Was The 20th Century A Catastrophe, Or A Miracle? | Aaron Bastani Meets Yanis Varoufakis

Remember what, uh, the president of the European, um, council said, that Europe is, uh, like a beautiful garden, but it's surrounded by a jungle, and the jungle is trying to invade it. And we, the gardeners, must prune it. And we must stop the, yeah, this is the same narrative as that of the fascists and the Nazis of the 1920s and '30s, and we know where it ends up.

Military against does not work. Uh, and unless you, you have one war after the other to keep the machine fed, at some point, either you're going to stop the wars, and then the whole economic miracle is going to collapse, or you're going to be embroiled in a world war, in a genocide, in some regional conflict that, in the end, uh, turns your own country into a wasteland. So, in the name of purifying the nation, the nation is led down the garden path.

With some guests here on Downstream, you're guaranteed to have a hit. You're guaranteed to get a ton of views on YouTube, viral clips on social media. You're guaranteed to have a fascinating conversation. Why? Because of their personality. Because they've got a ton of interesting things to say. Because they're original thinkers. Today's guest meets all of those metrics. They are, without doubt, one of the most interesting intellectuals in Europe today. They also happen to be very left-wing. We've spoken to them a few times before, particularly about things like technofudalism, current affairs, politics, what's going on in the world. But their latest book is a memoir, "Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance." It looks at five women in the life of this week's guest. And that guest is, of course, the one and only Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister in Greece. Yanis, nice to have you back on Downstream.

It's great to be back.

It's great to have you back. I think this is what, a third, fourth time?

Let's not count.

Let's not count.

Let's keep going.

Let's never stop.

Every time is a pleasure. We're talking about your new book, "Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance." It's very different to what you've previously written.

Very, very different.

Very different indeed.

You've written sort of first-person narratives of political events in real time, like the post-2015,

Yeah.

context, but this is basically not just your life story. Well, it's not really your life story at all, actually. It's the story of multiple family members.

It's actually five women.

Five women. The, the intended subtitle, until the good people in Penguin stepped in and ruled it out. The intended subtitle was "Five Women Who Taught Me How to Fight Fascist Authoritarianism and the Male Chauvinist Within." Now, you can imagine why Penguin didn't like it. It was too long. But that's what really this book is about. It's about these five women. Uh, through them, I tell the story of 100 years, from 1923, 101 years to 2024. So, it's, um, it's, it's a memoir, uh, that is trying to put on center stage those five women that, well, truly shaped me.

The stories are refracted through these five women. We, we'll go to those in a minute. But it does also encompass the story of your dad, your uncle, the Greek diaspora before World War II. I mean, it really is,

the British Empire.

British Empire. Big picture stuff.

Nazi occupation, the, you know, Winston Churchill's civil war in Greece. Uh, then my time in Britain. So, yeah, I, I try to tell my story through the eyes of five women because, you know, when you try to see, as a man, the world through the eyes of women, then you have a better chance of understanding your own circumstances.

So, who are the five women, quickly?

Well, very quickly. The, the first chapter is my mom, and it begins with her taking me, when I was only nine or so, to see her brother, um, who was in prison, recently tortured during the dictatorship, the right-wing fascist dictatorship in Greece. So, through her, I introduce the reader to my politicization because my mother was my political mentor. I mean, I spent 26 years abroad out of Greece, and every day I would call her to talk politics. Nothing else. No family matters, no, "How are you?" you know, "What have you been doing?" Politics. Uh, so the second chapter then moves back to the past, to 1923, when my father's mom exits an orphanage and a Catholic nannery kind of school, uh, in Cairo, Egypt, and she makes herself, um, effectively, um, an adult. She creates adulthood by joining the so-called Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923. And so, it's a story of, uh, resistance from her perspective. Then she begets my dad. So, at the end of chapter two, my mom and dad meet. So, this is how, uh, the story proceeds. Then the third chapter is my mother's mother, uh, who raised me, a peasant girl from the Peloponnese, who only learned how to read and write Greek in her, in her 60s. Uh, and through her eyes, I narrate the manner in which, uh, I came into being, effectively, as a teenager, and eventually left for the shores, for the United Kingdom, in 1978. Um, and then the fourth chapter is my daughter's great-grandmother, who is, um, the epitome of a, a kind of novel that would resemble what Tolstoy would write if he was to narrate the Greek Civil War and everything that followed. And that allows me to bring back elements from the 1940s, connect them to my life in Britain, then in Australia, my understanding of the end of the Cold War. And then the final chapter is my better half than I, an artist, whose eyes allow me, and hopefully the reader, to look at the last 20 years.

It's really similar to Leia Hapie, which is quite strange because we were speaking to Leia. She's obviously, um, Albanian.

Her grandmother very similar, actually.

Very similar. Her story, her grandmother's story is fascinating. She was born in Thessaloniki.

When it had just been given to the Greeks, the Kingdom of Greece, previously part of the Ottoman Empire. They were an Albanian family. They spoke Albanian. They'd never been to Albania. And all of a sudden, because of these big historical events, they were told, "Actually, you're Albanian. You should, you should probably go there."

It is a great book.

It's a great book.

And it is just, it's the same locus, uh, the, the Balkan Peninsula, ethnic cleansing.

Yeah.

There is, um, an element of that in, uh, the chapter in the third chapter, in which I tell the story of my mother's mother, uh, whose village, um, I always knew it as Rodafni name. On her deathbed, um, when she was in and out of a coma, she said, um, her last wish was that I would take her, if she ever got out of hospital, to her village, Servit. And I said, "Your village is not Servit." No, no, that's a name. Effectively, there was ethnic cleansing. Serv means the Serbs. So, you know, we, the Balkan Peninsula was a cauldron. It was the Greeks, the Albanians, the Serbs, the Muslims, the, the Christians, the, the Jews, and so on and so forth. And then the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of nation-states, as in the rest of Europe, uh, created, um, forces that led to ethnic cleansing, to, um, the rewriting of history, to new forms of exploitation, new forms of antagonism, which you can now, can you can see, um, in Palestine, how easy it is to lead to bloodshed and genocide.

And as an appendage to that, the book, towards the start, has this story of your grandmother in Cairo.

That's right. That's, uh, chapter two.

Chapter two. And there's this, there's this extraordinarily, an ancient Greek community in Egypt that's there for millennia, and they mostly go after 1945. What happens there? Because, you know, the way that she seems to interpret their presence in Egypt is one of exploitation and oppression. But I read that story, I read Lee's story, and it feels like that was a lost, that was a lost modernity, that was a, that was a different kind of world that we decided not to pursue, one of cosmopolitanism and so on.

I try to tell the story of how she discovered that history of the lost modernity and, um, colonization. Uh, you mentioned that the Greeks had been there since Alexander the Great moved. I mean, Cleopatra was a, a Greek Macedonian. Um, uh, great scholars, the, uh, Alexandria Library, the greatest library in the world, mythical and epic in its size and importance. All that was part of the Greek, uh, community, uh, in Egypt. And that community intermingled with, uh, the, the Arabs in centuries that followed. And actually, they lived, uh, in, in great harmony for many centuries until, until colonization, European colonization, sets in in the 1870s. Britain takes over Egypt through indebtedness. Um, I don't know whether you want the details, but all right. Um, what happened was, the, the French built the Suez Canal. The British Empire didn't like it because the British Empire controlled the Silk Road, the international trade routes over land, and the Suez Canal, which was French, was a competitor. So London wanted to grab it. And the way they, they managed to grab it is typical and very smart. Effectively, they indebted the Egyptian government. The Egyptian government, from the 1830s to the 1870s, was investing heavily in industry, in culture. There was a, a university hospital, a university, um, medical training center in the 1830s, 1840s, producing women doctors. And, you know, women progressive, uh, British women, Italian women, French women were going to Cairo to study medicine and to become doctors. So, you know, there was a modernity. But in the 1870s, this process of lending money to the Egyptian government to fund quite a bit of that, you know, investment, uh, following a banking crisis in the United States after the railways collapsed, another 1929 or 2008, if you want, in Wall Street, that led to the, to the bankruptcy of the Egyptian state, and the British moved in and took the place over. You know, it was their collateral. Eventually, they used the army as well. They, you know, they fought a battle against the Egyptians and occupied them, and then erased the history of Egyptian modernity. And with it, they erased the history of the emancipation of Egyptian women, uh, following the creation of those schools producing doctors and so on, as well as the, as the Egyptian Feminist Union, which I discovered very recently, as I was researching this book, that my grandmother Anna had joined in 1923. So, she, she was a card-carrying member of something called the Egyptian Feminist Union, which was made of, you know, Egyptian Muslim women. Um, today, uh, here in the West, there is this depiction of countries like Egypt, of Syria, of, um, Palestine, of, um, Iraq, as backward, um, places where fundamentalism reigns supreme. That's not the case. You only need to do a little bit of research to find out that this was a figment of the Western imagination, and it was functional. This figment was functional to the interests of the colonial rulers of places like Egypt. It was run totally exploitatively, u, and the Greek community, um, that had been there for eons, was fused into the British, uh, ruling class. So, my family were, I mean, my Anna's husband, my grandfather, was the director of Thomas Cook in Cairo, and he was organizing "Death on the Nile" cruises for, um, you know, British aristocrats. And so, the, essentially, my father grew up in a family made of the director of Thomas Cook and this, um, crypto-feminist revolutionary. I mean, her husband didn't know that she was organizing strikes for women in textile factories, right? But that, that family belonged to the ruling class, which was a British, French, Italian, Greek, ex-Jewish expat ruling class, and Egyptians were effectively an enslaved community. Um, so, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to, to unpick there, and a lot that informs us today about the very warped view we have of what is the Middle East, of, um, what European civilization means, if there is such a thing. Um, because we were pretty uncivilized, you know, when you look at the manner in which we betrayed our own values of the Enlightenment and modernity wherever we ruled.

I suppose a skeptic, and I'd be a skeptic, I agree with all of that, right? But I suppose a skeptic would say, you know, Yanis, this is typical leftist cope. The reality is that Greeks left. You know, and, yes, I buy the argument that they had been integrated into the British sort of bourgeois bloc. But the Greeks left because of Arab nationalism. Even though the Greeks of Egypt had been there longer than the Arabs had. The Greeks left that part of the world for the same reason that, um, Jews left Baghdad, right? You get the emergence again, you might agree or disagree, you might think it's in response to, you know, the formation of the state of Israel, etc., the breakdown of, you know, European colonialism, but it happened. And you have Arab nationalism, and that wants increasingly homogeneous states. It can't really deal with the sort of diversity and multiplicity of of minorities like Greeks. What would you say to that? Because, I mean, it is fair, and it's what happened to your own uncle, your grandfather, sorry. I mean, they do leave pretty sharply after the Second World War, and there's not really, there's not really an effort to keep them there.

The argument that you presented, which I know you don't believe in, but it's an important argument to, you know, deconstruct, uh, is a very powerful one, except that it is half right and half wrong, which means that it is misleading. So, it is true. I mean, historically speaking, you have the Nasser revolution. You have the Egyptians taking over, taking back their country. Essentially, um, uprooting the British colonial regime, getting rid of them, and then the Greeks leave very shortly afterwards. Not very, within a decade of that, slowly, and then much faster rates of, uh, immigration.

Gradually, and then all at once, said.

Indeed, as these things happen. Uh, this is true, but it's not because they were thrown out. It's because, take my grandfather. My grandfather and I had conversations about that, even though I was quite young, I still have a vivid memory of him explaining to me. He said, "Look, we were the ruling class, uh, and we had a fantastic life. We lived better in Egypt as the ruling class of that country than the bourgeoisie lived in London or in Paris. Much better." You know, they had first-class travel to the pyramids and, um, trips on the Nile, and they had servants, you know, from the Egyptian population who were quasi-enslaved. Um, they lived really very well. So, what, when the revolution takes place and the Arabs, uh, the Egyptians, uh, reclaim their country, then the possibility of continuing to live in such affluence, which was the result of the exploitation of the local population, these, uh, um, these, these capacities disappear. And a lot of them left as a result of not being able to be exploiting the local population. Now, the fact that the national revolution ended up in tears, and like many European revolutions, ended up devouring its children, right? Let's not forget what happened here, uh, what's happened in the French Revolution. Every time the, there is a revolution, usually, uh, it ends in, even though it may have very good long-term historical dynamic effects, uh, in the end, it ends up in tears. So, even though that, that is the case, uh, my father, and even my grandfather, uh, appreciated the fact that it couldn't continue, that the locals had to take back their land. And by the way, when you say Arab nationalism, you have to understand that a lot of them were Christian. It's not the Muslim versus Christian story. Um, and secondly, that who are the Arabs? And who are the descendants of the original Egyptians? They were utterly intermingled, in the same way that, and this is a tragedy, that a lot of the people who are being, uh, massacred now in Gaza, or in ethnically cleansed in East Jerusalem or the West Bank, if you go back many centuries, uh, they were part of exactly the same Jewish population that, in the end, were Islamized or Christianized, and who essentially, you know, they're a Semitic nation. There are two Semitic nations that should be living side by side. And in the end, you've got this genocide of one part of a Semitic nation by another.

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I think what makes the Greek experience in Egypt really interesting and and and different, and makes one ask distinctive questions, is that the experience you're talking about of Egyptian, of Greeks in Egypt, right until 1945, it feels like for a, for a British sort of mind, like settler colonialists in, you know, Rhodesia, or even maybe South Africa, not quite as bad as that perhaps, but that kind of experience, Kenya. But the point is, they had been there longer than the very people who viewed them as outsiders. And that's what I, I think, is really, really fascinating.

It's not exactly so. Uh, from, from the figures I have looked at, I've studied, there were around 100,000 Greeks in Egypt. Of them,

And most of them in Cairo, I presume?

Alexandria, lots of them in Alexandria, some in Port,

Uh, but mainly there. Uh, I would say that of them, 10,000 were the descendants from ancient times.

Interesting.

90,000 moved in, especially after the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey. What we Greeks refer to as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, when millions of Greek ethnic Greeks were ethnically cleansed following the clash between the Greek and Turkish armies in 1922. A lot of them moved there at, you know, between 1922 and 1932. Um, they moved everywhere. They moved to the United States. They moved to Canada. They moved to Australia. You, you still find, uh, ethnic Greeks from Turkey in all sorts of places around the world, and Egypt was one of them. So, in that sense, they, they are quite similar to the Greeks who went to South Africa to be part of the apartheid regime, of the colonial British, uh, regime, and they, um, they played a role in, um, setting up apartheid, aggressive role. While it must be said, some of them, like my grandmother, chapter two, Anna, um, saw the injustice, saw the exploitation of of the locals, and joined them. So, in, uh, South Africa, you have George Bizos, one of the sons of the migrants to, uh, South Africa, who ended up being Nelson Mandela's lawyer, and he ended up scripting most of the fantastic new, fresh South African constitution. So, Anna was, um, part of this community that was fused into the expat community that were the ruling class and exploiters of the Egyptians. But she had, in a Clantstein manner, joined the underground resistance against her own class and her own people.

And what was the Asia Minor Catastrophe?

Well, that's when, following the Great War, the, the First World War, uh, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and bits and pieces of it were up for grabs. Uh, one prized part of, uh, the old Ottoman Empire from the Greek perspective was the, the Ionian coast around Izmir, Smyrna, as we call it in Greece, because that was the vast majority of people there were ethnic Greeks from the ancient times. Homer was born there. You know, that, that coast of what is now Turkey, the Aegean coast, was part of the Greek civilization, and there were still pockets, including that were, you know, majority ethnic Greeks. So, the Greek government, under Venizelos, who is mentioned in this book, uh, utilized his great alliance with the British and good relationship with the French to get them, one after the, in the Versailles Treaty, during the period following the First World War, to agree to take part, a chunk with Smyrna around it, from the Turkish coast of the Aegean, and give it to the Greek state. So, the Greek army, uh, disembarks in Smyrna, takes a large part of land around Smyrna, with the approval of the great powers. Then that, the government that achieved that diplomatic victory for Greece, uh, falls in an election. An ultra-nationalist government comes in. They decide to take, more chunks of land from the Turks. And that's when, uh, Mustafa Kemal, later known as Kemal Atatürk, who revived modern Turkey, he's the, the father of the modern Turkish nation, um, saw it as a great opportunity to drum up support amongst the Turks. "Get the Greeks, and get the Greeks." He did. There were battles, the Turkish army won, and threw the Greeks into the sea, which was a complete tragedy for the ethnic Greeks who were there since the times of Homer, because 5 million of them, 5 million of them ended up being boat people. Uh, and they, many of them went, of course, to Greece. Others went to, uh, the United States. The reason why we have more than one and a half million Greeks in the United States is the Asia Minor Catastrophe.

Isn't that crazy? And also, it's interesting. I didn't know that. Um, so you, you were talking about the Treaty of Sèvres there, which is 1920, which awards Smyrna to the Kingdom of Greece, and then of course, that's, is it Sèvres? And then it's reversed in '23.

Yes. Because after the catastrophe.

Yeah.

Then there was a treaty which effectively sealed the victory of Turkey over the.

That's the Treaty of Lausanne.

This is the Treaty of, of Lausanne, followed by Treaty of Lausanne. Exactly. And there was another treaty in Geneva. But this was a, a catastrophic treaty.

I mean, 5 million people.

Because, because, you know what happened was, after the Greeks lost, after we lost that part of the Turkish coast, uh, in battle, the two governments agreed to trade populations. That was such a heart-wrenching event because there were thousands and thousands of Turks, ethnic Turks, in Crete, in, um, Athens, around Athens, in Macedonia, Greek Macedonia, in the Peloponnese, and they were forcefully removed and sent to Turkey, to a country they'd never been to for centuries. Whereas the ethnic Greeks from northern Turkey, Trabzon, and other places as well, as Smyrna, 5 million, were moved, the ones who did not escape the Turkish army. Then they were forcefully moved to Greece, to a place they had never been to ever, because these were ethnic Greeks that knew Asia Minor as their home, even in ancient Greek times. Um, and in a sense, that was good for Greece because before that, we were a basket case of a country, and all these people were far more sophisticated than when, than the original, uh, inhabitants of Greece were, far more agricultural and backward, whereas the ethnic Greeks that were forced to come to Greece after 1923, where, you know, they were richer, they were more cultivated, better educated, for God's sake, they had, you know, they had an opera. So, modernist owes a lot to these people. But still, the pain of being forcefully removed from your land is still there, still in Greek music. Um, if you hear sorrowful Greek bouzouki songs, some of them pretty good, resembling a little bit of the jazz and blues of the deep South in the United States, is because of the sorrow of having been forcefully removed from the land, exactly same as black music in the United States.

And the really interesting thing is that all of this is done under international law. You know, we view our international treaties, we view international law as this thing that will guarantee human rights, liberty, and freedoms. But actually, it's it's underpinned this extraordinary thing of, like you say, transporting millions of people from one country to another in response. One country sends millions back the other way. Also, you said about, um, all of this being the result of overreach by an ultra-nationalist government, which I didn't know. And I mean, there's a pattern, isn't there? The ultra-nationalist far-right governments, they, they get something, you know, look,

in the name of patriotism, they do a lot of damage to our motherland, fatherland, our lands.

Yeah. They have a tendency to overreach. In 1974, you may have heard of the invasion of Turkey that effectively, um, sliced a chunk of Cyprus and caused another exchange of population, another heart-wrenching removal of Turkish Cypriots from the south to the north, and of course, of the majority of the Greek Cypriots, all of the Cypriots from the north to the south. That was another such instance. This was 1974. It was in my lifetime. And this happened because, I mean, the, I'm in danger of being, uh, denounced here by my fellow Greeks for, um, you know, for not taking fully the Greek side. But I have to say that this is a historical fact that, okay, there were lots of tensions. There was the United States was planning to divide the island of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey because, you see, the island of Cyprus was neutral and did not want to become a military base for the United States, uh, in the 1960s, why the Arab-Israeli war was heating up. But the excuse for the invasion was given to Ankara, to the Turkish government, by the fascist regime that I described vividly in chapters two and three, uh, because they, um, overthrew the democratically elected Greek president, Makarios, uh, in order to install a fascist dictatorship that was vehemently xenophobic and anti-Turkish, and 18% of the population were Turks. So, Turkey used this as an excuse to protect its own ethnic Turks, uh, to invade Cyprus. So, yet again, an overreaching fascist, right-wing Greek government did a lot to damage, you know, the Greek nation, to put it in simple nationalistic terms.

Do you think that's a feature of the far-right? So right now, for instance, you've got the ultra-nationalist right across Europe on the rise, in America on the rise, and then you see these accounts online, and they're saying, "What we really want is basically repatriation of every non-white person in this country to go back to XYZ." And that, that just strikes me as implausible. It won't, it won't happen. It, it literally can't happen because in somewhere like the United States or the UK, I mean, this is just ridiculous, frankly. How would you even measure that? Would it include Irish people? Would it be 1/8th something else? David Beckham's grandparent is Jewish. Where, where would it end? This is the first thing. But, but there does seem to be this tendency of just complete overreach, which means that even when they make initial political gains, it ends in disaster. Do you know the, do you know the band Laibach? You must do, right? "Life is Life."

It's a great song. I don't. People should listen to this song. It's on YouTube, whatever. And it, it starts, it's militaristic, and it's fervent and patriotic, and it's all grand sounding. "You're making history. You're living life." And then at the end, it's the same tone, same register, and they're saying, "Everybody died. We failed. We screwed up. It was a catastrophe." And, and I wonder, is there something inherent there to far-right politics?

Of course. I look at what, uh, Hitler had on the German nation.

Decimated the Germans. Absolutely decimated the Germans. Every right-wing fascist, Nazi, proto-fascist regime, in the name of the motherland, does a lot of damage to the motherland. This is standard. I mean, look at Pinochet in Chile. Uh, Chile has not recovered from that experience, and I don't think.

So, somebody would say that Chile is the wealthiest country per capita in South America. Surely, you know, that's because of Pinochet, even if he did disgusting, murderous things. Why, why hasn't it not recovered?

Well, firstly, the majority of people are worse off today than they were 30 years ago. If you look at their capacity to educate their children, to house themselves, to put food on the table. Um, you know, GDP per capita is, um, perhaps the most, uh, uh, disconcerting and misleading measure of well-being. Uh, let me put it another way. I mean, you know it, and we know it, but let's just make sure that everybody else. So, if we're all in a pub and, uh, Mark Zuckerberg walks in, we are all, per capita terms, billionaires. All of us billionaires, not millionaires, and we're not. It's a joke. What happened was, the copper, the copper mines, extremely lucrative copper mines, were privatized, and a tiny band of Chileans, uh, became extremely rich. Um, and also, you know, wages were crashed because of the policies of, uh, crashing trade unions. So, profit rates, even for medium-sized businesses, went up. But the vast majority, 70%, 80% of the people in Chile are far worse off. And now politics is completely paralyzed. And, um, you have, uh, congresses and presidents, uh, who, independently of their, um, intentions, whether they're good or bad, and sometimes they're not bad, have decent intentions, they simply paralyze. They simply cannot govern Chile in a way that they move out of that downward spiral. Same with Greece today. So, but, you know, more generally speaking, you mentioned this, uh, idea of purifying the nation,

getting rid of the riffraff, getting rid of the other, the brown, the Jew, the Muslim, the, the people who somehow sully the DNA of the nation. That's a standard Nazi, fascist, um, trope. The idea is, uh, that, um, our pure men and women, uh, would have done wonders in this country if they were not held back by all these impurities that have, that have infiltrated the body of the nation. And that if somehow we manage to purify the body of the nation, uh, which will unfortunately, they say, but they don't mean it, involve, uh, strengthening our defenses in order to keep our borders, uh, airtight, and that may involve, uh, the occasional war with the out there, the foreigners who are, um, trying to, um, undermine our sovereignty and so on. This whole narrative may begin beautifully in terms of GDP, especially GDP per capita. If you have military Keynesianism, if you spend a lot of money on the police, on army, um, on weapon, on armies, on weaponry, and so on, this is exactly what happened in the 1920s in Italy and 1930s in Germany. This is what the European Union is trying to do now with military Keynesianism, of, um, embarking upon a spending spree on weaponry, uh, which is also underpinned by Islamophobia, by the fear of the Chinese, of the Russian, of, uh, the African. Uh, remember what, uh, the president of the European, um, council said, that Europe is, uh, like a beautiful garden, but it's surrounded by a jungle, and the jungle is trying to invade it. And we, the gardeners, must prune it, and we must stop the, yeah, this is the same narrative as that that of the fascists and the Nazis of the 1920s and '30s, and we know where it ends up. Military Keynesianism does not work. Uh, and unless you, you have one war after the other to keep the machine fed, at some point, either you're going to stop the wars, and then the whole economic miracle is going to collapse, or you're going to be embroiled in a world war, in a genocide, in some regional conflict that, in the end, uh, turns your own country into a wasteland. So, in the name of purifying the nation, the nation is led down the garden path.

I, I can't imagine a more stupid position than being a German fascist. If, if you were a German nationalist, if you were a German ultra-nationalist, why would you want to pursue that politics? Because you look at Germany's fundamentals at the start of the 20th century. Its scientific base is just wild. You know, your, your background is science, your parents were scientists. I mean, Christ, it's just, they had a virtual monopoly on, on the world's leading theoretical scientists. You look at the innovations coming out of that country, its population growth, its cultural production. The 20th century could have been the German century. It should have been the German century, but they up-twice really badly. And, and the second one was particularly up, because, you know, look at Berlin in 1945 at the end of it, and your country gets partitioned. And I, I find it remarkable that even given that, you know, you lost the 20th century, you lost the possibility of being, you know, this extraordinary great cultural, political power, and you'd still, you still go, "Oh, you know, old Adolf, the Austrian painter." The Austrian painter, second-rate painter, third-rate.

Aaron, I think there's a missing link in your narrative. I agree with everything you said. The missing link is capitalism. Because you see, if you combine a lot of capital goods, machinery, science, you know, engineering, physics, you put this all together, you end up with a great deal of potential, which you described beautifully. A potential to do great things, to be a great country, uh, on the cusp of scientific revolutions, of, um, production, and so on and so forth. But when those machines are owned by a tiny percentage of the population, and their accumulated profits hinge on the exploitation of the many, then that introduces the, the poison, which, um, uh, let me put it very succinctly, if I can. You, you, you end up being able to produce a lot more stuff than the majority of the people who are producing it in the factories can consume, because you have squeezed the living daylights out of them in order to have high profit rates and price-cost margins for the very few. And then you have a dearth in demand. That's when Keynes comes in. So, you, you have a slump, then you have unemployment. That gives rise to discontent. Then some third-rate painter from Austria gets up on a soapbox and says, "I know who the problem is. It's the Jew, or this the Islamist, or, you know, the foreigner, or the Irishman, doesn't matter, right? Somebody, somebody, you know, the left-handed, the trans, the gay, whoever that can be identifiable and who can become the focal point of the discontent, which is as the result of the failure of capitalist labor and capital markets." Okay? And then you get a lot of strength from them, and you say, "I'm going to make you great again. I'm going to make you proud again. Just give me absolute authority, and I will look after you, and I'm going to go and get the Jew, the Islamist, the Frenchman, or the, you know, the Greek, whatever. Yeah. The British." Um, and then you get a lot of power. And at the beginning, uh, you can take this power, like Hitler did, and you can, um, throw a lot of money at industry to build up weaponry, and that creates employment. And then people love you because they were unemployed, and now they are not unemployed anymore, and they feel really very proud because they see a lot of tanks rolling out of the production line, and they have parades, and you build an Olympic stadium, and you stage the Olympics, and you have Riefenstahl creating beautiful, uh, film of the, um, re-emergent national proud, you know, um, species. Uh, and then at some point, you invade Poland. But that, you know, this is what happened in the 1930s in Germany. It's, it's an attempt. They are now attempting to do it again. You know, when, when Trump says, "Make America Great Again." I mean, when was America great? Ever. It never was great.

I suppose, again, I suppose a skeptic of that would say.

When they had slaves.

No, they would just say.

When they had a civil war.

Before. Before it industrialized. That's what they would say. Before we industrialized. That's what they would say.

That's when they had slaves.

No, no.

In the cotton fields.

Before.

Yeah. And they killed all the natives.

Before. No, no. They, no, no. I'm just trying to.

When was that? When was the great, the greatness of, of, of the United States realized? I think that, I think that Trump's arguments that register the most. Forget the culture war stuff, forget Sydney Sweeney adverts, like, literally nobody cares about that stuff. The stuff that I think is agreed on by, um, JD Vance all the way down to, you know, a Trump voter from the Appalachian Mountains, who, you know, barely consumes news content. They agree on two things: illegal migration and de-industrialization. They, they agree on that. So, okay, park the, the illegal migration thing. I think when they say, "Make the country great again," I do genuinely think they mean before de-industrialization, which we, we agree that's a natural feature of capitalist production.

Well, you know, profiteering.

De-industrialization was a catastrophe for the American working class. There's no doubt about it. It's going to have to do with immigration. Nothing to do with immigration. I mean,

Sure.

the United States is the result of migration. It doesn't matter whether it's illegal or legal. I mean, in my country, we had migration of half of Albania. Uh, it was all illegal in the 1990s, and it created a much better Greece as a result. I mean, you, my university students, most of them now are children of those Albanian migrants. Without them, we wouldn't have a university. They are the best students I've ever had. So, you know, it doesn't, this illegal thing. Migration is part and parcel of the American story. Where you're absolutely right, and where Trump is absolutely right, is that de-industrialization was a disaster for the majority of Americans. You, you go from coast to coast, and all you see is carnage. The word that he, he used in, in his inauguration speech in 2016, uh, which was a horrible speech, but the word "carnage" did capture the result of de-industrialization. But why did de-industrialization happen? It didn't happen because of the Mexicans, or because of the Nicaraguans, or the Greeks migrating into America. It happened because Wall Street effectively took over after 1971, the end of Bretton Woods, and it started recycling the rest of the world's capitalist profits. So, you know, once America stopped being a producer of surplus goods and being an industrial superpower, it was in the 1950s and '60s, for a number of reasons, the Vietnam War, the internal, uh, dynamics of the American capitalist economy, led America to start having a trade deficit. And it was the decision of Richard Nixon, and the people who followed Richard Nixon, people like Paul Volcker, who was the president of the Federal Reserve, and so on, uh, and the people in the Republican party that now their descendants are applauding Trump, who decided, "Okay, we have a deficit. We're not going to be German. We're not going to tighten our belts. We're not going to introduce austerity. We're not going to do a George Osborne. What we're going to do is we're going to step on the accelerator and increase our deficits and make the rest of the world pay for them." So, the rest, you know, the German, Japanese manufacturers were producing cars and, um, electronics and so on, sending them to the United States. The United States would pay with dollars. Then the German and Japanese capitalists, and then the Chinese capitalists as well, would send those dollars back to Wall Street. And what would Wall Street do with that? It would buy American debt. So, the American government could be in perpetual increasing deficits, and it would matter. They would buy shares in American, uh, companies that, um, uh, subcontracted their manufacturing to Vietnam, and real estate. Thus, Donald Trump was born as a result of this model, which de-industrialized. So, this is the, the great hypocrisy of people like Donald Trump. You know, he's, uh, um, looking the working class of the United States in the eyes and says, "Oh, I feel your pain." But their pain is, is exactly this. It's the output of exactly the same process that led to, uh, Donald Trump's real estate business success, right? And in the end, of course, he's going to sell them down the line, in the same way that Hitler led to the destruction of Germany. Because even if, let's say that Donald Trump's policy and JD Vance's policy of, um, slapping tariffs on all the countries that export stuff to the United States works, and there is re-industrialization of, uh, America. I don't think there will be, but let's say there is,

then what, what, what happens immediately after that is that the flow of capital back to the United States stops. Because it, the flow of capital into Wall Street from the rest of the world is the flip side of the coin of the same coin as the American trade deficit. Once you eliminate the trade deficit, there will be no more German profits, excess profits, or Japanese profits, or Chinese profits from the American market to go back to Wall Street. So, who's going to suffer? Finances in Wall Street and the realtors in New York. So, Trump, even if he succeeds, he will have to choose between betraying his own class, the realtors and the financiers, or the working class of the United States. Make no mistake that he will betray the working class of the United States, exactly the same way that every other ultra-rightist has betrayed the working class that it has appealed to for support in order to be authoritarian.

So, Steve Bannon would agree with all of that up to a certain point. But then he would say, "Yeah, yes, Yanis, I agree with you. A certain interest was privileged over another, finance, real estate, over industrial capital. We didn't, you know, we didn't think that that mattered. Actually, it was a, a crucial part of the American body politic, our quote unquote greatness in the world. Now we have Trump, and you're saying he's going to have to choose because he's going to choose a very, very different way." Do you ever speak to people in the US about this stuff? Do you ever speak to somebody like Steve Bannon about how Trump will necessarily sell these people out? Because there's, there's literally no precedent for somebody from his class background, somebody peddling the interests that he does. There's literally no precedent with him re-industrializing a country in the way that they're talking about, autarky, import substitution. Like, this is, I mean, you know, you never say never, but it's literally never happened before.

Can I confess something?

Please.

One of my great sorrows is that, um, Steve Bannon has eulogized, has said very good things about my previous book, "Technofeudalism." You know, when you have.

He's always using the word, right?

Yeah. Well, and he quotes me. Um, it is terrible when fascists take seriously your book, and especially when Marxists hated my book, all of them, but most of them. But anyway, let's not talk about that book. Look, um, there was an occasion, Steve Bannon and I were meant to debate one another in 2019, prior to the European Parliament election, because he was here in, uh, Europe, I mean, um, organizing in the ultra-right, h, but then at the last moment, he pulls out. No, I don't talk to these people. Um, I would talk to them. I, I don't have a, a deep platforming agenda. Um, I don't think they're really interested deeply in ideas and historically grounded analysis of what's going on. Uh, Steve Bannon is a very good propagandist from the fascistic American right-wing perspective. Uh, he would agree with what a lot of what I said, that, you know, and, and he, and he uses the concept of technofeudalism in order to attack people like Elon Musk and to say that it's people like Elon Musk who are leading Trump astray. So, the MAGA movement is in grave danger of failing because people like Elon Musk are not allowing Trump to do that which his heart really wants to do, which is to re-industrialize America and so on and so forth. Uh, and then immediately he turns his eye, his, um, venom against the migrants. Uh, because, like a true fascist, he needs to blame it on the other, on the foreigner. He has no concept of capitalism. He's got no concept of the fact that as long as capital is owned by the very few, then, uh, um, whatever you do, there's going to be a tendency of the system, a systemic tendency for, uh, either an imbalance which, uh, creates, uh, large deficits that then require, uh, the exploitation of other nations in order to be covered, or large surpluses, like the German economy or the Chinese economy produce, which then also require, in order to be balanced out, the exploitation of other markets. So, in a sense, you know, when Marx was, uh, arguing that, uh, capitalism has spawned a new form of imperialism, which is not the imperialism of, you know, "we want to conquer South America in order to steal their gold" like old-fashioned imperialism, but it is the kind of imperialism where, because capitalism produces from the same production line not only amazing goods like iPhones and gadgets and so on, but also death of demand. Death of demand is one of the safest products of, um, of, of capitalism. Then, in order to cover for that, to plug that gap in demand, you need to conquer markets and exploit those markets. And that is new imperialism, or the.

Imperialism of the 20th century. And now we have new forms of imperialism through new forms of capital, like algorithmic capital or cloud capital.

But you see people like Steve Bannon; they are propagandists. They don't care about the true workings of the machinery of capital accumulation. They just want power. This, uh, will to power. This Nietzschean, pseudoscientific, fascistic, uh, need to gather power and do things with it, you know, create facts on the ground, and be men, and put the women back at home, and, um, you know, get rid of trans people, and blame it all on the browner segments of the human race, and pretend that there's no climate change. Because, you know, if you accept that there is climate a climate catastrophe or emergency, then you have to be communist. Because, you know, the atmosphere is, um, a commons. It's the definition of a common, and the moment you privatize it, you kill it.

The climate change thing is fascinating because more intelligent people on the right, in recent years, have started to say, "Well, climate change is real, but the climate's always changing. You know, you have the, the sort of, the Middle Ages of Europe actually were quite warm, and the Roman Empire was quite warm. It's always up and down." Okay. So the climate is not stable. It's contingent on various factors. The argument is that man-made climate change means that we're going to see that kind of shift much more quickly, with much sort of harsher, um, overheads. And it's not an either-or. Yeah, it's always changing. It, you know, we had dry periods and many ice ages and so on. That's all true, but it doesn't discount the fact that we're now living in a world which is touching. We're now beginning to get to 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial period. Those things are both true.

And what you said about the right not being interested in ideas is really interesting, Janice, because I, I kind of agree. I, I do genuinely try and and read as much as I can from people who are not just conservatives but neo-reactionaries, because they have a critique of liberalism, which I always find really interesting, right? But, but they don't, they literally don't have an account of the economy, which is why they end up in these bizarre, pseudoreligious, hyperrational places. And you see that with the Nazis in the '20s and the '30s. You see it with Curtis Yarvin today, right? You know, I, I, I try and read his stuff and I just think, this none of this makes any sense. Like, what are you, what are you talking about? I saw, uh, that former Fox lady, what's her name? She did the debates a few years ago, Megan Kelly, and she was talking about Etsy curses being put on Charlie Kirk and how these curses are real and demons are real. And I'm thinking, and I'm thinking, you know what? I get it. If China is on the rise, if China's developing technologies, you can't. If your people are increasingly polarized, and you know, the public is fragmented in terms of what they want, what they believe in. If you're losing technological leadership as an Atlantic power for the first time in 400, 500 years, at shifting east, you can't make sense of any of that unless, unless you're a historical materialist, I think. So they, they end up in the most crazy places, right?

>> They need to invoke, uh, satanic forces. They need to do that. But you, you said something before that I don't agree with, please.

>> You said that the smart rightists, uh, who are approaching the question of the climate emergency are the ones who are, uh, accepting that there is climate change, but they, they reject the notion that there's causality between, uh, fossil fuels being burnt, for instance, primarily and, uh, climate change. I don't think they're the smartest. Uh, I think these people can be easily disproved. Uh, the, the causal link has been statistically established, and you really need to do simply not care about the science of statistics in order to dispute it. The clever ones are the ones who agree that it is fossil fuels, it is the agriculture, that the way we do it that causes climate emergence, but insist in a kind of, uh, um, evangelical way that the market that caused this problem is the mechanism, the divine mechanism, the invisible hand that Adam Smith, he used the term in order to invoke the hand of God, right? So, and what is the hand of God? The forces of demand and supply that must be harnessed, uh, in a neoliberal way, uh, by creating new markets that didn't exist. You know, markets for emissions trading schemes and all that, in order to defeat the climate emergency in the most efficient way humanity has ever discovered. And that is what is the most efficient mechanism? It is the market. So this is the neoliberal mantra that is coming back to, um, suggest that, okay, the markets failed, they're destroying the planet. Now we have to, uh, create new markets that will save the planet.

>> But that's not a rightist position. That's like a center-left position.

>> Well, so when I say right, I mean kind of neo-reactionary.

>> I don't make a distinction. Labor position.

>> Yeah, okay. But for me, these people are, you know, they are expressing the interest of capital in a more lethal manner. Uh, Kier Starmer. Okay, let's go. I'll go to Starmer. I don't think he even deserves us mentioning his name. But Tony Blair was the worst Tory prime minister Britain ever had.

>> Was he? Did he do more damage to this country than Margaret Thatcher?

>> Well, he completed her damage. He was, uh, essential in completing the damage that Margaret Thatcher made. Because you see, Thatcher privatized externally, wholesale private privatization. She took the housing stock from, you know, council houses. 30% of houses were, when I moved to England in 1978, I remember 30% were council houses. So she, uh, essentially, uh, enriched those lucky enough to be allowed to buy those houses. I'm sure they loved it, and they had every reason to. But the result was complete, the complete catastrophe that now young people and not so young people experience in the housing market is the result of that. She took British Gas. She had KPM, uh, KP, no, Price Cooper's value it, and she sold it at half the evaluation, half of its market value. Uh, you are too young to remember. The ads were amazing by Saatchi & Saatchi. Tell Sid, in other words, tell Sid that to become a shareholder, that, you know, if you buy a thousand quid worth of British Gas, uh, shares, then you can sell them tomorrow morning for 2,000. Why? Because they, the company was valued at half its actual market value. Okay? And, and, and people felt fantastic because suddenly, you know, they could, I remember people coming were coming to me and saying, "Look, will you use your quota to buy British Gas shares?" I remember I used to live in Nollage back then, and I said, "No, because I wasn't going to participate in this racket." And he said, "Oh, well, can you allow us to buy your share and I will give you 500 quid? We'll give you half the, you know, the profits." Secondary markets.

>> Yes, indeed. And it was happening all the time. And so, you know, that's how the small shareholders became such, and that's how the, you know, the, the working man became, um, shifted from the Labour Party to the Tory Party. It was a great success story, but that effectively depleted massive amounts of, uh, publicly owned capital and essentially threw it into the mill of the financialization that the City of London was, uh, creating. And that was all wasted, including North Sea oil. All the proceeds were used in order effectively to fight a class war against the, the working class, with the miners' strike, with all that. And then Blair comes on. When Blair became Prime Minister, effectively everything had been sold already. So he does something more insidious than that. He takes the National Health Service, for instance, or the public school system, and starts, without formally nationalizing, uh, privatizing them. The NHS remained public, but he starts an incipient internal, um, uh, privatization of of all its functions, of its services. The subcontracting, the public-private initiatives, that was all doing what? Essentially increasing the cost of running the NHS massively, adding new layers of managers, uh, on behalf of private companies that that had taken over the NHS, except the shell of the NHS which remained public. He did the same thing with schools, the, you know, quasi-academies and so on. I'm sure that some of those schools are better as a result, you know, but they exclude the working class. You're working class, you can't send your kids there. In the same way that the council houses were privatized, some working-class people benefited, but in the end, there are no houses for the working class, council houses for the working class. And this was the Labour Party that did it. And now we have a new Labour government, a new Blairite Labour government that is taking this further down the same road of, um, turning what is left of, uh, public institutions in this country into empty shells where there is a cesspool of, uh, financialization within that increases the costs at taxpayers' expense and reduces quality, reduces, uh, quantity, and reduces, eliminates the sense that the British people have that they actually are in control, or their state even is in control of, uh, the social economy of this country. So talking about Labour or Pasok in my country, as left center-left. No, they are the worst part of the machinery of financialization and of turning our societies into neoliberal nightmares.

>> The thing about council houses is really interesting because it's such a big class signifier in this country, right? Oh, you mean Sadiq Khan, who I, you know, don't dislike the guy. I, I wouldn't vote Labour. I don't dislike him. He's not the worst person ever by a long way. He would say, you know, "I grew up in a council house," or "I lived in a council house." And I'm thinking, mate, I lived in London 15 years. I lived in a council house. The difference is I paid £1,000 a month for it because it had been privatized in the 1980s. You know, people don't live in council houses generally anymore because, guess what? They don't exist. So that really, really bothers me. But I have a question. You know, you mentioned, uh, Blair. You were going to talk about Starmer. You know, engage in the indignity of mentioning. Yeah. But this is really interesting for me because I was going to ask you, do you think they know what they're doing? So, for instance, recently Keir Starmer gave a speech and he said that we're getting all this investment from the US, and Blackstone, this asset manager, is "investing," I can't remember, tens of billions of pounds investing. Now, people who know what asset managers do know they're not investing. What they're doing is they're buying assets. Clues in the name. They try and buy them cheap. They underinvest. They underpay. They squeeze as much revenue as they can, and then they try and sell them at a markup price. That's not investment. That's actually the complete opposite of investment. But do you think, do you think,

>> Keir Starmer?

>> Does Starmer know that? Do you think?

>> Well, Tony Blair certainly did because he was a very smart man. He still is a very smart man. He's as evil as they come, but he's smart. I don't think there's much happening inside Keir Starmer's head. I have very serious doubts about his intelligence. Uh.

>> He was Director of Public Prosecutions. Yeah, he was a terrible Director of Public Prosecutions. Um, he has left a terrible legacy. I have heard, in stories from within, that he was one of the worst people to have run the CPS. Um, and if you look at his record too, politically, as, uh, the Director of, uh, of the Crown Prosecution Service, you'll find that, um, uh, even on the basis of human rights and, um, discrimination, um, it's not a record that he should be proud of. But in any case, look, I have no doubt he's a good lawyer, but that's a bit like an AI bot that knows to do one job well. So, you know, you give him a brief, you say, "This is what I want you to argue," and he's pretty good at putting together a case and arguing that brief. But as Prime Minister, he has to create a brief. And I don't think he has a clue of how to do that. It is, it's clear. I mean, he's, uh, stumbling and falling on his face.

>> He's a creative thinker.

>> I don't think he's a, he's a great thinker. Um, his greatest asset was that he operated like, like a chameleon during the time of my friend Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party. And he managed to look to position himself as somebody that was loyal, that, um, had the capacity to argue like a lawyer, and that he could bridge the, the two factions of the Labour Party. He could, he could, um, you know, with the face of somebody resembling Tony Blair, he could, uh, pursue a radical manifesto as he had promised to do in 2019, to maintain the radical manifesto of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. But within a year, he had ditched the 2019 manifesto. He had, uh, embraced, along with Rachel Reeves, the George Osborne, um, mentality about fiscal prudence. And of course, got rid of, you know, he, he expelled from the Labour Party. Um, I mean, to think that he expelled Ken Loach for anti-semitism. I mean, you only need to state that to realize that this man has never seen a moral void in which he didn't jump headlong.

Every once in a while, we like to take this down out of the studio. We do things IRL. We have public events. They can be powerful. They can be fun. They're always worth attending. We're doing one of those on October the 13th at Earth in Hackney. That's in London, to coincide with the publication of a really important book, "Gaza: The Story of a Genocide." I'll be hosting, talking to some of the contributors to that book, I think an editor as well. Come along. The link is in the description below. Really good news: 50% of any profits we make from this event will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. I think probably today the number one most worthwhile cause out there anywhere. So, we're platforming great voices. We're sending cash to a really important cause. Click the link in the description below. I hope to see you there.

You know, I've got a really good friend of mine. He's, he's half Italian, half Ecuadorian. His dad was a postman. Um, and his mom used to work in, my mom used to have a sandwich shop. His mom used to work in the video shop over the road, you know, really working-class background. And he's done really well. He's now a quantity surveyor. He lives in Qatar. He makes a ton of money. Just makes tons of money. And he, he has this knack for like, really good, folksy wisdom. And he said this thing to me which is just, it's how I now view Keir Starmer. He said, "People like that can end up earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year if they just do what they're told. They side with the powerful, and they turn to everything 15 minutes early. And that is three-quarters of the powerful bureaucrats you're ever going to meet in your life."

>> I mean, that's crazy to think.

>> That's a smarter way of putting what I said earlier, that he's good at, you know, in pursuing a brief that is handed to him.

>> But he cannot come up with one of his own. Look, compare and contrast him and Tony Blair. Tony Blair was, um, a strategist. Uh, he was very good at creating his own objectives and strategizing in order to get them done, to achieve them. I disagreed with his objectives, and I, I disagree with his means, especially his, uh, violation of international law and the resulting, you know, hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq. But he, he knew how to get things done. I don't think Keir Starmer can do that. Uh, you can see that he's flip-flopping. He doesn't have an, he doesn't even have his own agenda. Uh, and the, the worst aspect of it is that he's trying to appeal to people and to interests that would never find him appealing. And he keeps rubbishing the people that should be the national constituency of the Labour Party.

How long do you think he'll be Prime Minister for?

>> I know these are foolish questions, Janice, but...

>> I have no idea. Aaron, you know, it just reminded me of Keynes' expression that, um, you know, "The market can stay rational for longer than I can stay solvent or alive." So, you know, this political system with its great majority, it has, it depends on the parliamentary Labour Party. If they, if they see that their, uh, survival chances, um, are not improving as a result of Starmer's performance, they'll probably get rid of him and replace him, in the same way that the Tories kept changing one Prime Minister after the other.

>> I mean, there was one poll that put them on 16%. Right? And I think the Greens were on 12%.

>> I don't understand who amongst those 16% would have confidence in such a man. I find it an extraordinarily high percentage.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> It's very high. 16%.

>> Well, maybe 16% of the population who still trust, um, you know, it amazes me.

>> Yeah. I, I think, I mean, I think he'll, I think he'll go next May. But you're right. I mean, it all depends on him. But I was speaking to Tom McTague recently. He wrote this fantastic book about Euroscepticism. Really, really fantastic book. And he said there's a core contradiction. And, you know, sometimes somebody says things to just clarify so much. He said there's a core contradiction with Blair, which is that he wants modernization, be more like the EU, be more like the US, freedom of information, PR for elections, join the Eurozone, be pro-Europe. Big tech loves modernization. Right? And on the other hand, his electoral strategy is try and win over the people who hate, quote unquote, modernization the most. Right? So that's your sort of political economic project, and then that's your electoral project. Obviously, it's going to blow up. And what's crazy is, and that's why you get Reform. That's why you get Brexit. Like, that explains all of it, right? And then you see Keir Starmer in 2025 doing the exact same, the exact same thing. And I, and I, and I wonder where it ends. And it's so, it's so catastrophic as a strategy. It's so stupid and misguided, and he doesn't realize what he's doing. I, I think obviously it ends in a Reform government if this carries on, and it might not carry on. Obviously, it ends in a Reform government. But I, I think, you know, it could be genuinely the end of the UK. If this is now how the Labour Party governs, if you're a Scottish Social Democrat or a Welsh Social Democrat, you know, what are you thinking? Like, this is not a sensible way to govern a country. Do you, do you think that Reform could be in power at the next election? And if they are, what, what are the consequences for the union?

>> Well, allow me to take a bird's-eye view of Britain in the last 30 years in answering your question. Sold the lie of the free market revolution. There was nothing. There was no free market there. It was an old globalistic market that she created. She created cartels in the name of the free market. But she managed to bribe a large segment, large enough, under first-past-the-post, you don't need to have a majority, you need to get 35%. So she managed to lure into her project a number of formerly working-class people, people, uh, because essentially she liquidated a lot of public capital through, we had this discussion, privatization of houses, of companies, and so on. Tony Blair did the same thing with this, uh, insidious quasi-privatization of existing public institutions, of effectively turning the British state, universities, schools, uh, planning departments, turning them over to the private sector, to the consultants, to the class of consultants and consultancy firms, to the Ernst & Youngs and so on and so forth. So that was also a form of liquidating public capital and bribing a part of the working class and the petty bourgeoisie. Now, poor Starmer, after another, what, 14 years of Tory rule, after the Blair-Brown government, who effectively sold what was remaining of the family silver down the road. There's nothing left to liquidate. So he, he's trying to stay on the track of Thatcherism, Reaganism, of trying to, you know, uh, be kind to the grand liberal project, or stay faithful to it, while at the same time, uh, arresting the outflow of voters from, you know, the north of England, from Clacton, from the various areas that are now totally Reform-minded. Um, and he just can't do it. He just doesn't have the money, the capital to liquidate, to bribe them, and he doesn't have the narrative. And he's trying to win over people that have been, uh, lured by the xenophobia of Reform, the, the quasi-fascist, neo-fascist, proto-fascist, call whatever you might, um, xenophobia of Reform through racism light, essentially, you know, "I am going to be the one who stops the boats," as if the problem of Britain are the people who are coming to these shores on small boats. It is not a problem for Britain. There are other problems. Uh, so he's presenting himself as the more efficient racist who has a lighter touch. Therefore, he's a bit kinder, a bit more liberal. That doesn't win over the liberals, and doesn't win over the racists. So, you know, liberalism light doesn't mix well with racism light, especially when you don't have public capital to liquidate and bribe people. Uh, and, you know, at the same time, the Labour Party since Blair, with the approval of people like Starmer, has lost the capacity to talk to the working class, has lost the capacity to talk about exploitation. It doesn't want to talk about exploitation. I mean, you know, in the Labour Party conference the other day, right? I mean, they were they were hosting, um, sponsors' events with, you know, the large corporations, trying to convince them that they are better stewards of, uh, their cartel-like markets. You can't have these events while at the same time convincing the working class that you don't treat them like, uh, what was it that, um, uh, Hillary Clinton described them like? "Deplorables." And they are then presented gift-wrapped to Nigel Farage's Reform.

Liz Kendall, I think it was Liz Kendall, is at the Labour conference yesterday, or was it today? And she's talking about "Sisters in Big Tech." Now, I know you're a feminist. I know, Janice, and you know, the book is anchored around five women in your life. But I'm thinking, this is a lady who lives in a very, very expensive penthouse in central London with her financier partner. The taxpayer funds her heating bill, and she's talking about "Sisters in Big Tech." And I just think, like you say, it's almost a miracle they're on 16%. I mean, it's like it's like watching something from 15, it's like watching a US Netflix series from 15 years ago. They have no idea what is happening in terms of where people are going politically, in terms of their economic experience of life.

A few things.

>> But, you know, it's not feminism to claim to claim to campaign for, um, gender balance amongst the CIA torturers or in Big Tech. That's not feminism. Feminism is about liberation. Used to be. That's what my mom taught me. That's what, uh, her mom, that's what my dad's mom, um, taught me through her writings, her, um, letters and so on. Feminism is about liberation. Once upon a time, it was called Women's Lib. Remember? It was all about liberating not just women, but also men from the urge to be patriarchal. Because, as Hegel taught those of us who of a left-wing disposition, uh, in the master-slave paradox, the master can never be free as long as he fears the slave, and he must fear the slave if he needs to be the master. So, in the end, the critique of people like Karl Marx of capitalism is that, um, we all become servants of the machinery in the end, whether we are proletarians or, uh, capitalists, whether we are, you know, misogynistic, um, you know, terrorized women or trans people, we are all, in the end, subject to the terror of, uh, forces beyond our control. So feminism should be about liberating people from capital, including Big Tech capital.

>> Mmm. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's sad.

>> Don't look convinced.

>> No, no, I, it's really sad. No, because, you know, you talk about being a feminist in the book, and there are lots of people now, there are lots of men who would be, who are feminists, who would say, "I would never be a feminist." And you think, well, women couldn't have a credit card in this country till 1975. Was that a bad thing? Yeah, that's bad. It shouldn't be. Okay. Should a woman have a right to abortion? Of course they should. Should they have a right to divorce? Yeah, of course they should.

>> That's all the result of feminism. Or quiet. And these...

>> My grandma, big Egyptian feminist union in 1923. I'm ever so proud. Look, I don't think that we men can claim to be fe, I, I say I describe myself as a feminist. Maybe you, women feminists, um, and some more radical feminists are right that feminism needs to be, uh, lived through the experience of womanhood. Maybe they are right in this. But we boys, the members of the defective, we need, we need, we need to understand that, you know, keeping the woman in the house is a form of oppressing ourselves too.

>> It goes against our capacities, our nature. Um, you know, keeping somebody under your thumb, in the end, enslaves you. And this is not a utopian kind of hairy-fairy thing. I think that there is so much evidence of the diminution in the quality of life of those who spend all their life oppressing others. I don't think that the people now who are in the IDF in Palestine, killing thousands and thousands and thousands, participating in the genocide, I don't think they will have a good life when they go back home once this, uh, awful situation ends at some point. In the same way that the Vietnam War veterans went back, uh, to the United States and estranged from their own society, and they ended up, um, with massive, you know, uh, percentages of, uh, um, drug abuse, of early deaths, of suicide. Oppressing is not what it is cracked up to be.

>> Well, there's a reason Netanyahu's son's not there, right? I presume he'd like to keep all his arms, arms, and legs, and not get PTSD.

>> Like, uh, George W. Bush.

>> Yeah. I mean, this, I saw a great clip actually, speaking of this quickly. I saw a great clip the other day of, um, an IDF veteran, and he was crying, speaking to some kind of, I don't know, like some sort of panel, because he hadn't got disability benefits.

>> Mhm.

>> And he said, "I killed 40 people for you." And he's saying, so he was in, he was in the Golani Brigade, I think it's called. "I killed 40 people for you. I myself. I have nightmares, and my mother is paying for my hospital bills." And I think, man.

>> That's like the Vietnam War veterans and the Iraq War veterans. They, they use them and then they throw them out like, um, you know, fodder that has, uh, lost its market value.

>> You shoot kids, and then you end up yourself, and the people that told you to shoot the kids won't look after you. I, I use this as an extreme, of course, but nevertheless, helpful example of what, how, you know, this idea of the manosphere, um, is highly oppressive for boys. Because, you know, if you're a 12-year-old, 13-year-old adolescent boy, and you are part of that environment, and you feel that you need to conform to the macho image, to the image of a boy that thinks very little of women and wants to, you know, uh, treat them like, um, second-rate, uh, uh, humans, and, you know, at some point, you know, marry one of them and keep them in the home to have babies for the nation. That is, besides being abhorrent for women, uh, it is abhorrent for the soul of that young 12, 13-year-old boy, putting him in that position. So, we, feminism was always about liberating both men and women. In the same way that the socialist revolution is should be about not only liberating the working class, but also liberating the capitalist class.

>> Andrew Gors is really good on this, you know, he talks about feminism and the French thinker, he was really good on, on how feminism allowed men to love their children properly.

>> Well, feminist revolution, why I wrote this book. Yeah.

>> Literally, because, you know, I owe it to these five women, uh, that I've been, they have liberated me from the, uh, the male sovereign speak within me. I don't believe that, Janice, I think you were born, you know, enlightened. High. No, I was socialized through misogyny, like most boys. Boys, you know, I still remember as an 8-year-old, 9-year-old, that our socialization process as boys, uh, revolved around hating girls and treating them like, uh...

>> Do you think that's got better?

>> No, I don't. I think it's getting worse.

>> Did it get better?

>> It did. It did get better, and now it's getting worse. You know, look at adolescence, right? Um, I know that this has become a kind of stereotype, but I think it's, it's quite telling. I see this from our kids. It is, it is definitely getting worse.

>> Why?

>> Well, because we have the drift to the alt-right. I mean, allow me a bit of economic determinism, you know, revealing my Marxism, my un-reconstructed Marxism. Um, I think that 2008 was our generation's 1929. And ever since we had our generation's 1929, the left failed to put forward a liberating, emancipatory narrative. Even when we did get into government, like I did, we failed. It doesn't matter why we fought with one another. There was betrayal. There was treachery. There was, there was stupidity and mistakes and so on. Uh, and just like in the interwar period, in the 1920s and 1930s, after the left fails, discontent grows, and then the idea of the masculine, patriarchal rebirth of the nation, which, uh, goes hand in hand with the patriarchal family, around the patriarch, the paterfamilias. This whole thing becomes, uh, a political agenda that is functional to the interests of the cartel running big business. Don't forget that big capital always, in the end, goes into bed, gets into bed with the fascists. And this patriarchal, uh, narrative becomes even more reinforced. So, you know, if you are looking at it from this macroscopic and macrosociological point of view, then you realize why it all clicks. You have, um, stagnation, you have no investment in good quality jobs or green energy. You have, uh, the decline of feminism. You have the rise of, uh, hating the other, whether the other is the trans, the Muslim, the Jew, the Greek, the Irishman, or woman, whatever. Uh, it all, you know, there is a, a tsunami of regressive ideas. You know, effectively, the Dark Ages are engulfing us. And the only way of fighting this is by us leftists, firstly, looking ourselves in the mirror and, you know, being exceptionally critical of our own failures and our own incapacity to unite and to find common ground. Because the fascists are really very good at being solid, solidaristic with one another, whereas we leftists, you know, you put two of us in one room, you end up with three factions or four. And to resist, as, uh, a Palestinian said recently to me, "For us Palestinians, existence is resistance." And I think the rest of us will need to appropriate that slogan.

See, I agree with the economic argument, and that's that runs through this book, that runs through your other books, that we're kind of going through, not one for one, but we're going through something quite similar to the interwar period, right? I agree with all that. But I find it interesting that you're somebody who is, good comrade, good Marxist. You think technology is very determinative of things, not entirely, but very determinative of things. You talk about, you know, feudalism. And I look at the rise of the manosphere and the sort of reactionary right amongst young boys, and I can't help but think of pornography. I can't help but think of how you've got this triad of social media, smartphones, the attention economy, ubiquitous porn. Of course, young kids are going to think about women differently. Of course they are. You know, it was only 15 years ago in this country we had a campaign against Page 3 in The Sun. You know, it's quaint. Now you've got kids, 9, 10, 11-year-old boys able to, well, fortunately not actually, because the government's kind of changed it, but you can get VPNs or whatever, being able to access pornography, or, you know, you've got, uh, OnlyFans, gang bangs with a thousand, you know, and that's where it integrates with the social media and the attention economy, because her revenue model is to get maximum attention on social networks where loads of kids are. I write a lot about this in my technology because we have a new form of capital that trains us to train it, to train us to train it, to modify our behavior. And anyone who owns that capital, whether they use it to sell stuff through Amazon or Uber or through pornography, um, has enhanced power over the rest of us who do not own that capital.

>> But do you, what you're saying is completely consistent with my worldview.

>> No, I know it is. But the thing is, so somebody like Jonathan Haidt would say all of this, right? He would say, um, kids shouldn't have smartphones, social media before 14, 16. Get phones out of schools, which is happening. You know, I personally would, I would prohibit pornography. I would, I don't know how you do it. I would, digital pornography. I would, if you want to, we've got magazines, get a DVD, but you have to have some kind of prohibition. The ease of access for anybody under 18. You have to, you have to, you have to have some kind of, and, and I know we've kind of half done it. But the idea of a young teenager being able to access that stuff for zero cost, I, I think is responsible for so much bad stuff. And I can't help think of my, my grandmother, my Iranian grandmother. My dad came to this country in 1976, I think, to study engineering at Southampton University. And, you know, she's a, she's a Jewish woman, but she's Iranian. She was traditional, but she would have looked at the West as progress, enlightenment. They, they, they allow people to live more free lives. And I think now, if she was still alive, she died, uh, age 98 in 2023. I think now, if she saw OnlyFans, if she saw what what kids are doing to each other with regards to social media, like bullying, if she saw OnlyFans, and I sound like some arch-reactionary, she would, she would look at that and think, "What the hell is, what is going on in that country?" You know, she would say to her son, "Why are you there? Why would you want grandchildren there?" And she wasn't like a, a reactionary conservative woman. She would just view that as being really at odds with freedom and liberty and progress and enlightenment. And I feel like the left has given it a bit of a free pass, if I'm honest, actually.

>> Well, I don't disagree that, um, some curbs are important, and, uh, some good can be done. But I disagree that the problem will be solved through regulating.

>> No, as I said, so I'm not against what you're proposing. I, I would go a bit further, actually. I would say that the idea of anonymity on the internet and of free goods, free goodies, not just pornography, anything, is inimical to the species interest. Because there's no such thing as a, as a free good. With cloud capital, uh, effectively, we're training the machines to train us, to give somebody power over us. So, in, um, a science fiction novel that I wrote a few years ago, and others now, uh, I outlined it how in my utopian socialist democratic liberal, whatever society, communist, um, in everything, would firstly, it wouldn't be anonymous. Secondly, you would have, uh, complete ownership of all your data. And thirdly, you would have to pay for every service, uh, autonomously. So if you did that, then you would have a lot more, uh, degrees of freedom in society to control this, uh, reinforcement mechanism. Because blood algorithms, blood capital, reinforces existing misogyny. For instance, uh, everything you describe, what we see, uh, the way boys, uh, excite one another and through the algorithm and through OnlyFans and through pornography, uh, turn effectively, uh, super misogynistic in their approach to sex. That was always there, even before the algorithm, but it has been turbocharged. I agree with you. But the solution can't be just, uh, curbs, just, um, uh, you know, uh, regulations by which to curtail. You need to change the ownership structure. This is where Marx comes in. You see? So why is it that you have OnlyFans? Because the people who create all the funds make billions, billions out of this capacity to use the machinery, and whatever imagery is reinforced by the machinery in order to capture eyes, eyeballs, and then sell those eyeballs to particular interests, sell their data, sell their information, and so on. Now, why, why are some people like me, and maybe you, Marxists? Because we believe that what really matters in the end is who owns the machines, and whether these machines are socially owned. So I'm a socialist because I believe that all machinery should be, should be so socially owned. And pornography, it would never go away, because there are parts of our sexual makeup which, um, I think cannot be fully civilized. Allow me to put it in those terms. Freudian, you know, goes that.

>> Yeah. I mean, it's beyond the rational, it's beyond the moral. Uh, I don't claim to understand the darker aspects of our sexuality. Uh, so there will always be. But what you want to prevent is this, uh, reinforcement mechanism, feedback mechanism between ownership of machines and the darker aspects of our sexuality. So, I mean, I would have been, I was somebody who really heavily endorsed, like free culture 15 years ago, and I still do, you know, it's really, and P2P and all that stuff. I really, I, you know, really think it's a big deal. Uh, and that talk about, you know, lost alternative modernities, that was one of them. But I do think that if, so, you know, allow me to be like an Adam Smith, you know, disciple. I do feel like if you just said, okay, this is going to cost £5. If you just, if you just applied the price mechanism to this stuff, 95% of people, they wouldn't bother to say, okay, there's the marginal utility from this, or I'd spend £5. They would make a market decision through the price mechanism that it's not worth it. The problem is that it's free, and you can access it anytime, anyplace. So in that way, it's almost a supernatural good, right? It's not subject to scarcity, it's not subject to to location. It's just incredible.

But isn't it very different?

>> Firing the most primary parts of our brain.

>> The news feeds being free, which then create, like, and then once you have the theft of news dissemination from Google or from Meta, Facebook, then what happens is, uh, news agencies and news corporations, and not corporations, you know what I mean, um, news producers end up being vassalized by these digital behemoths. And then when that happens, uh, newspapers shut down, or they become utterly, um, dependent on these big tech companies, which then use, like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and so on, use that monopoly, the thievery they've created, in order totally to poison any possibility of democratic debate and, um, and news dissemination. The, the, I think that whether you're talking about news or sexual images, for the edification of the viewer, it is the private ownership and the highly concentrated ownership of the machinery that toxifies our societies, whether it is our democracies or, you know, our sexuality.

>> I, I agree with all of that. But I do think we're talking about things the right has done well, and the left has failed to do. I do think in the last 15 years, the left has just failed to say to people, you know what, these are the things you need to live a good life. We've failed to offer that normative framework, which all humans ever over the last 300,000 years, and other primates do, probably before them, archaic humans. They need that. And I think the left, and you know, in this book, it talks effectively about your, your moral foundation. And that's why I think it's such a, you know, a great, great read. I really enjoyed it. But I do feel like the left has said, you know, "We're not going to tell you what to do. We're not going to tell you what a good life looks like. We're not going to sort of say how you should live." And you've got somebody like Jordan Peterson who says something so basic as, "Clean your room." And all of a sudden, it sounds, which I know is, I'm being stupid here because it's, it's a stupid thing to say, but all of a sudden that can be passed as coded wisdom because actually young people have very few people in their lives telling them what a good life is. And, you know, as a Marxist, as a historical materialist, I think we're really missing a trick because actually we have the unique explanations as to as to why so much is happening.

>> If Peterson can find ways that I can utilize to convince my daughter to clean her room, maybe I will become one of his disciples.

>> How old is she?

>> 21.

>> But you, you're, I mean, you know, you're a product of the Enlightenment. You know, your parents were scientists.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh, they, you know, they come from very humble beginnings. You were, I mean, I find this really funny. You were going to become a, you were going to study physics.

>> Indeed.

>> And you were persuaded by Papandreou.

>> That's correct.

>> To become a mathematical economist.

>> Yes.

>> Let's do this story because it's quite funny. How come you're an economist and your parents are scientists?

>> Initially, I wanted to be a pianist, but then I realized I didn't have what it takes to be a good one. Uh, and then I decided I'm going to go into theoretical physics, not experimental physics, you know. No, I didn't want to get my hands dirty. I wanted theory. Uh, and, um, at some point, I had the opportunity of, when I was applying for university places here in this country, uh, filling my UCAS forms and all that, um, the, it asked for, you know, a kind of academic reference. And there was this opportunity that, um, the leader of the opposition at the time, um, who was an academic economist back in, uh, the 1960s and '70s in the United States, Andreas Papandreou, and later he was one of the most successful Greek prime ministers in the 1980s and, uh, early '90s, mid-'90s, um, he could give me a reference. And, you know, he was a very substantial person in my pantheon of important people at the time, in the mid-'70s. So somebody organized this. Of course, he didn't know who I was, and he was simply going to sign a reference letter that his, uh, secretary would produce, which is exactly what happened. And I was asked to go to his office and and collect it from his secretary in the House of Parliament in Greece when he was leader of the opposition. So I go in there, I sit down. I was waiting for the secretary to prepare the letters and to give it to me. Um, apparently it was signed. She was putting it in an envelope, and at that time, the great man walks by, and he realized I was waiting for something. He said, "No, come to my office." And he was very chatty, very pleasant. And he, he knew nothing about, he said, "Why are you here? Reference?" Oh, okay. Yeah, I know nothing about it. Um, he didn't even ask me for my name. He said, "What do you want to study?" I said, "Theoretical physics at Imperial College. This is what I'm applying for." He said, "No, you won't do that. You'll do mathematical economics at the University of Essex." And I was absolutely incensed. He knew nothing about...

me. He didn't know my name, who I was, what I was good at, what I wasn't good at, but he had an opinion not only that I shouldn't study theoretical physics and what I should study mathematical and but also which university. And then he started explaining and it made perfect sense. He said, "Look, for you to be part of this political party, I was an activist in the socialist party at the time. You must be political. So you shouldn't study theoretical physics because nobody takes physicists seriously when they talk politics. Economists that do take seriously and you should do mathematical economics because it's the nearest to theoretical physics. It's exactly the same mathematics but instead of having on the axis on the x axis and the y- axis having you know temperature and energy and um heat and all that uh you have inflation and employment investment but the mathematics is the same. So if you if if you care about the maths because this is what theoretical physics is do mathematical economics so that when you open your mouth and you talk about politics people can take you seriously. Uh and then he also explained don't go to the LC don't go Imperial didn't have economics back then I don't think it it does maybe it does now I don't know uh he you go to Essex because it's a very progressive university and there are two or three very good mathematical economists I know them personally I ended up going to Essex to the red university to study mathematical economics >> it was very well well it still is but at the time was very leftwing political >> back then we I was part of the communist party and the com the Homsock and we had four of the five members of the executive of the students union communists and there was one laborite >> a different time. >> You could have been Carlo Relli, you know, you could have been like a superstar European another penguin writer talking about black holes and whatnot, but instead you're >> I don't know how good I would have been as a physicist. >> We were a good communicator. >> I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed physics. I did study a little bit of physics and then you know I I managed to escape economics. Um at some point I ditched all the economics course and I only did maths uh with a bit of theoretical physics and my masters was in mathematical statistics much to do with economics. So I thought I had escaped economics until when I was in Birmingham which is where I was doing my masters. I um I came across an article written by an MI MIT economist, highly mathematical article which claimed in the abstract that he had proved that trades unions are stupid and capitalist employers are smart and he had a mathematical model of how they negotiate the capitalist employer and the trade union representing the workers. was fully fledged optimization model you know all singing all dancing you know double um integrals and all that and then he had a statistical section he had actually uh gathered data from American negotiations between conglomerates and trade unions and he claimed that through very sophisticated econometric work statistical work that he proved that his model was correct and the model assumed that uh employers are super smart computers of um net for future profits and the unions were dumb uh resistors and I thought okay that can't work that can't possibly be true but I need to find the in the armor of this article so I spent three months uh debunking it and the rest is history because that that that became a thesis and then then it was published as a quite successful quite impactful economic article and then I started getting offers for lectureships in economics and I became an economist as a result >> just cuz one guy pissed you off and that's why you're here >> that's right >> but to go back to my point about being a product of the enlightenments that's a really impressive CV right you're talking about I mean I don't know why I was nodding just then I've never read a academic paper with integrates Um, you've got physics, pianists, um, mathematical economist. >> Well, failed at all of those. >> Failed physicist, failed pianist, >> politician, >> failed politician, >> writer. You're definitely a good writer. Lots of good books you've written. So, the point is that, you know, you are a product of the enlightenment. And I do sort of think that highly intelligent people from a progressive background who, you know, are immersed in enlightenment thinking, they just sort of presume that people don't need quite rigid strong rules. I know you're I'm not I'm not saying you think that. >> I I don't think that, >> but I do I I think lots of people >> I I am >> I think lots of people do. Like my mom my mom was a Catholic. She would say and she'd be quite open about it. She say, I'm one of those people in life, I need rules. I just need rules. I can't live without it. >> Victimstein put it beautifully. >> Please. >> I mean, what's chess? Chess is a set of rules. It is the constraints that you can't take you know a pawn and do whatever you want with it. There are certain rules what you do with each of the pieces on a chess board. Those constraints create a whole universe of chess which liberate the mind. So constraints liberate. >> The question is who chooses the constraints? Are these constraints placed upon you by somebody who has exorbitant power and can make you do things for them without you being an agent. So being a socialist not being against rules or >> quite huh being a socialist is all about the collective decision making process leading to rules that make for a good life and the universe like chess which liberates the mind >> which takes us to Jeanjac Russo one might even argue the Chinese Communist Party >> indeed >> I mean you know the but yeah this idea that freedom freedom the idea that freedom is acting without any inhibitions whatsoever is you know it goes to John Lockach it goes to Hobbes and it's the heart of I think some of the ultra liberal problems we're facing today. I mean we're not having a conversation about the history of ideas but I think it's that's a beautiful analogy from Wickinstein. I didn't know that about constraints. Freedom is impossible without constraints. Indeed Hegel talks about it like >> indeed. But if you think about the the mindset of economists, the people who run Treasury here in Britain, the people who who run the Bank of England, they're they have a model of homoeconomics, they at the heart of all those models that forecast, you know, inflation, unemployment, this that and the others, the stock exchange, uh growth rates, all that. At their heart, they have a model of homoeconomics, the rational economic man, and it is a man because if you if you read the model, it can't be a woman. It's so stupid. It cannot possibly be female. Um, it is a it's it's a humanoid who loves what he does and does what he loves and the only thing he cares about is to maximize his satisfaction given his constraints. So his constraints are the only impediment to his freedom. So he cannot understand that with the point you made and the point that Bitkinstein made that constraints liberate because he's too dumb to have a capacity to judge his objectives, his preferences, his passions for me and I think that you know that is the case for the ancient Greek enlightenment and also for the French enlightenment, not so much the Scottish enlightenment. That's where I part ways and but that's why I think that the Angloeltic uh philosophical tradition even though it's very interesting and um noteworthy it has led us down towards the path uh that eventually eventuated in neoliberalism. The original enlightenment, the continental enlightenment is all about rationality as a mechanism by which we can ask ourselves the difficult question which is okay I want X should I want X you know to judge our preferences to judge our passions that's what differentiates us from machines or from stupid uh you know insects all animals want something they have a desire for something. But we are the only animal that have the capacity to ask the question, okay, I want X. Should I want X? And by what criteria should I judge whether I want X? And as a society, yeah, we want that. Do we want that? Um, have we found out ways of synthesizing our individual desires into a collective will? These are the the big questions which um the right never answers. They assume they assume that there is such a thing as a national interest which coincides with the interests of the rich of the powerful of the capitalists and this is where we leftists have to come in and to deconstruct it. >> See I think you've just beautifully explained there why we need on the left a project of uh a normative ethics which we we simply don't have. Well, of course we do. But, you know, the the the center left, the progressive left has, I think, in many ways over the last 20 years, just descended into just ultra liberalism. Do what you want. Um, and I and I do think that's a good critique of it. And I think the left, and that is not, as you've said, that is not >> that's not the left I hail. And no, I know these women in the in the book that I just wrote uh would be besides themselves with um fury if you told them that you know what what we need to do is just have absolutely you know it's relativism that anything goes. >> Many people associate the the modern left with like just supreme moral and cultural relativism. They do. >> Well, in that case it's not the left we're talking about. We're talking about some kind of mutation of what used to be left which in the end falls into a postmodern um milange of um just idiotic uh urges. This is not what the I am a true believer in the notion that you know every baby that is born has certain talents, certain capacities and that virtue and happiness genuine happiness you know a successful life um results only when these talents uh are realized. But for those talents to be realized you need to to invest in it. You know, if you if if you can become the best violin violinist or pianist in the world, right, you have to do the hard work of getting there. And if you have the capacity to play the piano like a dream, like um a magician, a man or woman, um then you can only be genuinely happy and fulfilled if you get to that point. But you're not going to get to that point if if you simply follow the path of least resistance. Yes, you need to write this book. The the rules to living that that can be the next one. Penguin can have that one for free. Let's let's have this uh this last question because you know I've um we say in English note blown smoke up your backside and I will happily do that because I think you're a terrific man. I think you're a huge asset on the left. We don't have enough people like you. >> Thank you. >> With your wisdom >> and you're making me blush. >> Yeah. Take the camera off your honest with your wisdom and experience and humility. all really really valuable and you've succeeded in so many aspects of your life. You say at the top of this book that you know this was written in response to three political failures in in one year. You were kind of depressed almost quickly. What what happened in that year? What were these failures? >> Well, to begin with, uh it was a time of war. I didn't expect to have a European war north of my home in the Ukraine. It was a time when a genocide was brewing. These were things that I didn't expect to have to live through again in my 60s. Uh in addition to that, our political party uh that entered parliament 2019, you have this experience here, a new left-wing progressive force trying to get ahead. We managed to get into parliament. We elected nine members of parliament into 2023. We had high hopes in the end because of high levels of abstension amongst the young who liked us but didn't go to vote. we crashed out of parliament. We lost our seats. Uh and then and it was a twin election because there was a hung parliament and so a month later we had a second one. Uh and of course the the media uh had a ball uh vilifying us and demonizing us because the media belonged to the oligarchs and the cartels that we waged war against. Uh so that was a second uh a second failure within a month. Uh and then it was a matter of not allowing a small party but powerful but powerful but I think quite significant one nevertheless forgiving voice to the voiceless uh to to dissolve because you know when you lose like that it's really very easy to turn inwards and so we we tried very hard to do that at some point um I was physically attacked by um henchmen I can't prove exactly who behind that. But u it wasn't so much you know my injury. It was uh watching my wife and my comrades. It happened at the restaurant with 20. >> It was serious. The pictures were really >> Yeah. >> I was hospitalized. But that wasn't the point. The point was that my own people >> in my eyes looked so helpless. So if you put all this together um somehow for the first time in my life I entered a period of depression only for about a month or two and then I decided I'm going to react to that and this is why I wrote this book because you know I remembered my mother who had who had died in 2008 on difficult at difficult junctures in difficult moments saying to me come on raise your soul now and um there There's a story to this which had to do with prisons, uh my father being in prison, my uncle being in prison and so on. And I thought, well, these people have had gone through far far worse than what I'm going through. Uh and I'm going to write this her story. So I started writing this book as a story of my mother. But then I added another four women because I realized that there was a lot more to say and that I could tell my story of the period between 1923 and 2024 through the eyes and perspectives of these women. So 10 pages into writing this book, suddenly the veil of depression was lifted. and writing it, what did it tell you about what you'd gotten wrong in the last 15 years? So, obviously you've suffered political defeats personally, collectively this process, did it make you sort of more critical about what you'd done? Did you be begin to appraise yourself as a politician differently? So, I could have done this. I should have done this. Because you're going through these other people's lives and obviously they've made mistakes, they've had successes. I try constantly to cast uh a critical light on what I do. I think only fanatics don't do that. You you you have to keep doing this. So what was special about the period of writing this book in terms of this self-critical process is that it wasn't so much me asking the question what did I do wrong? I relived the lives of my mother, of my grandmothers and so on and managed to look at myself not from a bedside bird's eye point of view but through their eyes. So I managed to bring them back to life in my head in my soul and to be critical of me the way they would be critical of me and that was helpful. >> Yianice, it's been a great conversation. It's a great book. Thank you so much. >> A fabulous book. >> Thank you, Novara. >> We'll have you back on soon. Um, thanks so much again. >> Thank you.