 Paul Crogman, one of the more intelligent, there aren't many of them, one of the more intelligent boos where it comes. He said the following, he said if you look at the situation he said the fact is that for the last three decades macroeconomic theory has been and I quote, right, in the best case spectacularly useless and in the worst case positively harmful. The worst case is positively harmful. Paul Clugman. You can check up the quote yourself. It's useless. It's useless searching that the boule-svoire journals define any explanation as to what the phenomenon that we are dealing with. But the only way, and that is the main thrust of my argument, which I hope to demonstrate to your satisfaction this evening, the only Y rhai mae'r gweithio o'r sefydlu y galluedd y twyd yn yn ymwybodaeth yma. Diolch o materialism. Mae'n amlodau cymdeithasol yw'r hollon, ac mae'n gweithio eu bod ni'n gweithio'r adfant. Rwy'n gobeithio chi fod yn ymwybodaeth. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio i'r llwyffydd a'r llwyffydd. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ymwysgr. It's only this that gives us the right to exist as a separate tendency of the labour movement. That is the superiority of the Marxist analysis and Marxist ideas. We'll deal with that a little bit more later on. Now, if you look at the bourgeois, it's quite interesting. I could spend all evening quoting, you'd find it quite amusing. I don't have the time or the inclination. It's sometimes, it often occurs to me. You know what? We are the only optimistic people in society. It's a fact. Everyone is plunged in the deepest pessimism, starting with the bourgeois themselves, who've lost faith as a matter of fact. They've lost all confidence in the future of their own system. You read their press, the serious press I'm referring to, like the financial times. It's full of the most pessimistic appraisals you can imagine. I give many quotes, but I haven't got the time. One or two later on. But there's one thing which did attract my attention. There is one bourgeois economist, which at least I find at least interesting, so we say, interesting. He is a rather, so we say, extravagant personality. By the name of Nouriel Rubini, have you heard of him? He's a professor of economics in America. He's a well-known economist. The other economist hate his guts. They call him Dr Doom. Only for one reason, that he alone was capable of predicting the crisis of 2008. The others did not. They predicted precisely nothing. They never forgave him for that. He put their nose on the joint, you know. And he's just here constantly annoys them because he tells the truth. Insofar as a bourgeois economist is able to tell the truth. And he's just produced a new book. I've not read it yet. I might get hold of a copy. Someone will buy it for me. It's published in America recently. The title is very interesting for a start. Mega threats. Mega threats, two dots. The ten trends that imperil our future and how to survive them. He's very good on the first, but not quite so hot on the second part. But we'll come to that. As he's honest enough to admit. We'll deal with that later. Now, I can't deal with this book in detail. It won't help his reputation with his fellow economists very much. I can see that. But at the end of it, I won't list all the mega threats. By the book, you'll find out. They're clear enough. And then he asks, what can be done? What can be done to avert what he's predicting is the mother of all debt-propelled crises? That's what he's predicting. He says absolutely inevitable, given the present situation. What can be done to counter the mega threats? Answer? Not much. Not much. And he concludes, I can't resist quoting this. He concludes with a suitably dark warning to the bourgeoisie. Expect many dark days, my friends. This is Rubini speaking, not Alan Woods. This is Rubini. And that happens to be correct. I haven't got time to go into it in detail, but there we are. But, you see, it isn't just Rubini that says this. If you look, just open, look, try an experiment tomorrow morning. Just open the FT, look anywhere you like. You will see a plethora of the most pessimistic, the most dismal predictions in July, for example, not long ago, the IMF in its report warned, the world is in a volatile period, a volatile period, economic, geopolitical, and ecological changes all impact the global outlook. That's the IMF speaking. And you're an even more interesting man, by a man by the name of Larry Summers. You may or may not have heard of him. He's an American economist and a former United's Secretary of the Treasury, who was quoted on the 6th of October. That's a couple of weeks ago, isn't it? He was quoted saying the following. This is interesting. What I said earlier about being different turning points and so on, he says the following. I can remember previous moments of equal or even greater gravity for the world economy. There you are. Equal or even greater gravity for the world economy. But I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross currents as there are right now. And he goes on to explain what he's talking about. Look what is going on in the... This is Summers speaking. Look what is going on in the world. A very significant inflation issue across much of the world and certainly much of the developed world. A significant monetary tightening underway. A huge... There's a rising interest rates and so on. A huge energy shock, you know all about that. A huge energy shock, where are we? Especially in the European economy, which is both a real shock obviously and an inflation shock. Growing concern about Chinese policymaking and Chinese economic performance. China is slowing down rapidly. And indeed also concerns about its intention towards Taiwan. We'll speak about that later. And then of course the ongoing war in Ukraine. Add all that up. And yes, you get a very, very serious position. As the financial factor of times again. In an article which is headlined. IMF forecasts very painful outlook. Very painful outlook for global economy published on October the 11th which says, as the global economy is headed for stormy waters financial turmoil may well erupt. Do I need to add any more? I think I'll rest my case. Just check it out for yourselves. In other words, the entire, shall we say, all the strategists of capital are filled with deep foreboding concerning and pessimism concerning the future. You can reply, you can repeat these examples at will. But I think I've shown the point. But even more significant than what the bourgeois economists, what the strategists of capital are saying is what's actually happening on the markets. After all, this is the market economy, isn't it? Which is supposed to regulate everything, isn't it? You see now, what you see now is extreme volatility in the markets. That's not an accident. Because what this shows, what the markets don't show you what's happening in the real economy. It's another world. The markets got their own laws, their own fantastic existence, you know? But you see that that's, what they do show is the morale of the bourgeois. The nervousness. The nervousness in the financial market was clearly exposed, by the way, in the recent crisis in Britain, where less trust, I think you've heard of her, less trust on her associated gang of escaped lunatics and half wits who now determined the fate of the British people took certain decisions, the so-called mini-budget, which immediately caused absolute chaos in the market. By the way, there's only one way you can describe the immediate reaction of the market to this, these measures, and that word is panic. One has to look at this. I will not waste your valuable time by attempting to analyse the weird psychology of the politicians that took those decisions in England. That's more a subject for a qualified psychiatrist than for myself. What interests me is something, and what interests us is something quite different to that. What interests me is the way that the market reacted to this. It was born prices in countries as different as the USA and Italy. Veered violently, it says, in response to every twist and turn of the convoluted nonsense that was coming out of London. And that was not an accident, that's the point. The same Larry Summers that I just mentioned, not long ago, was again quoted in the Financial Times as follows, quote, the destabilisation wrought by British errors will not be confined to Britain. In other words, this was not just a little local difficulty. This was a mortal threat to the entire financial system of the entire world. That's the interesting point. The IMF therefore was forced to intervene, as you know, to twist the arms of the people in London, which they did very effectively. They got the means of doing it, of course. And trust was forced to swallow her words in a humiliating retreat, ditching the whole insane plan that she'd worked out, that she'd worked out together with her chancellor, quasi-quarting, you heard of him? You had, just as well somebody said, he's gone now anyway. Now quasi-quarting, by the way, was a close personal friend and co-thinker and confider of Liz Twist. But there's an old proverb, you know. What do you do when you see a man falling? Silence. Give him a push. And that's just what she did. She didn't hesitate at throwing, ten seconds of throwing her buzz and pal and comfort under the first available London bus. But then what are friends for, after all, you know. Now you see, there's an unfortunate thing. All right, they retreated, they ditched everything, they changed everything, they surrendered. Okay, there's one problem, however. You see, financial credibility, like virginity, once it's lost, it is rather difficult to restore. You see? It is, it is. I'm telling you, it's a biological fact and an economic one. It's rather difficult to restore again. So therefore, Britain's reputation now as a world power and stable economic regime, it lies in the gutters, it shreds. And this is quite important because the UK, after all, enjoyed a reputation for stability, political stability, social stability, and economic stability. I won't trust myself on that because I think Rob is dealing with this tomorrow night. But the fact of the matter is that they haven't recovered by the way. Even today it was reported that the market is still very jittery about Britain. Britain has now got the same reputation, approximately, as dead, ridden, crisis ridden Italy. And very soon, if they do, we're not careful, we'll have the same reputation as Pakistan. But there we are. Now, you see, the reason, the point is this. What do you must think about? The reason for the panic on the markets was the implications of a financial crash in the city of London, which after all is one of the hubs of the international financial community. You see, nowadays it's hands up all of you that have ever heard of the credit and stalt bank. Hands up. One, two, three, four, not many, I thought so. Because nowadays it's rather forgotten that the great depression of the 1930s was actually sparked off by the collapse of a bank in Vienna known as the credit and stalt bank. I think it was in May 1931, which immediately caused a domino effect all over Europe, bringing down the hood system. That provoked, in turn, the downward spiral between 1931 and 1933, the Great Depression, and so on. But history can and does repeat itself. We know the nonsense, oh yeah, can't be repeated. We've learnt our lesson, yes, we've all... It reminds me of, I've known certain comrades, girlfriends, they go to a party, they have a great time, they have a drink, they feel fine, they have another drink, feel even better. They have several more drinks and they feel wonderful. Then the next morning they wake up with their head in their hands. And what do they say? Never again, never again, I've learnt my lesson never again. Yeah, the same thing happens every time there's a crisis with the capitalist, you know. We've learnt our lesson, we've learnt the lesson of history, we've learnt, yes, until the next crisis, you've learnt your lesson. You see, Hegel once said, the only thing that one learns when you study history is that nobody has ever learnt anything from history, and that's why history repeats itself, marvellous idea. Now, the present crisis, I can't deal with it in detail, but it's obvious. This crisis is somewhat different to the last crisis. That was a crisis of debt. This is a crisis in which debt still exists, colossal, ask the list trust about that. Colossal and manageable debts are combined with high and rising inflation. Now that's the point, because this inflation, my friends, was not supposed to happen. They learnt the lesson, you see. They wasn't going to be in, and there wasn't inflation for a while. They couldn't believe their lack, they couldn't believe their lack. There's economies going forward, there's full employment and so on, but prices are not rising. Adam Booth wrote an interesting article, a theoretical journal about that. And the conclusion of these embossies, these boos what economists drew, they compete clowns, is that the beast of inflation had been defeated and there wasn't going to be any inflation, and there wasn't going to be, therefore, no interest rises, this would go on forever and ever, amen. Did it? No, on the contrary. Beneath the surface there were reasons, Adam explained it, there were reasons, specific reasons, why inflation temporarily was kept out, it didn't disappear, it was held under the surface. They distorted the markets actually, by state intervention, they distorted the markets, they held it down. But the underlying inflationary pressures were still there, they hadn't disappeared, they hadn't gone anywhere. And now, of course, they burst, as inevitably would happen at a certain point, they burst to the surface and causing a colossal crisis, disrupting in the supply chains, destroying investment plans, eroding savings, collapsing living standards, and causing general chaos, which must be dealt with somehow. Now, the IMF and the World Bank are demanding measures to deal with inflation. So they say, I don't think these measures will work anyway, but they're demanding increased interest and so on. This will cause a recession. Factory closures, bankruptcies, mass unemployment, steeply falling living standards, that's the perspective, they'll bring it on themselves, but by increasing interest rates, which is what they're doing, in fact the World Bank and the IMF are complaining that these measures are not sufficient, they need more austerity, more cuts. And this is the way. That's why Robini says correctly, the word, to quote Trotsy's expression, is tobagganing to disaster with its eyes closed towards the mother of all debt crises, so he says. And that's correct. Now, there are a number, it is very difficult to know exactly the timing of events, you can't do that, that's asking too much of perspectives. For that you need a crystal ball, which is the common sense, we don't yet possess, we're trying to get one, second-hand markers, we haven't come up with them so far, you know. You can't be precise, perspectives, let's be clear about it, perspectives is not a finished plan as to what is going to happen in the future, so that's not what it is. It's a working hypothesis, that's all, nothing magical about it. It's a working hypothesis, where you try to work out things as best you can on the basis of the information you possess. Now it doesn't always work out as you imagine, therefore you go to adjust it, change it, alter it, perhaps scrap it all together and start again, so what? So what it depends. But it is necessary to have some kind of a perspective, some kind of idea as to where we are heading. And there are a number of things we can say with absolute certainty. In particularly, the impact, that's what interests, we're not interested in theological discussions about the ins and outs of the economy. We will leave that to the stupid economists in LSD or whatever it is. But no, but there are certain things that we are interested in and that's what effect does all this colossal and parallel instability have on consciousness and by God it has an effect. It is having an effect. I repeat what I said. When people are talking about these things in the bus stops, it's not a trivial matter. When people are taking interest in politics, that's not a trivial matter. It is precisely what Trotsky said. It's the molecular process of socialist revolution, my friends. Neither more nor less. Particularly the cost of living crisis inflation, it has a colossal effect. You know this, where people in Britain and many other countries, all countries are trembling in relation to whether they will survive this winter, whether they can pay the fuel, the energy bills, whether they can feed the kids. It's a fact. It's a human tragedy. In many cases, particularly in the poor countries, it's a matter of life or death. Millions of people are going to face death by starvation as a result of this. Food prices and so on and so forth. To think that that's going to happen without the profoundest social and political consequences, you've got to be living on the planet Mars, not the planet Earth. I'm not just referring to Latin America and the Middle East and so on. No. When I say all countries, including the USA, where inflation is having a big effect, I've got a quote of that effect. Britain, of course. It is, for example, in a country like Italy, it's undoubtedly a big fact of the fact that people's pensions are being... Even older people, not just young people are affected by this. There was a big demonstration in Spain. I was informed just a couple of days ago, a mass demonstration of pensioners. But these people are facing a dire problem. This is the kind of thing which forces people to come to terms with reality, which they didn't want to do, but they have to come. The inflation affects the middle class. Small businesses are facing bankruptcy, not just in the distant future, but right now, they're facing it. You see it on the TV every night. I will not deal with that. Therefore, this is the future of enormous economic, social and political instability. That's what you see in Britain right now. This, my friends, will have the most profound consciousness. Is having, has happened, and it will have a great result in the future. Now, this brings me to the other point, as if that wasn't enough. In the midst of all this general morass of chaos, you get other contradictions coming to the fore, other contradictions which are threatening the existence of capitalism, particularly the war in Ukraine. I don't have a great deal of time to deal with this in detail. We've dealt with it in numerous articles. We'll deal with it again. It's a moving picture. Okay, so it's difficult to predict. I don't pretend that I can predict what the result of this war will be, because there are too many variables. It's a moving equation. You know Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte knew a few things about war, and he made a very interesting comment. He said, war is the most complex of all equations. It is very complex, and therefore you can't be precise about making predictions. But I will be precise about one prediction, and that's the prediction which is being put forward day and night, night and day, all hours of the television, the press and the radio, and they've been saying this since last February. It is a very simple prediction, a very simple prognosis of the west of the imperialist and so on. Very simple. Ukraine is going to win and Russia is going to lose. Period. Okay, that's the prediction. That is one prediction, my friend. You can rule it out. Even despite the fact, I'm conscious of the fact that last September Ukrainians managed to stage an offensive, which was successful. That's beyond a doubt. By the way, let's give the devil his due. Ukrainian troops have fought with conspicuous bravery and so on, which has got to be recognized. I recognize that fact. I recognize that fact, and it is an important element. Moral is always an important element. Yes, but is it enough? No. No. Is it enough to win one battle? No. Is it enough to win ten battles? No. The fundamental question you have to ask is, does it change the fundamental balance of forces, and it does not? For everything they say, it does not. The Russians have retreated to a more defensible line, and it's still not clear, but it will become clear. And Putin is mobilized, is in the process of mobilizing 200,000 new men into the army who will be available. I don't think that he can complete that until maybe mid-December. It's hard to say precisely. But you better believe it. The presence of 200,000 new troops on the ground is bound to make a considerable difference. I note that the Ukrainian advance has already been slowing down. Yesterday they talked about conspicuous victories, which they were. Now they only talk about taking this or that village, which is hardly significant. It's been slowed down, and in my opinion it will be slowed down. They may win some more. It may even win some significant victories, but it will not be maintained. And in the meantime, the Russians are mobilizing. In the meantime, they are bombing infrastructure, which they didn't do today, by the way. It's not true that they've been bombing, deliberately bombing civilian targets entirely. Why should they? Nor is it true today, up until now, that they've been bombing infrastructure. They haven't. They could have done, but they didn't. They are now. And therefore the whole thing is being stepped up. Now you see, Klausiewicz. Have you ever heard of Klausiewicz? You heard of Marx, I think. Hands up all of you who've heard of Marx. One or two. There we are. That's good. Bravo. Hands up all of you that have heard of Klausiewicz. Ah! I see that we're surrounded by intellectuals in this room. I feel intimidated. Klausiewicz, the great military genius. I think the man was a genius. By the way, he's not a Marxist, of course. He was a reactionary pressionarystocrat. But he studied Hegel, that's the point. He made a great study of Hegel, and he pursued a dialectical method to analyze war, which he did with great genius in mind. And he said the following. War is the most marvellous definition. War, my friends, is only the continuation of politics by other means. That's all it is. And ultimately wars are not decided by guns and so on and by that. They decided by politics. What is necessary is for us to analyze the war aims. Define the war aims of the different contending powers. And you can predict in advance that the hostilities will only end to the degree that the war ends are either achieved or one or the other sides are exhausted by the conflict. That's a simple prediction. Now, if you look at Zelenski, his war aims are perfectly clear. He wants to drive the Russians out, not just out of Donbass, which they haven't yet been able to do, and I think they will not be able to do, but to drive them out of the Crimea, which is now officially part of Russia. Now, that is a dream. I'll make a prediction now. Crimea will never go back to the Ukraine, this side of the sources revolution. That's evident, that's evident. But you see, his views are shared, of course, by the hawks that are the differences of opinion. They try to present a united front. There is no united front, in fact. There's the hawks like Poland and the Baltic states, they've got their own agenda, and they're all in favour of an outright Ukrainian victory. The Russians must be defeated. They keep on repeating this. There must be no deal until the Russians are defeated. And, of course, the certified lunatics recently escaped from a lunatic asylum that are present in number 10 Downing Street, you know. The sovereignist imbeciles, the Brexit here, they are lunatics, by the way. First time in my life. I mean, I've been under all kinds of governments. Good ones, bad ones, well, not so bad, not so good. More or less intelligent, more or less stupid. First time in my life I've been governed by a government of lunatics. Certifiable lunatics. But there we are. I'm not joking, I'm not. Look at Rhys Morg Jesus Christ, he should be locked up in the bad himself. The other day he was physically bullying MPs into them. I'm taking Rob's remarks and I better change the subject quick. And their scenarios even better. Not just the Russians have been defeated, they should be driven back beyond the Russian frontier. And Putin must be overthrown. And if possible, the Russian Federation should be broken up into its constituent parts. Wonderful. Bravo. Yes, you and whose army. What are you talking about? These people are living in a dream world for goodness, gracious. It's an insult to the intelligence. And by the way, it's based on all this property. This war is really two wars. There's a war on the battlefield and there's the information war. I've never seen anything like it in my life. The amount of lies and propaganda and distortions and stupidities that they say is it defies belief. For a start, hang on to your seats. Don't get excited. I'll tell you something you don't know. Putin is in no danger of being overthrown whatsoever. As a matter of fact, his support, indicative of the poet you can say, that they would rig, they've not made me to some extent, but not that extent, has risen considerably. There is support for the war in Russia. It wouldn't necessarily be enthusiastic support, but there is mass support. Why? Because the Russian people don't like NATO, don't like American imperialists. They hate them as a matter of fact and they prepare to fight if necessary to deal with them. By the way, this is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. This is a proxy war between Russia and the West, between Russia and American imperialism in particular. And American imperialism will decide, Zelensky will decide that. Zelensky decides nothing. Nothing. It's the Americans that decide everything. They supply the arms, the money, the guns, they keep the whole thing going. But yes, but what are the war aims of America? That's the point. Not the same as Zelensky. Not the same as Liz Truss and the Blitz and the Polish idiots. No, no, no, no, no. They're not that stupid. They're pretty stupid. They're not that stupid. No, no, no, no. The aim is to exhaust Russia, prolong the war as much as possible, exhaust Russia militarily, undermine it militarily, financially and economically, ruin the Russian economy by sanctions and so on. That's the aim, to bleed it dry. That's the idea. And if this means prolonging the war and many Ukrainian innocent people, that's the thought that I feel sorry for the poor Ukrainians. They don't know. The pawns of American imperialism. If it means that a lot of people are going to die, so what? It's all in the good cause, isn't it? To undermine Russia, there's terrible Russia, terrible Putin, you know? That's the idea that they have. Now, of course there's limits to how far this is going to continue. Definitly limits. They say that the argument now is that the Ukrainians, the Russians rather are running out of weapons. Not true. Russia's not running out of weapons or ammunition. They just shown this recently. They might be running out of the high, what they call it, the very accurate missiles, modern missiles, they run short of them. But they don't need those to conduct the war as it is. And therefore this terrible bloody war is going to continue until something happens. But I predict now, as night follows day, at some stage Zelensky is going to receive a phone call. I'll predict this now. You'll receive a phone call from Washington saying, look, Mr Zelensky, very sorry, time is up, credit is up. Do you know how much these arms have cost the United States so far? $18 billion, a lot of money. And there are complaints. You wouldn't read it on the front page, but it's there. There's plenty of indications of that. Let me see if I've got the, yes, here we are. Public opinion in the States, for example, indicates the New York Times on May, even as far back as May said. Americans have been galvanised by Ukraine's sufferings, but popular support for the war is far from US source will not continue indefinitely, that's the New York Times. It goes on. Inflation is a much bigger issue for American voters than the Ukraine and so on and so forth. So I think it's, the figure was given, I will just finish that on that point. A recent poll pointed out that 57% of likely voters were strongly or somewhat strongly support the US pursuing diplomatic negotiations as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine, even if it requires Ukraine making compromises with Russia. And at the end of the day, Ukraine will be forced to make compromises with Russia. But anyway, we will have to see. It's a moving picture. We'll have to see how it develops. In the meantime, this war has had profound effects on international relations. It has driven China to form a closer alliance with Russia. They are now in a firm alliance. I don't predict that it's going to break up, but it will not break up. China is quite firm in its support for Russia. Others, other former nations, they thought would be like India, for example. India's got very good relations with Russia because they get cheap oil, which is considerably annoyed the Americans. And the Americans protest that the Indians are, yes, very sorry, but we need the oil kind of thing. Even Saudi Arabia, which was obviously a solid ally of the US, recently reached a deal with Putin. The Americans were putting pressure on the Saudis to increase the production of oil in order to bring the price of oil down. They refused. Instead of that, they cut oil production in order to force the price up, which considerably annoyed the Americans, but to no effect. And so on, and so on. And therefore, we are seeing like a kind of shift. What's the worthy use in geology? What's the worthy use? Yes, a shift to the tectonic plates. This is bringing about a realignment on an international scale, which also will introduce new instability. Now, I think I've said enough about the objective side. What are the implications for us? What are the revolutionary implications? Because there are profound revolutionary implications. And we've got plenty of evidence of this. For example, it's Sri Lanka. That's very interesting. If you want to see what a revolution looks like, of course you can read Trotsky's history of the Russian revolution, a marvellous book, take a close look at Sri Lanka. And the interesting thing is that this popular uprising not long ago came from nowhere, that's the main point, the first point to make, like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. Nobody was expecting this. I wasn't expecting that, to be honest. But the conditions were so bad, so intolerable. They always reaches a point where the masters say, that's enough, no more. Not prepared to put it with us anymore. It ended. And by God, they were facing ferocious repression because this was ineffective, this dictatorship. A fferocious regime. People were killed and they didn't make any difference. And that's the danger point for any reactionary regime when the masses lose their fear. You see, how often have you heard these miserable reformist imbeciles, you know? Oh, you can't have a revolutionary look. The state and the army and the police, they got all the weapons, they got all the guns, and we got no guns. Did you talk about a revolution like in Russia? Really? Did the people in Sri Lanka have guns? They didn't. Did the French people in 1789 have guns? No, they took it off the back of the Bastille. They raided the Bastille, they bare hands, they tore it down, and they took the weapons. The masses have never got the weapons. You use that stupid argument and there would never have been a single revolution in history, but there have been many revolutions in history, as we know. In Sri Lanka, you know? Without, listen, without a party, without a leadership, without a clear program, with no arms, they stormed the presidential palace and they took it, they overwhelmed the police and the army and they took it. Sections of the police and army came over to them. Army officers, a colonel, I remember, was driving around in an army vehicle and they were waving revolutionary slogans and so on and so forth. Now, what does this show? What does this show? What does it prove? It proves only one thing. If you leave this meeting tonight and you don't remember anything of what I've said, I will not be offended, but don't go away forgetting one thing about Sri Lanka. What does it prove? I'll tell you. It proves, my friends and comrades, that there is a power in society that is stronger than any army, any police force, or any state. And that power is the power of the masses once they are mobilised and on the move to take power into their own hands. Yes. And that was shown. That was shown. That was shown. But here is the tragedy. Here is the tragedy. That's only one side of the equation. There's another side of the equation also. You see, in Sri Lanka, power was lying in the streets waiting for someone to pick it up. Simple as that. Power was lying in the street. And all that would have been required, it makes you weep when you think about it, is one courageous voice to say right. Government has gone, the president has fled. We are the government. We take the power. And that would have been it and appealed to people all over the island also to take power into their own hands in local administration factories and army barracks everywhere. One courageous word. But that courageous word tragically was never spoken. And the masses, therefore, having power in their hands, they had power in their hands, they were allowed to slip through their fingers like water. The initiative then passed to the reactioner and now you've got the situation that you have in Sri Lanka. It won't last forever. The revolution will re-emerge, of course, but it will take time now. You can't waste an opportunity like that without consequences. And what are we talking about here? You see, and so many times this has happened and it continues to happen. This one factor that is missing, every factor was present. Every single factor for a successful revolution in Sri Lanka was present except for one, what we call the subjective factor, the revolutionary leadership, the revolutionary party and the revolutionary leadership, which led the Russian works to power in 1917. And therefore the opportunity was lost. That is an unpalatable truth, my friends, but it is a truth nonetheless. And the conclusion is that we must know that without the correct leadership, revolution can only succeed, and it can only, I would choose my words carefully, it can only succeed with extreme difficulty, because after all in the Paris commune they didn't have a leadership really speaking, but also they were defeated for the same reason. It can only succeed with great difficulty or most often of all it cannot succeed at all. And that's the main lesson that we have to discuss. And this is not an isolated event. We have now the situation in Iran. Again, what does it show for goodness sake? What does it show? It precisely shows that there's revolutionary implications present in the situation everywhere, and moreover it can come to the fore at any time. Again, yes I repeat, like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky, that applies to Britain, it applies to France, it applies to Italy, it applies to Brazil, it applies to the United States of America, and I would say that sooner or later. But that's not the point. That's not the point. The point is, when this occurs, when there will be a leadership ready and able to take advantage of the situation and guide it along the correct line. In this case in Iran, again Hegel points out that necessity reveals itself through accident. What happened in Iran was an accident. This poor young girl, this young Kurdish girl that was murdered in effect in the police station for a crime. What crime? Because she wasn't, not that she wasn't wearing the hijab, she wasn't wearing it correctly, beaten to death. Yes, but you see, that's happened many times in Iran. You think that was an isolated incident? How many times has that happened? How many women have been killed in this way in Iran? Many, many, many. And yet this time, you see the point, how quantity becomes quality. It's one step too far. It's one violent incident too far. And therefore it provoked this tremendous inspiring movement. What a wonderful movement. Again, it should fill us all with the greatest admiration and inspiration and confidence in our class. And in the youth, it's spread like wildfire. And in the women, the girls, the most downtrodden, the play section, not an accident. Not just university girls as well, but school students remove the hijab and challenge the police. 200 people have been killed, at least, in classes with the police. And it still continues. It still continues to this very moment. And the slogans, by the way, are very advanced. It's no longer a question of the hijab. It's no longer a question of that. The slogans of these young school kids, very young kids are shouting. It's down with the regime, down with the supreme leader. I mean, that's for the death penalty in Iran to say things like that. You'd be punishable by death, but they say it nonetheless. What an inspiration for all of us. And yet, and of course, now this is different. This is the big difference. Because we've seen movements, all right, not quite in the same way. We've had big movements in the past in Iran. This has spread to the working class and that's the factor that's been absent up until now. The mighty Iranian working class, which is the key to the revolution, not just in Iran, but in the whole of the Middle East. The oil workers, the teachers, many sections of transport workers, bus drivers and so on, in Teheran on strike. Now this moment. Even the official oil workers union, which has always been kept aloof, has been drawn into the struggle. Yes, this could be the beginning of a revolution in Iran. It reminds me very forcibly of the situation just before the revolution in 1979. You had a similar situation existing. Will it go that far? I don't know. One thing you can say, it can't go on like this indefinitely. There's a limit to how far the masses can be on the streets, tackling the state, getting killed and beaten up and so on. That's about the result. Therefore, we have to see what will happen. But again, the question can be come back to the same question, which is really the central question that we should be discussing this weekend. That's this vital question of the subjective factor. Now, in 1938, Leon Trotsky made a statement. He said that in the last analysis, the crisis of humanity can be reduced to one thing. And that's the crisis of leadership of the working class. And that's true. It was true then. It's even more true today. And just look at the situation. Look at the situation. You see, the subjective factor is just as important in the class struggle as it is in war. There are many parallels actually between revolution, which is a kind of war, and war between the nations. Many parallels. Now, this is an interesting point. How many times in the history of warfare has a large army composed of valiant, courageous soldiers been defeated by a far smaller force of trained professional troops led by good, efficient officers? How many times? Many times. Many times. In other words, the subjective factor of leadership is vital. And if it's vital in war, it's also vital in the classroom. And just look at the state of the subjective factor of the leadership of the working class. I will not speak about the right wing reform. It's the right wing trade union leaders, the right wing labour leaders, because they've long ago sold their soul to the devil. They've long ago abandoned any idea of source to infinity rule. Their agents, conscious, be sure of it, conscious agents of the ruling class who've infiltrated the labour movement only with one intention, to control it and to put it, to betray it and to put it at the surface of the ruling class. That's their sole role. They have no other role in society than that. On the other extreme, of course, you have ourselves, if you like, the revolutionary Marxists. And again, we have to be honest. For certain historical reasons, which I haven't got time to go into, objective reasons, the subjective factor of conscious, genuine Marxism, as opposed to the fake stuff which is all too readily available, I'm afraid, genuine Marxism, the forces of genuine Marxism have been thrown back. We have been thrown back by history, you know. And therefore, we're not in a position at this moment in time. We're not in a position to effectively change anything in the objective situation. You can make important changes locally, you know. But, you know, I wouldn't be too worried, by the way, I wouldn't be too worried about size. Every, I've said this before, at the risk of being a bore, I'll repeat it. Every revolutionary movement in history always starts as a small minority. As an insignificant factor, it's bound to. You think about it, it's inevitable. I mean, Jesus Christ started with 12, and one of those was no good. But in the end, he didn't do too bad, did he? Didn't do too bad. But in any case, to quote a more recent example, the Bolsheviks, the Russian Marxists. I mean, there's a book, it's not a bad book, it's called Bolsheviks and the Road to Revolution. It's by a promising young author. And if you read that book, you get all the facts. So I won't repeat it. But it's clear there, I quote chapter and verse, that started with very, very small, tiny groups, mainly of intellectuals, students and so on, studying Marxist capital in Tsarist Russia. And yet, within an immeasurable space of time, they were able to take power. And that, by the way, is because the subject we shall end up on, and that's the power of ideas. But let's leave that to one side. Take the other elements. The Stalinists no longer exist as a serious force. In the past, they were an obstacle, not anymore. They finished, really. And the former Stalinist leaders by God, they degenerated to an extent which is, in the past, you're thinking it was unthinkable. They become, in effect, the same as the worst type of reformists. And then we come to another element which is significant. The left reformists. OK. Now that's more complicated. Because whereas the right reformists, in most cases, are not trusted by the workers, and in many cases are hated by the workers, people like Starmer are not trusted, because of the role that they played in betraying and selling out. Even so, they can still come to power, for lack of an alternative. Starmer will come to power. Workers will have to go through an experience in order to learn again the realities of right reformism. But the left reformists, they're a bit different. They talk left. Sometimes they can talk very left. You'd be surprised in the future how left they can talk. But you see, the trouble is with the left reformists, they talk the talk with, they don't walk the walkers, I think they say, in the States. I don't like this American neo-legions, but they are. I think that's what they say. Yes. Take two examples. One from Britain and one from the United States. Take Jeremy Corbyn. Nice chap. Nice man. Inoffensive. He doesn't beat his wife. He doesn't kick the cat. Doesn't swear. Doesn't drink. Nice man. Means well. I've no doubt his intentions are excellent. But unfortunately, like all the left reformists, he was not prepared to go all the way and he compromised. Now, take another example. Sanders in the United States is the same. The interesting thing about Sanders and Corbyn is not themselves as individuals. It's too easy to point to their failings, if you like, and the limitations. I don't want to be too harsh on them because I repeat, they're obviously very sincere persons. But a sincere reform is very often more dangerous than an insincere one. But never, leave that to one side. The real significance of both Sanders and Corbyn is this. Immediately, they just made a few left-sounding radical phrases. Immediately, there was an explosion of support. Hundreds of thousands of people. Millions in the case of Corbyn. We're awakened to political life. Why? Not because of Corbyn being particularly clever or able. These people were looking for something. They were looking for a point of reference. And that's the same thing with Sanders in the States. That's the point. Don't doubt it. Beneath the surface of apparent apathy and difference and so on, there's a seething anger in society. A seething discontent. Above all, there's a seething frustration because they don't find any point of reference in Britain, for example, people despair. Look at this terrible position. We need to do something. Even the Tory, I think 40% of Tory voters say they're in favour of nationalising. The utilities. The mood is there. Is there anyone expressing this? Nobody is expressing it. But Corbyn, in a way, did express it. And Sanders expressed it. Yes, but in the final analysis, they preferred unity with the right wing and with the party officials, the party machine, rather than with their own base. Therefore, sad to say, it wasn't deliberate, but sad to say, they betrayed the dreams, if you like, of their followers, and now those movements have collapsed. There's nothing left. Same could be said of Syriza in Greece, of Cyprus, rather, and of Podemos in Spain, the same thing. And therefore, this is the problem. Left reformism will emerge again. It will emerge again. Because there's nothing else. Of course, we're too weak, basically. We're too weak. And therefore, ultimately, we will have to enter into agreements with them. Of course, we'll support them against the right wing. Be sure of it. We'll always support the left against the right wing, of course. We can enter into agreements, and United Fronts and so on and so forth. But we must do so critically. As Lenin said, if you don't know United Front, you keep one eye on the enemy who's in front of you and another eye on your ally who can betray you and desert you at any moment in time. So, you have to do both things. But it's not the kind of stupid attacks of the ultra-lesson. Insult people like Corbyn. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. We're in a friendly way, in a comradely way, in a positive way. We put forward our ideas to use Lenin's expression that he put forward in 1917. Patiently explain. Patiently explain. That's all you need to do because time now is on our side. Now we've got to finish because I've run out of time. I mean, you can't see this, but the chairman is kicking me under the table, but there we are. I will take it up with him later. But he's not really. But anyway, I've run out of time, unfortunately. But you see, one thing that you must understand. Look, we, the International Marxist Tennessee, we're not a mass organisation far from it. We are building, we are having success. Considerable success, I would say. But we've got a long way to go. We've got a long way to go. And the way to succeed is that we have to, we don't lecture the workers from the outside or the youth. You go along with them and you experience the, go through the experience and you explain and put forward the alternative in a patient in a comradely manner. That's all. Because the difference is this. For a very long time, I've been in this movement for a long time, longer than I can remember. To be precise, 1960, I was still in school at the time, believe it or not. I was young and thin and handsome like you guys. It was hard to believe. Now I know, but there we are. Long time ago. Okay. But, you know, I was like, what did I say? You've interrupted me now. I wasn't talking about that at all. What did I say? Oh, yes. For most of my life, I and our tendency, we've been fighting against the stream. Okay. We're not worried about that. We're not worried about that. Mark, you know, at the end of his life, Engels wrote in a letter. He said a wonderful thing. He said, Mark's and I were in a minority all our lives. And we were proud to be in a minority. Okay, that's what the Engels wrote. I could say the same thing. Okay. But we've been fighting against the stream. That's not a bad thing. Our forces, our comrades, have been strengthened and steeled in this battle. Fighting against this, constantly fighting against the stream. That's okay. But now you see, and that's the big difference, the tide of history that I mentioned at the beginning has begun to change. The tide of history, the current of history, is now beginning comrades and friends to flow in our direction. I've never seen it in my life. I have never, I've seen all kinds of things. I've seen revolutions have become more than one. And I've also seen counter revolutions, more than one of them too. But I've never seen a situation in my life. We're particularly the youth, the young people, we're more open to the ideas of Marxism and the ideas of revolution. Even without us being present, they've already drawn these conclusions. And therefore we have to reach these people. We have to reach them. Therefore enormous possibilities, that's the lesson we must draw from all of this. The booze was pessimistic, let them be pessimistic. And the left reformists, oh my God. Oh my God. I wonder why they don't commit suicide sometimes, when this is a... Oh my God. It reminds me of a poem by Edward Lear. You know Edward Lear? How does it go? There was an old man of Cape... This is not a rude one, by the way. There was an old man of Cape Horn who wished that he'd never been born. So he sat on a chair till he died to despair that dullerous old man of Cape Horn. There we are, there's left reformists. But anyway, we are the only optimistic ones. Because we know, I know, I can see that the road is open now for Marxism comments. It's open in a way that it never was before. The possibilities are in the sky is the limit. It depends on us. It only depends on one thing, it depends on you. No, no, no, no, don't look at the person next to you. I saw that, don't look at it. It depends on you. Individually, you must assume your responsibilities before history, if you like. And I'll promise you one thing. What I won't promise you is an easy life and an easy time. If you were looking for an easy life and an easy time, my friends, you were born at the wrong time of history. You said you'd be born some other time. Oh, no, no, no, these are going to be hard times. Hard struggles, hard fights, many fights. Some victories, many defeats with these leaders. Be prepared for that too. Can't go crying because there's a defeat there. We must bear defeats with the same cheerful equanimity that we bear victories. That's not a soldier's attitude, because we are what? We are soldiers in the international army of the proletariat, don't forget it. And one final word I'll tell you. We have one thing. We haven't got the numbers. We haven't got the money. We haven't got it yet, we will have. We're waiting for the property market to collapse, if you must know. Ha ha ha ha! You think the international treasure is stupid or what? Ha, yeah. No, but we haven't yet got a big centre. We don't have millionaire backers like Starmer. I see there's a millionaire support of the Tories just transferred to the Labour Party. We don't need that kind of... But we've got one thing. One thing which nobody else has got in the world, I guarantee it, I'm telling you. We have one thing and it's a very important thing. It is the most important thing of all. It's the power of ideas. And Marx explains ideas become a material force when they grip the minds of the masses and that's beginning to occur. Our ideas will be well received. By millions in the future. But at the moment we will be satisfied with more modest targets. And therefore, one final remark. These ideas are our weapons. They are our weapons. And if we are good soldiers, which I trust that we are, you keep your weapons clean and sharp. And that's the purpose of this weekend. Our enemies don't understand that, leave them alone. They never understand ideas. They're idiots. They have no ideas. They leave them alone. No, no, no, no. We spend this weekend discussing ideas. Not to pass a pleasant couple of days. We hope it will be pleasant and informative. We hope that's the case. But in any case, that's not the function. What we are doing, my friends, is we are sharpening our weapons. We are sharpening our weapons for the class struggle that will take place, which is taking place. And we must learn to participate and use those weapons to the best advantage which I trust every single one of you will do. And that's the way, that's the only way in which our forces, the forces of Jeremy and Marxism will be built and will succeed. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Alan. Thanks, comrades. We do have a little bit of time now. And so I'm going to bring in a couple of comrades in contributions. First up will be Daniel. Is he going to get a microphone for someone? Yeah, great. That's amazing to see so many comrades here. So, for decades, China has been rising relentlessly and growing its power as well. And throughout that time, the Chinese Communist Party has used that fact as a source of legitimacy. Basically, what they say every time there's something like what's just happened in Britain is they draw attention to that and they say, you see, this is what you get when you have democracy. It's a mess. It doesn't deliver people what they actually want. And it creates economic chaos. Whereas what we have is decades of growth. Your lives are getting better year after year. And it's stable. You know what to expect. And that's because we can have a long-term view because we're not going to get kicked out by a general election. And that has been true basically without interruption for decades. And that idea and that justification has become deeply embedded in the system in China and in the psychology of the masses in China. So what is going to happen now that Chinese capitalism is in deep trouble? I think perhaps comrades don't realise quite how serious the economic crisis that is beginning to hit China is. And that's possibly because, you know, because of the way that obviously it's a totalitarian regime. It's able to, and it's also, there's a lot of state ownership of the economy still and so it's able to sort of slow this process down somewhat. But the process is happening nevertheless. And it's not down to the lockdowns, although they are certainly not helping matters, that's for sure. The point is that the model for Chinese capitalism has run out of roads as happens to any capitalist economy. And as elsewhere, their model has been based increasingly on an ever-bigger pile of debt, which they use to boost demand and to basically delay the crisis. Total national debt of the Chinese economy is now about 230% of GDP, growing every year at a rate of 5%. And the property industry's debt has reached 75% of Chinese GDP, which is about the same as of the US property sector in 2008. Obviously we know what happened there. And the bubble is bursting basically in slow motion. Now debt under capitalism is a kind of lubricant that is used to fuel growth and to allow capitalism to go beyond its limits for a time. And it's also a kind of thread that connects everything in the economy. And if you pull that thread, then the economy begins to unravel. Obviously, as we know, debt can't grow forever. And as it grows and grows, it begins to lose its effect, which has been happening in China year after year. It can mask the contradictions of the real economy for a time, but ultimately those contradictions are fundamental. And so sooner or later, the debts obviously can't be repaid and so things turn into their opposites and you have a crisis. And that's what's been happening slowly, relatively slowly over the last year in the property sector particularly, which is the driver really of the Chinese economy. And that, by the way, has also been the basis for the finances of local governments and all other kinds of investment that's been taking place over the last 14 years, really. And that's because of the way in which basically when the crisis in 2008 happened, when they did actually go into crisis briefly, they got out of that by getting local governments to lead a fiscal stimulus. Basically local governments lent out massive amounts of money to create particularly an infrastructure boom. And they got that money, the local governments, by selling land, the land that they owned that peasants basically worked in the main. They sold that off, in many cases illegally, but nevertheless they sold it off for property construction. But that property construction is largely speculative, right? And the model itself has become increasingly speculative. These property companies, they actually, basically they're all in debt, up to their eyeballs in debt. They're all trying to build more stuff and sell it as quickly as possible. In fact, to pay off their debts, they have to sell the properties before they're actually finished. So the people buying the properties are, you know, Chinese people, or in many cases themselves, also speculators, who have, you know, the property isn't there yet, but they're buying it because they want to get on the ladder. And, yeah, like I said, many of these buyers are speculators. They're not actually the people that are going to live in the flats. They're buying up multiple flats once again before they're even built. And this is, you know, they're in debt. The property companies are in debt. Everybody's essentially in debt, and they've been spinning these plates, and it's all been hinged upon the expectation that the property sector will continue going up in value all the time. But, of course, now it isn't. It's crashing down. Millions of people are finding that the properties that they've bought are not actually going to get built. That's actually led to hundreds of thousands of people participating in a mortgage strike, refusing to pay their mortgages because they're not getting their properties, which is enormously significant in a country like China. Property developers now have missed payments on a record $31 billion in offshore dollar bonds up this year, up to August. Home sales have collapsed by 30%, which has driven many firms into bankruptcy. And, of course, this all comes back to the local governments and their fueling of the infrastructure boom. Because, as I said, they based their infrastructure lending on selling land. But now these land sales have collapsed. Revenues from land sales over the last year are down by 28%. And they account for 40% of local government revenues, which, as I mentioned, is vital for their then, in turn, lending money out. And thousands of these stand on the brink of default, and these are local governments. They're part of the state. It's thought that the total amount of debt that these local governments are sitting upon or responsible for is $7.8 trillion, which is half of Chinese GDP. And therefore, if this does collapse, which is highly likely, it will lead to a full-blown economic crisis throughout the economy. And this is of direct and immediate significance for the world economy. Of course, the boom I've mentioned, the infrastructure boom, after 2008, really rescued the world economy from an all-out depression. 28% of world GDP growth in the last 10 years has been from China. Clearly, that's not going to be possible for that to be repeated. Just as the world stands on the brink of recession, so China, the engine of the world's growth, is also standing on the brink of its own crisis. Now, as I mentioned, this is what the Chinese regime bases itself on. So how will they react and how will Chinese society react when this comes to an end, essentially, as it now is? As everyone knows, Xi Jinping has been concentrating more and more power in his hands. And many people were wondering why, what's the significance of that? This is why they know what is coming, and they are getting ready for the crisis that is about to engulf Chinese society. They fear the Chinese masses as they are right to. Thank you, Daniel. Jack? So Europe this winter is under severe risk of fundamental social unrest, a winter of discontent. These aren't my words, these aren't Alan's words. These are quotes from the right wing, Prime Minister of Belgium, and another bourgeois analyst. So you can see clearly what is coming down the line. One of the main elements really that is causing trouble here is, as Alan mentioned, is the soaring cost of energy. Now, this situation was exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, but it started well before that under the impact of the generalised inflation due to the escape that governments found to come out of the COVID crash. So, basically, the price of natural gas at the moment is around seven times higher than the average of the previous decade, and this is a real worry for Europe. So Europe last year got about 40% of its gas from Russia. And so obviously, as you can expect, the blame at the moment from all of the media is on Vladimir Putin for causing this issue. But the point is, really, is that it's not just Putin. A huge amount of blame, an equal amount of blame, really has to go on Western sanctions on Russia. What we're seeing, really, is essentially a war of sanctions between, on the one hand, Western imperialism, and on the other, Russia, and that's what's exacerbating this situation. Now, one thing that this demonstrates, first of all, is the barrier that the nation-state plays in capitalism. There's a crisis, obviously, at the moment, and so you'd have thought that there could be some sort of common plan that could be found amongst all of the nations of Europe. But as soon as any details are discussed, for example, on a cap on the price of gas, an EU-wide cap, well, you have disagreement. So, for example, there was an 11-hour summit that just about finished at 2 o'clock this morning, and the result of this summit, no agreements whatsoever, there was just a roadmap to an agreement, whatever that means. So, what was this 11-hour summit for, really? What we're seeing, basically, is that you have, on the one hand, richer countries, like Germany, for example, are very sceptical about introducing caps on gas because they worry, well, then we're not actually going to be able to import any gas whatsoever. So, what you have is that in a situation of crisis, basically, each government looks to the interests of its own ruling class, first and foremost, and that's why you see these crises of European unity whenever there is a crisis. Now, in trying to deal with this whole crisis, there's obviously a lot of talk on trying to reduce the amount of consumption of gas, and this has happened, but the reason why there's been a kind of reduction in the amount of gas that has been consumed, or a large reason for that's the main reason, is that there's been a huge amount of production that has been stopped. There's the biggest fall in production that we've seen since the impact of the coronavirus, since, basically, economies were completely locked down recently. And why was that, right? Well, so, I saw a letter, there was a letter by 12 business groups representing various industries from cement to steel, all sorts of things, and they wrote in this letter, they said, there was no business case to continue production in Europe. So it's pretty dreadful stuff, right, for European capitalism. Now, on top of this, if you can have a problem in one particular industry, but it's not ever going to be limited to that particular industry, just as one example, so recently, up to 70% of Europe's fertilizer production was closed down completely because of the increase of gas prices. But it's not just bad, I mean, that's pretty bad in itself, right, but it's not just bad for that industry, because the lack of fertilizer then causes problems for other industries. One of these is now a shortage of CO2, and this in itself is causing massive trouble in the beverage industry. So if anyone's going to the pub after this meeting today, I mean, you better enjoy it, because many beverage companies themselves are having to curtail or completely stop production. So basically what we're looking at at the moment is the risk of deindustrialisation in Europe and all of the ills that that would bring with it. But yeah, so without any kind of joint agreements seemingly being possible, European governments are looking to save the situation internally. So you've got countries like France and Germany, for example, who have nationalised energy producers. That in itself I think shows how little faith the capitalists actually have in their system. As soon as it goes into crisis, they don't let the market save things, they have to have the states rush in to save the day. Okay, there's a huge amount of money being thrown at the situation as well. As totals, about half a trillion euros has been thrown at the situation. But obviously all of this in itself means more problems being created down the line because there are more debts being piled up for all European governments. And this is all the more devastating in this situation that Alan laid out with increasing global interest rates. This is a really desperate situation that European governments find themselves in. And it's extremely desperate because they can see at the moment that they are sitting on a volcano. Anna-Lena Baerbock, the German Foreign Minister, actually has talked about the danger of popular uprisings that we could see over this winter. Now, in general, people are quite conservative, I think. They just want to get on, live their lives, watch football perhaps, as Alan may dislike. But anyway, they just want to get on with their lives. But when you are presented with this choice between heating and eating, when that is so starkly presented in front of you, people are forced to engage in politics. And that is what we're seeing at the moment. And there have already been some very interesting movements. In the Czech Republic, for example, relatively recently, there was a demonstration of up to 100,000 people, including, obviously, demands around the cost of living crisis. But one of the main slogans, actually, was in opposition to the Czech government's involvement in the Ukraine war. And this is just one warning of what is likely to come all over Europe because you have a situation of spiralling prices, shortages of energy, shortages of all basic goods that people rely on. And so the choice, really, is not just between heating and eating, because there is a third choice that many people will choose and will not even choose, they'll be forced to. And that's fighting back. And so I think this perspective that Alan has laid out, the other comrades will talk about, I think that should fill us with an immense amount of confidence because there's a complete social crisis out there. We are the ones with the ideas. So there's never really been a better time to be a Marxist, I would say. But it should also fill us with an immense sense of responsibility because we are falling way behind the wheel of history, as Alan put it. So I think we need to use this whole weekend to galvanise ourselves, go back to where we live, and build the forces of Marxism so that we can have a force that can meet these future movements that will pop up all over Europe and all over the world. Thank you, Jack. We'll have Jordi now. Hello. I wanted to add a few points about Latin America. Latin America is the one region in the world that was worst affected by the COVID pandemic, both from the point of view of the number of people who died in relation to the population, but also from an economic point of view, we had a devastating impact. And this was already after five years prior to COVID, there was five years of economic stagnation. And this is what explains why at the end of 2019, just before the COVID pandemic, there were a whole series of mass uprisings in different Latin American countries. Starting in Puerto Rico where people came out on a massive strike demonstration and overthrew the governor. And this is in a place which technically is a U.S. colony in Haiti, where there was a months-long mass mobilisation of the people against the conditions of poverty that exist in that country and against the government that's run from the United States and by criminal gangs. And then there were two enormous uprisings, the one in Ecuador in October 2019 and the one in Chile three years to this day on the start of the 18th of October with the student youth at the forefront. And these were huge movements. We're not just talking about protest demonstrations or big strikes, we're talking about insurrections, i.e. the governments were put against the ropes in the case of Ecuador. The government had to flee the capital, Quito, abandon the presidential palace and the workers and peasants and the youth, they organised self-defense, an indigenous and popular guard in Ecuador, the primera línea, the front line in Chile. And they faced brutal repression. Dozens of people were killed in Ecuador, same in Chile, brutal repression on the part of the forces of the police, the caramineros and so on. Militarisation of the country, state of emergency, none of that was able to stop these huge movements. And you may ask, what were these movements about? Well, there were sparks for this movement in the case of these movements, in the case of Ecuador, it was the lifting of subsidies of fuel and in the case of Chile, it was an apparently insignificant thing, an increase in the fares of the underground system, transportation system in Santiago. But in reality, this was just a spark, the trigger for these movements. These movements were movements overall against the capitalist system, just unable to provide for basic things, healthcare, pensions, education and against also, there's a very strong sense of disillusionment and lack of legitimacy of bourgeois democracy. People have elected different governments and the policies don't change. People don't trust the politicians, they don't trust the judges, there's a general discrediting of all the different sectors of the capitalist state. And this has the meaning of these two big uprisings. Now, this process was cut across partially by the COVID pandemic. The COVID pandemic struck the beginning of 2020. People were locked down, they had to see how they could survive and the process was partially cut across. But it then started to return because the conditions haven't changed and the process of these mass movements, mass uprisings has come back in Latin America. We saw a year ago the national strike in Colombia and this was an extraordinary event. If you know anything about Colombia, they say it's the most dangerous country to be a trade unionist anywhere in the world. You're going to be killed. And there's massive repression, there's paramilitary gangs that are linked to the state that act against workers and peasant organisations. Nevertheless, in this country, there was a mass movement. The unions called for a one day strike on the 28th of April last year and then the people stayed out. Without any leadership, the unions were saying, no, we're going to have an online May Day event. Go back to your homes because it's dangerous because of COVID. People stayed out on the streets for two months. The youth at the forefront, also organizing self-defense against police, repression and so on. And this strike also won its main demand, the repeal of the tax reform. And still people stayed out on the streets, to overthrow the government. And then we also saw another big movement in Ecuador a few months ago. Another national strike that went on for a few weeks and put again the government against the ropes. And now we see another big movement in Haiti against the threat of military intervention by the United States and Canada. And this is the general situation. On the back of these movements, we have also seen the election of progressive or left governments in a number of countries. Andreas Manolo, Perth Aberador in Mexico, Xiomara in Honduras, Castillo in Peru, Boric in Chile, the Fernandes government in Argentina and all these governments have one thing in common. They all talk about neoliberalism. We are against neoliberalism. But what they mean is another capitalism is possible. That you can remain within the limits of the capitalist system which none of them challenge and carry out different policies. And this goes back to the situation between 2005 and 2015 where there were a number of progressive governments in Latin America which on the back of a boom of natural resources, high prices of oil and other commodities, were able for a short period of time to carry out social policies without going beyond the limits of capitalism. But the difference between then and now is that now we don't see a boom of the commodities. There is no boom in the world economy that can give them room for manuba. And these governments are being exposed very quickly. The government of Castillo has gone through, I don't know how many crises there are already. And so the illusions that the masses might have in some of these governments are going to be dissipated much quicker than it was the case 10 or 15 years ago. And the scene is set in the whole of Latin America for new uprisings, for new mass movements which are inevitable. And the only thing that needs to be discussed really is in 2019 both in Ecuador and in Chile the masses could have taken power, the workers, the peasants, the youth could have taken power. There was nothing to stop them other than the fact that there wasn't a leadership that was raising the question. There was putting the real question on the table. And this is our task. We are on a raise against time to build a leadership that can bring our class to victory in one or another of these insurrections that will inevitably take place in the next time, not only in Latin America but across the world. Thank you, Judy. And now Adam. Comrades, this is really an amazing time to be holding this event. I don't think we could have picked a better weekend to be meeting, given all the truly spectacular events that are taking place in Britain right now. But I think what we've got to remember with the events in Britain is really just a harbinger of what we can expect in all countries in the period ahead. Capitalism is breaking at its weakest links in places like Sri Lanka and in Britain also, which has a special crisis, if you like, because of the result of its long-term decline. But this long-term decline has produced degenerate leaders like Boris Johnson, like Liz Truss, to generate who themselves then become a factor in accelerating the decline and intensifying the chaos. But I don't want to tread too much on this question of the British situation, which I'm sure Rob and others will cover over the weekend. But the point is that these individuals like Boris and Truss, they are not solely responsible for the crisis, although their actions and their ideas clearly play a role. The fundamental problem lies with the world economy and ultimately with capitalism, the capitalist system itself. Alan talked about this inflation crisis. Again, there is a talk later in the weekend, which will go more into depth about the real causes behind this. But in summary, it's the product of all the accumulated contradictions that have built up, particularly over the last 15 years since 2008, all the attempts by the ruling class to avoid and delay a crisis and to get out of each crisis have paved the way for where we are now. What you see really now is that in trying to restore equilibrium in one area on the question of prices and inflation, the ruling class is going to tip the whole world economy into a new world slump. In fact, this is their stated aim. This is actively what they are consciously trying to do in the sense that they want to bring up unemployment and bring down wages in order to bring down inflation. In other words, make the working class pay for this crisis, as with every crisis. That's why central banks are waging this aggressive war on inflation and hiking up interest rates. It's very similar to a period not so long ago. In 1980, a man called Paul Volcker, who was head of the US Federal Reserve, undertook a very similar programme to try and bring down the inflation that had racked the world economy, particularly the US in the 1970s. Many people are thinking that this will be a repeat of that episode, which saw a couple of years of sharp recession in the US. Alan raised an important point, which is that history never repeats itself exactly. There's very important differences today to the 1980s and to the 1970s, that we should bear in mind, and we're already seeing these. Number one is the world economy today is far more integrated than it was then. In other words, what the US does has much bigger ramifications across the world. The raising of interest rates sharply in the US is going to have a huge fallout across the world. Other central banks are forced to follow suit so that they don't import inflation from the US, which is already happening. This, in turn, obviously increases borrowing costs for everyone across the whole world. This raises another important difference. In the 80s, debts globally were at an all-time low. Today, debts are an all-time record high. World-wide debt stands around 360% of GDP. And this, as I said, is the product of all the crises that we've seen and all the measures they've taken to get out of every crisis. The bailing out of the banks in 2008, the bailing out of big business during the pandemic, now the bailing out of the energy companies with the war and the energy crisis. This means that interest rates today are going to have a far bigger effect when they're raised than they did in the 1980s. You're going to see all these zombie businesses that have accumulated going bankrupt. Loads of indebted households, anyone with a mortgage, suddenly finding their costs of living going up massively. And whole countries even being plunged into bankruptcy as the Tories are now discovering. This is why, actually, you're seeing in Britain, in the USA, in Europe deep splits occurring in the ruling class, far deeper than we've seen before. You're seeing splits between the central banks and governments. You're seeing splits within the ruling parties. You're even seeing splits within schizophrenic individuals like Liz Truss, who can't decide what kind of programme they want. Only she doesn't get to decide at all now. This all adds an extra layer of political instability which feeds back onto the economic instability. Justice Trotsky explained in his speeches to the commenter 100 years ago, where he pointed out that every attempt to restore economic equilibrium would destabilise the political and social situation. That's exactly what Truss's successor is also going to find out, no matter who they are, whether it's Boris or Sunach or Stamur, all of these will face the same situation. Finally, the other thing I want to say is the crisis today is far deeper. Unlike in the 1980s, where you had a period of upswing and markets expanding, you had globalisation beginning to take place, markets across the world expanding. Now, instead of the accumulated kind of fat that you had that could be chopped, you had privatisation able to take place, you had new markets that could be exploited. Today we're coming out of 15 years of crisis and stagnation. Globalisation is in retreat, markets are saturated, protectionism is on the rise. We've got another session on that this weekend. We're seeing a new world slump on top of an existing devastating cost of living crisis, which we should say is not just a cost of living crisis, it is the latest chapter in this long-running crisis of capitalism. The result is likely to be, therefore, the worst of all worlds from the capitalist point of view, stagflation, rampant inflation and world recession at the same time. There is no way out on the basis of capitalism. This raises, I would like to add and just finally finish on, this final important difference with the 1980s. The working class today is far stronger in Britain and internationally that has never been a stronger, bigger working class. Therefore, the prospects for world revolution have never been greater with a caveat that we have to fill that missing factor of the subjective factor, the revolutionary leadership. If we can build this and overcome that missing subjective factor, then the prospects for world revolution have never been greater and that's our task, therefore. Thank you, Adam. And now, Lubna. Thank you, Ben. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Iranian situation and, of course, Alan mentioned already that mass movements have erupted after the killing of the Kurdish woman by the morality police. Now, yeah, this was not an isolated incident. This has happened many times in the past, but as Alan mentioned, this is, of course, an accident expressing its necessity. Because shortly after death, a mass movement erupted across the entire country in 140 cities, villages and towns. And rather than stomping out the movement, the regime's repression actually is whipping up broader layers into action. It provoked real backlash and calls for even a general strike. Waves of strikes were taking place which have started in the oil and petrol chemical sector, indeed the heart of the Iranian economy, but among students and staff as well, where dozens of universities have been shut down and a majority of more than 100 universities have also heated the call for the nationwide student strike. The regime was very much caught by surprise. It did not expect the speed of the radicalisation of the movement and resorted also in increased violent repression. But the layers that are not on the straight, sorry, the layers that are actually on the straight are the most downtrodden and pressed layers in society. It is indeed a woman who came to the fore, but also the Kurds and the Balochee and the youth were of course the most sensitive barometer in society. And it truly reflects the deeper anger that exists in society. But the regime is putting out the idea that this protest is like merely ethnic secessionist movement sponsored by Western imperialism. They point to the support of the monarchists as the only organised opposition and the noisy campaign of course of the imperialists. In fact, the people themselves, there are actually not raising any pro monarchy slogans amongst the masses that doesn't exist. What they shout, as Ellen mentioned, is the death to the dictator, be they Shah or Supreme Leader. And they are also raising the slogan of unity between the Kurds, the Persians and the Balochee. The Kurds are also not raising any secessionist slogans and they also insist on that basically. What they say is that the fight is the same fight as all Iranians. And a proof of this unity is that also the slogan of the movement Women, Life and Freedom is a Kurdish slogan that comes from the, you know, originates from the PKK movement. And this slogan has also become very much the battle cry of the people on the streets. Their ultimate goal, as protestors say, is the overthrow of the Islamic Republic in favour of a secular and democratic system. It shows the effect of revolutions, that during revolutions the working class reaches the highest point of unity between all oppressed layers in society. And why revolutions form also the best way to overcome all forms of oppression. Through uniting, striking and literally fighting the regime, they gain a sense of power that truly develops consciousness on a higher level. And just to give another example, we see this too in Sri Lanka where the Rajapaksa family had tried to use racist divisions to cement their rule, basically, between the Sinhala Buddhist majority, the Tamils, Muslims and Christians. And it was basically the revolutionary movement where this division has basically come tumbling down. The masses insisted on their unity and have very much rejected racism. And for the first time in decades, Sinhala and Tamils stood side by side in struggle. But the point is that because in Iran, there is no clear organisation by this movement, the only voice that is heard and is amplified by the regime is that of the monarchists. So there is naturally some suspicion amongst the broad masses that are angry at the regime, but also truly hate the imperialists. And they saw what happened in Syria and they know that the imperialists have fermented ethnic conflicts and civil war that tore apart the country. In fact, the Iranian regime wants to push things in that direction and have very much tried to undercut the movement and to discredit it. And they are very much engaged as well in the bombing of the Kurdish region of Iran. And they have also massacred over 80 Balochis in one protest. And the hesitation to participate in the protest by some lay society is summed up, I believe, like very well in this quote of a 19-year-old student in Tehran when she was interviewed by the Financial Times. She said, I'd like to see the Islamic Republic gone as I see no future for myself in my homeland with all of the injustice, gender discrimination, gloomy economic perspective and waste of talent. But I don't see an option for a successor and surely I don't want to see the insecurity that an absence of an established government can bring. So the only way to cut across this hesitation is for the movement to raise up its own organisation with very clear programme and demands. And they have started to actually form this. There are certain embryonic sort of starting to organise someone's students in particular, but it's still very much at this immature stage. However, the self-organisation of the masses is a hallmark of all true revolutionary movements. We saw this as well with the rise of the Soviets during the Russian Revolution and the factory and neighbourhoods, the Shuras, basically meaning councils, which we saw for a brief period that competed for power during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. These structures form the embryo of a future society fighting to be born. But in order to reach that potential they must first of all reach all layers of the masses, in particular of course the working class. It's imperative that the committees of struggle be led as widely as possible and are connected on a local, regional and national level so as to become the organised expression of the will of the movement itself. In this way, the as-of-yet-unsolved problem of leadership can also therefore be addressed. And demands must be put forward that go beyond the democratic demands that the movement is limited to at the moment. They must put forward on a class programme consisting of social and economic demands that can appeal to the broader layers of society of the working class and the poor and oppressed. Furthermore, the most advanced layers should of course look forward and almost to students and workers to the need to put the ideas of the revolutionary ideas forward of Marxism which is the most powerful tool that the working class has in order to liberate itself to truly liberate itself but also of course from oppression. I think internationally it would certainly find an echo in the rest of the Middle East. I would say that a socialist revolution in Iran would mean key for the region and would mean also a first step in the socialist federation of the Middle East. Thank you, Lubna. And Fred. Is it working? Just a few words on Italy. It's not working. I thought it was. It is working. You're confusing me. This is a manoeuvre. I want to talk about Italy and France and that's not because of the excellent food and wine. There are other reasons for talking about these countries. Italy is a country racked with debt, a public debt of 152% of GDP. That is far higher than the level of debt in Britain, for example. It's 2.75 trillion euros. Inflation is at 9%. I get regular messages from friends and relatives in Italy and the main thing is prices, inflation. Everything is going up. Everything is more expensive. A friend of mine who is a railway worker who's worked 42 years and now retired said the other day, I thought I had a decent pension and the point is he did. He told me it was a decent pension, but it's not a decent pension anymore. That's what this is doing to millions of people and it's making them think and it's making them change their approach. We had a guy in government in Italy until recently, Draghi. He was the man of the banks, the bank representative. He was there to do a job, sought out the finances of Italy on what point of view, of course, from the point of view of the capitalist class. He managed to form a coalition with a huge majority. But notice one thing in the elections. All the parties that made up that coalition did badly in the elections. Every single one of them. The Democratic Party, the Five Stars. It's amazing, of course. Well, not all of them, but some of them were able to say they won because they didn't lose as much as they thought they were going to lose. The only party that gained was Fratelli d'Italia, the Brothers of Italy. Why? They were the only party in opposition. Now, people are talking about, oh, fascism, fascism. The first thing that she did was to try and reassure the markets by putting as many technocrats as possible in the government. She's trying to find an acceptable finance minister. From the very first day, the bourgeois were saying, the finance minister must be acceptable to the international markets. That's who decides. Like in Britain, by the way. Who decided what happened these last few days? It was the finance capital that decided what's going on. And in Italy it's the same thing. They decide what Miloni does. She hasn't got no independent policy. But what's significant is the 40% abstentions in a country where in the past over 90% would go and vote. Now, 40% support no party. The reason for that is a growing distance between ordinary people, ordinary working class people and the parliament. Parliament has been exposed many times for what it is, for the sham that it is. We have poverty growing. We have 3.5 million people in Italy receiving what's called the citizen's wage, Redliddo di Cittadinanza, which was introduced by basically under the pressure of the five stars movement. Well, this government has come to power saying they want to remove that in a moment like this where millions of people are literally barely surviving thanks to that income. They want to hit them exactly when inflation is going through the roof and poverty is growing. There's a swath of companies in Italy that are going bankrupt, factories which are closing across Italy, from Genoa to Trest to Florence, big industrial plants which are facing closure. This is what's happening in Italy. The brothers of Italy will find it extremely difficult to govern in this situation. I don't know how long. Trust was quite fast. I don't know if Miloni is able to run as fast as trust. But it's not going to be a five-year term. Next door we have France. Inflation, over 6%. France's debt in absolute term is actually bigger than the Italian one. It's close to 3 trillion euros. That's 115% of GDP. All these countries have similar figures. Now Macron is still in government but he's a far weaker politician than he was when he was first elected. If you calculate his vote in terms of the overall electorate, he only got 20% in the first round. This is also a common feature we see in many countries. Those who govern do not have the majority of the population supporting them. It's through one mechanism or another in the electoral system which allows them to have a government but only 20%. That's not a big base considering what he has to do. He's called on by the bourgeois to continue on the road of austerity. The problem is last time he did it he ended up with the yellow vest movement and the perspective is that something similar could explode again but we have the oil workers dispute at this moment in France with massive support amongst the population with the union that leads them calling for this movement to be spread nationally. Now unfortunately, both in Italy and in France we have these trade union leaders who do everything possible to use protests and days of action as a way of letting off steam rather than promoting an all out struggle of the working class. That explains why in spite of the huge anger very often in France you have a day of action and it's not as big as you would expect because people don't believe that just simply by marching through the streets of Paris for one day you're going to achieve something. They want a general strike. Some of the slogans on the demonstrations were called out general strike. In France we have the polarisation with Le Pen on the right and Mélenchon on the left. Mélenchon only narrowly misgoing through to the second round it would have been a very different scenario had he done. In Italy there's not even an expression. The old Alan's book spoke about the ex-communist party leaders. Some of them have become openly bourgeois. The democratic party in Italy is a bourgeois party. It's been taken over by the Christian Democrats by the way. That's what's actually happened to it. The communist party's leaders did that. That's the heritage of Stalinism in Italy. Now the two countries have high levels of abstention which shows the distance between the masses and the establishment and the parliament. High levels of debt which mean the policy is austerity. High inflation trade union leaders hold in the workers back but at the same time we see the growing pressure from below. The anger Alan says on the bus stops in Italy everybody's talking about politics. I had an experience talking to a relative I explained to them we just had a few minutes and they said what do you do and I thought well I'll tell you what I do as a job and she said and you tell me now you know and she wanted to know how many comrades we've got but wow this is an indication of how things are changing. Now in both countries that are great traditions France is the country of May 68 and Italy is the country of the hot autumn of 1969. Those traditions are going to come back you can see it it's being prepared an explosion and the spontaneity that often is an expression of the Italian working class is going to surprise the trade union leaders and it's going to surprise everybody. You watch this space and you'll see what happens. Okay Thank you Fred. All right we have one more speaker which will be Ben Currie and then Alan will deliver some final remarks. Hey comrades Lotters expecting a comedy routine. Yeah I was the front page of the Economist this week talked about the Italianisation of British politics. I wanted to talk about the Sri Lankaisation of the world situation and also the British situation to be honest. So the first thing I wanted to know, I mean Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president in November 2019 in Sri Lanka. Less than a month actually before Boris Johnson got his whopping majority in December 2019 and just like you saw actually in the wake of that Tory majority where you saw the left kind of like despairing the collapse of the red wall the working class has become completely reactionary they said the exact same thing in Sri Lanka back in 2019. You had 7 million votes for Gotabaya Rajapaksa he came to power on the basis of an extremely chauvinist campaign defends the Sinhala Buddhist majority in the context of the fear after the Easter terrorist attacks in 2019 and people talk about the masses are reactionary they'll never move that seems like a complete lifetime ago but it's the same people in Sri Lanka who have now brought down Gotabaya Rajapaksa sent him fleeing into exile and the mood likewise in Britain it's completely transformed Boris Johnson is probably now the most unpopular Prime Minister as we predicted that Britain has ever had actually he's been overtaken in the past month and the Tory's language 33 points behind in the polls it's a phenomenal speed at which consciousness has been transformed and I think we have to get that into our heads look at the speed people were talking about a reactionary situation you have to be able to look beneath the surface of events now the point that I want to the Sri Lankarisation of the world situation because the situation in Sri Lanka is not uniquely Sri Lankan we've seen a collapse of government incomes back in 2020 export markets were closed up you had a collapse of remittances which is something that hit a lot of developing and emerging economies the same things happen in Sri Lanka that happened everywhere this collapsing government income was also exacerbated by a stupid government Rajapaksa the first thing he did when he came into power was give tax cuts for the rich he was immediately getting reprimanded by the IMF and other people if that rings any bells with the recent British recently deceased British government those parallels are entirely not accidental because the stupidity of the ruling class is also a factor in driving the crisis not just in Sri Lanka not just in Britain but in many countries where the ruling class have a leadership which is up to the calibre of their level of degeneracy but the same economic conditions that exist in Sri Lanka exist everywhere just to one degree or another very quickly foreign currency reserves were eaten up leading to a situation where the government could not import a lot of the necessities of daily life and so shortages led to higher prices for imports runaway inflation which I think has reached 80% and eventually the debt became completely unpayable but this is not a uniquely Sri Lankan situation Bloomberg estimated that there are 19 countries that are at risk of default with a combined debt of $250 billion and a population of 900 million people nearly a billion people living in these countries that's another stick of dynamite by the way in the world economy it could be the British pension system that leads to the collapse of the world economy could be national defaults could be war in Ukraine could be any of these factors there's more inflammable material in the world economy and of course this runaway inflation has completely devoured the incomes of ordinary workers and middle class layers in Sri Lanka and the end result was that fuel shortages the state running out of money basic things like medicines paper for school exams and so on and the situation in which you have these long fuel queues I was speaking to a comrade in Sri Lanka our phone call we'd scheduled a phone call because he'd been in a fuel queue for five hours and I said wow five hours and he said that's nothing it was only five hours because he got tipped off in advance some people queue in petrol stations for five days in Sri Lanka that's the situation people die in these queues absolutely atrocious situation and yet of course Sri Lanka is at the sharp edge of this crisis but the BBC has estimated that this year you've seen 90 countries rocked by fuel protests that's almost 50% of countries have been rocked by fuel protests those are the four shocks of the sort of situation you saw in Sri Lanka 50% of countries are experiencing those four shocks now and what are the imperialists doing they are driving this into an even deeper and deeper hole through the war in Ukraine it's not a very good metaphor when I'm talking about fuel onto the fire of this economic crisis yes I'll draw it to draw things together the situation of course reached a tipping point where the masses could take no more and they burst onto the scene that marvellous revolutionary movement we saw in April to July this year and I think that a lot of what we saw in Sri Lanka will be repeated in many countries in the revolutionary events we'll see in the period to come the main slogan was got to go home get rid of this man but they also raised the slogan go home all 225 in other words all 225 MPs in the parliament clear them all out a complete distrust of all parties a clear bitter hatred of the entire establishment which was the target of these protests and it's no wonder not just the also the so called left parties which throughout the course of this protest movement focusing all of their attention on calling for constitutional reform and new elections in 6 to 12 months when the masses have power at their fingertips they're putting forward slogans that call for the demobilisation of the masses wait for new elections they've not played a good role whatsoever and the trade unions have barely moved to lift a finger in the midst of this and this of course is what has secured the defeat of the first act of this revolutionary movement I talk about the first act because inevitably there will be a second and probably if we don't build our forces in time there will be a third and a fourth undoubtedly but in each of these it's not really the revolution as such that has been defeated but it's immaturity the middle class leaders with their false slogans the idea that the movement is neither left or right I talk about confusion in the early stages of a revolutionary movement there's all sorts of confusion but you can't be confused as to who the ruling class think the real enemy they've brought now Wicrema Singa is in power he's brought repression down on the heads of the left and the trade unions and so it's an education it's a painful education for the masses in Sri Lanka but when the second and the third act of the revolutionary movement erupt it will be on a higher level with a higher level of consciousness but of course ultimately the only thing that can secure that revolutionary victory will be if we build the forces of Marxism in time for the next revolution and just as we are meeting here today we have we have comrades in Sri Lanka who are fighting to build the revolutionary forces of Marxism I had the privilege of attending via zoom their meeting of one of their of a congress a national congress which is very difficult to organise when you have the transport disruption and everything else and most of the Saturday of that congress we had both of us had our videos on they could see me but for most of the time I couldn't see them because the lights went completely out because of the blackout situation that they faced I hope that the lights stay on throughout the course of the revolution festival I'm sure it won't be long before Europe is facing rolling blackouts but the comrades were joking, they were jovial they had an optimistic spirit despite the hardships that they are also personally facing to build because they know that these are the only ideas that can transform society they have the confidence in these ideas and therefore that is what fuels their optimism despite all of the most the personal difficulties, the hardships that they face and that our comrades face in many parts of the world we have the optimism that raises us above that day-to-day hardship and sets our sights on something higher the fight for a socialist revolution Thank you Thank you Ben Before Alan closes this session for us I just have a couple of quick announcements three things first of all, you should all, when you're registered have been given one of these red wristbands please keep that on all weekend and then we won't have to re-register you and it will get you through the doors with minimal fuss secondly the midlands comrades the comrades who are down here from the midlands who have sorted accommodation together can you meet out the front to sort out your accommodation keys after this meeting and probably that's a good time to sort out accommodation for anybody else from different regions or internationally or whatever to sort out your accommodation and finally, and I should have said this at the beginning and apologies for not saying it but this applies all weekend and this is really important do not take photos of the faces of people in the audience take photos of the people speaking and making contributions and this kind of thing but there are comrades attending over the weekend who cannot be photographed is extremely dangerous for them to be photographed so please don't do that if you have taken photos which include the faces of anybody in the audience in this session please delete them it's not a joke it's a serious thing and please remember that over the course of the weekend and anybody who's chairing a meeting over the weekend please can you announce that at the beginning of the recession okay so Alan reply to the discussion and close the session for us well I have an impossible task I think all the interventions were excellent but our time is is limited and we must proceed from fundamentals now I thought that Comedian Adam Booth made some very important points about the world economy but we must emphasise time and again that the two fundamental contradictions the two fundamental obstacles which are preventing the development of the means of production that are obstacles in the way of the progress of civilisation if you like there's two things first, private ownership of the means of production production for profit instead of for human need and secondly the national state which is throttling the development of the means of production which has outgrown the national state now you see the second contradiction the ruling class actually succeeded partially and for a temporary time in overcoming this that's the secret to it through globalisation which by the way Marx and Engels predicted in the communist manifesto if you read that that they succeeded by developing it by intensifying the international division of labour and intensifying international trade it did have a colossal effect on the development of the collective forces for a whole period of decades particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union the entry of China opening up new markets and new possibilities in India even Russia to some extent yes but that process this is the important point that process has now reached its limits I think Adam made that point and therefore all of the factors that until now have propelled the growth of the world economy have turned into their opposite they're pushing the world economy down instead of the increase in world trade you've got economic nationalism and by the way that is what caused the depression of the 1930s economic nationalism the breakdown of trade and so on and therefore it's a very alarming scenario and frankly given this position these are objective factors which the boesers they cannot control they try to control by all kinds of means but by messing around by intervening in the economy they made things worse as I think again Adam pointed out in relation to Britain that's particularly clear the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated that it brings to mind you know the ancient Greeks were clever people the modern Greeks are not too bad but the ancient Greeks were very smart I got a great admiration for the ancient Greeks and they said the following those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make them mad and that's the fact you look at the ruling class everywhere Britain, America, the United States Brazil these are crazy people but that's not an accident even if they were smart it wouldn't make much difference because given the objective contradictions they can't solve anything that's the fact of the matter therefore they're trapped and therefore of course the stage is set that's the message of everyone that spoke today spoke very well by the way the stage is set for an unprecedented explosion of the class struggle you better believe it now not just in Britain but on a world scale everywhere you look there's no such thing as a stable country anymore it doesn't exist an insurrectionary situations like what we've described here in Sri Lanka and Iran that can happen anywhere you can't predict accurately it's impossible to predict where the next explosion is going to come it could be in France or Italy which as Fred said or Iran or Brazil or Indonesia or Pakistan or even China and I thought Dan Morley may seem interesting but the point about China that's interesting China is a totalitarian regime it is a bourgeois regime bourgeois bonapartism but it's also a hybrid there's still large elements left over from the old days of state control the state still participates considerably in the economy yes but that itself creates contradictions there's enormous accumulation of debt in the property market that's because these speculative companies were convinced that they could speculate as much as they like because all the debts of local authorities would be guaranteed by the state yes but there's limits to that Dan gave the figures it cannot be maintained everyone agrees with that and therefore there's this colossal colossal debt which is new to collapse at any moment could happen tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock which would really put the cat among the pigeons the Chinese economy is already slowing down considerably they used to say for years that the Chinese economy needs an annual growth of rate of 8% at least it's just to account for the growth of population just for that alone it's not it used to be much more than 8% but I think last year it was 5% I think this year the figures are not clear it's about 2.5% which is a catastrophe for China and therefore you can have a catastrophe in China at any moment and the Chinese proletariat it reminds you of something Napoleon said he said about China China is a sleeping dragon is a slumbering dragon China is a sleeping dragon he says when that dragon awakes the world will be shaken and it will when that dragon awakes the world will tremble he said so it will when the colossal Chinese proletariat gets on the move because it's been industrialised it's been developed it's the biggest proletariat in the world very exploited also by the way when that forces are unleashed you better look out and that can happen the paradox is this because China is a totalitarian regime it seems to be very stable very powerful nothing's happening because it's a bit like a pressure cooker with the safety catch sealed and the pressure is building up it's clear it's almost pressure is building up but that cannot last China spends much more on internal security than it does on defence by the way that's been the case for some years they know what's going on but we don't know what's going on and nobody will know until it's suddenly I predict now China will explode the class struggle in China will erupt when people least expect it and that is another colossal element of instability in the world situation or there could be a big movement in Britain where a general strike now it's openly discussed even by the trade union leaders although they don't know what they're talking about they've no real intention they've no desire to call a general strike and yet it may be taken out of their hands but the movement itself and they've forced to talk about it as a means of putting pressure on the government which isn't working very well so it seems so even in Britain you can have a situation which is unforeseen yes, we have this perspective of class struggle but as I've said earlier and we must bear this clearly in mind and that's only one side of the equation nobody can doubt the wish of the worker the desire of the working class to fight you know, nobody yes, but to fight does not necessarily mean to win there the factor of leadership does come into this and by the way even when the workers win a strike under these circumstances what the ruling class gives with the right hand they take back with the left hand wage increases are cancelled out by inflation and all kinds of things like that and therefore ultimately yes there will be an explosion on the industrial plane because the political plane is pretty hopeless as far as people can make out and they're right but at a certain stage the workers will begin to draw political conclusions and they will be revolutionary and that will shake the entire situation up from our point of view very nicely but see the question is given the president leadership you must be prepared for this I have no time whatsoever for people who think that revolution is a romantic thing it is not it's a hard struggle it's a hard business, hard school and yes there will be defeats, defeats are implicit it's implicit and we don't want commerce then hanging their heads and drinking themselves to death or whatever they might be doing or weeping into their herbal tea or whatever they drink you know because a strike's been defeated we can't have that cannot have that no I'll refer to the ancient Greeks again you know Ter Grant was fond of this story he often repeated it there was a giant called Anteas who was he wrestled with Hercules Hercules was a tough guy but Anteas was a giant and Hercules threw Anteas to the ground many times broke all his bones thought he was dead threw him down and every time that he threw the giant to the ground to Hercules as a star he jumped up again ready for the fight because he derived power from his mother Gaia, the earth Anteas used to say the working class is like that giant no matter how many times it's defeated no matter how many times it's hurled to the ground it will always come back always always always come back and I'll tell you something else soldiers learn also from defeats more defeats than from victories it was Engels that said defeated armies learn well and Lenin when he read that he commented yes that's well said said Lenin that's well said and it applies very much to the revolutionary army as well of the working class workers learn through struggle they can't learn from anything else that's the point workers are not little children as all the reformers think of the same snobbish illusion that the workers are stupid little children workers are not stupid and they're not little children and they're quite capable of understanding yes but of course they don't have the opportunity because the conditions of life doesn't permit them to spend time studying the three volumes of capital and so on it's very difficult yes but they do learn they do learn from the biggest and most important book of all the book of life, the book of experience Lenin said quoting a Russian proverb life teaches my friends life teaches yes and it teaches them very harsh lessons and they will be very harsh lessons that will have to be learned like the British working class is going to have to go back to the school of Stammer to learn a few lessons to find out the reality about right wing reformers they will need to go through that school and being through it for some time it's necessary, we must understand this and our task you know Trotsky also was fond of quoting that great materialist, philosopher spinosa, our task spinosa said is neither to weep nor to laugh but to understand okay neither weep nor laugh but understand have to understand the processes and help the workers to understand to draw the conclusions the necessary conclusions from their experience you see what is our task really well you know it's not, there's an English proverb you can't teach your granny to suck eggs I don't think that can be translated very I don't suppose grannies these days do suck many eggs, they used to in my day that was a long time ago Jim will remember that your granny used to suck eggs Jim embarrassed silence but anyway we're not here to lecture the workers as if they were little children not at all, you know what our task is our task comrades and friends our task is to make conscious the unconscious or semi-conscious striving of the workers because that is there nobody taught them that we didn't teach them that they didn't get it out of books they got it out of their own life experience life teaches, oh yes yes but of course it's still incoherent it's not fully developed but the desire is there that's why I say that they're wide open now more open than ever before to the ideas, revolutionary ideas of Marxism so our task is that to make conscious the unconscious or semi-conscious will of the workers to change society and we have to do this I finished because of the lack of time somebody's bound to say it they're bound to say it in the pub afterwards yeah that's all very well but what can I do little me what can I do you know well I'll give an honest answer to that comrade because she is sitting here today bound to be somewhere in the hall ideas probably in their head I'll give you an honest answer comrade what can you do as an isolated individual an isolated atom floating somewhere in the subatomic world I don't know what can you do as an isolated individual you can do precisely nothing you are right you are impotent you are meaningless you are right but take courage my friends take courage you are not really an isolated atom at all are we we aren't we are part of a far greater thing than that a far greater collective it's called the working class it's called the labour movement and it's called this organisation you know Marx said the working class without organisations only one thing you know what it is raw material for exploitation that's all it is all it can be but once you're organised it changes and therefore that's our task our task is to build this organisation starting with ones or twos and little groups or whatever we are getting there the attendance at this meeting shows that we're getting there but we'll get there a lot quicker if every single one of you if anyone in this hall is not a member of sources to be please join we'll be glad to have you and I'll give you two good reasons for joining first of all because we need you we need you because with your help we'll build much faster, much quicker I'll give you a better reason you need us you need us because as an individual you can't do anything therefore draw the necessary conclusions and I hope at the end of this weekend we will go a long way towards meeting these targets and on Monday morning sharp when you get back to work then of course this school will play the necessary role of educating, of training the soldiers of the international army of the proletariat such that will be fit for the historic task which now faces us and our class comrades long live Marxism long live the working class long live the international Marxist tendency now let's make this school the most successful school ever ok thank you comrades we are running a little bit over time so in the interest of letting the staff tidy the place up