30: French Student Protests, Mélenchon Ballon D'or

Riot tourism, you know, I wasn't doing a Riot tourism, I was genuinely in holiday. All right, welcome to Life of the Party, a deep dive into everything to do with new left parties, the green party, or whatever party we end up being a part of. I'm your host, Shanice McBean and I'm joined by my friends and comrades Jonas. What's up? And Joe. Hello. So first off, a big shout out to our supporters who give £10 a month. We've got Said, Andrew, Skeleton Wizard, Lear, Meal and Fraser. Your support helps keep this podcast going, helps keep it elite and top tier and gets us up in the morning when we can't be asked. So thank you so much for your support. So Jonas, you're going to kick us off with the news today. You were in France recently amidst the protests of young people kicking off against the system. So tell us all about that and tell us what it has to do with left-wing politics today. Yeah, cheers Shanice. Yeah, I wasn't in France for the October the 17th mobilizations that happened last weekend, much to my resentment, but I was genuinely on holiday in France for a holiday. Not like Pramifius, I've got an article called Riot Tourism. I wasn't doing a Riot Tourism, I was genuinely on holiday. Half the London left to do in Riot Tourism at the moment. Everybody's booking their coach tickets to Paris. I'm rolling my eyes right now because I'm like, I'm doing it. Yeah. But I was in a place called the 13th Haranthesment, which is kind of like a most like a larger Vietnamese neighborhood from where I know kind of home of municipal communism and great architecture and stuff. And I was leaving that place head lunch. I was going to get a train over to 59 Rivoli Street, which is an archery near the side, the Big River in Paris. And I get about two stops away from that. A place called Sully Moulin and all of a sudden I see a sea of young people, kids, people from the age of 14 to 18 in cofias and home made placards marching up the train platform. And I'm like, this is going to be, this is going to be interesting. So I was just like, I fuck off the art gallery and I'm like, I'm going to follow these kids and see what they're up to. And so they're marching out of the train, Sully Moulin and the stock marches onto the streets. And before I know it, bear in mind like, I've never been to Paris before. So I don't really know where I am properly. But I'm like, this is the protest I'm going to see what's happening. And I realized we're marching on the Bastille. Before I know it, I mean like a demo with like tens of thousands of kids. And it's just, it was just incredible. Like it was just like lots of anti-fascist chants, like completely packed out the square. This is before October the 17th. This was quite a spontaneous call as well. This wasn't a kind of a date that was called in a built for. This was a very Paris-called demonstration. And it's really interesting, very pro-melanchial, very pro-Palestine, very internationalist orientation. There, you know, a lot of them for Emmanuel Macron in this protest. And it was like, I was looking into the demonstrations at the origin story and they began in France's colonial territories, specifically a place called Mayotte. And they kind of spread through the utilities and into the imperial core through kind of Parisian suburbs, basically, places like Saturday. So you can see the way in which demonstrations that take place in France's colonial territories travel through these chains of migration into demonstrations that take place in the Parisian suburbs. And the crowd itself, when I was there, and you can, you must you can see this from the pictures and videos online from the October 17th demonstrations, was really multi-cultural. You know, you've got white kids side by side with kids from the landlords, you know, who just routes trace back right through to the grid, western and central Africa, Lincoln Arts were teachers, trade unionists, and making clear their opposition to Macron. And to be honest with you, like, this felt much more like a carnival of the one that I went to about a week and a half ago now than it did a protest. Like, it really felt like kids who have been fucked over by a decade of vilification by the press, kind of de-socialization by social media platforms, increasing impoverishment, and with the specific experience of kids from the landlords, kind of the racialized repression of the French police, it really felt like a lot of energy being unleashed on the street, sometimes in quite a carnivalesque way, like it was really interesting. Ollie Haynes, who's read a few things about the, and who we've had on the podcast on after hours previously, who's read a few things in different outlets about the demonstrations, talked about meeting a student at the Sorbonne, you know, there's different sections of youth here who had come to support the high schoolers first and foremost, and to learn to demand more money in public schools from primary schools to universities. And another fact that motivated this person to come out was the repression faced by high schoolers who were under 18, such as an incident in lawns where a police grenade blew a 15-year-old's hand to bits. Other protests, protesters that Ollie spoke to, came from various sections as a sort of young, old, white, ethnic minority backgrounds, people in their capacity as workers and a union student, and I say, or individual citizens who would come out and anger at the rising cost of living. Of course, something that has been kind of prominently lingering throughout this movement, the rising cost of living, the rising price of petrol, something that was a motive, in fact, for the Julet Genet, the Yellow Vests movement in 2018 has also prompted a kind of new wave of Julet Genet-esque block mobilizations in these protests. So there's all sorts of kind of different class fractions and curries of merchant here as part of these protests. There's a really interesting interview in a quaint magazine where someone called Chara Macarimian was talking to people at the EHS at University occupied by students, and the kind of conversations that they were having with people involved. That demonstration reminded them of the testimonies that they collected on demonstrations in Iran. People who described it, they left this feeling completely normal, even while vibrant demonstrations filled television screens, people living in a kind of double-temporality on the one side the river with demonstrations, on the other the river with the everyday saturated by a media discourse, centered on police responses and moral panics over the riots. So the context of the protests for the protests is really important. Obviously, the kind of central aisle for the protestors and typophies, the French calling system, which is in prolonged decay. For instance, the highest class sizes in Europe teaches the crime increasingly forced out of the profession by low play, declining like vacancies in poor treatment, and the physical infrastructure that underpins French schooling is increasingly strained by dilapidation, infestation, and incapacity to deal with extreme weather conditions, namely heat waves, massive issue in French cities. William Bouchardon wrote in a Jacobin that classes regularly miss teachers, there is a storage of both school nurses and aides for children with disabilities and other difficulties, and these realities are most felt in racialized working class, France, specifically the banners that we've been that I've been talking about and the places which have been so castigated by the press for their participation and their centrality to the recent wave of protests, all of this compounded by the reality that ministers contemplate further runs of austerity. As they defend in the case of former National Education Minister Amelaire, who the castor send in their own children to private schools. So, you know, it's all there, and you know, there are new dynamics of play in this this moment, but there are also echoes of recent struggles, right? So there's the kind of global movement against the Gaza genocide in 2024, which is playing into this, there's the 2023 riots of working class neighborhoods over the police murder of the Helmerzouk, which is playing into this, and there's the kind of deep echo anger, as I believe, NFE have referred to it in working class districts that were hit hardest by the recent heatwaves. So there's France, but it should also be said that there's a kind of increasingly global context, but particularly a European context, all of this, which is France, like a lot of Europe, is a country simmering with unease class conflict and political polarization. In Spain, we saw the violent eviction and eventual death of Mary Carmen Abascal, who, which was the kind of catalyst for an unprecedented wave of militant national housing protests, now sparking an early election initiated by Pedro Sanchez, the Socialist Party, Prime Minister, in Belgium, very similar movement to the movement in France in some ways, in terms of the demonstrators, workers of thought, structuring against exacerbating impoverishment and fiscal retrenchment. There's a good movement that's been in existence in Albania, since June, which is massively exacerbating and deep, and people have even taken over the houses of the Prime Minister, I believe, like it's pretty deep. And of course, you have a kind of global flavor to this, in Brazil, millions are taken to the streets against the prospect of a far-right government led by Jair Bolsonaro's son, Flavio. So we could be, it seems like we are, for however long, in a kind of part of it. You know, we're in the beginning stages of a kind of sequence of global social revolve of the kind that I don't think we've seen probably since the BLM protests since 2020. But I mean, the Palestine protests actually, I should say there actually, but dealing as specifically with questions that people feel of domestic class issues, basically, the people are about it up. So I think this is quite an interesting movement. Obviously, they have been responses to these protests in the context of France, which is the context that we were addressing today. There has been the call for the ban in of La France and to me is by our sections of the political class. They call for that. They call for that just whatever anything happens. Anything else is just like ban LFI. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, you really see the ways in which the center completely makes space for the far right in French politics. So they could leave all of the time. There've been 8,000 arrests since the movement began. 85% of whom are under the age of 18. There has been at least one death. There has been a hand loss. We've all seen and heard the stories of tear gas. The kind of famous image now that's been mimed into Spider-Man of Ballybacchioco, the mayor of Sandini, who we talked about on the podcast, months and months ago when it came to the French municipal elections. Now a huge international celebrity. One of the five favored political figures of under 35s in France as well as rebassant also in La France in Symi's and John Luke Mullish on the leader of La France in Symi's. We see this classic picture of Ballybacchioco standing to defend students from tear gas and from rabid, aggressive, police dogs. I don't actually mean actual dogs. That's just a reference to the police as dogs. There's a kind of another dynamic here going on. The Macron government asked French intelligence services to lie and claim their L.F.E. La France in Symi's were responsible for protest violence. The intelligence services subsequently came out and said, "No, that's not actually true, guys." So there's a kind of a real attempt to coordinate a story about who is responsible for this, about ultra-left instigation. It kind of reminds me of something that I don't know if you guys are aware of the Zenoviève letter. In 1924, in Britain, the Daily Mail forged a letter seemingly coming from Gregoria Zenoviève, the leader of the Communist International, preparing for an insurrection in Britain. And this was the kind of sabotage the first Labour government that the country had to smash apart the possibility of an Anglo-Soviet treaty between the Labour government and the newly formed Soviet state. So it's got a bit of this flavor to it, right? The armed forces are going to be deployed on Saturdays demonstration. We're recording on Saturdays, so that's today's demonstration. We will have seen how that goes down when you're list by the time that you listen to this Monday. It's predicted that it will be protests this weekend of up to a half a million. There's growing momentum for a general strike on the 5th of November. So there's no straightforward sign that this social movement is disappearing. There's certainly a sense that the movement across the continent is growing and accelerating in some places. And of course, one political project you need you place to take advantage of this radicalization and polarization is Jean-Lou Mellison's La François Symes. Founded 10 years ago, the product of a rupture from traditional French social democracy, it's becoming recently identified with the protests. Mellison, you know, a figure that has faced enumerous amounts of abuse since he broke from social democracy, was filmed sharing an intimate intergenerational moment with a student protestor a few weeks ago, made famous overnight, this student protestor for a few million journalists who try to ask fellow protesters leading questions in the midst of the action. It should be said that that kind of video was of a more kind of a richer student, basically. And so it's interesting that like there are these unities that have developed between richer students in more central Paris and and poorer working class racialized students in the kind of ill-defronts, the greater greater Paris. So there's these two different dynamics for LSD, right? As the 2027 presidential election approaches, Mellison is consolidating his dominance over the left-block in French society. The socialist party is now endorsed the notorious centrist Raphael Gluxmann. The ecologists remain divided over who they might break for, but the LFV leader looks increasingly likely according to Bolin to be the principal challenger to Marie Le Pen's violently toxic brand of far-right politics in the second round of election. There's a few contingencies to that story that we could probably get into in the discussion should just be said. Last, when the protests I went to, not last Wednesday, but the Wednesday before, there were a loud chance of Mellison Ballondor from the crowd of these Paris-use demonstrations. A few days later, I was on Lera Public, I spoke to a group of young men. Young men in their 20s, really. So if you think that the demonstrations of other people between the age of 14 and 18 happen to be in place to Lera Public, for you can see some young men who are in their 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s, 20s. You know, these were young liberals. They were young liberals who really supported the protests, the student movement, they were Mellison skeptics, but they were very clear even though they thought Mellison was an egotist and not very democratic, but that they would vote for him to keep out of the pen immediately when it came to the second round of the presidential election, if that was the task at hand. So, you know, for this historic figure of the French had a cleft and this insurgent party, if militancy is inaugurated, I think is a model for left-wing politics globally, both of those dynamics will be really central, basically, to LFD defeat in the far right and implement the program, if it comes to that. I guess I wanted to say something just briefly about Britain, because I'm not going to do a whole, why is nothing happening here, man? Because, you know, it's the green part of it. It's definitely the green part of it. Yeah, let's blame you today. But no, I'm not going to do that, but I will say a lot of the conditions for this exist too. You know, I don't think it's some complete lunacy to suggest that there will be iterations of this in Britain at some point as part of this global wave of struggle, right? We have a million people need for an education, employment, and training with a poor education system on all of the metrics, not that far away from France's other resource, understaffed, crumbling, infrastructure, the kids locked out of the housing market, vilified by the political class, diminishing living standards, loss of the future, and ultimately, you know, something that's really important for me in some of the right, and I've done a fundamental crisis in the way in which labor power that working class people are reproduced, right? And these struggles will become sharper and sharper, and we know that burden solutions are fucking poultry. So, you know, don't lose your faith, comrades, that French magic could come here to Britain, the conditions exist, but also it's fantastic that we're seeing these huge waves of social movement struggle in places like France and elsewhere across the globe. Thank you, Jonas, very, very enlightening, and I think what strikes me immediately is not necessarily our conditions today, but our conditions during the early years of austerity, particularly the 2021 riots here in Britain, and some of the characteristics that you describe of what's happening in France today were present then, the kind of complex connection between both impoverishment on the economic level and oppression on the state level. So, when you look at where the riots kicked off, it was places that had high levels of stop and search and police activity, and also high levels of poverty, and when actually people that participated in the riots were interviewed afterwards, the two things they mentioned as being a motivator, the two top things were poverty and policing, and then when you dig a little bit further, you see things like, for example, in the London boroughs where it kicked off, three years before the riots, there were new operations in these boroughs to increase the levels of stop and search and increase the levels of police harassment as part of this test that was called Operation Blunt 2 to see if increasing the levels of stop and search would lead to greater reductions in crime, it didn't, and you can read the report online. What I think is then interesting is comparing that to what happens in 2024, because actually we have had youth explosions in this country in recent years, and not just BLM and Palestine solidarity, but the far-right riots that happened in 2024. Very youthful, very working class, they certainly don't have that kind of racialized character, that mixed gender character, but there is a sense in which you can trace that breaking of youth solidarity from 2011 to 2024 in what happens in the UK in terms of how racialized narratives and racist narratives are used to kind of break and section off parts of the working class, and so for me, you know, these moments are always a moment where we are radicalized and the youth are radicalized and the left are radicalized, and the then the right are radicalized in response. So I guess I have a question which is, you know, having been through that period where we had these incredible multi-racial working class explosions of anger in 2011 to then explosions of partly working class anger, partly youthful but racist in 2024. What lessons can we draw out from our own experience for how we could not have that happen again? And, you know, are there any are there any key nuggets of wisdom that we can draw out for, yeah, how do we not end up in the same quagmire? Because Jonas, I think you're right that the material conditions exist, but actually the right and the ruling class mobilized after 2011 and the ideological conditions don't exist in the same way. I don't think. Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's lots of stuff that I agree with. I think I disagreed, though, I think I think youth wasn't a central part of the 2024 racist riots. I mean, obviously there were young people there, there were young people in the demonstrations and stoked that existed, but there's overwhelmingly, according to most of the data sets and research that exists, particularly the documentation of people who have been arrested, older phenomenon, people in their fifties. That doesn't mean, let's say there wasn't a strain of youth politics involved in it or young people involved in it. There always are in kind of militant far-right politics. And that is one of the things that should be stressed with the 2024 riots. It differed from 2011 in one key way, but which was the 2011 was not necessarily a result of the deeply politically organised, whereas the 2024 riots were centrally. Right? Doesn't mean they didn't have people who sympathise with it, who tagged along anyway, but it was centrally a result of people who are really highly politically organised, who are part of existing far-right political organisations and political cultures, and were able to bring a kind of periphery, if you like, along with them for the protests. I imagine that whilst the organised core and the periphery would have been disproportionately old people, there would have been more young people part of the periphery than there were of this report, of the organised core, if that makes sense, at least that's kind of my observational experience of seeing who turned down the streets in, in Hadley in 2024. I think that, you know, there are lots of ways in which you can see the potential radical politics of young people be fragmented. In Britain, it is definitely the case that young people are more likely to pay for private health than they are to use the NHS, for example. The kind of decommodified power of the NHS as a kind of national memory is less strong for young people who confront really a health service that doesn't work, but this is still quite a minoritarian condition. There's a strain of young politics that's more likely to be quite more realistic about crime and welfare, but again, it's to this minoritarian strain. The overwhelming view is of young people who do turn in some forward over to the left. I mean, I even think to be honest with you some of the talk that you get these days about the young, angry, white kid is a bit, it's a bit, it's a bit much like it in terms of like what it actually reflects in terms of what people think and feel and believe in terms of radicalisation towards the radical right. I think it's a bit exaggerated. Which isn't to say, you know, obviously Kim all gone wrote that book, I think about a decade, a generation left, and there's some obvious truths that Kim really gets the grips with in that book about the conditions that produce a generation that's more left-wing. And I think he would be the first to say that that shouldn't be taken for granted that that generation would always reproduce itself as a left-wing generation. But I do just think it is the case in terms of political sensibilities, in terms of Poland, that young people are more likely to track left. And I think it's not even just spinoid, even just in terms of Poland. I mean, if you, I'm really trying to kick my polling addiction and not just rely on, not just rely on polls to understand, to understand society, but you just look at, say like the composition of the membership of, say the Green Party, compared to reform or restore. They kind of put people that turn out to canvas for Zach Plenty versus the kind of people that turn out to canvas for Rupert Lowe or Nigel Farage. Yeah, for Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage, you'll have a couple of, you know, like weirdo 20-year-old work, to wear new-year-olds wearing suits and stuff. And, you know what I mean, you'll have a few kind of freaks. But apart from those people, it's just, it's just people, it's just like men over the age of 55 or 60. Why men over 50? My point wasn't about the composition of youth politics. It was about who will turn up in the streets in the way that we're seeing in France, right? And who is radicalised? Who in the kind of youth in Britain is radicalised? To participate in that kind of explosive energetic street activity. And my point is that what we're seeing is that it's the youth on the right who are exploding in that way rather than the youth on the left. So it wasn't a point about the composition of youth politics. Obviously, we know that young people are more likely to be left winged. And I just, I think, I just disagree with that. I mean, I think that the last six years of radicalisation and politics has been the youth and much more likely to turn up to protests. Veer left and the protest of Veer right. And yeah, Palestine is obviously an example of that. BLM is obviously an example of that strike wave sort of there in 2023. For me, it was an experiment example of that. I mean, you could say that an organisation that Patreon platform is an organisation that definitely conscious more support of millions of people. Then say your classic fascist organisation. But broadly, I just, I don't see that picture that you've described. I see a picture where it's young people when they do turn out, turn out towards things that are definitely part of the kind of left's chain of signification of values much more than the rights. And I think, you know, with this stuff, I think all of the kind of grounds there, I think there's some stuff that's missing, right? In terms of talking about how this stuff might come here. Like, I do think that, for example, that like we do lack in this country, youth and student organisations of the time that exist in France that seem to have been pretty, you know, so, you know, what you get from abroad is that I look at these spontaneous uprisings that just happened in the street, right? But it's the, there are political organisations involved in these things. There are youth organisations, student organisations that are kind of far of viewers might not be aware of, but they actually play quite an important role in these kind of organisations. And I think we lack some of those in this country. But, you know, this is a podcast of militants and activists, right? The people that listen to this podcast, the doers, right? Let's get some stuff initiated. Like, I think there is fertile ground for this. I think the conditions exist. I think we have a political project that would be able to speak to some of these, in the green party, I mean, that would be able to speak to some of these anguishers. We need to spark off some of that French magic here because we're suffering through. I just think for me, I do get what you're saying, and I don't disagree. But I think what I'm trying to add is the nuance that there's clearly a contestation for the heart of the youth in Britain. Like, if you look at, so the arrestee figures tell you part of a story of who participated in the 2024 riots, mostly it tells you the part of the story of who was dumb enough to not wear a face mask. And, you know, that's not my problem, I don't care. That's not my people. But if you look at the videos that circulated on social media, we were seeing dozens and dozens of young people, you know, chucking bricks at mosques, lighting up police cars. And I'm not trying to make a generalized point about the state of youth in Britain. I'm trying to make a point that I don't see, I see a crossroads rather than a one-way track in Britain to what's happening in France. I see the possibility for things to kick off in Britain in the way they have elsewhere in France and in Europe. But that contestation is real, you know, reform put a lot of funding into their youthwork. Tommy Robinson puts a lot of funding into his youthwork. The kind of new far-right leaders that are emerging, you're kind of what you call them, you're ethnic nationalists. These are young people. The people that are kind of exploding on social media, pitching themselves as, you know, the new wave of leaders of the far-right young people. So it's not to make a generalized point about where the youth are at. It's to say that actually there's a lot of work that needs to go into building the kind of infrastructure and movement resilience that could translate what is possible materially into the kind of political uprisings we're seeing elsewhere in Britain. The only, I mean, I'm sympathetic to that, you know, no guarantees, right? Like the, there should be no assumption that radical youth are going to just radicalize towards the left. I think that's right. And just to be clear, like on that, let's not totally imagine that France is a utopian paradigm of youth radicalism, right? I mean, like in 2022, 2023, large quotes of youth polled to be supporting Marine Le Pen's R&D, Rassemble and that's a lot. So it's worth having that, which is much worse than here. So it's worth having that characterization. The story is one of political polarization, which tears through different cohorts of society, right? So you have politically radicalized the mobilized youth who will be on these demonstrations today, but you also have some politically radicalized youth who will identify with the fascist right, right? So the story is one of- polarization across different cohorts of society, including young people. And that should be said. So we don't kind of imagine that the France is, it's basically a problem. - And just to bring this back into the conversation, you know, a lot of work was put in from 2011 to break that youth coalition. And we're still suffering from the, from the outcomes of that. - The only thing I would say really about this, about this conversation anymore is that the, if regards to Britain's conditions and the breaks in youth coalition, is that I do think the increasing participation of young people on the right, and like the activist level, right, at the level of organisation of militancy, is still really a level far removed from the level of participation on the left in terms of like, when you think about specific right wing mobilisations, like with the exception of the United Kingdom rally, which happened in London, they're all quite deeply minoritarian, right? And you compare them to some of the kind of, I mean, all of these mobilisations are minoritarian, but apart from the United Kingdom rallies, like it's difficult to describe a lot of far-right political action as mass in any considerable way, whereas you can say a different picture for left wing political action, which God has youth attention in this country and that, maybe that's something to speak about, a bit more attentively to what you're saying about those eruptions, shinnies. - Yeah, about that certainly true, certainly. - I was just wondering if the better division here to draw is one on the basis of geography or whether you've got university education or life world, in that you're gonna see young people both on the left and the right, although more on the left. But if you look at the divide between the young people that are going to the left or involving themselves in a restore or a reform, you know, activity or a green party activity, the main divide I bet will be not necessarily class, it's loads of impoverished people on both sides, but more, and loads of people that have different relations to the means of production, but more whether you've got university education or not. Like that, I think that will probably, that will probably be the most stark divide and you'll see pretty much all of the vast majority of those young people that engage, engage and say the green party will have a university education of some sort, and I'd say pretty much all of the vast majority of the young people that are engaged in reform or restore probably do not. - There's also a racialization element and the urban, you know, the urban city context. If you haven't got a university education, but you're also in a big city and you're black unlikely, you'll be on the far right. - Yeah, for sure. And then the university in the university and the geography plan to it too, because you go to university, which nearly always means going to a city or a university town. And it's interesting when you look at, you know, when you look at green targets, they're not just urban areas or they're predominantly, they are the urban areas. They're in some ways dominated by universities and also there are smaller towns that dominate by universities, you know. - Could we just talk a little bit about kind of how Elify and Le Pen have responded to the rights? 'Cause I think they're both taking kind of, maybe not sophisticated, but they've tried to take quite careful positioning, I think. In the, you know, Elify who've gone, you know, full front all, like we back the protesters, you know, their deputies have gone to the protests, wearing these quite fantastic, a trickle or like sashes and standing between, you know, the, the protestors and the police and trying to defend the kids from the police and stuff. But Melishon has taken, I'd say a slightly more nuanced line, just in the sense that he backs the protest and is on the side of the protestors, but has also called for a compensation for, you know, like small businesses that have been looted and I think in one point, describe the looting as not our means. These are like not the means by which we do politics. So he has, you know, he has, despite his maximalist reputation on the Anglephone left and the idea that Melishon is always this person that always drives forwards and always sharpens the contradictions, he's taken a line which has a certain nuance to it. And then Le Pen, as well, has tried to position herself as in her words, with the French people who are caught between the austerity and fiscal hammering of those in power and the insurrectionary anarchists, the insurrectionary activists on the streets. And she's tried to like construct this idea of the French people stuck between the machonies government and the protestors. Obviously this is bollocks in the sense that she, as many people pointed out, she is proposing deep austerity cuts in the machonies to have ever pushed through. So for her, this is a very kind of like fragile and contradictory line. But it's interesting, I think, to see these two forces on the far left and the far right trying to navigate this moment in a relatively nuanced way. - Yeah, and you could see, because obviously both far left and far right, I tried to politicize this crisis. And will it end up strictly law and order message or will this become a kind of increasingly big part of the picture in terms of the deeper legitimization because swing to the left of the political center remains to be decided, right? And as you can see, the different political attempts to kind of strategize around it. A lot of marine lepens and the far right language as well is very much focused on the fact that these demonstrations are sparked at the most vibrant and at the most military in their eyes among people from the bandlers, right? Really deep-seated attempt to racialize the social movement and to kind of paint it as a kind of civilizational clash between black and Arab frauds in the one hand and white frauds on the other hand. I think Melanchons was interested. I mean, I've seen a couple of parents now. You know, his basic line is we defend the social movement, right? That's the kind of start position of his line. Here's a bunch of other stuff, which is the violence and the system is to blame where the police were present protestors and violent, where the police were absolutely were peaceful. And of course, I think quite smartly, like you say, the land that I really like is at the French state, if they're so worried should fork out the money for small businesses who have to rebuild after the riots. I mean, you know, it's just both my mind that we never had a single politician saying that kind of thing from our side in 2000 and the left foot, right? It's just such a straightforward line, but I really, I think quite an effective one. But you're right. He has tried to, I think, to be honest with you too much, I think particularly in this Lamont political lecture that he gave a few days ago, too much tried to kind of play out the divisions between kind of intentional and well-organised protestors and other protestors, who are just normal and ordinary. I think he tried to play that up a little bit too much in some of his more recent stuff. I thought his appearance on national television, but I think which is mostly the one you're talking about on LCI was great, basically, but it is more lectures that members kind of stuff have been a bit disappointed. Alas, all of this is like a considerable depth from where, from what I'd imagine, any left-wing political figure maybe apart from Zach and Muffin Day and any from here. All of his campaign in particular though, I think this is, this dynamic is quite interesting. Because obviously there's the huge worry that a lot of people have, that it's the RN who would be most well-positioned to take advantage of the social crisis of what they were famous in the law and all the crisis. Recent poll that came out had them up in the poll, also in Melanchion up in the poll, but they had them up in the poll. But I do think, there's a big part of it that does think that Melanchion's campaign is well-placed to take advantage of this social crisis and the social movement to be honest with you. He's already hegemonized in the left block. So you've had big declarations from substantive sections of the French Communist Party of the ecologists, which is the equivalent of the Greens in support of his candidacy. You have lots of support, minoritarian support, but you know, interesting how this takes reflection upon the actual, on actual voters, but you have lots of support within the party socialist. Raphael Glutzman elected further devised the centrist block. So it cleaves substantive parts of the left towards Melanchion who's really, even before this social movement was developed in quite a head of steam and quite a sense of momentum. There's a huge social movement in which there's a huge degree of Melanchionist support but of which Elephia heavily associated. But that's important in one way in particular because it's constituted by the central key plan of Elephia's electoral strategy, which is traditional non-voters, such as the young and racialized working class people, right? Which isn't to throw all of the lot of the social movement into the kind of presidential campaign, right? There's a while before that takes place. But it is to say there is a opportunity for real congruency here that we shouldn't sniff our noses at. But and you know, look, that the Elephia haven't almighty obstacle in the attempt to net a cordon sanitaire around them as a party of racialized riot in thrown fronts, is law and order, society into disarray. But the protests themselves are deeply resonant with the population at large. Even if most of the population are not insamese, Melanchion supporters, most of the population are supportive of the protests. And so there's a large part of me, Michelle Fahaire, who was part of this interview in the quater that I mentioned earlier, is I agree with something that they said, which is that the left shouldn't let this momentum and energy slip away, because there are ways in which this could be articulated into an incredibly grand fire, but it comes to April and May 20th, 20th, 27th, in terms of season and taking advantage of the social crisis that confronts the French, state, I mean, it's quite something. - Yeah, I think that's completely right. And it's worth saying that, you know, all of those, as far as I understand, all of those polls that show Le Pen being Melanchion handily in the second round are very much based on, I mean, as much as you can read them, there's anything but propaganda. They're very much based on assumptions of low turnout around the exact voices that Melanchion is trying to attract. And politics is often, so much about that energy and momentum and attention and mobilization is precisely what we suffered from in the home of the St. Pancras Bialecture. It's just like a sense of low energy at that moment and the sense of things being a low-mobilization. It was interesting that the turnout for that bialecture was weighed down on other bialectures in this parliament. And if Venashon can harness the energy of this moment in the big cities where he has to turn out a ton of people and if people remain politicised in this drive's turnout of the exact kind of people who are going to vote for the Elify, who knows? Who knows that way that can end up? I think that's a completely unpolable situation, frankly. And yeah, it's very, very interesting. Cool, so really, really interesting dissection there of what's happening in France and hopefully we can start drawing out more of those lessons as the situation unfolds. So thanks for that, Jonas. So Joe, you have a hot take for us on the Green Party's strategy and programme. Hit us. Okay, so I'm doing this week's hot take and I'm doing this week's hot take on an article I wrote for the Guardian. And I was going, I love the old school I wrote for the Guardian. So all of the Guardian comments are listening, hello, hello, I love writing for the Guardian, please, please continue commissioning me. But I wrote this for the Guardian this week. I really need to get this change in my picture. I've got a really weird picture with them where I look like I've shot myself. I hate it. But they have a very strict picture guidelines and I always send new pictures in and they never, they never fit the guidelines anyway. Oh, you're done. Yeah, you'll picture that for life. No, not man. Anyway, so I wrote some this week and I, it was around how the Green Party needs to, it's basically around how, as the Greens, I think we're entering phase two, you know, after a year of Zach's kind of like big, populist attention grab in leadership. And I think we need to do something quite specific now. And I think that thing is to essentially get serious about the project and deepen the project and get serious about what is it going to take to achieve eco-socialism, what is it going to take to build a party that is capable of achieving eco-socialism? And I don't know if I get explicit about what I mean about this. So I think, I think the first year, what we've seen is we've seen a move from the Green Party being essentially a liberal environmentalist party. So a party that comes up with good policies and engages in rational debate and tries to, you know, pressure the bigger parties to adopt better policies and, and, you know, a party that holds people accountable and scrutinizes or whatever, into a party that is an eco-populous party. So instead of just trying to engage in this rational debate and make things better, Zach has gone out and he has named conflicts. He has picked enemies. He has looked for fights as a way of trying to recompose British politics. And as a way of trying to push British politics to the left and build a party that is the left of Labour. And he's done that incredibly successfully, everyone has been appalled and that project has done that incredibly successfully. We have obviously recomposed the politics of the Labour party. The Independent would not exist if it weren't for that Plancky and the Green Party. I still say to my Labour comrades who are listening. If you want to affect the internal politics of the Labour party, join the Green Party because we are the best vehicle for that. That's what you care about. I know you're listening. Just jump over to the Greens, mate. Jump over to the Greens. But nevertheless, that's what we've achieved in the first year. And we've also started, you know, like building this thing that exists on its own. It was really great going to conference this year. And the quite wild difference between, you know, the conference of this year and the conference of last year. Conference of last year for that incredibly DIY light, something my mates could have thrown together this year. It was the conference of an actual real political pie. So that's all well and good. But I think that this first phase, we were still in a way stuck in a similar mode to the liberal progressive phase in the sense that we just conceptualize ourselves as a party on the fringes, a party that is, you know, trying to influence the politics of other parties. There was that moment where it's like, oh, could we replace Labour? And then that moment retreated very quickly. But I don't think that moment really came from a sense of taking ourselves very seriously and thinking about what would it mean to build a party that can actually wield state power and bring us to a position that is not capitalist or bring us beyond capitalism. It came from Starmerism being this black hole into which we were all sucked. It came from Starmer completely warping British politics and the Greens being the kind of momentary beneficiaries of that. And I think we're now we're entering this next phase where we have a Labour leader who, you know, depends on your reading reading of him as an individual. But if you're going to have a generous reading, he's earnestly trying to do social democracy in a time of no or low growth and incredible constraint. And I think our analysis is going to fail trying to do that, but nevertheless, he's trying to do that. And he's outlined this and I put this in air quotes, but this vision, which, you know, I argue in my article amounts to not particularly much. It amounts to like some reforms after 29, namely the voting system and social care. And in the mean time, a limited increased public control of some utilities, not ownership, but public control, small day-to-day cost of living measures, but really things that are materially very, very small, and actually little else until 2029. And I think this has been lauded as a vision by, you know, the press and others, in part, because, you know, there are sections of the press and the establishment that once you've had them succeed and they are seduced by his, you know, Ancunian charm and the fact that you can deliver an emotional speech. And I don't want to take it away from him. He's an impressive politician, but I think there's a certain seduction there. But I also think that we're able to call burn and visionary because compared to everybody else, he does somewhat have a vision. And I think this is where the Green Party's failing at the moment is that we don't actually have a vision. We're not. We don't understand what we're trying to achieve. We understand what we're against, you know, Labour says that they're not going to cap rents and we're like, well, we want to cap rents. Labour says that they do, they want to do public control and we're like, well, you should go further with public ownership. But so much for our politics is just a reactive politics that kind of skirts around the edge of what Labour are doing. I'm not doing. And obviously it is incredibly important for us to in a kind of war of maneuver with Labour. I'm not sure if that's the right phrase, but I'm going to use it anyway. But like in this kind of, in this, you know, I'm trying to say that, you know what I'm trying to say, like it's important for us to kind of like maneuver around Labour in these various ways and show distinction and Redwater between between Aussen Labour. And ideally we do that in like a conflict seeking attention grabbing way. Like that's really important. It's kind of the day-to-day of Zack's work to be honest. Like it's the, yeah, it's the stuff he has to wake up and him and his team think about like how can we create new conflict that brings people with us that shows that we're different to Labour. But if it's unmoored and it's just reacting to kind of like what's going on in the social media that day or what Labour are saying, we're always going to fundamentally be an unserious party because we are not going to have a deeper and more comprehensive vision or program for what we actually want to do. We're not going to have a proposition for society. You're not going to be able to go to people and say, well, look, like this is what Labour are trying to do. We think it's going to fail. We also don't think it's enough. This is what we want to do and this is why we think it's going to succeed and what this is why we think it's enough. And this is, you know, this is the difference that I think we need to draw. And I think it's really important for me to to hang this on an eco-socialist horizon and say, look, like what Labour are going to do at best is try to do social democracy. They're going to try and manage the system as it is. We think it's impossible to manage the system as it is because it's fucked and contradictory. And fundamentally is driving the climate crisis which is just going to come to define all of our politics. So we need to move beyond the system. We need to move beyond the system. But to have any credibility in saying that to people that don't pay attention to politics, to working class people who frankly have had that hope stash time after time after time and for whom promises from politicians to political parties are worth absolutely nothing. We have to build what I would say is credibility and that credibility is a phrase that is usually used by the centre to say, like, do the financial markets like what you're doing? Is what you're doing quite incredible. I want to use and reclaim credibility in a very different way. I want to build credibility with the people. I want to build credibility with working class and middle class people. I want to be able to go to someone that actually say, not only does the green party have a really well thought through sophisticated, comprehensive plan for how we would transition the British state away from capitalism and towards eco-socialism. But also, I think this party is capable, is becoming capable of enacting that transformation as part of a broader set of actors across society. I do not think the green party is there at all, like, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm not saying the green party is currently capable of this. The party is disorganized in many ways. The membership is still very passive. It's very unclear to me what half of the staff in HQ are doing. Most of the time, we need a whole new set of leaders to back up Zach, like, you know, there are all these ways in which we need to build the party to be serious and resilient and capable of acting and doing things. But we also need a program. You know, we also need a program. In the way that La France Insamese has a program, we need a program which is meticulous and is detailed and acts as an anchor for our movement at a reference point when we say, "We are trying to achieve this big thing," which is transitioning away from capitalism. And here is our plan to do it. Yes, it is an ambitious and audacious plan. But like, what's the point? What's the point if we're not going to try and do something big ambitious and audacious because we see this gap of the crises in front of us? And I just think fundamentally that if we don't start taking ourselves seriously in this way, we don't start taking our part in a political project seriously. Why would anybody else take a seriously? Like, why would they take a seriously? So yeah, that's my pitch. I think the party ideally led by Zach needs to turn as part of this program or part of the process of taking ourselves seriously and building us into a serious party. Not of government, because when you say a party of government, what that means is like a party that can manage the system as it is. But a party that is capable of transitioning to ecosystem, and I think a massive part of that is to come up with this like deep, comprehensive program that not everyone's going to read. I'm not saying everyone's going to read our 400-perch program, but it's important that people know it's there. It's important that people know that you fucking thought about it and put the effort in. So yeah, I want Zach in the party to learn some kind of process like that. Thanks, Joe. That's a really useful part, take a really useful set of framings there. I guess one question that I've not questioned. This is more a comment than a question. I guess I'm not that convinced that Bernard is trying to do social democracy, right? Which is to say that he has a brilliant story, a really, really brilliant story. Obviously there's the kind of personal dimensions of the story, which I won't dwell upon. But there's the kind of story that he's constructed, which in lots of ways you get frustrated, this is something that Jeremy Gilbert has talked about. You get frustrated that Corbyn didn't really talk much in these terms throughout his courses, they believe that. Which is he talks about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, but I think it's the industrialization austerity leaving the European Union. And of course, neoliberalism. And Corbyn never spoke about neoliberalism. He never really spoke about the political settlement that kind of underguided people's experience of life, the 40 years prior to him being a Labour leader, but Adam has done. But I wouldn't necessarily go make the jump. I'm not saying you're making this jump, but I think a lot of people are of going from that. It's really quite a compelling story that we should have been thinking about the radical left phylogm in an anti-burner. It's coming around the minute with a kind of social democratic programme or even a social democratic strategy. I mean, it's just really stark to be both in terms of the minus scale of the reforms that anti-burner is actually delivering. That I'm winning this really. Because part of the social democratic gap is yes, you want to have the kind of state grow and you want to have the economy grow so that you can widen the share for working class people. But it does also require some intrusions upon ruling class privilege, right? That class compromise requires other sections, opposite sections of society coming to the table and offering something. And so what's your burdenism is in lieu of that fact, right? And so when you see it's like, oh yeah, we're not going to deliver the care stuff until the late 2013. So you get kind of flavor. I don't know the side of that. It's like the, I mean, I really, I really think one of the things that might slap him on the bulb is the is the Manchester City stuff. Both is typical of his kind of read as mayor, because I said try to let you to real estate to that experience. But also just murky negotiations with Manchester City who are now at a hundred and four EGRs. I think might come back to buy it and the burden of the future. But for me, that's all important in relation to the Greens because I totally agree with you that the program isn't there for the Greens and it needs to be there. And this is an opportunity, right? To open up the party to its members and to social movements precisely in that way that you talk about in the article that La France and Simeez have done with their program where it becomes something that's constructed from below and it becomes something that people feel quite infused by. People take seriously, people read, people articulate in the kind of different spheres of their life. I think in terms of a framing that I've talked about this in one of our live shows in the past, I think Zach is getting there a bit. Like I think the kind of triumvirate of the cost of living crisis, the current majority is the agent of the project, and then people will plan it as the kind of internationalist horizon of it. For me, that is a quite encouraging frame to start from. But how you fill in the gaps there becomes really important. I'll be honest with you. You can tell me if I'm wrong about this. Partly reads your piece and listens to you today. I think part of that, it was a dissatisfaction. Part of this feels like it's a dissatisfaction with the Greens campaign and Lyden Holben and St. Pancras. If you want to keep labor honest, vote to get another Green into Parliament, that seems to me what part of the frustration of the line is this piece is. So I'd love to know what you think about that, whether there's any truth to that, because rather than like the development of a real credible in your words, meaningful social alternative, you get the kind of position which is will keep labor honest. There's no point getting another Labour MP into Parliament. And it does seem to me there's a bit of attention there, right, between will keep labor honest and what is a distinctive meaningful alternative. On the credibility stuff, I really agree, obviously, you need credibility with the people who believe in your ability to deliver this programme. Or at least trust you. You need it to be based on a meaningful plan. And you need to be delivered, delivered. And you know, this is really important, delivered by specific, but the distinct groups of working class people or people who are going to make it work. I guess though this is also one of the trouble runs it, right, is that the effort of the left and the green party is the effort to seize this pre-existent institution and transform it into an eco-socialist party, right. And that will mean over the course of the next five years to fight basically and different disputes. And that kind of rubs against credibility, right. Although we have a very, although I think that the kind of notion of credibility that you've articulated is very distinct from the notion of credibility that will obviously be thrown in various green leaders' faces if there are fights within the party. There is a kind of sense in which you want the credibility that you've talked about, but there's also the credibility that is articulated by the bourgeois press. It's still real. And people still read politics through that, right. And if you have a divided party, then it becomes difficult, right, to foster that credibility in the way that you want to. And yeah, I mean, then it becomes that how do you have a democratic party that's both really democratic that involves the determination of the programs, but that is also highly centralized and disciplined, where you have well-trained leadership caterer who relish a fight, and you have a kind of synchronicity with fights outside parliament that the Greens can kind of garter energy from and try to articulate the ones and sediments of becomes a really important question. I'll leave it there and let you respond to some of that stuff and I've got other stuff for what I said. You're not allowed to just raise every salient issue within the Green Party right now, or within your response and then be like, oh, just convert it. Just convert it. It's all relevant, of course, it's all relevant. All right, all right, let me give it a go. So just on your democracy point, like how do you how do you ensure that a party is still is like focused and effective and driving towards horizon whilst also having internal democracy that then can hold debate and fractiousness and disagreement and all that kind of stuff? I think it depends on what kind of democracy you have in the party. I think there are a lot of people in the party now. I mean, and it's actually just worth caveat in this. I think ecosocialists in the party for a long time have thought that the democracy within the Green Party needs to be reformed. Like for a long time, there's obviously now added impetus because everyone's talking about it in the wake of Zionism is racism, but like I think people have thought that the democracy in the party needs to be reformed for a long time. There are people now pushing a delegate structure for conference rather than an OEM of structure for conference. At the moment with the Green Party conference, you can join a couple of weeks before and just come and turn up and vote. Or you can even join a couple of weeks before and then just log into a Zoom and vote, which is kind of mental. Like it's just like that. You just wouldn't run an organization like that. It's just so. I'm not saying this is what happened with Zionism as racism, but I don't think it really did. But it's just in the abstract. So obviously open to entryism. I probably favor some kind of delegate structure, which means that local parties will delegate people to go to conference and it means that people who are actively involved in the party and doing the work in the party, they're going to be the ones that make the decisions. I think that's probably fairer, does obviously downsize to it. I think it's probably fairer. I think the other thing that a lot of good left parties do, though, is that they don't overly verify the membership of the party. They understand that the membership is one constituency, but the people out there, and I think it's about to say the people rather than the voters. I don't want to talk about voters. The people out there are another constituency that really matter. Then you have to have this mass orientation to the people out there and constantly be trying to get information back on like where they are and operating in response to them and balancing between your political principles and your ideology and the position of of the mass and that's what I think the Badger Workers Party somewhere is so well in a party that is, you know, principled but flexible. A principled but flexible party working class, you know, like that is, that is fundamentally what I think we're aiming at. Am I proposing this program stuff in reaction to the kind of meek campaign that we ran in Hoban and St. Pancras? No, not really, like I was actually an advocate of that tactical maneuver in Hoban and St. Pancras at the time. I have to own that 'cause I don't know the progress. I was an advocate of that. I think I was probably wrong in retrospect. I think I think in retrospect that campaign did need loads more politics. As someone made the point to me really well yesterday that it was crazy that we didn't just put loads of leaflets associated in the Labour candidate with Stama because she was a Stama and there were loads of pictures of her with Stama and if it had become, if we could have in the minds of voters this time, all the people in Hoban and St. Pancras, made it into a Zack versus Stama election. Then we'd have probably won it. So I don't know, like, I just, Miracle, but I was wrong about that. But no, it's not. It's not. It wasn't trying to, I wasn't trying to extract a meek campaign. No, I know you weren't, no, I know you weren't. I, you've forgotten, you've forgotten, I said that. I just know, I just know we've got very attentive and avid listeners who won't have forgotten. No, I, I think, I'm coming, I think I'm coming at this because I, I think that there are other parts of the party and I don't want to, I don't want to just distinguish these parts of the party into distinct ideological currents 'cause I don't think it necessarily works like that. And I also understand that there are, like, blurry lines between them. And I also don't want to imply that any of these parties are the left or the right of the party, 'cause I think it's more complex than that. So now I've got my caveats out of the way. I think there are other bits of the pie, such as the kind of the liberal environmentalist wing maybe around, you know, Caroline and Ellie and Adrian or again, there's differences between them. Or the Greens of Palestine and the imperialist wing that pushes down as a mass racism. Who I think, I don't know if it's explicit and I'll be really up for giants of them, but I think they have a theory of the party which basically kind of always assumed someone else is running the state. Like their politics always assumes that, like, labor or the Tories are running the state. And from, I think, the liberal perspective, it's like, well, we just need to, you know, work in coalitions and be a part of a progressive alliance and be this, like, junior partner on the outside or whatever. But I think from the more radical pro-Palestine position it's that we need to take these, like, you know, like big seismic actions that reconfigure politics and drag the over some window back to our side. And if we lose some counsellors in the process or if our polls go down in the process, whatever, that's kind of fine. And I think I very much agree with the latter's emphasis on big fights and big conflict. Like I think that's completely part of it. I do not want us to turn into like a tame boring party. Like, there doesn't attract any attention. We need to do that. But I do also think we just need to have a, a theory of our politics where we aim in to take the state and we're not just assuming that we're operating in this mode, this purely attentional mode, where somebody else will be running it. And our job is just to essentially running around shifting the, shifting the over to Windows, shifting the possibilities of politics. I think you need to hold those two things at the same time. It's hard, it's contradictory, it's intentioned, but I think you need to hold those two things at the same time. So I think that's where this is coming from is me wanting to be like, okay, how can we build a party into a party that's actually serious about taking state power, even though we know that that is not going to happen in the next election, but who the fuck knows could happen at the election after that or the election after that. And I do emphasize that by the way, like I know, I know to everyone in the Green Party right now, it feels like we feel a long way from running the government. But it is remarkable how the fortunes of parties have rocketed up and down in global North politics over the last 10 or 20 years. Things are incredibly volatile. And they don't always feel like it, but they're incredibly volatile and things can just change. So, so, so, so, so quickly in a way that, you know, in a way that in the '90s or the '70s to the '90s, it just wasn't the case and things were a lot more static and like, by a box we're attached to parties because people had institutional loyalty and relationships. So I just want to emphasize that, that's kind of like where I'm coming from on that. And then maybe just on the point of is Burnham trying to do social democracy? Yeah, I don't want to get caught in a definitional argument. Like it, it's like what does it mean to try and do social democracy when you don't have growth to split up between capital and labor, like that, that's the whole compact, right? So if that's not happening, like what, like is it even possible as a thing? I guess, I guess I'm just trying to take Burnham is word, not because I trust him to do stuff, but I think because we have to position ourselves against the maximal and most effective version of his project, even though our majority assumption, or our highest probability assumption that he's probably going to collapse, and it is the case that his state of aim, you know, and it's kind of like launch of his pre-launch of his leadership in the Guardian, his state of aim is to take down neoliberalism, you know, so it's like roll back the privatization of neoliberalism. And yeah, I think we just have to take seriously that he might try and do that in some various limited ways. He definitely had nothing he said so far and applies that he's going to, but, you know, like nothing applies to this going to, but I think we need to like, at least reckon with the set, he's like self-description of the project, if that makes sense. And maybe my final thing on this, maybe my final thing on this is that, you know, you say that like, it's a real shame that the Corbin project didn't reckon with the 40 years of neoliberalism, and it just got stuck in this vernacular by only talking about austerity since 2008. I think that's somewhat true. I also think that description of the Corbin project is slightly overblown in the, maybe that maybe that was how Corbin spoke about things, it wasn't really how much Donald spoke about stuff. I remember, I remember Pike political broadcasts that was maybe played at the start of 2017 or 2018 conference, which literally starts with the words of like 40 years of deindustrialization, and that was the open slide. I do think that, I do think that characterization of Corbin is kind of like only emanating from 2008 and not from, not from, that's right, deindustrialization. I don't really buy it completely, but I'll go further than this. I'd say that if we are only talking about neoliberalism and deindustrialization, we are fundamentally talking in a social democratic register. Like we do need to, we do need to be talking about capitalism and socialism, but I hate to say it. I know people are scared of like, say in the web, like we do need to be talking about capitalism. Socialism. I'm not saying, I'm not saying, I'm not saying, well, I just think people are. I think you people try and come up with so many synonyms. They're like new economy, new system moving to a new system. People say like so many synonyms. And look, I'm not one of those kind of like revolutionary socialists. I'm not in a sect. I'm not saying that the working class are just ready to revolt over capitalism. All we need to do is mobilize them. Like I'm not saying that you're not kind of door and someone's like, oh, no one empties my bins and you're like, oh, yes capitalism is terrible, isn't it? I'm not saying that's how we do our communication. Fundamentally, in our core analysis, and when people ask, we have to be honest about what we think the problem is. Do we think the problem is for you as a privatization? Or do we think the problem is a capitalist system that drives, that drives a profit and causes extraction and accumulation and mass emiseration and inequality and drives the climate crisis in this completely fundamental way? As we can see from the work of Naomi Klein or Andreas Malm, or whoever, what do we actually think what's our actual analysis? And this is why I come back to a program. Because a program would affirm that. It would be in there, and we'd be able to point to this thing. So we'd like for fundamentally, we think the privatization is the last 40 years, we're really bad. But it is also the system as it is. It is also the capitalist system that we need to move on from. I just don't really see how God, I can feel the kind of art you would draw influence in me now. So I hope he's proud for it. But I don't fundamentally see how we're going to move on from it unless we're honest about it. And at some point talk about it. I think the last thing I'll say on this is that, we cite the Belgian Workers Party all the time. It's worth remembering the Belgian Workers Party, although talking about cost of living issues and really responding to people in a very kind of mass way, I still have explicitly Marxist party and described themselves as a Marxist party. And to anyone that will ask, they'll talk about that. I mean, I thought, I stand by the point that I think the any talk of neoliberalism is a kind of historic project. And the kind of dismantling of working class life was that it don't was quite remote from the language you'd call but it's relative to, relative is what is a complement, relative to the end to austerity language, which really predominated among the project. There's a kind of a new left language as well that was around it that had certain inflections and infractions into the kind of broader leadership of the project as well. There shouldn't be dismissed, right? But the kind of guiding frame was, and you know, that maximized the 2017 election because it was more than anything, the manifesto was an end to your austerity manifesto than it was like a kind of radical social democratic manifesto and a 2019. I do think that was a dominant frame. That being said, one of the things that I really liked about your piece is the insistence upon the kind of lived anti-capitalism and socialism as the kind of, as the kind of linchpin of the green programmatic process basically. I think that's really important. One of the questions I have, it's not necessarily a question to you, frame directly to you, Joe. Don't want you to feel like you're responsible for all of my questions. I mean, so what's got, so what's got, right? But one of the things that I worry about, one of the things that I'm concerned about, I'd be concerned about this in any kind of political project to be fair. I think there are reasons why it's magnified in the Greens because it's a pre-existing party. But one of the things that I'm concerned about is the development of anti-capitalism as a frame and as a language for the Greens, right? Whilst the Greens are trying to develop their support, there's this kind of historic tension inflected a lot of traditional socialist parties in the late 19th century, into the early 20th century, which is that even if we put to side the Green Establishment figures that are around seeing Lucas, right? I don't think they're remote from the challenge, but let's put them to the side. Let's adopt a kind of optimistic tenor, right? As the party grows, it's electoral ambitions higher, right? It's share of MPs and councillors, right? It becomes a greater electoral machine, but also more imbricated and responsible for a whole host of state institutions, particularly at the local level, right? And I guess the tension that we have to confront in our practice, right? Big question is, how do you embed across the Greens left, the Green Left and its social base as set of politics and practices that can redefine the kind of anti-capitalist agenda whilst resisting? Knowing that you have to deal with it, you can't just avoid it, right? But resisting the kind of tendency for the left to just become managers of the system, right? That kind of tendency, which is so inflicted laborism over the course of the past century, right? That's a kind of thing that stands out to me is a kind of broader challenge. I think part of it is the stuff that you talked about in terms of democracy. Democracy is an experience of condensation, right? Which is you condense a whole range of sediments and interests and different class fractions and expressions into the party, right? Both in terms of the kind of people who participate directly in the party as members and a part of whole different organizing experiences and struggles, but also the stuff that's taken that place outside of the party, right? Where you condense those things together into a kind of, I think, a transitional politics, right? I think the, it's not that I think that LFE program is a transitional program in that kind of classic trotsky sense of it will transition us to socialism, necessarily. But it is transitional in the sense of it is transitional between what you have now and how you try, you know, seriously radicalize the coordinates of society through a much more anti-systemic project and try and bake that in a different way. Because look, there are lots of ways that you periodize the LFE's program and you compare it to say Francois Mitterrand in the 1980s and it's not as radical. There are some ways in which it is more radical, but there are lots of ways in which it's not part of the kind of caveat to that is that we live in in a fundamentally different moment, right? Where they kind of hold the historic order that's been pushed back into retreat much more decisively than they were in the early 80s. But also, so you have to reckon with what are the transitional bits of an anti-campus program that can you grasp and kind of bring to push the conversation forward. But yeah, I really like the piece, I really like the focus on how we kind of radicalize this project but was also keeping it with mass attention. I think the question is, I mean, the question is for me. What is phase two? What does it look like? That's the big picture question, but we can't answer it on this podcast. That's a question afforded by practice. We're definitely not going to answer it on this podcast and we were going to be disciplined about time this week, so I'm definitely not going to answer it on this podcast. Just to come back to a few of your things, like, yeah, I just do think, I just do think we have to be clear fundamentally about the horizon that we're trying to move towards and people then can then agree with it or disagree with it, but at least we've got a point of reference and at least we're clear amongst ourselves as to what we're trying to do. And I just don't, I don't think we have that as a party yet. I mean, he's trying to win that as a party. How do you, how do you socialise? An eco-socialist horizon across the party whilst also having to run bits of the state, which is in contradiction with that. I mean, I've got all of the kind of, like, try answers for you. You expand intellectual work and political education across the party. It's really good to see the eco-socialist members launching a party journal called The Grane, I think, which can be really good. Fantastic. I'm writing something for the first issue. You know, we need new leaders who are eco-socialists, who can articulate this, who have got MMPs, who have got a lot of assembly members. There's loads of stuff that we need to do, whether it's all possible, or whether it's all possible within the time frame that we've got, and whether you can transform a liberal progressive party into an eco-socialist one. Who knows? Who knows? But it is the opportunity that we have in front of us. And I think on that point with regards to where the LFI's programme or our programme will be more or less radical than it's around them. I'm kind of just not. Yeah, I mean, you implied this in your answer, but I'm just not interested in the measure of whether something is more or less radical, it's more like, is it the thing that meets the moment and starts to transition us to the two eco-socialists and to the thing that we're trying to achieve, you know? And I think it just about being really rooted in the context, very material, and as the Stuart Hall folk, like to say, like conjunctual, you know? Like just like really, really, really, really. I've got some mates, you say conjunctual all the time. I am one of the mates, you say conjunctual, that just to do that. You don't say it anywhere near as much as half the rest of my mates. I've got like. What do you mean to use the word conjunctual? They sound great. I love them, but it's just like. But yeah, I want something rooted in the now, and I want something that actually makes sense with regards to the conjunctual conditions. All right, thanks for that, folks. Great conversation, as always. So onto the reading for this week. So I'll kick us off. I am currently reading a review copy of Janey Starlings' upcoming book, Punishing Women, The Case Against Prison, which is due to drop in February of 2027. Janey is one of my good, good friends. She's an incredible activist and campaigner for women in prisons, and this is going to be truly, truly a groundbreaking book that combines both deep research in prisons, chatting to women, getting their perspectives, as well as hot, sharp abolitionist, radical analysis as well. So yeah, it's a thick time as well as a proper big book. So yeah, check out Janey and get ready for that book dropping in 2027. Jane, that's what you read in this week. Really short and sweet. It's an article in Tribune by Rim Cad Rowey. France's high school movement has entered a new phase. Rim was a comrade that we went to lay out fee with, great comrade, and this is a really nice analysis of the kind of composition and dynamics of the high school movement. And it's implication for politics and the ways in which those relationships between the social movement and politics itself can collide but also diverge. And I also think it's a really nice treatment of just how much things have shifted in the political consciousness, amongst young people of the course of the last decade. I really recommend people go and give it a read. And Joe, how about you? At the moment, my entire life is arcing around one thing and one thing only and it's making enough time in my day to continue reading the first Dune book by Frank Herbert. I have held off reading Dune for a long time. I'm a massive sci-fi fan of held off reading Dune for a long time. So I've looked at normal hours. It's actually been many good. Oh my god, is it good? It's so good. I'm just obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with the world building and these kind of like the clash of cultures and obviously it exists in this kind of post-machine post-computational age. And there's all of this about like what is the possibility of the human spirit when you don't have machines and computers surrounding you all the time. And they do these amazing kind of like time warping, premonition stuff with one of the main characters. I mean, I guess everyone's seen the film a few of them watch the book, but oh my god, it's just so good. Everyone just needs to go re-tune. Apparently the subsequent books are a bit shit, but the first one's fantastic. And thank you so much, Lads. Cracking episode, as always, Lads. Thanks for the conversation. And for those who are listening, do subscribe to us on Patreon. It keeps us going. It keeps the podcast going. It keeps us ad-free and makes sure we can pay the wonderful Marcus who does all of our editing and promotion and socials in the background. So yeah, catch you in the next episode. Yes. Bye-bye. This is an ampersounds production.