed on future episodes of IMTV. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with more of the latest news and analysis of current events and revolutionary ideas. In the meantime, check out www.socialist.net and www.Marxist.com for all the latest news and analysis there online in terms of articles and videos. And also, as I say, come along to our Marx in a Day event on the 5th of May in UCL in London. We'll see you there for a great day celebrating Marx's birthday. Thank you very much. See you next time.