ACFM - #ACFM Trip 20: Revolution

Episode Date: November 7, 2021

The #ACFM gang square up a suitably momentous topic for their milestone 20th Trip: revolution! Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn wonder how the idea of political revolution ever became thinkable, and if it’s still thinkable today. Was the sexual revolution a real revolution? How did disillusionment with Soviet communism affect our political imagination? […]

Welcome to Welcome to ACFM, the home of the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and as usual, I'm joined by Jeremy Gilles. Hello. Hello. And Kea Milburn. Hello. And before we get onto the show, we just want to extend a massive thank you to all of our fans,

new and old, who came down to see us at the World Transformed and participated in our workshop on the Ecologies of Solidarity. It was lovely to spend an evening with you. So thanks so much to everyone who came down. So everyone, today's episode is on Revolution. So, guys, why are we talking about revolution today? There's lots of reasons why we would want to talk about it, but one key reason is that we all feel that we're in a situation now,

a sort of historic situation where the scale of the climate crisis in particular means that just to sort of preserve human life and civilisation, then we need systemic change of a type and on a situation. scale that we would, historically, we would have described as revolutionary. Historically, you need a revolution or something that would have been described as a revolution to make that happen. But it's also pretty obvious, at least in a place like Britain, that we don't seem to be in a historic situation, which, you know, you would describe as pre-revolutionary. So the political and cultural conditions are not anywhere near to those you would expect to see in the inner

society on the brink of revolution. So that leads to that. And that leads to the, the whole set of questions as to well what do we what do we do about it i mean the way the way you put it an idea about um why are we talking about revolution and is it even possible i think you might have meant that as is revolution possible possible to talk about revolution but it might also be interpreted as is it even possible to talk about revolution does it even make sense to talk about it and i think that gets us into this this idea that you know the way people have talked about revolution and what they've had in their minds has changed a lot our idea of revolution is like rupture or change is some sort of rupture where everything starts

a new or you have a new start, a new beginning, you know, that's not that old. It's only, you know, kept two or three hundred years old. In fact, it goes back to the, the revolutions of the 18th century, the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the Haitian revolution, which you should probably add in. And before that, that idea of revolution wasn't thinkable. Just wasn't, you weren't able to think in that way, basically. And so the revolution, the word revolution, you know, brings to mind this sort of revolving. And it is, it is in fact, linked to this idea that predates those revolutions of the 18th century, this idea of history in which history moves through huge cycles which repeat themselves. This is sort of like

one of the ways in which the ancient Greeks would have thought about history as a sort of cyclical thing that happens rather than something that goes in a particular direction. And we get the word progress and progressive from those sort of direction. So it was only made possible to think about revolution in those terms, you know, a few hundred years ago. And is it possible to think of it now, it's not really clear what it means anymore. Another thing that revolution makes me think of is a kind of outward energy. I think revolution is necessarily exothermic. Like, it produces energy.

It's kind of like a burst, and then there's energy that comes out. It's active, and then something settles, and then obviously it depends what's in the void. I think it's a really interesting thing to think about is whether you think of revolution in sort of quantitative or qualitative terms. Is it just like a handy name for a sort of accumulation of changes and shifts or is it like some identifiable tipping point which then creates a whole sort of qualitative change? Because I don't really know. I mean, because I think that idea of it being exothermic, that's one way of thinking of it as both. You know a revolution when you see it because it produces a level of qualitative change that sort of produces various sorts of new possibilities.

I think that is really interesting, but it might also only kind of bow as a result of an accumulation of smaller changes. Ah, but but don't, okay, so right, wow, okay, this might be getting on to something else then. So is, because to me there is an event, like there is, there is a point which can be pointed to, which is like, this is the day, the thing happened. And it might have been because of an accumulation of 10 days, 10 years, you know, 10 centuries of pressure. but there is a day where it started or there's a day that it happened or there's days that it happened in between. So are you saying that there's another way of looking at it

where actually it's just an accumulation of little things and the tipping point isn't kind of spectacular? No, I think, well, I think this does come on to the topic of like the difference between revolution and reform actually because I think if you have any notion of revolution, then the notion does imply that there's a tipping point you can identify. Like it might only be a tipping point. It might not be like suddenly everything changed for no reason, but it is a tipping point.

Whereas there's a completely non-revolutionary idea of progress, which is that progress is so sort of piecemeal and so sort of a cumulative that indeed there never would be a tipping point. The biggest tipping point you could imagine would be like, you know, a particularly successful reforming government. It would be like the 1945 Labour government. Partly why, you know, that it's still like a real sort of fetish for Labour. the politics in Britain is the question of, well, was a government like that just an example of a really successful, efficient technocratic reforming government, or did it mark such a qualitative

shift that, you know, you have to understand it as having been oriented to, yeah, was it, were they trying to produce a really qualitative shift in power relations? But I guess, I mean, what we mean, to a large extent, this is all semantic. I mean, it's all, I mean, the semantics are really important, but what people mean by revolution in any given moment will just depend, like, you know, how they're conceptualising those things. And I guess, as you said, we should go back and think about the sort of history of how people have used the term so that we can get a sense, because people have used the term in all the different ways. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, sorry to bathe. This is future, a key from the future,

a future in which we went on to record at least an hour and a half on the history of revolutions and revolutionary thought, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Russian, you get the idea. It went on for an hour and a half, then we realised the whole episode would be like three hours. We decided we're going to take out that history bit and put it into its own separate podcast. That podcast is out now. Go and check it out, have a listen. It's a really good episode, I reckon. Slightly too much Jeremy for my taste, but you'll probably enjoy it. Anyway, let's get back to, the future. No, forward to the past. Well, anyway, look, here's Nadia. Meanwhile, women are going

actually, for the last thousand years of all of your different revolutions, men, whenever one group has won over the other, one of the first spoils of war have been our bodies. So fuck that. We're going to have a sexual revolution. And feminism as a revolutionary project is a thing in the West, anyway, during that same period of time. And there becomes a real re-imagination of women as people, frankly, rather than women as women. We've talked about this before, but it is pretty interesting that the feminist consciousness raising groups, which were the organisational form of that, what they call second wave, feminism after the first wave, sort of suffragette period, that consciousness raising groups are really quite influenced by practices going on in China at that point.

There's a Chinese cultural revolution, which is this huge period of ferment in which, You know, you have these practices of like Maoist self-criticism, et cetera, et cetera, and that sort of feeds through. Yeah, because it's not, because it's not, sorry to interrupt you here, because I think it's really important to point out, it's because it's seen very much as a revolution or an attempt at serious social change on a structural level. So when all of these policies are being, you know, borrowed and adapted from like other movements, these are because these are other movements that are looking to create mass structural change. This is not about, this is, and that's how the kind of women's movement was, was viewed. It was like, we want to change the entirety of society, not I want to change me. I want to change absolutely fucking everything and how it's done, you know, in the seats of power down to all of the institutions I have to engage with. Because it seems, because you might think from, you know, not knowing, knowing much, knowing much about that history, looking at it from, you know, 2021, it's saying, well, why would the women's movement look to, you know,

you know, Maoists to borrow something, right? It might not make sense. And so what I was doing there is by way of explaining that regardless of what you think about those tactics, there's a logic that binds those kind of movements or like revolutionary groups together. That's exactly what was going on in the Chinese cultural revolution. It was this attempt to change social relations now, basically. Yeah, yeah.

So I was arguing that rather than that. feminism is a Maoist plot. A Maoist plot by... I wouldn't put it past some people, but I know you were trying. I mean, that's sort of the dominant attitude on the right. Yeah, it is interesting thinking about these connections, isn't it? Because feminist demands had been really an important part of radical socialists and communist demands going back to the 19th century.

And, I mean, who had the right to abortion first and who was putting women in, you know, spaceships? Yeah, totally. It wasn't the English or the French. No, no, it was the Soviet Union. I mean, there's all, you know, there's all kinds of, there's a book, there's a book came out. I don't know if it's a book or an article, because I only, I just heard about it on a podcast a couple of years ago about, you know, some historian about how, you know, saying that women had better sex in the Soviet Union than in post-Soviet Russia because they were more empowered. It is a book.

I've got it down there. There is a T-shirt as well. People have better, people have better sex under socialism, I think it's called. And, well, I mean, it's women, specifically, it was seen as, you know, being, you know, there's good evidence for saying women are much more empowered under socialism. But broadly speaking, even people who we would now identify as having been sort of very radical, sort of feminists and socialists, were largely, we're seeing feminist demands either as a continuation and radicalisation of liberal demands for democratic rights or as a continuation and radicalisation of socialist demands. I think it is sort of coming out of China, really. It's the Chinese experience, the experience of the Chinese revolution and then Chinese communism. And the fact that the Chinese communist, various sections of the Chinese communist leadership, obviously, most famously Mao himself, they think that the Chinese tradition, sort of like Confucianism and deference to authority and ancestor worship are like inherently obstacles to building a communist, you know, society in China. And so you have to really take on people's like basic preconceptions about the world. And that's why you have the consciousness raising groups in the 40s from the 40s

and then you have Mao's attempted at sort of top down project of the great Chinese cultural revolution in the 60s. And then I think that does influence the emergence of the idea of feminism as a project to do the same thing. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that there's a logical connection in terms of like the scale. I'm not saying. I'm not saying that. Well, I know you know.

You might be saying that. Well, I am saying it because consciousness raising, because they had because consciousness raising groups was a term directly lift from a book about the Chinese Revolution in the 40s. Yeah, sure. Nobody used that term. So presumably the people who used that term

knew where they were getting it from. I mean, they did. But I think we can make it, we could do a little bit of an air point of like, you know, particularly that, Socialist feminists saw that feminist movement as a revolution in the revolution, right? A little bit like the Haitian revolution, which is, you know, basically, this is foreshortened. Once again, these people are not included. These social relations are not included in the revolution.

And so it was, you know, it was the continuation of sexism and sexist practice in the new left, which was one of the spurs to the... And if you read Angela Davis's like women race and class, like it's very clear, like what this is coming out from. like where the radical direction is. Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. You know, it doesn't sit outside like we want to change the world order. No, that's right, that's right.

The thing that really happened in the 60s and in the early 70s, is this idea of feminism not just as radicalising a set of demands that are coming out of either liberalism or socialism, but as a revolutionary project in its own right, as something that has something to revolt against, which is patriarchy.

And it identifies patriarchy as an older, more established, in some sense, more fundamental system of power relationships than, say, capitalism. And it takes those as its primary sort of objects. That is linked to a whole, a sort of idea of the possibility of sort of completely changing a way of life, which is really, really radical. and the idea of counterculture it partly emerges in the end of the 60s as part of the same context

and people are talking about the sexual revolution more in the kind of modern sense of talking about a revolution which is a bit like the way we talk about the industrial revolution they just mean like a wholesale change in kind of attitudes really rather than a kind of fundamental shift

in power structures necessarily but also like but also the pill You know, the change in availability of contraception and women being able to control their bodies literally in a very practical way. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, I'm thinking about this on my feet now

because I think this is really interesting because my understanding of that term the sexual revolutions, I don't know when people were first using it. There's several meanings. Yeah, but it has several meanings, doesn't it? So there's this quite casual sentence, and really there's a really casual sentiment

which it just refers to general social liberalisation, basically. And it just means like everybody having loads of, of sex basically and like porn being freely available and you know yeah there's more more people more people are having sex and you don't necessarily have to marry the girl once you get her pregnant so there's like pros and cons isn't there yeah but the point is as well that that does involve a change in power I mean that can't not if you have anything like a feminist understanding of how society works that can't not involve a massive shift in power relationships and so the the sexual revolution

in some sense an actual revolution and actual massive shifting power relationships is also something people are really sort of conscious of also conscious of a need to keep fighting for. Yeah and it depends who's participating in it like a load more people are participating in it but I think it remains a question about like you know obviously change society

but whether it but you know whether those practices or viewpoints or perspectives really touch that many people It led to massive social change institutionally, but I don't know about who holds the power. You know, who was partaking in the, if we take the sexual revolution as people are more freely able to have sexual partners. And then some people radically seeing it as part of their revolutionary practice that they no longer want to be, you know, women, no longer want to be locked into marriages with men. So, you know, part of that, like, to what extent was that practice on a, on a mass scale? You know, it doesn't mean that it didn't change social attitudes.

The social attitudes didn't change that it led to changes in legislation and that was really, you know, really important. But in terms of like people's practices, like how radical they were for, you know, a lot of people, the arguments made, well, you know, that was just done in London, mate, whereas the rest of the country was pretty much living a very conservative lifestyle. I mean, that is said, isn't it? In some ways, you can link it up to this idea that, like, the second-way feminist movement is in some ways a revolution within the revolution. Part of the revolution within the revolution was the sexual revolution and the way that that was, the way that played out in the sort of counterculture was seemed to be to the advantage of men to a large degree.

And that, you know, basically that was one of the stimuluses to, you know, a sort of autonomous women's movement. But you're also right that, you know, that these, things started off in the 1960s, the sexual revolution was something that was taking place amongst very small groups of people. But across the 1970s, that changes to a large degree. The countercelties sort of massifies in the 1970s, but it also stimulates social attitude changes, you know, which do have a really big effect, and that takes place for the 80s and 90s. All right, I guess if you were thinking about revolutionary music

or sort of that's also been sort of commercially popular that in some ways I think the greatest example of the past few decades is public enemy at the sort of height of their commercial success in the late 80s which is in some ways is an odd moment for this to be happening so we could play a track like revolutionary generation

from their album, Fear of a Black Planet. Yes, just jam that the rhythm runs day to day America is young They're defeats our women There's the gaps in why we all can swimming Drowning up get down and get it Got it going on with it

Sister, hey Soul sister We're going to be all right It takes a man to take a stand Understand and take the woman To make a stronger man As we both get strong They call me a crazy anxiety

When I'm singing the songs Oh my God My Lord I can't hold back So I can exact on the track They've quite self-consciously borrowing imagery again from the Panthers they kind of redefined the kind of soundscape of hip-hop, these very dense sample collages before a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions

basically made it impossible for people to release albums with that amount of sampling. They especially sampled a lot of soul and funk, which was a really deliberate reference to the kind of high moment of black militancy in the early 70s. It's an interesting moment because on the microdose, about folk music, we played Tracy Chapman's big hit, talking about a revolution. I mean, if you said, like, what's the most revolutionary period in, like, you know, American popular music, like, very few people are going to say off the top of their heads, like, 1987 to like 1995. But actually, this is the period when quite explicit music with an explicitly revolutionary

politics, like pops, keeps popping up, actually, even in the sort of pop charts. And I think, as we said when we were discussing it, I mean, one can make a fairly pessimistic reading of like why that is, because this, this coincides precisely with the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union. So it's the moment when there's really, there's no, there's absolutely no threat within American society from a revolutionary politics. So it's fine to start talking about saying you want a revolution, which by implication in all of these contexts would be some sort of a socialist revolution. It's fine to start talking. It's fine to start saying, that because nobody, there's absolutely no chance of it happening. There's also absolutely nothing in the political behaviour of the generation who were buying all these records, which is basically, you know, my generation is Generation X, that led, would lead one to the conclusion that they were sort of revolutionary. In the Bontos, yeah. We could, I mean, we did, when we did the episode about the long 90s, we talked about the early 90s, the possibility of understanding a moment of radical possibility in the early 90s that then gets close.

down by, you know, sort of neoliberal hegemony and capitalist realism. And I think maybe that maybe this reinforces that idea, actually. Maybe this does reinforce that idea that there was this moment of possibility. And the shift from radical possibility to capitalist realism is nowhere more explicitly registered than in hip-hop. You know, it's, it's public enemy being replaced by Dre and Snoop as the key figures in commercial hip-hop really registers that shift. And actually, you know, Mark Fisher's phrase capital is realism was initially inspired by an essay by Simon Reynolds in which he critiqued people who defended people like Dre and Snoop are on the grounds of their supposed social realism. So, all right, let's go to the 70s and the sort of the effects of the radical disillusion with communism, with the Soviet model and also with the cultural revolution. I mean, it's important to understand there were a few people.

in the West, a few radicals who were sympathetic to Mao's cultural revolution. But most people even on the left thought it was just a kind of barbaric, megalomaniac experiment that totally failed. So there's a real disillusion by the 70s, amongst people who a generation earlier would have expected to be, you know, probably sympathises with the Soviet Union, probably seeing it, seeing themselves as allies of it. By the 70s, in France, in France, for example, the wave of intellectuals that included people like Deleuze and Guatari

are very much influenced by the failure of the French Communist Party, either to support the student movement in 68, or to properly condemn the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the suppression of the so-called Prague, spring in 68, there's a general sense

in lots of quarters that the form of revolutionary politics, which manifests itself in 1917, which is also practiced by the Chinese Communist Party, has indeed has not led to the sort of liberated societies that people were hoping for. Instead, it's led to something which is basically worse than the forms of mixed economy and liberal capitalism you get in places like Britain from a sort of left perspective. And so on the one hand, there's all this kind a liberal critique that becomes fashionable in some quarters from the 70s onwards, which basically says,

it's basically echoing Edmund Burke's conservative critique of the French Revolution from the 1780s. It's basically saying, look, the whole idea of revolution is flawed. Because the idea of revolution is you're going to try and change the whole of society in like one big go. And the only way you can do that is by claiming a kind of knowledge about. society and history that nobody can really have. And therefore, if you try to do that, you're inevitably going to fail and you're inevitably just going to end up trying to impose your vision on the world in a way that becomes ultimately totalitarian and sort of terroristic. And, you know, for example, I mean, that is a view of the, that is a view of what isn't,

isn't politically possible or politically knowable, which for example, you know, is very close to the views of Friedrich Hayek, you know, the kind of founding figure of neoliberalism. And it's one reason why, you know, some sections of the sort of intelligentsiae and the sort of political class gravitate towards neoliberalism, the 70s onwards. On the one hand, there's this general sort of disillusion in the 70s with this, from the 70s onwards, various strands of radical thought, like the radical democracy, thinking of LeCloat move, for example, basically say, you need to have a different vision of radical change than a sort of revolutionary imaginary

that basically the idea of revolution is inherently flawed and then obviously the final end of the Soviet experiment in 1989 in 1991 really is when the 91 is when the Soviet Union formally ends

you know for me it's really striking like that experience in the 90s we've talked about before of seeing like Russian society just collapse and like the standard of live you know the life expectancy collapsing in Russia and everything you know I mean the way it shaped my politics like my thinking about revolutionary politics as it was that well it seemed to me though well look what what's been the final outcome of the Russian revolution final outcome of the Russian

revolution is Russian workers are worse off there than they are like in Britain so you know it doesn't look like it worked that well there's other there's other ways not on a long term, but it might have worked for a certain period of time. How long did you think it was going to last for? Well, that's what I thought in the 90s. What I would say now in 2020 is, like, trying to have a functional left or a functional workers movement in a world absent the Soviet Union has not worked out at all well either. You know, that's been going really badly for us now for the past 30 years. It turns out that the presence of the Soviet existence of the Soviet, the existence of the Soviet Union, the existence of a sort of geopolitical power bloc that was, you know, opposed to

Western liberal capitalism was a necessary precar, was a necessary condition of social democracy. And without that, without that prop being, you know, in place. I think it's the specter. It's the, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's on itself, which it keeps on doing over and over and over again. Well, I think that predated the last 20 years. I think that's part of the problem of the project of the left, which is the version of revolution in which you have an authoritarian government that says, you know, you must do this.

That's always, always thought of as a temporary state of affairs leading to, you know, an outpouring of democracy in which people find their own way in the world. Okay, well, this gets to a really central thing. thing, actually, that's a really central issue because one of the critique, the sort of post-Marxist, post-structuralist, sort of radical democratic critique of the revolutionary tradition,

which has a big influence on my thinking, like amongst other things. One of its arguments has been historically that indeed there is a deep connection between sectarianism and revolutionary thinking. That if you think about the world, and you think about the process of making change in terms of having a clear and dogmatic idea about the

direction of historical change and your place in it and a conviction that in some sense history is on your side and that you can completely transform society with one decisive intervention like the storming of the winter palace the storming of the bastille etc then inevitably you will become dogmatic to a point that will engender sectarianism. And that idea that there is a sort of necessary direction to history, there's a necessity to history, and so therefore a necessity to revolution, that idea that there's a clearly identified revolutionary subject, and if you're acting on behalf of that revolutionary subject,

then that justifies suppression of other potential actors, that goes as grossly as, you know, we shouldn't have a feminist movement or, you know, movements for black power, etc., because that distracts from the class struggle, and the class struggle is the thing that, you know, they're the chosen revolutionary subject. I mean, all of those bits are the bits that don't really work anymore, that don't really make sense anymore, and also the idea of revolutionists like this punctual event in which everything changes overnight is, you know, those are the bits that don't make revolution. very hard to think about or make it very, very unpersuasive, basically, at the moment. Yeah, I think we should play What's Up by Four Nonblones, which I think is a 1990s song, because it's just got this energy for it, especially as a woman. And I think I sang it in drunken karaoke the day the Tories got in in 2015 in a pub somewhere.

And I just, it has that kind of crescendo of the kind of like, shit man, we've got to do something about this life. Like, it's really a struggle. and yeah maybe it's revolution and it's got that you know it's like you know it's a commercial song i love it i think it's got a great energy to it Then we return after going through this huge amount of history. Then we're left with this problem that we started at the beginning, which is we're faced with a situation in which huge dramatic change needs to happen relatively quickly. And previously we'd have thought of that level of change as revolutionary.

And like climate change is one of the reasons why this, you know, this is the problem. the problem that needs to be addressed. And yet, revolutions doesn't seem possible. That idea of revolution that we've inherited from the 20th century doesn't seem viable. We're at a stage where, you know, that classical idea of revolution is really, really hard to think through or to hold on to, basically. I'm not particularly convincing because of this problem, this problem of, like, the certainty that comes with, like, acting in the direction of history, etc., just doesn't become, you know, becomes very difficult to hold on to. The other thing that happens, of course, is that society becomes incredibly much more complex, partly through things such as moving, you know, that moving from Fordism to post-fordism,

these sorts of terms that we've used before in which, and also the effects of the, of the, the sort of cultural revolutions and the emergence of mass consumption, you know, in the post-war period, it feeds into the counterculture, etc. You end up with this much more complicated, there I say, intersectional world in which, you know, the idea of a homogenizing industrial proletariat as the leading direction of history becomes much less convincing. So then you're getting in this process of the 90s in which the idea that the world could change just basically becomes very hard to hold on to, basically, even if you're on the left. And then you have this moment, you know, the moment of 2008 in which that world that

seemed quite solid of neoliberalism falls apart. And then you have 2009. 11, you know, that is one of the political effects of that, of that, the sort of re-emergence of left politics in a way. But it becomes complicated, Nadia, because in terms, because you were involved in a revolution in Egypt, you were actually there. Yeah, which looked a lot more like the sort of revolution events that we might have thought of in the 20th century. Yeah, exactly. But that is just not the case of what happens in, with Occupy or even the 15M movement in Spain. That becomes, that's something else. That doesn't. look like a classical revolution.

Yeah, but I think you can probably answer the question, and this might make me seem like Tanky Nadia a little bit, but probably not, hopefully not. I mean, you've got the same, frankly, you've got quite similar factors in Egypt in terms of like the percentage of the population that are below the poverty line or to use a more classic term, like working class, etc.,

that put their bodies on the line and kept on coming and coming and coming. You know, it's like 100 million people in this country. There was just loads of people who could participate in this thing to tip it over really quickly. And you just don't have such a different identification of people along complicated like seven different class lines or whatever like you have in the UK or Europe or whatever.

So you had those conditions that looked a lot more classically 20th century European for that movement to actually occur, you know. That's really interesting. But it's also an example of a revolution, not without revolutionaries, but without a communist party or some sort of thing which would fulfil the role of the Communist Party. And the Muslim Brotherhood is the thing that ended up fulfilling that way. Well, I mean, that's the other question, which is that can you retrospectively remove the revolutionary title from an uprising based on its outcome? And I would say that the answer is no.

You can't say that it's not a revolution because, in fact, there was a massive social voice. And the revolution was never able to consolidate its demands in a way that was at all meaningful within a year, you know, because the organized force, as you pointed out, was the Muslim Brotherhood, which in fact have been taking the role of the welfare state for the last, you know, definitely 2030, if not much longer time, because of what happened with structural adjustment and neoliberalism and Mubarak's government, etc. However, if we go back to our point of analysis of how did it happen? I mean, the Winter Palace was not stormed, but, you know, there were very clear demands that were formulated. You're right. There wasn't a communist party or there wasn't an organizing party behind it. But, you know, it's the first time in 7,000 years of Egyptian history that a leader was disposed. Like, it's serious stuff, you know.

So I would definitely classify it as a revolution. and I kind of resent people. I go, no, maybe it was an uprising. I meant, no, I think actually it classifies it fulfills those criteria. Yeah, I mean, the government was overthrown. That's one of them. Yeah, and there was a counter-revolution, of course, there was a counter-revolution and loads of other forces that played in, you know.

But you're right in terms of saying that it had a lot in common visually in terms of the movements of the squares. But, yeah, you didn't have a government overthrown. I think was there a government overthrown anywhere else? Well, it's been easier. Tunisia, yeah, yeah, sorry, Tunis and then Egypt, yeah. One of the bands which is most sort of clearly identified with revolutionary politics in the 1960s is the MC5 were formed in Detroit. And they were managed by this guy called John Sinclair, who was a sort of an artist, but also a, you know, a countercultural figure and a sort of revolutionary political figure.

it's not clear how, you know, to what degree the band were on board. I think people, so the most famous people in MC5 were Wayne Kramer and Fred Sonic Smith. I'm pretty sure Wayne Kramer was on board with the revolution. But basically, John Sinclair was really influenced by the Black Panther Party. And in fact, Huey Newton, who was the founder of the and the leader of the Black Panther party, he sort of had a word with John Sinclair and said, look, you need to step up to the plate so he's he formed this organization called the white panther party which was a sort of

militant leftist organization which would support the white panther party program although they added to the black panther party program the white panthers added their aims were fucking in the streets drugs sex drugs and rock and roll and um the abolition of capitalism not necessarily in that order revolution and fucking in the street was one of their slogans We did talk about the potential problems of the sexual revolution earlier. Basically, John Sinclair, he gets arrested in the late 60s. He passes a couple of joints around at a party, and one of the people he passes it to was an undercover police person, policewoman, I think it was, and he got 10 years for doing

that, which became a real cause-seleb, actually. John Lennon wrote a song called John Sinclair about him. And famously, Abbey Hoffman from the Yippies jumped on stage at Woodstock when the Who were playing to try to shout about John Sinclair and Pete Tenzin kicked him off the stage, basically. So they were this band who were sort of really caught up in this

this real sort of like acid communist moment you'd say when the sort of counterculture gets to its most sort of radical moment. The MC5 play at the Chicago, 1968, Chicago Democratic Convention protests which turned into a police riot, which is really famous incident in the US sort of counterculture. The songs, you'd probably point to something like Kickout the Jams. A lot of their songs don't necessarily have revolutionary lyrics or obliquely revolutionary lyrics,

but like, especially if we played a sort of live version of Kick Out the Jams, you could see the sort of revolutionary energy they will work in with. I think on the day, got to kick on. Got a kick on. Got to kick on. I think on it. I think of that moment, a sort of ten years ago, to that longer history we talked about, is interesting because I think it's making me think

well what the question for me is which of the various ideas of what a revolution might look like survived the 20th century and if you'd have asked it I mean if you'd have asked me that question in sort of 2005 I'd have said I'm not I don't know if any of them have

but it may be in a certain sense the kind of anarchist idea you know which you might link to the councilist idea of a more or less spontaneous uprising the spontaneous occupation of like workplaces homes the streets, you know, of a kind of leaderless mass sort of survived at least at the fringes

just as a kind of utopian way of imagining things. And it was what kind of informed, you know, the radical fringes of the social forum movement, the anti-globalization movement, et cetera. And then it feeds into things like the indignados and in Spain. And there's also, I would say, to some extent, the popular front, at least for people like me, Yeah, the idea of the Popular Front government

ultimately did sort of survive. I mean, that's the logical conclusion of the thinking of people like LeCloin-Moof, the idea of the Rainbow Coalition, the idea that, okay, you're not going to have one party, one organisation, or one social group represented. And of course, that's already an idea in the 30s in the writing of Antonio

Gramsci, the Italian communist leader, who's reflecting on the defeat of the communist by the fascist in Italy in the 30s. And he's, he, that's, thing that we've called like the storming the winter palace he calls it the war of manoeuvre in which there's like there's one move you can you make which is to capture the central position and then you've taken power and he contrasts that with the war what he calls the war of position and the war

of position is more like in his metaphorical imagine it's like trench warfare like you you capture a bit of ground and you hold that ground then you move forward you capture a bit more ground and that in a way I mean, the logical conclusion of the concept of the War of Position is to some extent to reject the whole distinction between reform and revolution, for example, is to say, look, actually, you don't know whether a given set of reforms will ultimately lead to a kind of revolutionary tipping point. All you can do is try to make them and then try to keep pushing forward, try to keep building your forces. But in effect, you know, the War of Position, I think it has always been, ended up being quite close as a concept to the sort of the idea of the popular front. the idea that you're going to have a kind of relatively complex coalition of social and political forces

you might occupy state power you might not but even if you do you recognize that occupying state power is not going to be enough to actually do what you want to do and I think that idea survives to some extent into the early 20th century but then what is something that happens around

I think again around sort of 2011 2012 is at least in the kind of tiny bits of the social world that you know, some of us have occupied is because of the perception that that wave of apparently relatively spontaneous, you know, sort of ground up, you know, revolutionary movements, including, which you might include Occupy, which definitely includes, you know, the movement of the squares in all its different forms, because that's largely been defeated,

been successfully, you know, hegemonized by a counter-revolution or has just been sort of defeated, just neutralised. That's the perception anyway. there's this kind of return to the idea of kind of classical you know the classical idea of revolution so there's this wave of interest at least among sort of like graduate students you know and sort of intellectuals and some artists there's this return to the idea of communism the idea of leninism you know there's a this big conference at bert Beck called the idea of communism as people like jizek and jodie's speaking at it and this is almost to me that's like it, but it's almost like it's just a sort of mirror image of the perceived failures

of the kind of spontaneism, the spontaneous nature of the movement of the squares. Yes. So because that... Once you make a conference on it, you know, it's like an independent inquiry. You're like, we're fucked. So that, so there's that. But of course, that doesn't really have any purchase. Like what that has, that doesn't have any real sort of connection with the sort of real world politics, you know, there's no, there's no mass working class or peasantry like waiting to be led by this new generation of self-styled Leninist leaders. And in the world of substantial politics, what happens instead is something quite different is, you know, there's a research, in the past six, seven years, you know, there's a resurgence of the idea

of democratic socialism that in effect, like whether people will admit this to themselves or not, I think. In effect, there's a kind of acknowledgement, well, the only form of revolution that hasn't been tested, the only idea of revolution that hasn't been tested to destruction on some level is something like the sort of, you know, the idea, the popular front government, you know, idea. And that's what's, to some extent, that's what's informing the Bernie Sanders movement and the Corby movement, although I would say, you know, in both cases and especially the case of the Corby movement, there were too many people around Corbinism whose only way of conceptualising what a revolutionary movement would look like

was basically Leninist, because they'd been trained in the weird Leninist and Trotsky's sects, which a lot of them still belong to. And I think that really, I think that massively limited Corbinism's capacity, because ultimately people couldn't really get their heads around, well, okay, we've captured this thing called the Labour Party, but like what is it? Or is it a revolutionary party? Like, can we turn it into the Communist Party in 1917? Like, what do we do with it? And I don't think, I don't think Corby never knew what to do with it. They couldn't figure out what to do with it. And they couldn't conceptualise it really as the kind of coalition of forces that it was. And they couldn't conceptualise the need to broaden out

the coalition, you know, beyond the Labour Party. They could only think of the party as the only possible vehicle for it. Well, one way into that is Rodrigo Nunes's recent book, neither vertical nor horizontal, which really, like, the vertical, we've talked about that strategy of revolution. Horizontal, we've talked about the mass strike sort of idea, that sort of anarchist idea of revolution. Now, he sort of says, look, there are two left melancholys. There's a 1917 left melancholy, and there's a 1968 left melancholy. You know, there's a melancholy around trying to recreate the 1917 model of revolution, even though the circumstances is completely different, and there's a sort of melancholic attempt to re-do the 1968 version of

revolution, and, you know, which leads to sort of the more horizontal time. He said, look, look, that's like a spiral. These two melancholies circle around each other and reinforce each other, basically. And, you know, so you get this oscillation that you were talking about earlier, gem, between the total of that 2011, which is, let's retry the more horizontalist conception of of revolution in the 1960s, although gone through a whole strange process in the meantime and sort of like, you know, what that was carrying was the idea that you couldn't actually change the world.

And the reaction to that would be to flip back to the Leninist idea of revolution. Well, that was getting us knower, we need to reject both, reject both of those melancholys around that and try to face up to the problem that we have now, you know, the circumstances that we have now. Well, I was going to say, I was thinking in terms of what Nardi, you know, says about sort of, you know, talking, you know, thinking about who the audience is

and it's true like this quite linear narrative that we've given especially the last bit is going to be really confusing because some people listening will have met people who are absolutely committed

Marxist's Leninists you know today like they haven't people haven't stopped being that they'll have met people some people will have met people whose politics are completely some form of anarchists

or syndicalism or something and they'll think that and the truth is like the actually ecology of the contemporary left, contemporary politics, is that people committed to like different versions of all these things. Every single thing we've talked about is coming from some particular moment. Actually, there are people around today who totally believe that thing. And we'll say that's what they mean by revolution. So it's not just a sort of linear process whereby like one

moment in history, everybody believes that and the next moment everybody believes this. So I mean, especially like in the American left, but this has really influenced, like, like the Corby Night Left in Britain. There's been this, we've got into this weird situation now where there's a sort of general consensus that what we're after is basically social democracy. It's a program like the Green New Deal that would have been definitely classified

as merely reformist by most people who regarded themselves as revolutionaries until very recently. But on the other hand, the kind of theoretical ways that people, especially people around things like Jacobin, the theoretical ways they have of conceptualising what they're doing and what political organisation and strategy looks like, they tend to be pretty much exclusively drawn from the revolutionary tradition. So they only really use like sort of Trotskyist and Leninist

conceptual apparatus to think about what they're doing, which has some really productive results. But it also produces some real sort of, you know, impasses, I think. So, you know, one of slogans like to sort of of the past few years which got came out of the American left and got taken up by Corbynites was the idea that well we're not reformists even though basically we're just asking for a restoration of post-war social democracy because what we want are non-reformist reforms like when we talked about this when we were planning and saying like it's a it's a great phrase on the one hand the idea of non-reformist reforms because it because it kind of suggests what we want it suggests that we want a set of reforms

that would significantly shift the balance of power in society and therefore have some sort of long-term revolutionary implications. But the trouble with using that terminology to say that is, well, look, when the word reformist was first coined, the people who were called reformists like Bernstein had every assumption that the reforms they were in favour of were exactly of that nature, that it was a way of sort of eventually achieving radical change.

So the whole concept of the discerpt of the decision, distinction between reform and revolution is based on the assumption that you know you can't have non-reformist reforms like you're either in favor of reform or you're in favor of revolution the people who like bernstein who were called reformists by their revenue street critics never accepted that anyway yeah but don't we don't we think that's because of some of the stuff that we talked about earlier as in like where the concept of revolution is kind of where it sits in the current discourse and whether people think it's discredited or not, because if you, if you're, if, if by saying what we want is

reforms is more of a mobilising tactic than saying what we want is revolution, then maybe it's the right tactic. Yeah. To have. When in fact, the outcome might be more revolution, might be revolutionary. But if you call it that, you know, you're not going to get people behind you. I mean, that that whole picture is complicated by the idea that, um, it's really not clear, especially after the defeat of Saunders and particularly the defeat of Corbyn or Corbinism, it's really not clear whether you can have reforms, even modest reforms, without a level of struggle, antagonistic struggle with the forces of capital, or at least some of the forces of capital, which you might associate more with revolutionary change.

And so this is the sort of idea that we've mentioned at the beginning, that perhaps it's only in times when you have growth that you can, have rising living standards and still have capitalist profitability, et cetera. So one of the ways you would do that is to think about, well, look, let's not associate revolution with a method of change, but like with the scale of change. An interesting person to go to on that sort of idea is Eric Olin Wright, who's written a whole series of books, but he wrote one, I can't remember, it's not called 20, capitalism in the 21st century, perhaps it's called that, perhaps that's your book.

It's how to be an anti-capital. His one is how to be an anti-capitalist in the 21st century. That's why I was getting confused. And basically, he's got various versions of this, but like he says, look, there are different socialist strategies, right? And basically, they're not necessarily in conflict and they should all play a role. And one of them, he talks about taming capitalism as reform is reforms, but reforms which aim to ameliorate the effects of capitalism rather than to change it, right? then he talks about like ruptural change in terms of that classical storm in the winter palace idea of a or even perhaps a mass strike version but like that ruptural change is a big rupture that goes on and then he talks about this other strategy of eroding capitalism and you erode it by changing the way people live within capitalism changing the structures of capitalism perhaps the thing would be associated with that would be like massively grow in the cooperative economy etc so that people have different experiences perhaps the ubi is often thought of in terms of that as well in terms of this problem of like there's a gap between what's necessary and what's possible at the moment, what's necessary in terms of dealing with climate change. And that has to be bridged.

You can only bridge that by this strategy of eroding capitalism. But the metaphor he uses to sort of structure this discussion or his thoughts is he has all these graphs. And one of them is this graph he calls the transition trough. And it's something like this, right? In order to, you know, you want to change the world in order to improve people's lives. But the sorts of disruption that comes with any serious attempt to change the world, either in a sort of classical ruptural strategy, or even in terms of a Corbyn government, in the current situation, that would provoke serious backlash

from the forces of capital, a capital strike, perhaps, capital refusing to invest, capital flight money coming out of the country. It would be a disruption which would basically make people's lives worse in the short term. So there's this trough that you have to get through where people are not going to go for the disruption of their lives in the short term in order to get to improve living standards later on.

And so a lot of the strategies such as eroding capitalism, perhaps tamism, they're all about shallowing out that trough, making it easier to cross that bridge, basically. It's a really interesting way of thinking of sidestepping the sort of reform revolution debate by saying we don't know how you change the world. You should try all of these things, but we do know there's this problem of disruption that's common. and to all of them. So in Rodrigo Nunes' book again, he's got a really nice gloss on this.

He sort of says, look, if we take Eric Olin-Royt's approach seriously, and Eric Olin-Rike talks about it as a plurality of strategies, everybody's trying all of these things. But one of the things you have to do in that is to try to manage the velocity of change, right? You want change, which is fast enough that things actually do change. Social relations do change. You have to achieve a sort of escape velocity from capital of social relations. But change can't be so fast. that social reproduction gets seriously disrupted and therefore, you know, people might choose fascism and reaction as a response.

I really like that managing velocities of change. I don't know how you do that, but I also like the idea of that like plurality of strategies because we don't know how the world changes. It's one answer to that problem we started with. You need change, which is on a scale of that's normally associated with revolution. Revolution doesn't seem possible. We're not really sure whether reform is possible.

without encountering a lot of the problems that traditionally associated with revolution. So you try all of these things and try to keep them in balance with each other by maintaining the right velocity. Who's the we that does that? I'm not sure. That's another problem. Well, I think we definitely need to play the Internationale.

I'm not sure which version of it, but, you know, I mean, if anything makes me feel like a lefty, it's how that the Internationale does move me. You know, it really does. And I like hearing it on with a lot of other people. And I have a dream of it being played in pubs, you know, in a future life. for this is the time and place The International Arles is the classic Albert

It was written and popularised as the anthem of the second international in the late 19th century, an early 20th century but then it was then retained by the Comintern, the Communist International as its sort of official anthem it was originally written in French and it is referring directly to the socialist

International. I mean, is referring to the organisation. My anarchist dad taught me to sing the words not to sing. The line, the international unites the human race should be replaced with the phrase the international working class unites the human race because the latter is communist. Should we have Billy Bra? I mean, the most obvious version for us to play would be Billy Bragg. Should we talk about Manu Chow or something? That's a good idea. Yeah, talk about Manu Chow, yeah. So the title track from Mani Chow's album, I mean, Mani Chow, this was a really,

interesting sort of phenomenon. I mean, Manichow is like a, is a sort of French, Spanish singer, and he was, and his music really became associated with the kind of international anti-capitalist movement in the late 90s and early 2000s. At least, at least, you know, it was music you would hear a lot, you know, within that scene. And I guess it was, you know, it did sort of, um, if it, its popularity did express the very strong, people had at that time for a kind of international movement and the sense that, you know, after the end of the Cold War and the imposition of the global neoliberal order by the World Trade Organisation, that we really, really needed forms of international solidarity

in order to confront capital. And this, you know, the popularity of this music really did kind of express that. And it has bits in it from subcommandante Marcos from the Zavistas, doesn't it? Yeah, I think it samples stuff. It samples here. I saw Mano Chow play live in Florence at the European Social Forum after there was this huge, huge march, the first anti-war march, which would have led to the February 14th March. That's when that was the first proposal, that European Social Forum. Wow. So I saw him at the end. He was at the end of that march. In fact, I saw him. I was with Marie Rosa della Costa, who's like his famous 70s Marxist feminists, who I danced to Mano.

chow with yeah that's my man o chow sorry yeah we i was on that demo i don't remember man o chow though i don't think i went i think we were doing yoga i think we were doing yoga i think we always left to do yoga the other last thing i want to talk about was once something we can like that out of all of this stuff that we can sort of hold on to right perhaps the one thing we can hold on to with some sort of certainty out of all of that revolutionary the discussions of revolution

and all these sorts of things is the problem of transition so that's like a classic problem revolutionary transition is this classic problem of like okay so Eric Olin writes transition trough obviously is one approach of that

another way people have thought about this and this goes back to Lenin actually while Lenin wasn't completely like just a rupturist where you have one a rupture and then everything's different the next day he says that that's the people position that the anarchists take, the spontaneous, spontonists take that, like, things can change

straight away in a rupture. And on the other side, you have the social democrats who say, you don't need any form of rupture. And his thing is, you do need rupture, but that doesn't change everything, because you have a rupture with us, people who have been, you know, had their whole experience to go back to Kossela, the whole experience leads them to think that the only certain things are possible. And even Lenin is saying this, we're going to get to a society in which workers rule themselves,

But they've, every of the experiences so far is training them to take orders, basically, to be managed rather than to self-manage themselves. You're trying to produce societies in which we ourselves, as we currently exist, wouldn't quite fit, basically. That's the problem of, like, revolutionary transition. Lenin sort of says there need to be a process of, like, training and education, etc. But that's going to be led by the Vanguard Party. The argument I want to make, though, is transition is the problem of today.

People talk about transition towns in terms of, like, you know, towns trying to adapt so that they can they can be ready for the sorts of changes that climate change is going to bring and ameliorating climate change is going to bring you know so that the problem of transition which previously would have been hidden away in this minority niche literature around revolutionary transition suddenly that those same problems are basically one of the key problems of politics today so that's one of the ways in which i think this literature can or this whole conception of revolution can be sort of change under present circumstances. That and the revolutionary subject, who is that person?

Who is the revolutionary subject? Yeah, well, I mean, that's the other thing that's fallen apart is that, like, the idea that you could, that there is a chosen subject, there's a chosen people, a chosen subject, chosen by history, and that their struggles are more important than the other struggles. That doesn't hold up anymore, but just because society is so complex. So the response to that is that, like, that has to be, the subject has to be formed.

It doesn't exist. You have to form it, basically. Yeah, and I think that subject has to be formed through a politics of solidarity, not a politics of identity. Yeah, I'd sign up to that one. Yeah, I agree, yeah. Well, I'm glad you solved the problem of revolution. Next week, people.

How'd you solve the problem of revolution? So that does go on to, like, the next question, in a way, on the list of these quick-fire questions, which is, I mean, what makes you, revolutionary or is it even useful to have a political identity like that? I mean, I think it's useful if at that particular juncture in history or that moment you think that that is an identity that will move people as we were just talking about the revolutionary subject.

Like will that, you know, if calling yourself is a reformist, if you've got a movement of people calling themselves reformists, which to me might sound like it's a bit wet, perhaps because of my political experience, but maybe for other people, that is what's going to move them. And in the same vein, you know, if that is an identity that's going to work into creating change, then positive change or, you know, progressive change, then I'm for it. But I do tend to think that revolution is something that you do rather than you are. So I don't think the other side of the coin is I think you're a revolutionary if you do certain things rather than you call yourself that. So I'm not sure which

side I'd fall upon in that argument. So how would that relate to somebody calling themselves, say, literally a communist? That isn't a communist also what you do rather than what you are? Yeah, I don't know. I think revolutionary has

I think revolutionary doesn't particularly peg you towards a specific tendency or a specific faction. I think it's wide I just suddenly got struck by a thought and I must express it now but let's think about when

Ash Sarka said that I'm literally a communist it was in response to Pierce Morgan sort of basically just interpreting her as a liberal and then trying to attach her to sort of liberal identity politics in some sort of

sense and so she responded by saying no I'm not I'm not a liberal I'm not even associates I'm literally a communist you know and so you can see in that sort of level, I can see the utility in that, right? Yes, yes, exactly. It's a relational term, isn't it? That's good, yeah, no.

That's why I've always, I've always, I've had this little bomb I've used for years, which is to social Democrats, I'm a communist, like to communists, to communists, I'm an anarchist, and to anarchists, I'm a social Democrat. Whatever you say I am, I'm not. I can't remember what that's from. That's from a... It's, well, the Arctic Monkeys first down, but it's from Alan Sillito,

Saturday night and Sunday morning. Whatever they say I am, that's what I'm not. Because I'm from Nottingham, and I'm a grumpy bastard. Yeah. The question, are you a revolutionary?

Just, like, you know... It's done. I can give you an answer to that, but it'll similarly be three hours long because I'd have to go through the whole history. of what it means, revolution would mean. The thing is, I sort of feel like on the one hand, I mean, we all know.

I generally am against sort of identity politics and bothered political positions as identities because you just get frozen in them. And I think I completely agree with Nadia. And that's why I tend to be quite dismissive of people calling themselves communists and calling themselves revolutionaries when we are clearly not in a pre-revolutionary situation.

We're not in a historical moment when the difference between like social democratic aspirations and revolutionary communist aspirations matters to anything. So it seems sort of banal. But I also feel like I completely understand, you know, when people want to use those terms about themselves. Because I feel like, well, there is a difference, to be honest, I do feel just in my everyday life all the time, I'm very conscious of the different, just in every interaction I have, to be honest, with other people, like other adults. I'm conscious of the difference between people with whom I share, like a fundamental critique of contemporary society, that I basically think it's all fucking bullshit. And it should all change.

And people who, even though, indeed, we probably would like share a lot of, you know, short to medium term political aspirations and ideas, just don't share that outlook, really. You know, they're people, they're the people who they want to have a functioning public sector. They don't like the Tories, you know, they would never vote for their Tory. You know, they'd probably always vote Labor. They'd even, they even, a lot of them would have, like, voted for Corbyn as Labor leader or something, you know, because they, because he seemed like a really nice guy. But it's more, you know, it's a difference often, I think it kind of registered itself kind of effectively and in sort of cultural attitudes, like as much as anything else.

And I just think there is something. There is something there. I mean, there is something. So I do sort of, I understand why, you know, for some people, it's sort of important to think of themselves as a revolutionary, as distinct from people who are. Because there is something about the scale of one's critique. You know, there's just about the, because, I mean, we said. right at the beginning, the part of the issue is about to go in. It's an important

shorthand in conversation and interaction. Yeah, but there's a problem with that, is that we've gone through about five different conceptions of what revolution might mean. And when you use that as a short hand, it could mean any of those or those people. But then the next question then would be, what, are we in a situation? Okay, this is, in some senses, this is our core question. And this is the question animating the whole epic show is, are we in a situation where even minimal social democratic reforms are now effectively revolutionary demands? I mean, meaning it's just, you know, things that a lot of people,

like in Britain, a lot of people still think it's basically a reasonable, moderate demands to have a fully funded National Health Service that isn't in the process of being privatised. And then a lot of us would say, yeah, that's a good demand that we share, but unless you're willing to engage in confrontations with direct confrontations with capital, you know, that may well, you know, up to you and including, you know, violent conflict, there's no way that demand is being met. And is that, well, I think, I mean, we framed

it as a question, but I think we know what we think the answer is, don't we? Well, I mean, we don't know, but like, my analysis leads me to believe that we're not in a situation, We're in a situation in which any struggle about increasing the resources of the working class, though in the most broadly drawn sense, basically means an antagonistic struggle with those who have the resources because we're not living in a society in which the pie is growing. And I'm not really sure that we're going to get to a situation in which the pie will be growing anytime soon. So that means it's directly antagonistic. Yeah, and recent history with Corbinism seems to, you know, it sort of puts the fear of God into me, actually, that a lot of the things, a lot of the norms that I thought would be the basis upon which politics could be conducted as long as you kept your demands within sort of quite modest terms, they sort of got torn up quite quickly.

I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but it's always a surprise when your analysis is confirmed. Oh, that's far out. That's pretty far out. Thank you. Thank you.