 A wnaeth i oswt chymfodd a chyfodd ar gweithio yng Nghymru, i gael y Llyfrgell Ysbyd Cymru i'r symyn a'r Ysbyd Cymru ar gyfer cerddiogol. Mae'n gwiswch Ius. Ac rwy'n caw i'r Rhywun Llyfrgell fel y cyflaidau ac roedd hynny'n cynghru mewn enhyf yn bau ac mae'n eisiau sydd wedi'i gael cerddiogol fel rhaid i mewn enhyf yn bau ac rywbeth ar gweithio a'n ei gael ei felly rhaid i hefyd â'r gymhwyfr yng nghyrchu I know you've just got involved, but we've got sort of 16, 7 hours ahead, but I really want to thank you for getting involved. And also to our colleagues, many of them have been organising the series for a number of years. And what we've aimed to do from the beginning is to create a forum for discussion and debate amongst the vast number of topics that are directly and indirectly related to development studies, to development in the global south, but also its relationship with the global north. So it's about supplementing what we learn and what we teach in development studies, but also touching on debates that go beyond the classroom as well. And for this seminar, we're very pleased to hear from David Bailey on austerity, populism, protest, people power in the age of dissent. And I don't have to tell you how relevant this is at the moment, both because of the global mobilisations around the climate crisis in the past several months by the youth strikers, but also the current protests that have just kicked off yesterday by Extinction Rebellion, but also the vast number of protests that are going on all around the world, the strikes, the occupations that are happening. So, yeah, Jay will be chairing, she'll explain the format, and then we'll have room for questions. Thank you. Welcome everybody. I'm going to speak quite loudly because we're still in the process of getting the microphone set up, but I hope everyone can hear me. It's one of the benefits of having a booming loud voice. I'm Jay. I'm on the Organising Committee of the Seminar Series, and I will be chairing tonight. Our talk this evening will document and illustrate the key trends in different acts of protest witnessed in neoliberal Britain since 2010, assessing the reasons why people have turned to protests, the effects it's having on British democracy, putting these questions into a broader historical and global perspective in order to understand the current stagnant phase of neoliberalism and its related age of dissent. And as Faizee just said, the focus is on the UK, but this talk has never really been so relevant to the global context, whether we're talking about the news in Ecuador just today, whether we're talking about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, what's going on in Algeria. So it's never been as apt a time to have this particular seminar. Our speaker tonight is Dr David Bailey. David is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Birmingham. His research and teaching focus on the way protest interacts with capitalism. He recently co-authored a book on different forms of anti-osterity and opposition within the neoliberal European Union, titled Beyond Defeat and Austerity, Disrupting the Critical Political Economy of Neoliberal Europe. He's also a reviews editor and editorial board member of the journal Capital and Class, and currently the chair of Critical Political Economy Research Network. And our discussant will be Dr Faizee Ismail, who is a senior teaching fellow here in the Department of Development Studies, and of course the chief organiser of this amazing seminar series. Faizee has taught at, as well as at SOAS, has taught at UCL in geography and at Goldsmiths in media, communications and cultural studies. Her research interests include NGOs and social movements, alternatives to neoliberalism and imperialism, labour and migration, and politics and development in Nepal and South Asia. She's on the executive committee of the Britain-Napal Academic Council, and the editorial board of Capital and Class. So the format of the seminar will be as follows. David is going to speak now for 45 minutes. Faizee will then comment for five to seven minutes, and David, if he wants to, can then respond. We'll then open up to all of you for questions. And as we've said, although the context or the speech is going to be about British democracy, we'd very much welcome comments and thoughts about its connections to the wider global context. If you're tweeting, please use the hashtags SOAS-DEV-Studies and ESRC. So without further ado, hand over to David. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation to speak. Thanks for agreeing to come and listen to me. And Faizee asked me to speak about what's going on. What's going on with the crisis of democracy? What's going on with capitalism? What's going on with the rise of populism? It's all kind of big general stuff that we're all thinking about. So can we all have opinions on? So I guess I haven't got the answer, but I've got a take on it that we can then use to engage with. And I suppose the way that I'm trying to come into this is to think about what tended to, I suppose, for the decade of the 2010s in Britain to be thought of in terms of the age of austerity, and to try to think about that as maybe not so much the age of austerity, but the age of dissent and to switch it around to think about what ways are people seeking to survive, to maintain a voice and to seek to put pressure on government at a time when the opportunity and the constraints within which to influence public policy are narrowing. And I suppose this is also a kind of general trend that we want to think about. How does capitalism relate to democracy and how does capitalism, especially in periods of crisis, in periods of stagnation, which I think we can all agree is happening now, that then affect the relationship capitalism and democracy. So I guess I would start by saying if we're going to try to think about some kind of crisis of capitalist democracy, then probably we say it's not a new crisis, probably we can agree on that, and that there's always been a tension between democracy and between capitalism and that tension. Maybe a lot of people are talking at the moment about how that tension and crisis is becoming increasingly prevalent. I suppose maybe probably Wolfgang Strake is one of the key people I've been talking about, this demise of democratic capitalism and almost a kind of no-root back. But I think we can say that that democracy-capitalism relationship has always been in tension from the beginning. So if we think in terms of how democracy itself was created, one of the best studies I think in terms of a kind of historical comparative study is by Bzieworski, who tries to document the first introductions of democracy towards the late 19th century, early 20th century, and showing how that directly comes out of episodes of unrest and protest. And I guess in that sense dismissing the notion that democracy is a kind of liberal ideal that elites found to be the correct way to organise society, but rather seeing democracy as, from the start, a concession to acts of protest and an attempt to offer sufficient concessions to enable the elites to maintain their position of power, but not to upset that hierarchy too greatly. So he shows this is quite helpful. This shows what are the kind of key factors that led to the emergence, the first emergence of the extension of the vote to people without property and to women, and talks about how, first of all we can see a correlation between after-war, so that after the war elites tended to be more concerned about unrest, and then after this factor we look at unrest and we find that the extension of the vote both to men without property and then to women was directly associated with instances of unrest occurring before it. So it was already protest pushing democracy to come into existence. And this kind of tries to map that historically and then show, try to identify the relationship between the granting of, or extension of the vote to certain groups and peaks of unrest. And what we see is almost immediately beforehand the unrest reaches a peak of this kind of historical process before then the vote is extended. And once the vote is extended, unrest tends to drop off as well. So he's kind of trying to show explicitly that there's this kind of concession element to democracy. It's some degree of decision making he's granted, but only enough to seek to quail unrest. So you've already got that tense relationship between democracy and capitalism from the start. And I think perhaps to try to help us kind of theorise what this relationship, some of the key people that I would probably point to talk about this aren't this kind of constant conflict of logics between the logic of democracy and the logic of capitalism. The logic of democracy talks about the need for popular demands, collective voice to be expressed, self-determination of individuals but also of classes, social groups, majority rule, and then a free association, all of which, at the same time, as it's part of capitalist democracy, also has to somehow be made to fit with the logic of capitalism. So Ellen Mason Woods is good on this, trying to show how it was only once the notion of what do we mean by the democracy as a kind of very narrow, formal type of representative democracy. Once that had been established as what we mean by democracy, it was only then that it could be rendered compatible with capitalism. So there's already a need to constrain choice to make democratic demands compatible with the logic of capitalism. In terms of the logic of capitalism, some recent people I think who are helpful in this, Anwar Sheik and Nancy Fraser, Anwar Sheik talks about how, drawing on general Marxist framework, how the exchange of commodities is central. So once you have commodity exchange as the central principle of social interaction that obviously clashes with some notion of democratic choice, that the competitive pursuit of profit is the kind of key driving force underpinning the organisation of production especially, that that produces a centralisation and concentration, so we have, which explains inequality, problems of disequilibrium are then created because for various reasons partly consumption becomes difficult, the more inequality that you have, and problems of, and then moving towards mechanisation, irrationalisation, robotisation I suppose is what we're talking about now in terms of the introduction of technology, how that's then creating an economy without jobs, and then all of that is associated with declining profit rates, if you adopt the declining classical Marxist framework, and declining profit rates then produce a decline in growth, and the decline in growth I think is key to understanding how this tense relationship between democracy and capitalism becomes tenser and that over time that becomes more problematic to render the two compatible. So we see an expansion and intensification towards the world market as partly of an attempt to resolve some of these problems, and also at the same time moving more to Nancy Fraser's framework in her recent book, Capitalism, a Conversation in Critical Theory, trying to theorise well how does the outside of this very narrow sphere of capitalism relate to our understanding of what's going on? She talks about boundary conditions, background conditions, and then boundary conflicts over those background conditions, so the sphere of social reproduction, home, civil society, as necessary for what's going on in the formal sphere of production and how that relationship is then also contested, and then also nature as a resource to be extracted as part of what we understand by capitalism and these problems. And then also all of this is associated with crisis, and it's a predictable crisis. I thought this is not very nice to have lots of text on the screen, but I think this is a really nice passage in terms of helping us to understand the predictability of capitalist crisis. So this is talking about how in the boom, in the boom, so before the bubble bursts, credit appeared to have the magical power of suspending altogether the barriers to the accumulation of capital, providing finance for new ventures and sustaining unprofitable capitalists through periods of difficulty. The only limit to accumulation appeared to be the availability of credit as the boom gathered momentum, the readily availability of credit and the negotiability of credit money reduced the demand for cash. The banks were able to reduce their cash ratios and continue to feed the boom by expanding credit. Capital overcomes the barriers to accumulation debts, and as debts were regularly repaid, a mood of optimism prevails and credit becomes cheap and freely available. And eventually the boom was destined to break. The event that precipitated the crash to the subprime crisis may have been remote from the underlying cause of the crisis, and at first appeared insignificant, yet it triggers the crash. It gains momentum as the contraction of credit precipitates defaults that spread through the financial system. In the crisis, the overaccumulation of capital suddenly appears in the form of a mass of worthless debt and an enormous overproduction of commodities. And we can see this, perhaps I think this is a nice picture. This is the empty houses that sit in Spain or sat in Spain immediately after the crisis. Everyone invests in housing and then suddenly have these worthless commodities but obviously they have worth in terms of use but they don't have any worth in terms of being able to be sold. The reason I think this is interesting is because this is adapted from Simon Clark, writing in 1988, which seems to describe almost exactly the way in which the subprime crisis transformed and the way that it played out. But it was obviously written in 1988 and I think that highlights the predictable nature of the types of crises that we're talking about with this expansion forming of bubbles, the bubble burst and it has a knock-on effect and we have this period of stagnation. So then where are we now in terms of, I'm talking particularly about British capitalist democracy, where are we now? I think we can probably agree that we're in a period of, I would argue a period of stagnant neoliberalism that we had the neoliberal growth period after 1980. We had the bubble that formed and then collapsed in 2008 and really we have seen a return to some degree of growth but the peak of growth that we saw in, sorry these are three-year averages, smoothed. The peak of growth that we see around 2013 during the stagnant period is almost the same kind of level as the trough going back to the 1960s. So we can see this constantly declining average levels of growth during this post-war period and also we have to bear in mind the massive amount of money stimulus that's gone into producing this growth with virtually no increase in productivity and arguably much of it is fueled by the creation of money and arguably therefore simply the creation of the next bubble that's due to burst and we can see this in terms of similarly high levels of debt to income in terms of comparing with 2008 similarly high levels of house price, not quite as high but similarly high levels of house price inflation all of which is obviously an effect of this ultra-low, ultra-loose monetary policy which has partly stimulated a low level of stagnant growth. So I think that's the context probably in which I'm trying to speak in terms of thinking about this idea of an age of austerity or an age of dissent and trying to think about first of all in terms of what happened so as we know in 2010 as the coalition government came into office it saw high levels of public debt as a significant problem for the British treasury and sought to respond to that by imposing a massive range of cuts across the British public sector. It had the target to cut the deficit to zero by 2015 to 2016 which it still hasn't achieved largely that was to be achieved through spending cuts including a two-year pay freeze for public sector workers a shift in terms of how inflation was calculated from one RPI to CPI which basically made it cheaper for the government to keep up with its calculation of inflation housing benefit reforms were kept, disability living allowance an imposition of much greater levels of conditionality upon the receipt of social spending and growth benefits. Much of that was also passed off to local government so 60% cuts in local government funding from central government and now we're seeing things like universal credit the food bank crisis and the freeze in social security payments so I think this is quite a nice illustration it's not a nice illustration of some of the effects of this this is recently acquired through freedom of information requests from the government to identify deaths of people receiving incapacity benefits or severe disability allowance so those people who died whilst they were receiving the benefit and the most significant one I think is this work-related activity group which are basically the people who are encouraged or forced to work to receive their welfare benefits that group of people is nearly 11,000 and to compare that as an average of the proportion of people who die in this age group is about four times higher so putting people who are four times higher at risk of death forcing them into work as part of the new conditionality regime that we see as part of this kind of austerity agenda we also think within the workplace reforms like the extension of the time when you can claim unfair dismissal from one year so you now have to work for two years before you can claim unfair dismissal and the introduction of 1200 pound employment tribunal fees which made it almost impossible for many people to even claim they've been unfairly sacked when they lost their job so all of these reforms are part of a kind of attempt I suppose to move towards low wage to promote the low wage sector and to reduce the role of the welfare state in supporting people so that kind of is the context within which what I want to talk about is an age of austerity but as an age of dissent that those kinds of conditions have produced new and changing and higher levels of acts of protest which we can look and chart to see how they've developed throughout this period so I just, this is a blog that I've produced there's a page on here called Political Protest in Britain and there's a data set here which is what the work largely draws upon and this is trying to show, or trying to map rather the different forms of protest activity that we've seen going back to the 1980s in Britain and so what we do to generate this is to do a newspaper search of four newspapers in the UK in the centre left and right and then once we do a search for protest demonstrations or strikes we can then try to identify the agent the action that the agent did and then the target of the action in some cases there's no target and use that to essentially create a catalogue of different types of protest that are witnessed in the British context over this period of time so it goes back to the 1980s it's a sample for the 1980s but it's from 2005 onwards it's every act of protest identified during the search and what I think that helps us to do is to basically try to chart and understand how different agents of protest have emerged and also I think what's interesting to see is how the layers of agents of protest change over time and how they have then a knock-on effect how we sometimes see protest as something that flashes up and then disappears I think it's more helpful to think of it in terms of this kind of sedimentation of different forms of protest produce different forms of subjectivity which then sometimes translate into other forms of activity and I think what's significant about this is the way in which the agents of protest are growing and the frequency of acts of protest are growing which is partly why I'm trying to say that this 2010 period 2010s period is an age of present so we can perhaps just talk us through how long we're in for time at the moment 20 in okay so we'll try and talk us through some of the kind of key events some people are probably more familiar with some of this than others so one of the first kind of events that we saw after the 2008 crisis was the famous British Jobs for British Workers protest which was a big national wildcat strike so an official strike which was done by engineer workers in the oil refinery industry and it gave national attention because of this slogan British Jobs for British Workers but there's some debate about how kind of nationalist it was in the way that it was mobilised but it was largely about the idea that post 2008 there'd been a casualisation of work an attempt to undermine the working conditions of the engineers in the industry and partly an attempt to bring Italian workers into undercut the agreed conditions in Britain so it created this big tension which with hindsight can quite clearly be linked to some of the kind of demands around Brexit which then developed over time subsequently just one of the key kind of flash points that we see immediately after the crisis then once 2010 starts and this austerity agenda is unleashed by the coalition government we have organisations like UK Uncut so this is the their strategy was essentially to try to challenge the notion that there's no alternative to austerity by highlighting tax evasion and tax avoidance by certain key quite often shops and using the high street as a public space in which there could have been an attempt to gather and to raise awareness and to put shame onto those high street banks as a way of publicising first of all those banks or shops first of all those high street outlets should be paying the right amount of tax but also to challenge this notion that austerity was some kind of necessary agenda then we see at this point when the tuition fees for domestic students was increased to 9,000 fees we see in 2010 the big outpouring of student protest so we can see the big bulge and student protest here around 2010 and then 2011 we see the riots which spread from London and then across the country and then in terms of this kind of idea of a sedimentation and translation of protest we can see in this 2010 period the big kind of free agents being the anti cuts activists, students and workers and then that kind of proliferates so rather than again this idea that that goes away I think there's more of an idea that this informs subsequent strategies of trying to influence public policy through alternative means again with this idea of a constrained democracy and a government unwilling to listen this is the focus E15 mothers protest to use occupation strategies to highlight the decision of the government to move people from sites largely in London to sites outside of London in an attempt to redistribute housing which was largely opposed increasingly using similar kind of direct action protest strategies to challenge the treatment of racialized minorities and migrants so this is the closed down yardswood and all detention centres protest that we I put here as pro minority protests and again in terms of forms of dissent just recently it was announced that there's been 3000 hunger strikes in the last three years in detention centres in the UK which really just kind of highlights that that the treatment of people in detention centres in this kind of period of austerity but also the way in which individual protests can quite often not even get reported so we're only picking up here the very visible stuff that manages to make it into the media looking at 3000 hunger strikes happening then we're really talking about very severe levels of dissent and resistance this is the end deportations protest coming a bit closer to the present I don't know if people followed this one but the deportations protest was an attempt to block the use of deportations as a way of pushing people out of the country and in the end they were convicted for anti-terrorism legislation the first time that anti-terrorism legislation was used for this kind of direct action anti-deportation protest and fortunately the sentences were light enough to mean that they didn't have very severe sentences but the potential sentence that was associated was up to life imprisonment then I think we can also see I suppose one of the points that I tried to make is that we're not only seeing those hardest hit within society resort into these forms of dissent but also there's a kind of mainstreaming of dissent that some of the mainstream demands also because they're not being listened to and they're not managing to channel into democratic outcomes are also now everyone basically is doing protests so we can see the anti-Trump protests had a massive increase in 2017 especially after the Trump's flight ban Brexit is producing increasingly pro-EU protesters as perhaps not the typical protest that we might have imagined five or ten years ago we know as part of this kind of mainstreaming of what it is to do protests green here is the pro-EU protesters and also there's sometimes a debate is it really progressive protest the far right also do protests which is true and this is generally organised by Tommy Robinson far right nativist, white, English kind of movement but I tend to say it's not as bad as we think in terms of this protest enabling also unprogressive voices that we don't want to be articulated I mean when we look at the right wing as a proportion of the protest is this grey it's always far outnumbered by the more progressive types of mobilisations that we see it's also virtually always as a counter demonstration that happens and is of equal unnormally larger size in opposition to the far right mobilisation there's an increased mobilisation by feminists especially sisters and cut mobilising around the effects of austerity on women especially the closure of refuge centres occupations are often used to draw attention to those kinds of problems the women's march as well pushed up the feminist mobilisation as an explicit identity of protest and then perhaps going right to the present we're obviously now seeing school children so for the first time we see school children emerge as a category of protestors in the in 2019 and at the same time we've already mentioned extinction, rebellion as well as again seeing a massive bulge in terms of environmentalist mobilisation in the present and then also perhaps just to bring us back to British higher education I thought it's quite notable that there's again this kind of idea of direct action partly reflecting the the mobilisation of trade unions and perhaps another remobilisation of it that we see for the first time protest by unionists against their own trade union in this kind of no capitulation conflict that happened during the pensions dispute of last year so I think it illustrates nicely this kind of tension between arguably weakened trade union movement and a arguably growing in ascendant more kind of I guess dis informal and disorganised forms of protest which we're seeing and charting in virtually all of these illustrations that I'm showing here and perhaps just also to kind of illustrate that as well we can see the if we go back to the 1980s these are average figures because it's a sample of the 80s we're seeing workers by far as the largest agent of of protest during the 1980s and then much reduced for the rest of the period so again this kind of idea of neoliberalism as undermining the capacity of workers to to mobilise you can also look at types of protest ok good so types of protest we can also look at I think two things are interesting here in terms of the changing patterns first of all we again reflect in this idea of trade unions as being demobilised we see strike activity as much more significant during the 1980s and much more diminished throughout the period then also perhaps what we notice is the increased use of stunts so I think part of this is also what I'm trying to say that because there's this growing resort to protest as the way in which democratic demands are attempted to be articulated so you have to become more innovative in the way in which you do the protest and try to produce new stunts which might capture the media's attention so these are some examples I'll go round in clockwise this is the face-sitting protest of 2013 which was sex work of protest against the heightened regulation of sex work this was the bites up, knives down protest by teenage bikers who are protesting partly against the lack of policing the lack of resources in policing which is partly associated with the increased night environment especially in London this is the photo my pants protest against the EMP who opposed the upskirting ban in parliament this is a coffin that was laid outside a Conservative MP's house to highlight the impact of austerity in terms of its impact upon lives this is a sit-in by doctors during the junior doctors strike of 2016 and this is a more recent one this is actually a lot of his house's grass roots because this is just Philip's MP son who was placed outside Downing Street to do his homework in opposition to the shortening of the teaching day now schools increasingly are moving to cut the Friday afternoons from the timetable as a constable measure and so that's obviously raising concerns about how austerity is then having a knock-on effect in terms of both education but also in terms of childcare and how childcare gets managed in this kind of context so then I think probably then there's also the question of what's the point of doing the protest I suppose that one response or one dismissive response is to say that protest is kind of futile maybe you've captured some media attention but you don't necessarily don't necessarily secure the outcomes that you want and so what I've been trying to do is to look at try to trace through austerity initiatives and see to what extent opposite opposition and protest and resistance does really matter so this is a paper that's out and it's got a company in blog called Anti-Austerity in Low Resistance Models of Capitalism which is a catchy title and it's trying to trace through proposed austerity in a number of initiatives and then to see what kind of opposition they encountered one that I'll talk about especially is the work fair initiatives which we've talked about already this idea of placing greater conditions well fair support in social service social security as a means by which to essentially force people into work as a condition for their for the receipt of their benefits and so what we find really is that we shouldn't be thinking about victories like the aim of anti-austerity is to try to stop austerity really we should be thinking I think in terms of concessions that the more mobilisation and the different types of mobilisation that we see the more likely is that concessions are extracted from and the austerity proposals that go through are weakened so in terms of the work fair we saw a range of different types of protests some of them are kind of very individualist this is John MacArthur age 59 who refused to attend his workplace in 2014 on the grounds that it was a job he previously could pay to do so he basically got sacked from his previous job and then got put in as a welfare claimant as a condition of getting his welfare benefits put into the same job that he'd just been sacked to do so in protest he braided outside the company for two hours a day for three months with signs saying no to slavery so we see these kind of individualist types of protests we also see a kind of I guess what people call a sort of subterranean form of protest protest that don't make it into the news but they are going on in terms of individual foot dragging kinds of resistance unwillingness to act in accordance with instructions that are being given but not in an openly confrontational way and so one study also conducted in Birmingham found how essentially what claimants could do is that they could be that the agency so the agency is hired to basically test whether you're willing to go into work or not and if you would assess your degree of willingness if you're very reluctant to go into work then it's basically too much effort for the agency to try to put effort into getting you into a placement and per placement the agency gets a fee so by being very reluctant you almost kind of escape the attention of the agency that's trying to recruit you and it's the mid range reluctant people that will tend to get targeted because there's a process of gaming going on which if we can think about perhaps there's a sort of subterranean form of subterranean form of resistance and then there's a more kind of visible level boycott workfare also used this idea that the organization boycott workfare was trying specifically to oppose the workfare regime used this idea of forced labour as a kind of key message in the media to oppose the workfare regime and again this idea of shaming in the high streets so they would turn up common target they would turn up outside the employers shops that were employing unpaid workers or workers who were being forced to do that on this condition for their benefits to shame the firms into abandoning the scheme and it was relatively effective because none of the firms wanted a stigma of basically being employing people free and participating in a form of kind of forced labour to the extent that the government itself used the argument in court that they weren't prepared to tell the public who the firms were that were participating in this workfare scheme because, quote, if the public knew exactly where people were being sent on placements political protests would increase which was likely to lead to the collapse of several employment schemes and undermine the government's economic interests so in other words the government itself recognises that the protests are effective and the protests are putting the firms off and participating in the scheme and so they have to keep the things secret which for the protests themselves was great because it kind of confirms a case that we are having some kind of effect and then there was another kind of big case which also allowed a workfare scheme to be challenged which was a case of Cat Riley who was doing voluntary work which was contributing towards her career out of that and put her into working in Poundland and she managed to challenge it in court on what she used to kind of force labour argument but she basically went up on a technicality on the grounds that the government hadn't put in place proper policy process and fortunately then afterwards the government retroactively changed the legislation so that the unlawful act of pushing her into this unpaid work then retroactively became lawful afterwards which is quite odd but the point was it managed to raise the publicity and it managed to produce significant outcomes and I think there were significant outcomes where the government effectively couldn't find firms to participate in the scheme because it became so toxic that they couldn't find people to participate so I think that leads then to this kind of idea of what's the point of the protest I think it's quite easy to think the government's all powerful we live in neoliberalism and whatever we do it seems to just kind of trundle on we don't really have much of an influence and I think there's there tends to be lots of examples of influence that we tend to kind of filter out because partly because we it's quite a gloomy world so some recent impacts just to kind of pluck a few out this is Natasha Engel the commissioner for shale gas who recently resigned and in resigning she said we know shale gas can be extracted safely we have the best regulations and regulators in the world we know the positive impact it has on local communities but we are choosing to listen to a powerful environmental lobby campaigning against fracking rather than allowing science and evidence to guide our policy making this is partly in reference to a lot of the anti-fracking protests that we see across Britain especially in test and new road the quadrilla site which was closed down from 2011 to 2018 as a result of protests partly in the result of the alarm at the earthquakes and tremors that the fracking was producing but again we tend to see how the government still carries on with the fracking agenda but we have to see as well that on the government side they are concerned about the publicity that the anti-fracking protests create the Goldsmith anti-racist action occupation I guess people heard of it with 137 days in occupation until earlier this year and managed to get the Goldsmith in the end to agree to a number of their demands for the introduction of new anti-racist training within the university and the acting warden again openly acknowledging that while they the university management cannot condone some of their means of protest they, the Goldsmith anti-racist action have provided us with a wake-up call to take action by sharing their experience and insight and then one more example the BA pilot strike which was the second round of the BA pilot strike at the end of September which was cancelled but the problem was that BA had already had to basically schedule in the strike and itself had cancelled all of the flights already to the extent that Morgan Stanley estimated that the industrial action cost the British Nowways up to £130 million so even when people aren't striking they're still having a disruptive impact in producing significant costs for employers just a couple of other examples so sometimes we win through legal battles so this was the unison legal dispute over the employment tribunal fees which I mentioned earlier which then got challenged in court and eventually was overturned on the grounds that it was preventing access to to justice and then United Voices of the World who people would again probably know as a migrant workers trade union who have been very active and very successful over the last two or three years and seem to have a new victory to proclaim every week. This is one at LSE when they managed successfully to bring the cleaning staff they were represented back in-house which again as a reversal of neoliberal privatisation is almost unheard of and seems to illustrate again this kind of more direct action forms of publicity as a form of protest being effective so one kind of when we were discussing with how we were going to try and talk about this we were also talking about what does this mean in terms of the end of, is there an end of neoliberal hegemony and probably not yet but I think we can say it's more unstable than it was five years ago and I think we can say it's more unstable than it was five years ago partly because of this kind of age of dissent that we're witnessing the political elite in the case of Britain the kind of Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party increasingly having this kind of pro-protest slant so for example this is John McDonnell providing a statement in support of Extinction Rebellion activists in a court case where he says the Extinction Rebellion activists successfully raised the profile of the climate threat and focussed the minds of all of us on the radical action that is needed and this one I think is really nicely telling is the transformation of the Labour Party so this is, in 2009 there was an occupation by workers of the best which is a wind turbine factory in Ireland White and the workers basically said the Labour Party stands for green power and it stands for jobs where I wouldn't be nationalised this wind turbine as it's about to be closed down and Peter Mamberson then the business secretary I said everywhere for a statement from the Labour Party this is the only statement that I could get and it was, it's been really good to go away and it was a nice peace inquiry on holiday it was good and I'm very glad to be back which was this statement when he was meeting protesters going back into the Department of Business 10 years later John McDonnell faced with the Harland and Wolff occupation as a shipyard in Northern Ireland where they had a I think 60 day occupation said it was explicitly stating that what we need is some kind of government action so we know this is a vital concern we know the government has naval contracts that can put here to ensure the long term future we know there are contracts out there but it just needs support from the government I am saying to Boris Johnson very specifically he can't stand on the sidelines for the contrast I think in terms of the political manifestation of how especially in terms of the Labour Party how has that been, these forms of dissent being responded to I think we can see in terms of a a reflection of those acts of dissent in terms of political consequences which then perhaps brings us to a bit towards populism Brexit and so on there's a nice piece or nice work being put out at the moment by somebody called Timo Fetza talking specifically about how we can directly link the impact of austerity on certain parts of the country the way that the public spending was specifically cut had a much greater impact on certain parts of the country and those parts of the country see the largest increase in support for UKIP over this 10-year period and that its increase in support for UKIP can be directly linked to the support for Brexit and he argues that the austerity can be essentially be associated with about 6% increase in support for Brexit and that was enough then to push the leave vote into majority terrain so I think some of this is kind of controversial there's differences over Brexit there's a question over whether it's okay to say that it's the left behind that supported the Brexit vote some people think this is kind of justifying racism I would say it's more that it's created the condition in which the right wing have only got a kind of nativist racist narrative to appeal left to appeal to voters in these categories and so left as the only option when welfare spending and so on is off the table democratic demands largely are off the table that's kind of where we end up with which is why I think we can see which has basically been the narrative of Boris Johnson for several years here he is talking in 2018 about the impact of 20 years of uncontrolled immigration by low skilled low wage workers and so on and so on and Brexit basically gives us the capacity to deal with this problem so I think one I think I'm running out of time but then one thing I would say then on Brexit is the legitimating strategy of the right in the context of stagnant neoliberalism but also we probably want to ask what is the cost of legitimating stagnant neoliberalism is itself huge so the government's own operation Yellowhammer identifies clearly the kind of problems that the government is anticipating and the IFS yesterday produced a report predicting that public deficit would double as a result of Brexit compared to their estimation of what the public deficit would be earlier this year so in other words it's not straightforward using Brexit as a legitimating strategy if that's the only legitimating strategy that they've got it's proving to be an expensive one and again I think that kind of speaks to this idea of it's not a straightforward process of producing and securing and reproducing neoliberal hegemony okay so okay so we're trying then to link this kind of analysis in a framework to other contexts and as a kind of closing I suppose the what we're trying to say is that the capitalism and democracy have their own logics that will translate into different contexts and neoliberalism has a logic which translates into different contexts but those also manifest themselves in different ways so that we see more neoliberal contexts and we see different forms of neoliberal contexts so we looked in a study that I'm doing a group of collaborators we're trying to show how similar trends can be seen similar to different trends can be seen especially in the most neoliberalised contexts of the global north in this case so we look at the comparison with Spain and the United States and try to say how we can see similar trends but they reflect the model of neoliberal capitalism that developed in those two contexts so in the US are much more racialised forms of inequality associated with Black Lives Matter as a kind of key agent of descent and in Spain the very strong reliance on housing and a kind of corrupt political system that was attached to the housing boom and there we see we can see specificities of these types of trends in the Spanish case as well so I think I suppose in terms of trying to see how does this relate to other contexts I suppose the point that we're trying to make is to what degree is this society neoliberalised to what degree is growth possible what growth strategy is necessary and then how does that growth strategy then produce different forms of social strain social conflict and how is there an attempt to reincorporate that social conflict back into a model of democratic capitalism and I think the most polarised is the most neoliberal context seem to be the most polarised so in terms of thinking about change it seems that the opportunities for change are greater in the most neoliberal contexts of the present some conclusions capitalism and democracy are becoming increasingly incompatible we can think about the age of austerity but I think we also maybe want to think about it as in terms of an age of dissent there are seem to be cracks in neoliberalism that are becoming increasingly evident which is prompting a nativist brexit in the British case as the only solution for the right wing to offer and that itself has then some global parallels with polarisation especially in the most neoliberalised contexts and the obvious question I think is what's next which is probably the thing we don't know but I think what we also do know is if we look back to the chart the school children are the emerging agents of protest in the present it doesn't look like if we think about sedimentation and how that then produces new subjectivities it doesn't look like this kind of age of dissent is going away in fact it seems to be more generating more conflict and see what happens Thank you very much David I'd now like to hand over to our discussant Dr Faisie Ismail who's going to talk respond for five minutes or so to David's very interesting talk Okay, thanks David Okay It's just sort of three comments and in a way I think we probably agree on quite a lot of them So I mean clearly this is a moment of deep crisis not just in the UK but globally We've got a nexus between financial crisis climate crisis warring Yemen impending warring in Iran I mean this is a it feels like all of these things have never come together and particularly in a crisis of the climate where we're talking about a kind of potential civilisational question which I think is very scary for people When we talk about we know a lot about post traumatic stress disorder I think we're now experiencing particularly among young people a kind of pre trauma a kind of this idea that what is my future going to be like? I have fear right now fear and anxiety about the future and in that sense I very much agree with your point about polarisation and I think that is precisely the logic of capitalism that it will produce polarisation so this is seen in the most neoliberalised countries but it's also seen so a Trump produces a Sanders and obviously it's not that simple but you are seeing this kind of this polarisation the kind of tenures of the Tory Government has produced the Corbyn Phenomenon in France Melanchol versus a real possibility earlier this year of a fascist in the form of Le Pen Government but then you're also seeing it in places where it feels as almost like the Arab uprisings had a kind of a second wind in Algeria, in Sudan in Morocco, in Egypt and so on and of course of course Hong Kong so I just wondered if you can kind of comment on that polarisation and how progressive movements and things should deal with that because if you think about XR for example Extinction Rebellion often there's a narrative which says let's go beyond politics let's put our political differences to one side and come together around these questions so how do you deal with that? Do you put politics at the centre or do you kind of try and move beyond those because clearly polarisation is very political the second point about Brexit I mean I don't want to say too much about Brexit just that it hasn't been a kind of neither inevitable nor nor kind of straightforward shift to the right right I mean in the beginning in any case it was never a conspiracy they sort of stumbled into it and you now have a situation where a minority of a minority in the Tory party is pursuing a policy and is quite held bent on policy given the news today of pushing this policy through against what the establishment wants so I mean if you think about what is it vast majority of 99 out of 100 companies on the footsie 100 want to remain and yet the traditional vehicle for the establishment which is the Tory party is doing exactly the opposite so you have that crisis for the establishment and then you have the kind of associated crisis which is that normally they can rely on this basically right wing Labour party to kind of supplement that push forward of their policies and it's now captured by a very left wing leader so that's also a crisis for them so in a way you have this kind of you have this situation where it's not they appear strong it's having an effect but actually I think there's a contradiction there, there's a real weakness there and I mean of course what happens here, what happens in other parts of Europe do have an effect globally clearly I mean not just in terms of international development policy or foreign policy but also climate policy clearly and then finally just the question on movements globally I mean it feels as if in the last 40 years but in the last 10 or 5 years even that that neoliberalism has kind of standardised the conditions under which we're living right so it's not just slave labour in the global south although that's you know predominant but you are seeing forms of forced labour slave labour and so on you are seeing food banks, you are seeing wage cuts you are seeing these things happening in the global north and it feels as if we're increasingly seeing protests and responses to that finding outlets in common and that's not a new thing I mean of course it goes back to the non-war protests it goes back far earlier but I think that it feels as if that's becoming more common and obviously that's most expressed in the climate strikes most recently where people can feel some sort of solidarity with others and you're going to start it here or we're going to start it there and obviously social media has helped us so it feels as if there's this mainstreaming of protest in which it's become a legitimate form of action and I suppose but that kind of the conditions seem to be becoming increasingly standardised the responses becoming increasingly standardised and then what you ended with was the kind of the fact that this is starting to these questions are starting to be at least responded to or increasingly younger people are starting to engage with these issues I mean you go on some of these youth strikes and you'll see five-year-old kids on these protests and some vague awareness of what's happening and that it's not good so I wondered if you could just comment on what kind of an impact that could have okay thank you very much Faisie what we'll do now I think is open up to questions from the floor and at the end David will pull everything together and comment on Faisie's comments and respond to questions so we'll take maybe three or four questions first there are mics coming around so when the mic comes to you please say your question if you just put your hand up if you have one thank you very much my name is Lord I would like to find out about the relationship between capital and labour your presentation seems to me that there is a capital hegemony over labour how do we reverse that do you see a continuity in future whereby capital continue to dominate labour or you will see labour overcoming capital in future thank you that's one behind can I, sorry can I just ask when you speak into the mic if you can speak up because it's quite a big room hi thanks for that my name is Montita I was wondering in terms of not just the legitimacy of neoliberalism being questioned and undermined and increasingly untenable but the legitimacy of nation states as organizing units being kind of undermined and revealed to be untenable especially if the ways that they're I guess justifying their existence are increasingly relying on like logics of securitisation and you know kind of these threads of what racism imperialism kind of that yeah hi thank you my name is Bailey and I was wondering if you could talk about sort of like the theory of accelerationism just sort of like looking at the graph you showed about how unrest increases and then like drops off when concessions are made I was wondering in your research what you think about that kind of theory perhaps we'll give David the chance to respond to those three first and then we'll take another round maybe I'll just respond as well to the phases comments thank you so so you talk about the polarisation that I talk about what effect does that have on how should we respond to it I think basically saying do we embrace the polarisation or do we do we try to moderate it I suppose I not entirely sure that we have a choice would be I think my response in that it seems like the only if we're saying the only iterative making strategy that the right have is a kind of nativism it seems then it seems that we've pushed into a kind of polarisation in which a sort of more moderate agenda doesn't really gain traction which I think it seems to me that we can probably agree that the kind of the old social democratic parties suffered significant declines over the last 20 years and I think the reason for that is because they were they became unable to speak to people's economic grievances especially and their grievances in general and that led and partly was a contributing factor to the emergence of a kind of nativist populist right which was able to kind of jump in a gap that was left in terms of how do we what do we offer people in this context of kind of stagnant neoliberalism it seemed that a sort of nativist agenda was the one plausible solution so I think that created the polar right I don't think there's really a choice basically the only way to respond to that is to try to re-articulate a left agenda that can try to have some kind of some kind of response to that basically so I wouldn't I don't really see that there's much of a choice I don't think which kind of speaks then to the idea of Brexit so the we should in a different way say we're saying if I'm saying you're saying Brexit maybe wasn't kind of inevitable it was something constructed rather than a sort of inevitable response of a neoliberal stagnation I think I'm saying perhaps it was an inevitable response there needs to be some kind of nativist legitimating strategy in a context where democratic outcome democratic options are limited and constrained and that so Brexit has its roots in things like the hostile environment has its roots in the right wing of the conservative party which came to ascendance and I think that was in some ways the only option available to the to the conservative party to try to think of ways to appeal a sort of centrist appeal had lost and so they pushed to the right in the same way that the centrist appeal from the centre left has lost appeal and pushed things to a more kind of left agenda I think this might be the only mic that's working so if we share it between the three I suppose what I mean is is that the establishment or the ruling class didn't didn't want it so that's an interesting thing I get that it's a problem and it's a way it's a legitimating strategy it's a way to kind of appeal because the centrism has basically lost or it doesn't have appeal but then how do we explain or how do we make sense of the fact that the vast majority of the ruling class don't even want it so it's like it's just this kind of situation where something's happening and the people in charge or the kind of traditional ruling class is not at the is not driving it through it's basically happening despite them but you know the financial times is writing today the financial times is writing today about how a Corbyn Government would produce great high levels of growth than a Johnson Government so like you said the capitalist class are seeing problems in terms of the legitimating strategies that are emerging but I suppose what I'm saying is legitimation isn't an option there needs to be some method of legitimation in place and it's difficult to see how the right can come up with one that isn't drawing on these kind of nativist tropes to try to to produce something that can appeal to people in terms of mainstreaming of the mainstreaming of protests I think this is one of the points I was trying to make the more that protest becomes the only way in which a voice can be articulated the more you've got to be imaginative so it becomes a drive to become more and more imaginative all the time and partly it becomes a kind of mundane so the government is less easily shamed I think maybe the boycott work fair that I was talking about only six years later might not be as embarrassing for the government now as it was six years ago people have got used to austerity in food banks and hyper exploitation and just basically you have to live with it and so I think the kind of shock value that comes from some of the protests is starting to wear off which then obviously pushes things if you're going to try and get your voice heard requires again new ways in which to try to achieve that in terms of capital I suppose what I'm trying to say partly that the kind of autonomous argument of we shouldn't think of it in terms of capital dominating labour but also we should think about labour problematising the reproduction of capital is kind of what I'm trying to say so what I'm trying to say is what does that look like in the present and one way that we can try to explore that is to say well first of all what types of dissent can we see there's a visible forms of dissent but there are obviously also more subterranean forms of dissent where people just think the government's all crooks and we don't listen to them and we just try and get the best we can out of the situation but there's also then we can try to spot the gaps in the way in which authority is secured which is what I'm trying to do in terms of looking for example at the shale gas commissioner resigning and explicitly saying the reason I'm resigning is because we can't produce the policies that we want because the protesters are too successful in terms of making this a kind of toxic environment so I'm trying to say that's one of the ways in which labour is problematising if we have a broad category of labour not just workers but people engaged in waged work and non waged work and susceptible in multiple ways to exploitation and not having the opportunity available to them to benefit from the ownership of capital those people constantly able to problematise in different ways the regime and that's what I guess I'm trying to sort of think about and map out in terms of the legitimacy of the nation state I think it seems to me that the current context is kind of clearly undermining the sort of cosmopolitan hegemony of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s when it was seen to be we're just going to have these new supranational forms of cosmopolitan liberal governance which now looks a bit too triumphalist given that there seems to be a reversal and a return to the nation state and then sort of an accelerationism I'm not sure I'm an accelerationist or definitely know what it means but I think the point is to use the tools that I think the point of the accelerations is to use the tools that capitalism produces that capitalism has to have this drive for technology for rational life or mechanisation for new forms of efficiency and that we don't just say isn't that terrible thing that capitalism is doing but we try to use those tools to our own benefit that then sort of somehow links to demands like universal basic income I think along the lines of if we're going to accept that that we're moving towards a kind of jobless economy because technology can produce so much stuff then we're going to have to find ways to maintain consumption and demand especially so one example of an accelerationist strategy is to promote the idea of universal basic income as a flaw of consumption that could enable reproduction of capitalist system given those conditions so then the question is well is that going to quell descent I think is your question I suppose with the universal basic income it basically depends what type of universal basic income I mean you could say universal credit in the UK as a form of moving in that direction but it's so low that first of all you can't get it and you can't rely on it but it's unlikely to produce quelling of descent so it also seems to me unlikely that you can quell descent capitalism as an antagonistic system and so it seems unlikely whatever concession is produced produces its own form of crisis in its own I mean the main concession of neoliberalism it seems was that financialisation enabled a massive increase in wealth in housing and that was a particular generation benefited from concession which has worn off now because the next generation can't afford to buy a house so the concession that's used has a knock on effects and produces new forms of crisis and new forms of tension and strain and that's what I'm trying to figure out. Okay we'll take another round of questions if you can put your hand up. Shall I start? Yes? Okay so my name is Alex and my question is what is the course of the growing student or school children protest because in the graph you have shown there is like a sharp growth of the number of student and school children protest it has been the number one like protest in recent years so what is the cause of that because if it's another type of protest for example the feminist or the environmentalist there is some kind of pressure group or organisation behind it but for school children there is just no clear like group of people organising them to do so so what is the cause of the growing number of the school children protest. So I'm Theresa thank you and I'm Portuguese and in Portugal two days ago we had national elections and the percentage of abstention was about 45.5 and four years ago so last parliamentary elections was about 43 so we are beating records my question is how to tackle the most basic demonstration of participation in the future of a country democracy which is voting. Following on that question I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more about the relationship between these forms of dissent and protest and more mainstream or traditional progressive forces in the UK that would be the Labour Party and what would be the ways for Corbyn's Labour to capture these energies like XR etc. Take a couple more if anyone has anything. Thank you so much for your talk my name is Rob and just relating to countries outside the highly neoliberalised context for example South Africa Zimbabwe where we're seeing more of a nativist indigenisation policies coming through just wanting to see are we seeing this more as a nationalisation across the globe as a result of globalisation or is there more of this battle between capitalism not working and it kind of influx against democracy so just really kind of thinking outside of that relationship you mentioned is globalisation actually not working for us as a whole because we like to stick to our own thanks. I mean this is still building on the previous questions about the relation between kind of the representative elective democracy and these protests I'm wondering in particular about an issue like the climate crisis where the debate that's going on in institutional politics is in my eyes not the debate we should be having because it's about whether climate change is real or not and how far we should do something about it whereas actually the question should be more political about how this transition should happen and whose interest should be considered so I was wondering if you could speak about how kind of the dialogue and the political dialogue is often seems confined in these institutional politics Okay so we might have time for one more round after this so Yeah I mean there's a lot of questions around participation I suppose the general question is about the relationship between the institutional tier and what's going on in terms of civil society how civil society is mobilising and how should we try to understand that relationship in different contexts and I think a general trend that seems to me is there has been a rejection of the institutional sphere as something which was essentially dead and closed off and all interesting forms of politics were taking place outside of the institutional sphere that perhaps a period especially before 2008 kind of anti-globalisation movements there was a general consensus that we should pretty much give up I think on the parliamentary sphere that it had no capacity to really accommodate demands that the two actively tried to engage with the parliamentary sphere was itself a debilitating act and I suppose that John Holloway has changed the world and that that kind of agenda of reject parliamentary politics reject parliamentary politics and and try to construct new forms of societies outside of the parliament and within society and so I think what we're seeing in the post 2008 period is a questioning of that and but a cynical questioning or a sceptical questioning of that there's a re-engagement with the institutions but there's a re-engagement with the institutions I think with the recognition that they probably aren't our friend as well at the same time and I think that's probably how I would see some of them ask questions like why is there no participation in formal voting then in one sense my response is well who really cares because what you're going to achieve anyway by electing a left government that's then going to have to capitulate to global financial forces and everyone gets very disappointed and then doesn't quite know what to do which is kind of I think what happened in Greece so who really cares if the voting level is low but then there's a questioning of that dismissal but there's also at the same time a questioning of the re-entering into the institutions so I think we're in a stage where we basically don't know we've tried to change the world without taking power and before that we've tried build the party win the elections for the left both of them seemed problematic and now we're in a situation where we don't quite know which and so we basically try a bit of everything and see if that will produce the types of outcomes that we would like to see happening and it seems to me that's roughly speaking the kind of Corbyn project probably Sanders project in Portugal it seems like that was the left coalition it seemed to be a kind of grassroots movement attached to the more mainstream left party but interestingly it hasn't then generated higher levels of participation so it hasn't had the subsequent re-politicisation of the formal sphere either it doesn't seem like so I don't know why that why we see those outcomes but I think that's how I would understand it in terms of this kind of rejection of parliamentarism but in a sceptical way in which we in which we recognise that probably we have to engage with the parliament to resphere but we also think it's also going to bite us back when we do I think that answers the question about what's our plan for transition in terms of participation in terms of why are students and especially school children engaging I agree with what Faisie was saying basically the situation we were in is the younger you are the more screwed you are and the sadly and the older you are the more wealthy and comfortable your life has been and that seems to be in a lot of contexts the type of situation that we're facing so like I was talking about before the one-off benefit of the big financial injection into the housing market is that it can't be repeated because people have now got the expensive houses and so the next generation can't afford to buy them that pattern can be seen in multiple spheres I mean university education obviously I didn't pay any tuition fees and if I went to university now in the UK I'd end up with £50,000 worth of debt so there is a looming sense of what's the future hold for young people and first students in 2010 with the tuition fees and now it seems to be school children with the recognition that we have at least a dual crisis in terms of the environmental crisis and in terms of an economic crisis so Keir Milburn has a book out called Generation Left which talks about this basically what we are seeing in those two crises is the next generation bearing the burden of the benefits, the costs that are associated with the goods that the next generation had so the previous generation used up all the carbon and the previous generation used up all the debt that fueled their assets which now are unavailable to the next generation so there's a kind of generational conflict which falls along class conflict lines as well so I think that's in terms of why they're doing it I talked about that in terms of how they're doing it I think it's self-organising so in Birmingham where I am it's basically 15 and 16 year old children what's up on Instagram and figuring out how do we hold the next one not Facebook because that's for old people and then globalization I think the question is I think the question can be translated into is there an inherent nativist narrative that can be picked on by the right to try to legitimate itself and boost its popularity and so on or is it a sign of the times and I think probably capitalist democracy always has that risk because there's a needs to be governed by a state and a state needs to be territorial in some way and that territorialism needs to be justified and that tends to produce then national identity nativism, patriotism and so on so all of that kind of conditions always exist but it just when you're in a context where you can't meet other demands you've got to rely on God save the Queen as your legitimating strategy Thank you, I think we have time for two or three more questions if anyone has anything more that they want to Regarding the dissent as that just over here right in front of me you mentioned that the dissent as I understand it dissent comes about as this frustration between democracy and capitalism intensifies and there are no roots through democracy in order to get those concessions so dissent happens and then it's only through concessions that this payoff can happen is it that you don't foresee any because it seems like as you mentioned there were concessions made previously and if we look at maybe this kind of double movement framework it's as if the political institutions or the holders of political power aren't willing to give concessions maybe because there aren't any concessions to be made do you foresee is that there aren't any more concessions to be made unless we have and I use it in the most strictest terms strictest way revolutionary change and what sort of change would that be yeah that's my question Hi my name is Maria I come from Brazil and I thought was interesting the thing that Theresa said about people that not going to vote in Brazil we are obliged to vote and even though 25% of people don't go voting and even knowing that they are not going to get their passports or they are not going to be able to going to a public competition if they don't vote so it's quite interesting in a sense 20% of the population just think that they won't be able to travel and they won't be able to pass to a public competition to a public position but the other thing that I was going to ask maybe I am asking something that would force you to talk about something that you didn't talk yet but you mentioned the word populism in your title and you didn't mention it during your presentation and I would like to know the connection to understand the connection that you are making between austerity and populism it would be interesting for me to know about it I have a sort of related question to that it's the link between the way in which right wing populist movements and figures are sort of adapting and adopting left sounding arguments around critiques of financialized globalization for example and so what you think about how the left can counter that and what's the way forward for that one more question anyone who hasn't had the chance to ask yet maybe okay let's take a few more hi right here I guess my question is going to sound a little bit pessimistic but I just want to get your thoughts on it imagine there's a second referendum and the thought process is when the vote comes out and it's leave again next year Trump wins the second election do you think protests remain a viable option of I guess calling for change or do you think that almost something more radical will be needed hi my name is Akmo do you think at one time we will have a balance between democracy and capitalism or we have to lose one either we have austerity or we have democracy or none of them thank you I think we just had one last question at the front first thank you very much for answering my previous question and my second question is related to the government concession question and its protest is a reliable way to change my question is is it a little bit misleading you think that protest is the only way to change but a protest in some way shows the public opinion and shows the way of people to change but what if someone is just really good at mobilising people go on the streets to protest and force the government to change that is not a really needing change like the change is not that urgent to be done right so it seems like we are asking about how are we going to change the world and and is protest an option I suppose I suppose I see both of them as sort of connected so I suppose on saying dissent isn't necessarily you kind of only that you have a kind of aim and you think okay how do I dissent you achieve that aim dissent also becomes a necessity at a certain point because you have to find a way to survive so if economic if your ability to reproduce yourself as a being becomes sufficiently difficult and the kind of commodity network that surrounds us and produces the formal way in which we are able to achieve that doesn't allow us to achieve that then we kind of have to turn to forms of dissent or alternative in terms of alternative forms of association rather than alternative forms of dissent but the problem is that for capitalism alternative forms of association are also a form of dissent so I suppose we could think about things like Argentina factory occupations that took place after 2001 as one way of trying to sustain people trying to sustain themselves in the context in which there weren't any jobs it's not necessarily that factory occupation is a form of dissent it's a form of survival it becomes a form of dissent as well because it doesn't fit with the logic of commodity exchange as the way in which we're supposed to organise our reproduction of ourselves so in that sense I'm not sure that protest or dissent are necessarily always an option it's more like you've got to do something and that then sometimes becomes a form of dissent a form of resistance visible, more organised, more prominent and makes it into the newspapers and sometimes it's more like foot dragging of some kind criminal activity sometimes and so on I suppose the point I'm trying to make is it's not the case that it's optional it's that we need to find some way in which to survive and it's quite often the case that that possibility doesn't present itself through the formal permitted means so on so I'd ask I'll probably ask it back to you so is the decision not to vote is it an active opposition or is it just there's no point because you weren't going to get it to the formal sector anyway and you weren't going to fly anyway so it doesn't really matter if you get those penalties so it's not it's not even necessarily an active resistance or opposition it's just the formal sphere doesn't touch you so there's no point in so there was a question around the second referendum if the second referendum voted leave and if Trump wins again then is protest the only option which I think is going back to this kind of general question of what are we going to do it's a kind of double movement question as well are concessions enough how do we produce a substantial change I think probably historically what happens unfortunately is that war is what kind of clears it out and the tensions become so so substantial that the challenge of legitimating the challenge of managing expansion and the challenge of mutual hostilities that that generates has tended to lead to war so that also currently unfortunately doesn't look entirely impossible I mean Trump's obviously gender is to hostile hostile agenda internationally you mentioned Iran already there's obviously hostile relations with China in an economic trade war but that obviously then can spill over so I think if we're trying to say how does this incompatibility between democracy and capitalism normally get managed when it reaches the peak of the crisis quite often ends in a war as the way that gets resolved that doesn't sound very happy but then there still doesn't resolve the tension as the point isn't it obviously so then you still have to find a way to survive in those kind of context that's sort of the narrative that we used to explain the emergence of the welfare state that people didn't want to that people were collectivised through the experience of war and that they great gained a collective consciousness through the experience of war and they didn't want to have another war and so they were willing to push a more socialist agenda so if you thank you for all the comments listening, thank you OK, so I'd like to thank Dr David Bailey very much for a fascinating talk and response to all the questions and also thank Dr Faesie Ismael for her comments and all of you for such a great contribution to this first seminar we'd like to invite you all to continue the conversation in a small reception we have at the end of each of these seminars which will be in the SCR which is on the first floor there'll be some nibbles and drinks and you can continue these comments and thoughts and talk to everyone about it I'd also like to invite you all to come to next week's seminar which will be the same day next week the 15th of October with Adam Hania which will be money, markets and monarchies the political economy of the contemporary Middle East thank you very much