How We Got Here | Yanis Varoufakis, Brian Eno, Laura Pidcock & Erik Edman
Intro and Francisca Martinez monologue
11:00
I'm going to start with you, Brian, because you were referenced by Janice in his opening.
11:07
Actually, I didn't. No, you told me you would. I was going to. That's how much attention I've been paying.
11:12
I was going to say, and I missed this bit of my design talk, that Brian was at
11:20
the Fox Bun Theater 10 years ago, and he wrapped up the proceedings. It was a 4-hour event and he came out and he gave
11:28
a a glorious speech that ended in a majestic line which was that was his final line and this is how the whole
11:35
event wrapped up. Um and he said start cooking a recipe will follow
11:46
and here we are 10 years later. Personally, I feel like we need to order takeaway,
11:52
but maybe you've got a different opinion. Maybe we have been coming up with a recipe along the way. How do you feel 10 years later?
11:58
Yeah, I feel that. Yeah, I um I didn't say it anywhere near as dramatically as
12:04
Janice did. I I wish I'd had you to speak for me on that occasion, but but I think we have been doing that. I think
12:11
we've learned a few things. One of them is that we're actually dealing with fascism.
12:16
uh we've sort of got over that thing of oh it's just far-right politics as though it's part of the same game we've
12:22
all been playing and we should be tolerant of it and you know join in. It
12:29
isn't this we're dealing with fascism now and fascism intends to end the game.
12:35
It intends to smash the game of democracy. Um so that's qualitatively
12:41
different I think. So I think a lot of people have realized that um this is not
12:46
politics as usual. And the second thing I think people have realized is that we
12:52
aren't going to win on our own. We have to organize. We have to form
12:57
communities.
Brian Eno:
13.00 "And the thing I've noticed most over the last 10 years is that community is the big word. "
Brian Eno:
13.06 And I always say to people when they say, "Well, I never know what to do to help. You know, I haven't got much money. I haven't got much time. What to do to help? And I just think find somebody who's doing something that you admire and help them. You know, whatever it is, in whichever way they can be helped, try to do something. Don't sit there worrying. Actually get into something. And that makes a huge difference psychologically. As soon as you're part of the action, that really makes you feel better.
This ties in quite well, I think, with
13:43
what you've been doing, Laura, because up until I think was it 2017, you were a Labor MP, right? And then you chose not
13:52
to pursue that anymore. You haven't run again for election since then, right? And I was watching this incredible
13:58
interview that you gave recently in Local Heroes, um, where you kind of spoke about kind of the disillusionment
14:03
that came with that parliamentarian experience. Let's say you've gone to grassroots organizing, local organizing.
14:11
Do you agree with what Brian's saying about that's really where the hope is? That's really where the action is.
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.
1715 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 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.
21:02
Thank you for that. By the way, I should point out that in the country we're
21:07
from, um, it's actually considered rude not to interrupt the people that you're speaking with. Um, so if I do cut in,
21:14
you don't care. It means you're not listening. So, you know, keep you mean it's rude not to interrupt
21:20
grease, you know, that little rocky place. You're getting into practice. So, if I ever jump in, you're not
21:25
allowed to get mad at me. All right. 21.30 Yanis, you're somebody who's also had the misfortune to be elected in the last 10 years on a couple of occasions. You've had your dablings with power here and there. How does what Laura has been saying measure up to your own experience?
: My own experience is perfectly in sync with what Laura said, especially the question, you know, when did we last feel powerful? Because, you know, I grew up in a fascist dictatorship. Um you know, we had didn't
21:55
have the right to vote. There was no constitution. All the supposed uh
22:00
institutions of democracy had been suspended. We were put in put in a cast essentially. Um and yet people had more
22:08
hope then than they have now because we you know we could see the problem. you switch on the television, it would be a
22:14
news announcer who wore a military uniform and you say, "Okay, all right. If we get rid of the army and if we have
22:19
democracy, everything is going to be better." Whereas now, um, in the west, it's exactly the opposite feeling as of,
22:26
you know, as as of know your question, you know, to me that I've been in power.
Yanis Varoufakis:
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 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.
I'd
23:32
like to ask Brian a question. May May I just a brief one that is you know because you have been
23:38
involved in community building through hard art and various projects. Now how does that
23:44
merge with the the crucial aspect of change which is
23:51
you know to gain nothing and bring it together with community power in order to defeat the very very
23:57
few the tiny minority who control everything. Have you ever heard that thing Douglas Rushkov said, find the others? That's
24:05
sort of my idea that I thought years and years ago I was involved with various activist groups.
24:11
Yeah. And I was seeing these people over here who were doing really interesting things and these over here who were doing
24:16
almost exactly the same thing and didn't know about them. So I thought the first thing we should do is know about each
24:23
other. You know, the the first a movement really takes shape when it starts to notice itself. This this all
24:31
stems from something that happened to me in 1965. I think on June the 25th, 1965.
24:38
Very specific. I was an art student and my girlfriend and I had heard that there was something
24:44
happening about beat poetry at the Royal Albert Hall. Now poetry then was was
24:50
very much a political identity thing. You know people who were into poetry sort of agreed with each
24:57
other. Um so we thought Albert Hall god that's a big place we should go up. So
25:03
we hitchhiked up to London to the Albert Hall and it was absolutely jam-packed with
25:11
people who looked a bit like us. Sort of long hair and bit scruffy and sleeping
25:16
bags and things like that. There were 7,000 people there and about another 2,000 outside who couldn't get in. And
25:23
suddenly I realized, my god, this is a movement. And that movement from that
25:29
day on was called the underground. Not to be confused with the transport system. But but suddenly suddenly there
25:38
was a thing called the underground. It was a sort of awareness of of the sheer scale of it. And I think that's what
25:45
happened a couple of weeks ago in in Gorton and Denton where suddenly a group
25:52
of people who had thought that they were the minority suddenly realized that they actually
25:58
could be the majority. So all of these people who kind of felt like they wanted to vote for the Greens but thought I
26:05
don't know is it a wasted vote? main thing is to stop reform, you know, and
26:10
when they heard because of that opinion poll that there were actually a lot of
26:16
other people who were who would like to vote green as well, suddenly things change.
Brian Eno:
26.22 Perception is very very important in movement building. A movement isn't really effective until it's aware of itself and then it's suddenly very effective. I've always been thinking that I wanted to make coalescence happen, I want to bring people together and my studio is where this happens, I don't have any room to work in there anymore. I work in two little side rooms and the main space is where people meet now.
But can I say something? Because
26:53
community building, solidarity, all of these things feel a bit
27:01
out of fashion in the 21st century. It feels like we live through these times
27:06
of hyperindividualization, right? It feels like the left and the things that the left stands for and the
27:12
things that the left kind of depends on in order to be successful are things
27:17
that go against the trend of the times. This kind of like retreat to smaller and
27:23
smaller sort of units of individual of individuals. Do you think that's the case? is the
27:29
left outdated? Are we like a fossil or is there still space? This is for anyone
27:34
who'd like to pick it up. Well, I I think I think
Laura Pidcock:
This has hit on a really important point because in and of itself, food banks, mutual aid, resistance to evictions, whilst they are all very very worthy, in and of themselves aren't going to challenge on mass the British establishment. The last time the British establishment were worried was when we thought Jeremy Corbyn could form a government. Then of course the whole operation of the state swung in to defeat that that project. We have to think about building back power in ways which are about confidence, which are about political education, which are about establishing spaces for ourselves.
28:29 This is so important now, especially in relation to what you both said about legacies of fascism, and really what is the existing fascism as a threat. We have to be able to be in dialogue with one another. We have to be able to argue with one another and we have to be able to formulate politics.
28.48 What I mean by that is moving beyond this reductive sloganeering. This is not to blame anyone or anything like that. A culture has evolved where the right have been formulating arguments and telling stories about what the system does to you. Obviously it's reactionary and it's shameful because it blames and scapegoats people who are nothing to do with the causes of people's discontent.
29.14 The people that protest out the outside the asylum hotels in Newcastle. Not one of those people inside that asylum accommodation has put the 600,000 people in poverty in the northeast. Not one of the people inside that accommodation causes young people in our region to not be able to eat, mothers going out without food because of asylum seekers. It's a nonsense. But they've been allowed space and they've allowed themselves the opportunity to formulate political arguments that are resonating. I don't think we can match that by saying save the NHS.
30:03 Of course, we all want to save the NHS in here, we want it free from private interests. We want to make sure that it is a an accessible system. Same with education, we want the education system to be free from private interests. But do we take the time to explain it? Do we sit down and say, do you know what? Even if you really disagree with me, let us have this argument and let us formulate a narrative and tell a story about what the capitalists, particularly the neoliberal capitalists, have done to our homes and our communities and our sense of self.
30.37 We're going to need all of it. We're going to need to help each other because people are poor, people are cold in their homes, uniforms are extortionate, people don't have all the really simple things. Tap water, you're paying 58 quid for your water- water a natural resource which is privatised. There is so much wrong and it's going to take a jigsaw of things.
31.01 On the left we have to realise and I don't say this lightly that our politics is not popular right now. It's not popular because I think people sense like we're telling people off, we're kind of moralistic, that we want to shame people - other people are stupid, and get back to having dialogue with our neighbors about what these neoliberal capitalists have done to our communities.
31:31
So can I please Yes. shortly and then I'll um Janice probably some of you know the writer
31:37
Edget Telkaran I know Janice does um she wrote a book about 10 years ago uh
31:45
called how to lose a country which is about the really the history of fascism
31:51
in Greece in in in in it's in Turkey in modern Turkey often confused
31:56
separate confused um and one of the things she says which I I
32:03
really really like. She says hope is for lightweights because people keep talking about you know we we're doing things to
32:10
give people hope. She says hope is for lightweights. What you need is faith. And her concept is that imagining a
32:18
future and then acting as though it's going to happen is the way to create that future.
32:23
And I really think that's quite um precise that analysis because hope is
32:29
speculative. It's sort of thinking that it might not happen, hoping that it will
32:34
happen. Um, faith doesn't have to be religious faith, but
32:39
just a real belief in a future that you can imagine that changes the way you
32:45
behave. Hope doesn't really change your behavior that much, whereas faith does.
32:50
So, so, sorry. So I I want to say the kind of vision you've got there, we've
32:56
somehow got to try to get that to people to make it as real in their minds as it
33:01
can be in ours and to say, "Would you like that kind of future?" You know, we
33:07
we have to we we know that
Brian Eno:
33.13 The right will bury all of their differences because they're interested in power and they'll work with people they hate. The left will not do that. The left will constantly split and fisher and splinter because of slight tiny little differences. We've got to stop doing that. We really haven't got time for that.
33:37
Laura, I think you wanted to jump in. Well, yeah. I was going to say that Jordies are quite good at interrupting as well. We do quite like that. In fact,
33:44
we're just we should just speak over each other and be like, but I was going to say that hope also I think must be
33:51
earned. I don't and I I've done this I've been part of a political project. Mind you,
33:58
we thought we were on the precipice of government as well. So, I felt like it was quite a hopeful time and with all of
34:04
the all of the um limitations of what could have been done. But I think what I mean by
Laura Pidcock:
34.09 Hope needs to be earned. Quite often people are so desperate for hope, myself included, we look for what can we do now? What's going to save? Who's going to save? Where we're going to put our trust in, and it becomes this reductive slogan and saviorist kind of politics. I think that that leads to false hope, I think that leads to this sense of betrayal when our leaders aren't necessarily perfect people or the projects fail. What I mean by hope needs to be earned is that we need to have a plan which is about collective power and I'll repeat it again not that deferential power that we will hand over to someone who will be good for us. We will build it ourselves.
35:09
One thing that Sorry. No, please. Um
Brian Eno:
35:16 I started a little charity recently. It's a little foundation and I give money to things that I think are good. And usually it's to individuals who are doing something and who would otherwise have to take a job and couldn't do that thing any longer. One of the things I've discovered since starting that is that there are so many community groups all over this country that you never hear anything about who are building things, really good things. One example, there's a place called Coleville. Very unpromising name, but some people there took over a few abandoned buildings and started building a community center for kids, places where people could meet up and do things. They did it on really no money at all. But this place has completely revitalized this small town, it has become a different town. I've seen it in Yarmouth where we've helped some people in lots and lots of places. So, it's all going on and it's all there but nobody gets to hear about it. Again this is a perception thing. If we started hearing these stories, I'm sure there would be many many other instances. And it gives encouragement when you hear that other people can do this. "Oh, maybe we could do that as well."
36:46
I could talk about this all night, but unfortunately
there are time limitations. Janice, I wanted to maybe
36:53
guide things back in a different direction a little bit with you. One
36:59
Sorry, that was me. That was you, Brian. Um, one of the things you did mention,
37:06
this I did hear you say in your introduction was that story from the launch of DM in
37:13
Berlin, the guy with the picking up picking up the pieces, Mr. Hines.
37:19
Do you think the pessimistic faithful, the guy without the Well,
37:24
there's Do you think he was right at the time? Were we like doomed? Was it
37:31
predestined for for 2026 to happen? Or were there
37:37
missed opportunities in the last 10 years? Were there chances we had to change things in a
37:44
different direction? With the benefit of hindsight
37:49
now, I can see that he was absolutely utterly right. what we had embarked upon 10 years
37:55
just wasted 10 years was always going to crash onto the shoulds of exorbitant power
38:02
uh and not only exorbitant power in the form of you know oligarchs and capitalists and governments and you know
38:07
intelligence services but also the center left that was always going to try to absorb
38:16
our energy and crush us if we ever ever
38:21
jeopardize the great privileges the exorbitant power of the very power
38:27
that's how the central left works whether it is the social democratic party in Germany or the labor party here
38:34
you can see in the end it reverts to the mean which is you know um if if we are
38:39
going to put it in the context of the 18th century 17th century there were always people who were critical of the savagery with which the masters treated
38:46
the servants but they were not against slavery that's the social democrats for you you know that's the labor party under
38:52
he wants, you know, his cake and he wants to eat it and the end he's going to be a ludicrous figure in British
38:59
history, political history. So in that sense, we were doomed. Uh
39:06
but I do believe that history's will turns in the right direction not only by
39:12
our victories but also by our righteous defeats. I think defeats are crucial
39:20
because every time you build a movement like ours, you know, you train people to
39:25
think that the impossible is possible. And you know, at some point it's going
39:30
to become possible. Yeah. I mean, how long did workers need to
39:35
struggle for the first states union to win the first strike? I mean, weren't
39:40
they doomed? The first strikes? Yes, they were doomed. Wasn't the attempt to
39:47
end slavery doomed? I mean, think of Spartacus. It was a, you know, 2,000 years ago. It was doomed. But
39:54
Spartacus's defeat, I mean, was much better than Spartacus being a good slave
39:59
to a monster. So, you know, we are refusing to um jeopardize our soul and
40:06
we continue to exist through resist resisting
40:16
Please the
The other thing I think is important is your effort even if it fails plants a seed in other people who haven't tried anything yet. In the late 80s when I first started playing around with computers and the internet started appearing, there was such a mood
40:36
of kind of irrational uh idealism about that. And a lot of people, me for a
40:45
while among them, was saying, "Oh, we don't need politics anymore. We don't do politics." Politics was sort
40:52
of uncool because technology was going to make it all irrelevant. technology would what we needed was management not
40:59
politics. So it was an idea that ideology would evaporate. Um and of course that meant that a lot
41:05
of the most interesting minds weren't in politics. It left a huge
41:11
vacuum which was filled by very much less interesting minds and I think
41:18
became the seedbed for the fascism that we see now. Um there was a vacuum
41:25
you know I used to say less a fair is fine but while you're lessing somebody
41:30
else is fairing fairing. Just a quick point on this if I may
41:36
Laura uh when you started and I started playing around with the internet we did
41:41
so even before it was called the internet in my case it was called Janet joint academic network in universities.
41:48
Uh you see the reason why there was so much hope about the original internet was because it wasn't capitalist.
41:55
Yeah. It was a genuine digital commons. It didn't belong to anyone. There were no companies. Nobody bought or sold
42:00
anything on it. It was a genuine social gift exchange. You know, we would
42:06
produce stuff. We would give it away on the internet to everyone. Everybody would reciprocate. So it was an
42:12
experiment in socialism until it was privatized. Yeah. So you see the left was always
42:19
right. It doesn't matter what who thinks what. What matters is who owns what.
42:24
Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Always right and always losing though.
42:30
So because you know 0.001% own the most powerful bits of machinery
42:37
in the world and we need to take it away from them and we need to socialize.
42:47
Unfortunately, I need to start wrapping this panel up. We promised these good people some lessons.
42:56
Having spoken about the past 10 years, our experiences, what they taught us,
43:02
and looking forward at the next 10 years, the lie ahead, what do you think,
43:08
this is for all of you, is the one mistake we cannot afford to make this time around, or the one thing we
43:16
absolutely need to get right? Who'd like to go first? Well, um, I had a very obvious
43:24
realization the other day. I'm sure everybody in this room has already had this realization, but I was thinking
43:31
about this new war in Iran. And I thought that war is being fought about
43:38
fossil fuels. Nearly all these wars have been fought about fossil fuels. And I
43:44
suddenly thought, so stopping war is actually contingent upon us stopping our
43:51
dependency on fossil fuels.
43:58
So, but the takehome from this was, you know, I
Brian Eno:
44.02 I'm president of this thing called Stop the War Coalition and I have a little charity of my own called Earth Percent. I just thought, well, these are both the same ******* thing. Why don't we all realise that? Why don't these two huge movements? Because they're both very big movements, the environmental movement and the movement for ending wars and pacifism, they're huge numbers of people. Why don't we realize that we're doing the same thing? That would be very powerful.
44:41
Um I think the the main lesson that I
44:46
have taken forward and and learned from the last 10 years is that class struggle
44:53
is absolutely pivotal to every single thing that we do from now on.
44:59
that we are not in some kind of I know I know people would love to think we are
45:04
and not us but we're not in some kind of post class world. Some of my heroes are the people who
45:12
engaged in the 8485 strike um and withdrew their labor and were absolutely
45:19
um crucified by Margaret Thatcher and the police and the state and those women
45:25
who also fed the communities throughout the strike. their aims were met. They made sure that those communities did not
45:32
starve and they are absolutely heroic women. Now,
45:43
now the attack on workingclass communities is as intense now as it was
45:50
then. Yeah. The way in which our class is being crucified by successive
45:57
governments, by neoliberal capitalism, punished, incarcerated,
46:03
exploited. The violence that is endemic at the heart of this system, that we do
46:09
not put workingclass emancipation at the core of every single element of our
46:15
political activity. And not just that, that workingclass people should be the drivers of that political project would
46:22
be and repeat every single mistake that has happened on the British left since
46:28
this last 40 years of decline. And I'll just finish by saying this is that I don't want to be an activist. I've made
46:35
a lifelong commitment to being an activist, right? I don't want to call myself that. I mean, nobody here does.
46:41
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.
47:39
Well, I'll just add a few words on what Laura has already said, and I'm going to be very brutally honest with you and
47:46
extremely rude about the Labor Party. The Labor Party is the only political
47:52
party in Britain today that does not believe in class struggle. The Tories and reform are all about class struggle.
47:59
They are fighting for the opposite class. So the Labor Party needs to be
48:04
ditched once and for all. I'm not going to say what you should be voting for or who you should joining, but you know
48:11
later on we have both Zach Pollinsky and Jeremy Corbyn here. Uh and this is the mass movement that we need.
48:23
It's exactly what I was just It's the two poles that I was talking about just now. You're right.
48:29
Yeah, we'll bring them together on this stage. That's what we're doing.
48:35
That's what we're doing. But don't tell anyone. Thank you for that segue, Yanni. It's very smooth to the second part of this
48:42
event, which will happen right after a 15minute intermission. So, you'll get to stretch your legs, grab a couple of
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drinks, but it's going to be strictly 15 minutes. If you still feel like there's any point to elections, stick around,
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and even if you have been disillusioned by this panel, give Jeremy and Zach the
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chance to uh persuade you. See you again in 15 minutes. Thank you. Janice Varuis,
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Brian Nino, Laura Pitco,
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