Diem 25 held a conference called "Resistence is Existence" on March 28 2026. This talk is taken from a transcript of the first panel called "How did we get here?" with Yanis Varoufakis, Laura Pidcock and Brian Eno with Erik Edman facilitating. During this talk Laura gave this powerful talk about empowering the community:-
Laura Pidcock:
"14:19 Well, first of all, I'm not disillusioned. I think that there is this idea that if you are not just looking for a parliamentary seat, trying to organize in parliamentary elections that somehow you've given up. It was in 2019 that I was defeated - it was 2017 when I became a member of parliament, and I started looking at the recipe for the defeat. I started looking at a community that was battered by Thatcher during the miners' strike, how could they turn to the conservatives?
What was it? It's not about any of those people being bad people, there were serious lessons to be learned from that defeat. It was about broadening the conception of democracy. We are so stunted in our imagination in relation to representative democracy. As if it's just we get a good set of MPs, send them to parliament and that is the job done. I'll give you an example of why I think that's flawed. I was the shadow secretary of state for employment rights. If I had become the secretary of state for employment rights under Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn and if I had implemented even a tenth of what we wanted to implement .... One thing was sectorwide sectoral collective bargaining, and we went first to the care sector. In fact that was where we were going to start because it's mainly low paid women being absolutely exploited for their labour; what a good place to start. Day one you sign in some kind of order and say right now there's going to be national selective sectoral collective bargain for that sector. How would capital have responded?
16.14 If we went for water, for chemicals industries, for the building sector, if we started to organise and mandate that pay was collectively bargained. Were we in a position during the Corbyn era to defend that mandate and defend that political program on the streets, in our communities, in the pubs, in the churches, in the mosque? Were we building a popular case inside our communities? No, we were defeated. There's a big rich story to tell about how the establishment defeated us, about how I was defeated in northwest Durham.
16.57 We have to widen our conception of democracy. We can't just have this idea that for working-class people we defer our power to a set of very good people trying to do noble things. Building power for ourselves in lots of different ways is important.
17.15 The second really quick example of why I think it's flawed is because look what capital did to Liz Truss - one of their own. The markets who are entirely unelected got rid of that prime minister in 45 days. They did what our social movements have been trying to do for the last 15 years with 14 million people that they've kept in poverty.
It is not that I'm disillusioned. It's just that I want to widen our concept of what democracy is and what power is for working-class people.
Erik Edmen:
So where does parliamentary politics come into all of this? If the bedrock of democracy is on the ground, how does that translate to power in the halls of power so-called? Because many people will say that local organizing can also be quite tribal, it can be quite insular, you just let the rest of the world burn and you just take care of the things in your neighborhood. How would you react to that?
Laura Pidcock:
18.31 I know what you mean. I would like to forget that parliament exists but it does exist, and there are important things to be done in relation to parliament; but it is only one sphere of our political influence.
This isn't a northern thing. Margaret Thatcher was a proponent of neoliberalism that smashed our communities. They smashed our sense of community. They sold off everything that we produced. We don't own things. I feel and I'm sure people in the audience will feel this as well, a sense of bitterness set in. To build ourselves the kind of power to get out of that situation isn't just to go:- here is a group of really brilliant people, we'll defer our sense of hope to them, and that's how we'll regain power. We have to look for every single opportunity where democracy could and did exist. If we think about inside workplaces and the levels of collective coverage of trade unionism, if we think about some of the mining lodges, they got things done in the communities. They were democratic spaces where those people debated, thrashed things out, argued with each other, and I'm told came to fisticuffs sometimes, especially during the dispute with the politics being so intense. This isn't about saying let's forget parliament, let's just think local; this is about saying, let us expand our imagination for everywhere we can build power for ourselves. I don't know when we last felt powerful. The housing, the schools that we're in, the water that we drink, all of the all of the things that are dear to us, they're owned by somebody else. We can't control them. We can't intervene. Okay? We have to intervene and we have to start to be able to take back control through our sense of self, community, and power. And if parliamentary politics becomes a focus, that is because it is rooted in a ground swell of working-class radicalism.
Yanis Varoufakis:
21.30 My own experience is perfectly in sync with what Laura said, especially the question, when did we last feel powerful?
22:32 I was never in power, I was in office; don't confuse office with power. If you're a right-winger and you move into an office, then you have power because you have capital behind you. I moved into the Ministry of Finance in Greece and I had 14,000 employees. They were all against me except the two or threepeople I brought in with me. They were not against me as employees, they were against me because they belonged to a system that was predicated upon, plundering the many on behalf of the few. I was there on behalf of the many and I was completely imprisoned in my ministerial office. That's why I felt so relieved when I resigned.
But where does that leave us because that means that the left is always doomed to come up against a brick wall? Where it leaves us is that it's important to win office but that's not enough. You need that which Laura was saying - empowerment from below, and what Brian was saying community building.
HARMONY - Avoiding Division
As part of the tathata on activism zandtao quoted Laura Pidcock but he noted it was not in context; here is the quote in context:-
Laura Pidcock:
46.41 I'm sick of going into spaces and places where me neighbors aren't there or my family isn't there and it's all these activists all these special people doing things. Actually, this has to be a mass movement that is about involving absolutely everybody with all of the brilliant skills and talents our class has. Whilst we have potentially been doomed to defeat, all of the lessons of those defeats are gifts and we've got them. We've got the gifts at our disposal, the wisdom of what those defeats have taught us. ...
And for me, it's that working-class emancipation with working-class people driving the next political project is key.
Up to the ellipsis (...) zandtao quoted in the tathata on activism because it was strong and well put. He did not include the part about being led by the working-class. In a previous advice zandtao asked us not to see class yet Laura wants the "working-class people to drive the next political project". The people driving our next political project need to be those people with "brilliant skills and talents" working with compassionate liberation for Gaia and humanity. For his short time as an activist bill felt he had a sound understanding of working-class perspective, and had no doubts in his mind of his working-class credentials - he was a teacher and NUT activist working within the local trade union movement. He often recalls people saying he was not "proper working-class", he even used to describe them as "cloth-cap socialists". This was an unnecessary division. And it is division - being divided by the system-of-accumulation - that is at the root of the failing left at the moment.
At the time bill's analysis was dual - proletariat/bourgeoisie, 99%/1% - and he saw as divisive class divisions such as middle-class. However some of his teacher colleagues could not bridge the perspective that they were working-class; for them the Marxist terminology was divisive. But for a Marxist approach to work the "middle-class" and the "working-class" had to be united; whatever ego divided was not constructive.
But HARMONY needs to be far broader than this. How many people do not see or choose not to see the system-of-accumulation yet they want to work for compassionate liberation? Whilst in the end such compassionate liberation, the end of suffering for all, cannot exist within a system-of-accumulation, such people working for compassionate liberation can benefit others. In the short term a political perspective is not necessary to be compassionate and help liberate.
And that then leaves the oligarchy itself. How many people ally themselves with the oligarchy when that oligarchy would just drop them? How many richer people choose to ally themselves with the oligarchy whilst not having power and influence? A class analysis usually has attached to it some kind of redistribution of wealth. Redistributing the wealth of oligarchs who exploit - such as techbros - benefits all, but redistributing the wealth of these allies would have little impact as their limited wealth matters only to them. Because their numbers reinforce the oligarchy they are important to the system-of-accumulation, but wealth-wise they are not.
Many of these allies are not bad people, and often they have been convinced of the harm that revolutionaries cause. But these allies could work towards compassionate liberation as we all can. Other oligarchy allies are the Deep State; here is Yanis Varoufakis giving a very detailed analysis of what the Deep State is, but there is no need here to have that depth. Again these are not bad people but out of survival maybe they have allied themselves with the system-of-accumulation. Maybe they could come along with the harmony of compassionate liberation, something not possible with a class struggle.
We need to divide allies from the oligarchy, and zandtao does not think that will happen with class struggle. Perhaps it can with harmony - and maybe some of the oligarchs will regain their own compassion and liberation if there is an agenda of harmony - pipedream?
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