 Hello and welcome to another coordinating call of dim 25 movement for Europe featuring progressive ideas. You won't hear anywhere else. Feels like ages since we've actually done a live stream that's because we moved to a fort nightly schedule so if you were there last week waiting for us that would explain why we weren't there. Today we're going to launch directly into a debate on why aren't progressives better at winning public opinion. We were having a discussion just before we started live streaming and we struggled to name progressive governments in Europe. We're not doing very well as progressives these days. Let's look at why. So let's kick it off if Anna. Thanks. And I'll try to give my point of view. Because friends and colleagues were telling me that it's the first time since the nineties. They hear so many news about Serbia as the country has started to being portrayed as a COVID vaccine heaven comparisons are even made with the smallpox epidemic from 1972. And this with the vaccination response with the vaccine produced in Yugoslavia free for all. The availability of vaccines from Russia China USA and the U does indeed resemble the good old times when Yugoslavia was far part of the non aligned movement. And when it was quite common to have students from Mali or Libya studying in Yugoslavia capitals. It only resembles the non aligned times because today the government is feeding the xenophobia and the vaccines are bought with loans, while the government is pushing their own positive PR. The truth is that despite three decades of deterioration of the health system in Serbia the well organized vaccination is a result of the leftovers of the Yugoslav public health system, which isn't privatized yet. The Institute where the smallpox vaccine was produced then despite of its current poor condition will be able to produce the Sputnik vaccine. This time the question is, is it going to be for all, or for those who pay more or for those who are willing to take the Russian vaccine. Why am I saying all this. I was born in a socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia where social equality unity and brotherhood were a way of living. Those were the principles on which generations until the 80s were raised. After the dark era of Slobodan Milosevic, leader of the socialist party of Serbia, after the revolution which supposed to establish democracy after dictatorship, and to open the country after a decade of sections and embargo, then embrace the neoliberal model denouncing everything that even remotely resembled the past ideology. Five years ago when I joined the end and entered the world of the left, I found out that my beliefs in peace, social justice, equality, freedom, and so on carry a label, which in my country is heavily associated with the legacy of Slobodan Milosevic, where the leftist small groups are divided among themselves using the narrative of partisans from the Second World War. In Serbia for the past 20 years, everything from the spectrum of terms used by the left was heavily scrutinized. Communists were blamed for the war and the misery, while the new parties with democracy instead of communism in their names, started to sale the public property and destruction of socialist legacy. For the countries of the Eastern Bloc, which were behind the Iron Curtain, left socialism or communism are triggering memories of repression and poverty, while the countries which moved from feudalism to capitalism never experienced what the state-owned public property is. Instead there is no such thing as a free lunch is a mantra. Therefore, I believe that a much more tolerant approach to those who are not part of the leftist tribe is needed as well as the redefinition, reinvention of terminology to make the narrative contemporary and comprehensive. Finally, when I looked up what my new identity considers, I discovered that my education and background in art and culture won't be sufficient to understand and to adapt to the many shades of left. Here's what Wikipedia says. The term left has later applied to a number of movements, especially republicanism in France during the 18th century, followed by socialism, including anarchism, communism, the labor movement, Marxism, social democracy and syndicalism in 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the term left wing has been applied to a broad range of movements, including the civil rights movement, feminist movement, LGBT rights movement, anti-war movement and environmental movement, as well as a wide range of political parties. If the left or the progressives really aim to go beyond the philosophical overthinking of the ideological differences with a little real movement towards the future, making a unified front and making its relationship with the subgroups less complicated and divisive would probably help with winning the argument. Thank you. I, too, would rather steer away from the problematic notion of the left and talk about progressives, because I think even if you do talk about progressives, which I take to be a broader category, but one that we should be very interested in being and in mobilising, even if you do talk about progressives, I do believe that they have a particular set of hurdles when it comes to democratic elections today, and I want to concentrate on one of those. Most of these hurdles fall down to convincing others that they can get things done. And one neglected aspect of this is that elections have an essential electoral metaphor, which is of backing a winner, the electoral gamble. Generations of impotent populaces have treated their vote as one where their one throw of the dice every five years is all they've got. And fear of backing a loser is a real force to be reckoned with for progressives. Because for progressives, the only way they can circumvent this involves a really complicated two step. One step. First, we have to articulate people's discontent at the diabolical state of things. This is somewhat easier, I think, in this pandemic era. Two step. Then we have to instill hope with little tangible evidence, because we can see that progressives have not been in power in many places recently for any decent length of time that we can cite in Europe. Nevertheless, instill hope that this can be transformed, and that we can do it. All too easily, the right breeze in, calling us doom and gloomsters, and head us off at the pass before we ever get to step two. So it involves considerable tax to get around this. And I have to say that tax completely failed progressives in the 2019 general election, which was so disastrous in the UK and which brought in Boris Johnson with the majority of 80. All he had to do was to adopt a slogan called, we at least are going to get Brexit done. This despite the fact that nobody knew what it was or what it was going to look like or feel like. And secondly, he could accuse us of being doom and gloomsters when we were worried about at least a no deal Brexit, but also about much more general other things. So I think that is the challenge. And I think one of the things it's worth thinking about it is to what extent the COVID era has changed this situation. Thanks for his memory stretch go. Yeah, I'd like to start by a quote by the great Brazilian trade unionist, she commended us who was killed just one week after his 44th birthday, who famously said that ecology without class struggle is like gardening. I would say that today using technology without class struggle is just like surfing by feeding the machine with more data. And if the green new deal today needs to take into account the class struggle, so does a new tech new deal. Because what we have seen with COVID-19 is not just a revelation in the sense of the original Greek meaning of apocalypse, this kind of unwilling of the real reality and the class struggle. But COVID-19 also served as a sort of accelerator of everything what is bad in society, also the good things. But what we could have seen is precisely this kind of acceleration of the further digitalization of all our lives, social bonds, learning, dating, loving, even organizing because most of the left or the greens or the progressives today. These days for a year already organized mainly through technology, which on the one hand helps but on the other hand, users precisely the means of the system which brought us in the first place here. So I think what we have to do now in order to win opinion, to put it to answer to this question that might impose that the very start is to see how his opinion being formed today, and opinion today is mainly being formed through technology. It's not anymore the classical story of media, it is more the story of social media and new apps and so on. So I think what we have to do today is not just seize the means of production, but to seize the means of production and to understand what exactly is happening in the technology. So just a short anecdote before I finish, in 1932, Günther Anders, one of the greatest German Austrian philosophers underestimated maybe more famous that he was the husband of Hannah Arendt at that time after Heidegger. In 1932, Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt had seminars about Hitler's mind comp and everyone including the Frankfurt school and so on was laughing at them. Why are you taking this book seriously? And Günther Anders even said that it would be easier to organize a seminar about Hegel at that time. So I think what we have to do today first is to take very seriously those who are portrayed as crazy, including social media events like Capitol Hill performances and so on, read it, but then also seize the technology which we have. So besides the real organizing in our communities, what we need today is really to seize the technology which we have and to understand the contradictions of technology. Thanks very much. Right, so as you all know, there are elections, regional elections coming up in Madrid in the month's time right. And one of the things that I've noticed and I've been noticing for a while is that progressive slash the left, we've been caught up in a very strange place. And if you look at you hear what the right is saying to galvanize their voters is their their call to arms is communism or freedom. Right. So we keep on being labeled into this old fashion, you know, ideas, whatnot. But at the same time, when you speak to progressives on the street. They say, Well, the socialists, you know, the left, you know, their establishment. So the pool of voters that we know that you're trying to entice to come over that the ones that are secured are seeing you as not radical enough, or being just part of this establishment. And at the same time, the increasingly more radical right is pointing at your law of communism, your against freedom and all these things. So I think that the answer might be being more clear and more radical and explicit about the message. I think that's where maybe one of the answers are in this in this manner. So there is a comment from the chat from Dark Brotherhood progressives often antagonize those who disagree with them and hinder discussion with people that they don't agree with Judith. Sorry, no, not Judith David had a stack and then Judith David. And I really appreciate that comment because it really I think points to a big problem that we're facing in the progressive circles nowadays and I mean, for lack of a better term because also I'm not exactly happy with that word. I just want to make a little comment on if you know if we're if by the left because that was, let's say progressives left. If by that we mean the so called socialist parties that have been effectively selling their soul to the market that I'm afraid we have our answer to why we're not good or better at winning opinion and I think as I said a couple of weeks ago. I don't think there is a left really in Europe and the progressive circle itself is very very minute if you ask me, especially when you consider the need for you know transnational internationalist movement like the m25 that is creating a kind of shared universality and so on and what the left does appear to be doing at the moment or what's, you know, what what remains of the left or what's left of the left is there's being involved in cultural wars you know playing this kind of identity politics game which is, in my view, one of the causes of its own destruction and I grew up in the UK as you all know, and I got used to this fabrication of lies by the Tory rags you know the sound of the mail and so on with headlines whose only purpose was to turn people against one another really, you know the Brits against migrants and so on and the same papers have been for years trying to distract us from the real source of our alienation and exploitation at the hands of the few. And so in a sense they've been, you know, trying to instill in us one could say a fear of the other but another, which is not guilty of the crimes of the powerful. But by pitting us one against one another they've essentially contributed to a narrative of fear of the migrant of fear of the refugee and so on and so forth when, you know, we all know that these people are not responsible for the huge crimes that we are witnessing nowadays you know the huge tax evasion that we're, you know, we're witness every single day in our lives. And also this has happened, you know, not by chance but by design and I think like I said this type of culture wars are destroying the left where good people are being driven to really just you know blame one another for for the predicament that we find ourselves in even when that predicament was not caused by them themselves. And so I think that what this kind of narrative is doing is treating everybody treating us as idiots as people who are unable to see the big picture which is by and large not true. You know this purported differences are being exaggerated and weaponized in order to create atomized citizens and to atomize our common struggles. What we have to do as DM and so on is to bring these struggles together because that has to be the only way, at least the only way that I know of getting the left or progressives whatever we want to call it to a point where we can actually win power. We shouldn't be so shy about that. You know we need a shared universality and true internationalism as I mentioned and if we keep focusing on identity and cultural distinctions as opposed to the things that actually bring us together will be forever stuck in a loop out of which we will not be able to get. And that's I think what those in power actually want us to be blaming the next door neighbor instead of the banks you know the private equity firms and the big corporations which are hiding behind their corporate social responsibility programs, basically greenwashing let's call it what it is, while under the dark of night, they spend their time effectively pushing through their policy agendas to you commissioners at the level of the you and national policymakers at the level of our countries in order to influence, and often even let's be clear, legislation, not to mention the cases where private interests are essentially drafting the legislation itself. You know, all of this, just to come to a close, or most of it at least is happening right in front of our eyes almost as if it has become socially acceptable. As if we're living with a big elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about the fact that there is no democracy in Europe. That's something that we have to keep talking about it says Chomsky I said before right that under capitalism we can have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system, I'm quoting in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control in the end you know it all boils down to one thing that progressives need to care more about winning really I think and it's true that we always need to be aware of the authoritarian in us this is something that we keep telling ourselves and it's good that we do that, but we cannot let go and when we, if we cannot let go is what I'm trying to say and free ourselves from that mental barrier. We will never be able to properly win you know we need, we need to start caring more about winning instead of just participating. And yes, we have to be consistent and we have to be coherent but there has to be a way for us to win whilst maintaining some level of purity at the same time you know that does not entail us having to sell our soul to the devil. We need to keep trying but let's be honest just do one last point. We also need money, because we're a movement of more than 130,000 members with a monthly budget of around 30,000 euros you know like we're trying to create a kind of, let's say democratic revolution in Europe but we need the money and we need the assistance and support to make that happen. And so, you know if you're watching this and you know a part of our movement or would be willing to help us by contributing please do so, you can do so on our website. So, yeah, that's what I wanted to say. We are we have to find a way to win right so you David to drop the culture war and more funding loose things left should be more radical. Judith, what do you think. We have two struggles, one is that from what I've read in a survey recently I'm not sure if this applies only to Germany or more of Europe I would say it's probably more that the representation of the poor in parliament or not just the poor but anyone even working class is has has gone down historically in the past 50 years and also the voting share. So, the working class and poor people are less likely to vote each year. And that is a problem which I would time not so much to identity politics but basically an issue of trust. The social democratic parties, especially are to blame in losing people's trust that the parties can change anything can keep their promises and actually improve the situation for the majority of people. Those who do not want to vote for a xenophobic party are basically just abstaining from voting. And I think that these are the people that we must try to win back, we can only do so by making clear that we are different. If you look around, how many parties are there really around Europe where you could say with certainty that they're going to be different they're not going to sell out their voters, they're not going to sell out. I think Syriza was an inspiration for a lot of people at the time. They sold out too. Janis can still count as an inspiration in that sense we're very lucky to have him. But how many other politicians can you really point to that you would recommend to a working class or a poor person and say vote for this person, they're not going to sell you out. That is I think is a basic problem of politics nowadays and the other problem is that when you look at the other segment of likely left voters, the ones who are a bit, a bit further ahead in society who do not have to worry about making ends meet every month, but not super rich, let's say, they basically have a feeling that they cannot pay more they cannot afford to. And somehow, at least in Germany, the basic assumption is that if you want leftist politics is going to raise your taxes is going to cost you more. And I think with this segment, we have to work much more to let them know that there is plenty of money flushing around I mean, my understanding of all these blockchain based innovations that we're seeing just the other day I heard about the blockchain where you can bet on the value of someone's reputation. I mean all or the NFTs or all these things I think they're basically money that doesn't have a place to go. It's all these people who are trying to make to make to invest in something, and they have no idea even companies are no longer worth investing in. So, I think that we have to explain this better and explain to people how we can take this money and make sure it gets invested in things that we actually need in the improvement of people's lives. And of course, in a working climate change and future pandemics. That's my two pronged approach. Yes. Well, in my opinion, two factors are important here. What is the lack of why the left is not doing better in building opinion. One of the factors is the lack of bond between left intellectual academics and the hardworking class. The second is what unites them. The preservation of status and its protection for the future. These are value conservative attitudes that also involve the environment in which they live and work. Because the unknown, the new could threaten these values and throw things out of balance. That is why both sides prefer to keep to themselves. It must be a goal for the left to break through this barrier and gain access to and be heard by the hardworking people. The lack of commitment, however, is less rooted in the cause. For instance, in the demand for fairer redistribution for general prosperity for environmental protection measures. But more in the fact that the left traditionally prefers to quarrel with itself. It only makes a marginal effort to convince the working people. When it does, the language is not right. Language, therefore, must become a unifying element. Well, before the less intellectual non academics are willing to listen to what the left has to say, they have to understand what they say. We should not think in terms of the written and spoken language only. Since I have been thinking consciously, and that goes back to the 60s. I've always experienced art as a unifying element of a revolt of protest. Be the protest songs of the rock music of the 60s and 70s and after or painting sculptures and the like. You know, they make you think about things that make you realize things, but also films contributed to my absorbing political news and thus creating solidarity. Well, it was a young person. Now, we at the M35 are moving in this direction. I know that because I'm really, you know, trying to support this, what we are doing. We have to use as many channels as we can. For example, with the new green deal for Europe. And I hope that the path will become broader and broader and more and more people will be able to join us and march with us. It won't be easy, though. To use the words of the historian Adam tools. The only thing that is certain about the green new deal is that those who couple climates with Polish climate policy with broad demands for social transformation, create powerful enemies. Then what is needed is a strong political movement in cooperation with a mobilized labor and climate movement that combined forces. And what first create majorities and then watch over the implementation of the program. These are dimensions that are beyond the current horizon of left politics in Europe. And that is precisely the point, you know, we, we have to get used to thinking in terms as big as the challenges we face and have a plan that is as radical as it's implemented as it is implementable. Thank you. And also pointing out communications failures of the left on a related note that we have a comment in the YouTube chat the left struggles with public opinion because the real left doesn't control the mainstream media and large propaganda networks. Interesting. Who are we calling on next rosemary. Yes, I wanted to comment on what I think is a There's a sort of danger on two sides here. One is the cause for a clear and a radical posture and a revolutionary vision and to be able to say it all and get it out there seems to me to be part of And the left and I'm talking about left now does have with its obsession with truth. This is an interest in the scientific nature of Marxism for example, but more generally with rationality as the thing that is going to win our battles for us. And the fact is that if you tell people exactly what they ought to think, they very rarely follow the backwards and if their arms and legs in the air and say, Oh thank you I never thought of that. I'm not going to change my life entirely. On the other hand, you will have the show until moves of this world on the left, who respond to this by saying, Oh golly, look how good the far right are at capturing hearts and minds among working people. We must look at a left nationalism. We must look at a left strong man. We must understand the irrationality of these things. And so you move into a kind of irrationality area, which I think is very dangerous indeed. And for me, what's completely missing here and this touches on this question of communication is our understanding of ideology of how ideology works of the fact that class struggle never takes place except through and in ideology. And if you want to persuade other people, and that's what our job is and by the way I would say, we want to persuade the people who back the xenophobes, as well as the people who frightened stiff of that, of that route. We want to persuade an awful lot of people, but then you have to think about how ideology works, and it works very well in the arts, because they are ideological pieces. They have successful ideological interventions. That is when art works. One thing that's working is just making an intervention on the way that people are interpolated into society through their sense of the meaning of life makes an impact on that. And yes, I think we have to work much harder at what it means to be to make successful ideological interventions in different ways to all sorts of different constituency. Claudia. Yeah, thank you. In my view, there's another problem, because society has become so individualized, but there is no longer possible to continue with excited existing party system. It's a consequence of progressiveness that people no longer feel they belong to one single group. It's not a bad thing, in my opinion. People are much more diverse than they used to be, and to quote an hour and again, we have to learn to argue again, we have to deal with issues across party lines and find a common consensus. The current party system, especially with a few large parties can no longer reflect this. The electoral college alone prevents this. I think there is no way around more citizens participation. The only question is how we implemented the 25 people scattering, for example, are one way to do this and we should continue doing this to not split people by their opinions, but find ways to combine and be more implementive and divorcing people from each other. Thank you, Claudia. Ianis. Thanks, Mattman. Hello, Eric. Welcome back from the Greek Navy. Look, we must begin by acknowledging how difficult it is to organize a rebellion against the system, whichever system that is, whether it's slavery, feudalism, the Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, doesn't matter. Rebellions are notoriously hard to organize because by definition, when you're going against an oligarchy, a monarchy, you've got many with not the same interests, not the same views, against one or against a unitary force. The unitary force exists. It's a force. It's there. It's got all the instruments of war against the many. The many will only gain a degree of power if they unite, and it is so difficult to unite because of what game theorists refer to as the free rider problem. You know, Jean-Jacques Rousseau even put it in different terms, you know, the stag hunt game for those who remember what Rousseau said, that, you know, he depicts this tribe where they're trying to catch a stag, but the only way of catching the stag is by encircling the stag and moving in. And the weakest link of that chain is sufficient for the stag to escape, and then they all starve. So because they fear that they would not coordinate, it's not a prisoner's dilemma. It's not that nobody wants to destroy the solidarity, but the fear that the solidarity is not going to eventuate means that each one of them tries to catch a rabbit, and then nobody catches the stag. So let's begin by being kind to progressives and to forces that must unite in a rebellion against an armed clad system. Okay? So that's the foundation. Then moving on, I think a fundamental error of the left, which has cost us a century of lost struggles, has been the abandonment of freedom and the surrender of freedom and liberty to the liberals and to the libertarians. Part of that was the catastrophic embracement of the concepts of equality and justice, which I think are toxic, ridiculous, and undermine the movement. Because equality means nothing. Equality of what? Don't tell me about opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To be a capitalist, to be Jeff Bezos? I'll recall, I will remind you that Karl Marx could not stand the word fairness or the word justice. He wrote powerfully against them as bourgeois concepts, and he was completely right. When he was in London in one of the first international movements, the movements of the first international, he went to great lengths to fight against the slogan of the first stage unions, a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. His point was, there can be no such thing as a fair wage. The moment you have a wage labor system, you cannot have fairness. We forgot about that. We went into the laborist direction, the trade unionist direction, about fair wages and about a nice accommodation between capital and labor. So we've gone, even the communists left, the split of the second and the third international, we went from class hatred, which is ridiculous. You cannot attract people on the basis of the idea of hatred to class accommodation, to surrender to the capitalist. So that was a split in the 20th century between those who went for class hatred and authoritarian Stalinist control and the others who believed in the mixed economy and accommodation with capital, as if capital can never be tamed and civilized. So, you know, we have some profound errors in our past as progressives as the left against the background of a very difficult task. I could go on and on and on and I'm not going to do that because I want to say one more thing before ending with the question that should be pertinent at the moment. So what do we do? The comment I want to make before coming to my conclusion concerns the way we approach people. You know, we of the left, progressives, we have a tendency to talk to people out there who are suffering, who are having a hard time, who are hopeless. We have a tendency to talk to them as victims. Now, they may think of themselves as victims, but they will not allow you and me to talk to them as if they are victims. You know, they are not defined by defeat even if they are defeated. They do not want your pity, my pity, the movement's pity, and they're not going to be organizing because we tell them that they are losers. You know, they have interests, they have aspirations, they have passions, and also they are hugely, hugely divided in terms of their motivation. We have to take this into consideration. You know, comrades, this is not a world in which the majority who are being exploited and who are proletarianized and who are the precarious and so on, right? They want what we think the left wanted them to want, you know, eight hours of work, a good wage, no exploitation. No, you realize today that there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world who would give their right arm to work for Goldman Sachs for free as interns, to work 18 hours a day to crush their souls for no money. Why? So that they can one day hope to join the other side, the side of the evil. Now, we have to speak to them as well. We cannot dismiss them. You know, we have to speak to the boy or the girl in Mumbai as we speak, who has one dream, to go to Silicon Valley, you know, set up a tech company, float it to the stock exchange, get billions and retire at the age of 30. Now, you know, this is what these people are aspiring, the people that we should be appealing to. Now, if we go to them with stories of equality and justice and eight-hour, you know, working limits and, you know, they don't want to hear about us. So we end up with this laborist agenda. Okay, what do we do? I think what we are doing, except most successfully, what we need to do in order to overcome the errors of the past, which I alluded to, is first, we've got to understand that, which we do understand as the MDM25, that we can no longer build progressive policies on the basis of nation-state parties. Transnationality, number one. Not just within Europe, but internationally. Not internationalism anymore, transnationalism. Number one, we understand that. Number two, that we have to be, we have to do that, which the left has not done in the past. We have to offer a genuine blueprint, a vision of what we do in six months and 12 months and five years and 10 years. If you don't offer this to people, they will not follow us anymore. They will not simply do it on the basis of laborist resistance. We are doing that as well, with a Green New Deal and so on. But where we are failing quite abysmally is to combine local action of, as Rosemary keeps saying, doing things together with movements, with municipalities, with trade unions, with interns, with anyone who feels that they have something in common with us, even if it is in the digital space, combine local action with a global campaign, a pan-European campaign, an international campaign. And finally, we have to be harsher on professional politicians like the European Left Party, who are a scourge in Europe, because they are far more interested in the end, in distributing little jobs between them than organizing a transnational progressive movement. And they do this in the name of the Left. We will embrace them because we must never hate anyone. We must move beyond the standard tendency of the Left towards hate it. But at the same time, we should not look at something like the European Left Party as a potential ally. It's not an ally. Individuals in there are allies. But these organizations, these bureaucratic organizations are the death of progressive politics. Thank you, Janis. A comment from the chat. We have to create more small victories on the ground and build a progressive track record before we can worry about inventing public branding for progressives. Eric. Thanks, Mechan. Hi, everybody. It's really lovely to see you all. It's such a joy to be back with a little view. For those of you watching, as Janis said, and as you can probably tell from my painfully fashionable haircut, I'm serving in the armed forces. And what that has meant for me, apart from all the amazing things I've learned about how to hurt people, is I've been exposed and I've been introduced to and I've spent time with people completely outside my social circle. And that's something that would never have happened in my life if I had not been conscripted into the army. And on top of that, I had the great misfortune, or some would say fortune, I guess, because of high educational and inexperience it was, to get COVID, which meant that I was stuck in a very small space with a very few number, a small number of people for a couple of weeks with nothing else to do other than the ancient tradition of talking to each other, conversation and telling stories, to pass the time. And with people completely outside of my comfort zone. To give you an example, the person sleeping on the bed over mine, his father was the head of Golden Dawn for Southern Athens. And this is a guy that, before I found this out about him, I spent many an evening laughing and to be honest, even after I found that about him, I still spend quite a few evenings laughing with him and passing the time with him and sharing human moments together. A number of other people with similar backgrounds, who in normal life I would never even share a table with. I lived with and slept in the same room with and the rest of it for a month. And beyond everything else, the one thing that I've understood about working class people and us in the left, is that we don't register on working class, on the working class radar. We are irrelevant. The kind of things that we decide to talk about as left. This strategy of everything is important, because it's important to somebody. This isn't just, it's not just that it makes us irrelevant. It alienates us and it undermines us in the eyes of people who think they might be wrong, but they feel that they're in a fight for their survival. So every time we take the microphone and we speak about something that they consider to be not a priority at all, not even closer priority. First of all, that tells them that we're completely out of touch, we have no idea what we're talking about and we're utterly irrelevant to their lives and to what they're going through. And what it also does is that it stigmatizes us, it makes us come across as intellectual, academic, as snobs. And it makes it impossible for them to trust us, even if we're saying things that feel like they might be true. And if we say things that feel like they would improve their lives, it's not good enough for there to be good arguments and for what we say to make sense, people need to trust us as the people who will make that happen. That's a major issue in our communication. It's very difficult when I was talking to somebody whose house had been broken into three times by Roma people, he's from a very rough part of Athens. His sister has been sexually assaulted by two boys of the Roma community. Now, I don't agree with his views on Roma people. In fact, if I shared them here you'd all agree I think that they'd be abhorrent. However, when you speak to people who, unlike you might have real life experience of the topics you're discussing not just a theoretical approach. It's difficult to come across as credible. And it's difficult, and this is a problem in general I think that we face as the left, that we come across as the textbook, the textbook politicians, we come across as their theoretical academic politicians. And another side of the political spectrum that doesn't do that is the far right they come across as the people who share, you know, the conclusions of these life experiences and they come across as even if they even if the ideas don't feel credible at least they make people feel hard. And I think that's, this is an issue that we're facing I think Yanis went definitely in the right direction about what it is that we need to start doing as the left, but in order to say to bridge this divide. But first and foremost we need to accept that there is a divide right now between the left and the working class and that divide isn't just one that is missing because of communication. It's one that is missing for a variety of reasons and we need to have a serious conversation. First of all amongst ourselves about what that means about what the left has become and about our relationship to the working class and about whether or not we are the party of the working class. And if we're not, what does that mean about our relationship with the working class. Hopefully I'll be joining many more of these calls and I've spoken a lot long time already. I don't have time to talk about what I think we should do, but hopefully I will do so in in future. Thank you Eric valuable fresh insights, literally from the frontline. Very important. Hi. Good evening. What I'm telling the same thing thinks as Eric. The problem is that the left doesn't represent the 99%. It represents the coordinates coordination class in Michael Albert's terms. And it represents the power of those who know better. What we sell is a very good ideas from very clever people and very important people. And the 99%. I hate the term working class because it means there is a working class. There is a coordination class we are part of. And this is not the matter. The matter is being, if you want a revolution, you must be part of the revolution. You must be one of the many and not the one that tells the clever and important stuff to the many. You must practice what you are saying and you must mean what you are saying by your acts. So by campaigning with others on things that are in their interest, in their concrete interest. It's very true what Eric said. It's people fighting for their survival. And we must feel the same urgency. We all are fighting for our survival. And we must translate our clever words in terms of survival. In terms of what we need to survive the collapse of capitalism and the rising of managerial feudalism. It's me, right? Well, since we're coming to an end, I guess, first of all, let me say that I'm really glad to see Eric back, which is a proof that the army sometimes can bring something good. And also, actually, Frederick Jameson, whom I know Yanis also appreciates a lot, mainly because of his writing on science fiction, had a book, which is called the American Utopia, in which sense, actually the army should be used as a public institution, as an educational institution, which can help in case of climate change, in case of wildfires, in case of the collapse of civilization. Well, we're very far away from that, but I'm very glad that Eric is actually using the time in the Navy in this way as tough it can be from time to time. I'd love just to reflect a bit on what was said before and to agree on those who said that language is very important. Not just language in the sense of getting rid of all the academic discourse, which just academics or professional activists understand, but in the sense of inventing maybe even a poetic language in the sense what you often said that language is not just spoken language, written language, language can be memes if you want, not just films or short images, but also new sorts of technology being used for transmitting language, so we have to use that. Speaking about language, many times the term progressive was name, and I must disappoint you or surprise you, but I also dislike the term progressive, because what immediately comes to my mind is of course Walter Benjamin, who criticized the very term of progress, saying that progress is a single catastrophe, saying that progress is a storm which is blowing from paradise. Of course today we need to be tactical in the sense of using terms which can serve as an umbrella for getting the greens, the left, and so on under one struggle, but I think at the same time we also have to embrace the contradictions themselves. For instance, the very term besides progressive as well, and what's the problem with progress, the problem with progress is that it's usually connected to capitalist progress, to more development, more extraction, more expansion. And you know, to shut up, I think what we have to do and I can see it from this discussion is not just to understand the contradictions, for instance understanding the contradiction of the Green New Deal, if you want, in the sense that green capitalism, which is now misusing or co-opting green politics is not the one which will get us out of this crisis, but it will just make it deeper, but we should also, besides understanding the contradictions, embrace contradictions. And here we can learn a lot from different movements, for instance, the Zapatista, who are coming to Europe in two months for the first time, and I hope you'll speak about this in the next sessions, who gave us this big lesson that we have to embrace the differences. And only through embracing the differences and the contradictions, maybe we can move a step forward. Thank you. Hello. Good evening, and I think Eric has described what is happening in Turkey concerning the leftist movements. It really is the same, it is really the same as he was telling about the working class, because the working class in Turkey is at the moment in great struggle, in deep, it is the most poor part of the communities in Turkey, in almost every city, there are oppositions, and there are manifestos coming from, mostly coming from the working class. You know, Turkey's left movement is already 100 years old, 1908 it started during the Ottoman age with young Turks, and since that time, the several parties established did not have a significant electoral success during all these years. I have witnessed, since 1960s, many leftist parties, many leftist leaders, and I am sorry to say that the cemeteries are full of martyrs, martyrs of leftist persons in Turkey. It's a long, long list. At the moment there is always political campaigns outside the parliamentarian situation, and many NGOs are advocating, advocating human rights, gender rights, etc., are using modernist leftist strategies, rather than postmodernist or progressive leftist ideas and practices. Even Gezi, which was a kind of utopic movement for Turkey's political state of affairs, did not create a progressive programmed leftist ideology, it was rather populistic and naive. I would like to remind you that there is one production in the world, and especially in Turkey, and that is contemporary art productions. Because at the moment, you know that there is no freedom of expression, freedom of journalism, etc., but contemporary art works are really, if you look in depth to the contemporary art works produced in Turkey, all over Middle East and even in Europe, are having the ideologies of progressive left. So I would recommend to collaborate with these groups of contemporary art and culture artists, experts and all the institutions and of course NGOs. There are many art and culture NGOs with progressive left ideas and practices. Thank you. Thank you, Burrell, and I didn't see any more stacks, so I think we will wrap up. We've been debating and discussing for one hour now. We've heard how the left should be more radical, particularly against professional politicians. We should have better ideas, better communication that connects better with people, more funding. We've heard about the sheer scale of the task that left faces today and the problems of the intellectualization of the left, the culture wars. And if you'd allow me some thoughts, just to wrap up, because there's something that hasn't been mentioned, and I think it's a problem for me that the left has, I think, a management problem also as well. And I'm not necessarily talking about DM 25. I mean, I've been an activist and organizer for about 10 years now. I think that we talked about winning earlier. And sometimes I feel that the left has lost sight of what winning actually means of what impact is. For me, impact is not about finishing a position paper or having a successful event or getting someone canceled. It's about changing people's lives. And that if we think of impact in that way, it has a very clarifying effect on how we organize our work and how we plan and how we execute that plan. And connected to this is what Eric said, which I think is really important, which is the idea that everything is important that with the left often gets stuck on the outrage of the day, rather than picking one issue and focusing on it clearly for one, two weeks or whatever, but just for a dedicated period of time in order to make progress on it it's constantly juggling different priorities. And I think that means it spreads itself very thinly and it's hard to have an impact that way. So we can go on and on about this there's much more to say and I think we should definitely pick up this discussion and this debate, another day. So, we're going to now go into the boring internal part of our meeting thank you very much, you guys out there for listening. And we'll see you back here in two weeks. Same place.