Knowledge and Nostalgia: Why a University Education Should Be Free (Louisa Munch)

BBC-podcast on suurin jälkeen. Lässin kärkukriilta on saada kärkukriilta. Tämä on kärkukriilta. Jokakokilla on saada kärkukriilta. Hokkeilla on saada kärkukriilta. Salkku X. Tapaamme jälleen. 5 numeroa. 5 vihjettä arvauksia päätelyä. Poveria. Palkintona X-pen GQ-sähköauto. Tääysin omaksi. Kymme lelviikkoa aika ratkaista kodi osoitteessa Powerpistefi kautta X. Älä jää kydistä. Sitten on jälkeen. Sitten on jälkeen. Sitten on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Sitten on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. Tämä on jälkeen. 12394804 Helentomson-questions on Trump, Great Power rivalry and the politics and history and future of oil. Hello, it's Amal here. Welcome to Radical Conversations about the deep global trends changing our world and offering you some pretty radical ideas for the future. This week, what is the point of going to university? Is it for everyone who should go and how should it be paid for? Once a lot of time, a long, long time ago, Tony Blair, remember him, was a Labour leader who said half of young adults should go into higher education. And you know what? By 2016, that year of Brexit and Trump, they basically hit that target. But Keir Starmer, a very different Labour leader, thinks that that target is no longer right for our times. He wants a much greater focus and emphasis on technical qualifications and apprenticeships. And of course, all of this, as listeners to Radical will know, is rather salient in the age of AI, given it's certain. In fact, we can already see that artificial intelligence is replacing lots of entry-level white collar jobs. But in terms of politics, this is a really big and significant shift in tone from a Labour Prime Minister, because it puts more emphasis on equipping people with the necessary skills for work, whatever those skills may be. However, my guest today, who is on the left of politics, who is a fascinating thinker and who has grown a really big following on social media, thinks that people should be encouraged to go to university, not because it might get them a job, but because it will give them the intellectual and theoretical skills, which they need to apply in the world. It will give them a sense of agency and power over their lives. She is Louisa Munch, a young academic at Basic War at University, a social media influencer in the intellectual sense of that term, who's built a big following by applying critical theory. By the way, if you don't know what that is, don't worry, we can explain it very, very shortly, to the political issues of the day. I think you can enjoy this. Thank you so much for coming in. I thought we should start, right, by me, A. Confesting, that I've spent more time looking at videos of you talking about critical theory than almost anything else that I've done in my life for the past month. Since you said yes to come along this podcast. Also, with what you think about higher education, because people tuning into this will be a way, because I've told them that you are an academic, and you really believe in university at a time when some people don't. Why do you believe in university? I think it's one of the very few spaces that we have left that's protected for questioning power. There's not a lot of places I think that is left where we can do that. The university is about ideas, it's about thinking of something new. I think one of the biggest problems we have in society is imagining something different. Everybody knows something's not quite right, but we can't think of an alternative. The university is a place where that's what it's all about. I always tell my students, I don't care what you get in the essay. If you come out with 100, if you come out with 50, whatever, what I care about is they go into the world and they can act upon the world. They feel like they have some sort of power. They can call themselves exactly exactly all about agency. You equip them with that power through something called critical theory. What is critical theory? To put it in the dictionary definition, it's like the critique of ideology. What I think of it more as is the critique of power. Calling power into question. Ideology is a way of thinking the aims at power. Yeah. It's not a passive thing in critical theory. People think of theories as a passive sort of everybody's philosophers, sat-round in rooms, just mulling over things and feeling smart. It's about change, it's about creating social change. It has a goal and I think that's what I found really empowering about it. You want more people to go to university or you want more people to engage with critical theory. To learn the art of critical thinking. Yeah, critical thinking. That's what your social media content, which is very addictive, is about. Do you think university should be free? Absolutely. I think it's ridiculous that you have to pay for it. I always say in my videos, we can't have a democracy without informed citizens. We can't have a democracy if you don't have citizens that can critically think. And we're in the BBC. This is about journalism. The whole thing recently has been about not having a bias, isn't it? And to give people objective information assumes they can think critically about it. But this is not something that we're teaching people. So we have to think of something. I think universities are the one place where you are taught to think critically. I know that's where I learned it. And it's kind of weird. I felt like before I'd been to university, I was living in kind of like the Truman show. What do you mean? Because we take so much for granted. We don't question a lot of things and I didn't seem to question a lot of things. I think one module in particular, I went to Liverpool John Morris University. And you're now based at Warwick I should say. Yeah. And in my final year, I was kind of, I didn't know what to do. I was working in marketing in Manchester. I was a copywriter. I liked writing and creating things. But there was just some sort of feeling that I got that was like, I don't think I can do this forever. And I did a module called Capital on the Markets. And I was like, oh my god, I can't stay in marketing anymore. You're in a wakeening. Yeah, it really is that. And I think a lot of people will talk about university in that way. This sort of awakening. Especially when you come from like a working class background, you don't have like, you don't grow up in a political household as such. Or you don't grow up in a household where you talk about, I don't know, philosophers or literature and things like that. Then it is really life-changing experience. There is so much I want to talk to you about it. What was the nature of that awakening? So there's Louise Munch. How old were you when you do this Capitalism in the Markets module? I must admit, it was just full COVID, so like 20. So you're 20 years old. You're reading this stuff about Capitalism in the Markets. Did you have this sudden feeling that kind of like, everything sort of made sense if it had into place? Or this sort of sudden realization that maybe what you've been told or grew up believing, grew up believing was a lie? Yeah, it wasn't the fact that everything made sense. It was everything doesn't make sense. Exactly. Nothing makes sense. Like, what do you mean? I'm on the planet where you work 40 hours a week until you're 70 just to buy things and then you die. Like, put me somewhere else apart. -Kiitos. -Kiitos. So invigorating, I read one of the books that was on the module was Mark Fisher's capitalist realism and that is, it was such a life-changing text for me. He's got the idea, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Yeah, and that idea changed my life. I thought, why can't we imagine an alternative to this? I'm not enjoying myself, you know? So before we get into that alternative, what it might look like in the munch, are you going to go into politics one day, by the way? I am in politics. You are in politics. You are educating the people, that's it. Would you go into democratic politics, legislative politics? You mean like party politics? Yeah. I don't know, I don't know. I love educating, I love teaching, there's nothing I enjoy more than speaking to people and teaching them. And I think with the state the politics is in now, it's not, it's not. Not particularly attractive, yeah. And there's other downsides like it completely destroys your family and private life and all of that sort of thing, or so I'm told, just on education, right? So we should acknowledge the fact that in Scotland, higher education is free. It's subsidized by the general taxpayer. And what you're saying about it being universally available, it's amazing to think that even 25, 30 years ago in this country, it was, you know, free. That's, it was funded by it through general taxation. And then something changed happened a bit, I think, started under the Blair government. And it's amazing. You know, last year, tuition fees in England and Wales rose. They were raised really quite substantially. And I wondered, we've had Nick Clegg on this podcast and Nick Clegg, way back in 2010-11, there were literally riots where people, when tuition fees were going up, and that was partly because Nick Clegg had said before that he was against erasing tuition fees and there was this feeling that he'd sold out and when tuition fees rose under the coalition government, people gave him a lot of hard time. I wondered what Nick Clegg would have made of the fact that, you know, the Labour government rose, you know, gave a major issue fees even higher. And there was kind of not a pit of protest. So the idea of university being free, it's actually quite radical now, it's actually quite a kind of, no one's really advocating that. Maybe the Greens are, I don't know what Zach Plansky thinks. But the idea that the university should be free is not where the consensus is in British politics. I think it's crazy. Like, I've sort of always grown up, I felt like on the fringes of something. So obviously my dad's Danish has spent a lot of time in Denmark where it is, it's not just free, it's funded. You get paid to go to university. When I even want to go to conferences in Europe, like people cannot believe that we pay, you know, when I say I'm doing a PhD and I've paid for just the PhD alone 30 grand, people like you're paying to research on behalf of the university. And I'm like, yeah, you know, it's all made into this personal investment. And I think you really see it in the students as well because they really take on this like idea that their education is a personal investment. This is a power. Exactly. And they want, you know, the most out of their products. But the product isn't, you know, and the way that they care so much about the grade as well worries me so much. Because that's not what it's about. It's like this, not to use these sort of terms but like the neoliberalisation of university. You know, it's a financial, the financialisation of it. It's something that you buy and you get sort of an equity from or whatever. And I think that's a huge problem because that is not what education is about. What is education about? Freedom. It's about freedom. It's about being able to have an impact on the world, feeling empowered, you know, calling things into question. And, you know, we have school. We think it's morally right to say no children's or school but why does education then end at 18 or whatever? But when you say you are skeptical about why people are obsessed with a grade, isn't there something quite admirable about being obsessed with grades and standards and trying to be the best, trying to get a two one instead of a two two or trying to get a first instead of a two one? Isn't there something important about children aspiring to higher standards? Well young people, not just children. I think this age of like competitiveness isn't helpful. And it also, you know, I've never known classes until I've got to university. There is such a stark contrast between those students that have grown up in households that have had this kind of ability to think critically. They've sat around the table and been asked political questions and asked what they really think about something and made to feel like, you know, their opinion really matters. And then the kids that haven't had that. And I think this idea of like education is a meritocracy and that, you know, if you just work hard, you'll do well. Like, it isn't helpful and it just picks other students against each other and I just, in the classroom, I always say like, I'm not above you. You know, I might have read more than you but if you want to challenge my view, please do like, we can have a debate. And I think that's the most important thing about, you know, university is a space for debate, a space for challenge. It's not a space for competition and, you know, getting some sort of number on a page at the end of it. Do you think university is a really healthy place on that front? Because there's two, there's a lot of people, and I'm obsessive universities, I'm married to an academic, I present a programme that's got the word university in it, university changed my life. There's a lot of people say we've got two big, big challenges. One is there's a bunch of very specific financial challenges facing a lot of institutions that are basically about to go under. Some of them have gone under poll departments, whole universities have shut in recent years. And there's another which is there's a feeling that a kind of spirit of intolerance or censorship has spread across campuses in this country and maybe on the other side of the Atlantic and the culture wars have come for university and it's harder to have that kind of open critical thought and debate than it used to be. What's your sense on that? To be honest, I'm quite lucky I haven't experienced that kind of, a warwick is really good for allowing a very wide range of opinions and probably more like conservative leading academics and I know people who are more left wing than me. So I think a lot of the wokism of university and the culture was is a lot to do with the media and a lot to, it's a story. It's kind of like, you know, this is the reason why you don't want to get into it. It's too cutthroat and it's too critical. But I mean, critical theory and critical thinking is about critique, is about challenge, is about question, it's about holding ideas to account and you can change your mind again and again and again. And like, there's no shame in that. Like I've changed my viewpoints over and over again. I'm a student, I say something, I'll be like, oh my god, I never thought of that. That's all true. And actually, that's wonderful. It's wonderful changing your mind. Yeah. And if you could just have the courage to forego and forfeit something you thought of before to let go of it and to be open to challenge, actually that's one of the wonderful things because you don't know all the answers, right? And it's nice to be, it's nice to be challenged. On your thing about education being free, I wonder what the argument against education being free is if the benefit of, go, first of all, if you've got a time of tight finances, huge strain, lots of different public services and where you spend your money, the government spends around a trillion pounds a year, those are choices that you make as a society and as a government, which is democratically elected. If the benefit of university goes primarily to the people who receive that education, why should the general taxpayer, why should the people you grew up with in Rochtel fund a benefit fund through public taxation and benefit, which is mostly privatised? Because it doesn't just benefit the person that gets the degree. Doesn't it primarily benefit them? Well, what is benefit? You know, you have to define what benefit is here. Is it the job that they're going to get? Because there isn't a graduate premium anymore. We know that. So even that idea is like, right, so there's no economic benefit necessarily. You probably, the only people I know, my age of bought a house is that haven't inherited money are people who've had apprenticeships from being 14 years old. So there isn't really any economic benefit here. The benefit is about democracy. It's about having ideas, about thinking, it's about autonomy, it's about agency. You know, I look at places like France where, you know, they protest if like anything happens, don't they? They're out on the streets, not the bins aren't getting taken. If like the government says, right, we're pushing the pension age up six months. No, you're not. Because that sort of agency that people have, you know, we're not going to lie down and let this happen. We have control. And I think that is one of the most important benefits of education. It's about our public domain. It's about having, it's about the social value that accrues to everyone. For the fact that a lot, a lot of people have intellectual confidence and the ability to really participate in democracy. It's so interesting to say that because there's also this, you also mentioned the decline in graduate premium. And what I think is quite interesting and kind of counter-intuitive, dare I say it radical about what you say about education is a lot of people are going to university because they think it will help them get a particular job. And the graduate premium, which is the increase in the amount of salary you might earn because you went to university has been falling very steadily for a long time. It's now almost completely disappeared. It has disappeared from lots of different courses. And so increasingly people are thinking maybe I should a, not go to university or be do an apprenticeship instead. What do you think, because you said earlier, you think it's good for lots of people to go to university? Would you defend the idea of going to university to people, listen to this now, even if it meant they got into lots of debt because it gives them through critical thought the kind of mental intellectual equipment with which to have agency in the world. Well, I'm living example of this. You know, I'm in a hundred grad. - It's a grand worth of student. - You're in a hundred grand today. - Yeah, and it's still going up because I've still got one of the six months to pay. Yeah, I'm saddled with that. And I have no-- - You're in a hundred-year grand of debt. - Yeah, yeah. And I'll probably never pay that back realistically. But I don't see it as a debt like I would make it, I'd be happy for it to be 200 grand or a million pounds because what I've gained from it is priceless. And I think the feeling that we can change things and that you have autonomy, and that's what it's about. It's having a language in which to name things, name oppression, name what you can see is happening because so many people now are like, there is so much noise, there is so much conversation, especially from the far right. People want to know why everything feels rubbish. - And why we're on the edge of something, but we don't quite know what it is. How do you feel about, 'cause this gets us into nostalgia, which is one of your great interests and what your PhD was about. How do you feel about the fact that 25, 30 years ago, so the blink of an eye in the history of a society, people who are, the younger Louisa Munches from Rochdale, who went to university, who grew up without a huge amount of money, but were really interested in ideas, could do what you've done and not have any debt. And here you are, this public figure, this academic, someone with huge cognitive credentials, and you're in over a hundred grand a debt. Don't you think that's a bit sort of, doesn't that make you dare I say nostalgic? (laughing) - It makes me angry. - It makes you angry. - Yeah, it makes me, - This is right, it's incredibly unfair. - Yeah, it's frustrating because like, you know, I inhabit two completely different worlds. I inhabit, I go to Warwick and I teach these incredible students have so many ideas and you know, it's great, I love it. And I come home and like, they're a roundabouts with flags all over the street, the end, you know, where we live. And it's just like this huge gap in knowledge and in the feeling of power, you know, the feeling of power at Warwick is being able to challenge ideas and understand. And that's the next question. In Rochdale, the power is about blaming someone. And I think it's so frustrating to me because I think, you know, that feeling is, the feeling is correct. People who do want to blame immigrants or you know, like endorse an agro-fragile and stuff like that. And they feel angry about that we're getting poorer and that those are all things they should be angry about. It's just the way of thinking is the issue, you know. And that's what I'm trying to give people is a way of thinking critically. A lot of people who have these kind of dual existences between kind of where they grew up and where they maybe, you know, they achieve a certain credential and they achieve a certain status. And they leave to go to a residential university or they teach somewhere else. A lot of people have quite mixed emotions about it because they feel perhaps caught between two very different identities or they feel a sense of betrayal. How do you navigate the fact that you've got this life in Rochdale and then you've also got this life in Warrick? How do you kind of cope with that? Oh my God. Like if you asked any of you, like, my family, they would know how much I struggle with it. It's like even my supervisor, I've said, I can't, there's been so many times when I thought I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. What can I do? I can't go between these worlds. I can't exist in both worlds. It's so fragment, it's so fragmenting. It's so alienating. And that road, that M6, I travel up and down twice a week, it feels like I'm traveling from one end of the university to the other. It really does. And it's, it's, and that's the reality of it. And like, that's how it feels inside me. A lot of the time is like, I am having to get myself like, I've had two weeks off, and now I'm like, right, okay, come on, the way's our academic mode, you know, start using big words again. Because at home, I'm not going to do that. If I was, it becomes very, very lonely if you can't find a language to speak to two, these two different worlds. But it's, it's interesting to call it a struggle because it is like two very different. It's not you're the same person, but you bring, you kind of almost elevate different aspects of yourself in these two different places. But you don't, yeah, you don't at all feel when you go back to Rochdale, how could I want to get out this place? You know, in both spaces, I, I've realized I can't just exist in one anymore either. You know, I can't go home and, and stay in Rochdale and just have, you know, go back to the marketing job. I knew that when I finished university, I can't do that. But I know when I spend enough time in Morick, I can't stay here. And musical home, and he's, you know, sitting in a pub and talk about the football, isn't it? Because, you know, I think one thing about the whole idea of like selling out, it's, I think the problem with that, that happens there when people do inhabit like a different world and go home, they don't look across, they look down, you know. I think that's such a big issue. Like, if you do have some sort of social mobility, a lot of people will return and look down on the people that they've left behind. And I'd like, I can't do that. I've just, you know, these people aren't. I don't even like to talk about education as making your smartus, to be honest, because it's not about intelligence in this way that we think of it. It's just more of like the critique, you know, the, the question in. You mentioned the idea of meritocracy earlier. And one of the big kind of, kind of intellectual movements of recent years is to say the reason we had Brexit, the reason we had Trump is because the idea of the meritocracy kind of overreached. And I've mentioned before in this podcast that meritocracy is an incredibly interesting idea 'cause the guy who coined it, Michael Young, who wrote the Labour Manifesto in 1945 and he founded the Open University, he meant, he invented, he didn't invent the word, but he used it as a, in a satirical sense, to warn against meritocracy. He said that the, and it's amazing. We read the rise of the meritocracy, which I think was published in 1957, think he warned about how by the year 2030, there will be these people called the populists. And he says it's a terrible idea to split society in two between the clever people and the not-so-clever people. And to say to not, the not-so-clever people, you deserve your place at the bottom. And there's been lots of very interesting, actually, ironically, very intellectual kind of critiques of meritocracy. Would you go along with that idea that the problem of meritocracy is not so much that it didn't deliver what it said out to, which is a society based on merit, but that it's intrinsically dangerous to split society according to clever and not clever and make the bottom half feel stupid. - Yeah, I think that's a massive issue. You know, that's why we have people that, you know, like Donald Trump, he has said, I love the uneducated. - I think that's the most, I think that's the most, four most important words he ever said, not make America great again, but I love uneducated people. - Yeah, because what does that say? You know, he loves, the thing is when you don't have like the ability or the tools to think critically about political issues, but you know that there's something wrong, you know. Then you will go towards leaders. And if you feel weak, you'll go towards leaders that just simply make you feel strong. You know, that's why we've got this like big wave of strong man leaders. And I think that's a huge problem because they are just filling in for another emotion. They're not actually going to do anything, you know, they're not going to change anything because why would they? - They exploit grievances rather than actually by the answer to them. Let's talk about your ideas then and those flags. Why did you do a PhD on the idea of nostalgia? - Well, during Brexit, once again, I felt this like huge sort of split because I'm half Danish and I thought I was really confused by the fact that I was half in and half out, you know, I was just enough, but not quite enough. And it was a personal experience. I felt like a personal attack really. - Watchtale vote breaks it, so I forgot. I can't remember, didn't I? - Yeah, but I'm not sure I was to be honest. - Okay, so we're going, yeah. And all this narrative about taking back borders, you know, - Take back control. - Take back control, yeah. And I'm thinking like, what is this like return? What is wrong with the future? You know, that is the politics of nostalgia. Like if you can't think of a decent future ahead of you, you're going to return to the past. - It is an interesting factor about nostalgia in the past, isn't it? That the power of the past has been more, has tended to be deployed pretty effectively by people on the right, and particularly the nationalist right. So take back control was a kind of dominant Cummings idea, which was very, very powerful. Make America great again is Donald Trump. It's also, we've landed me a Putin, it's amazing. There's a guy called Timothy Snyder, who's the world's kind of expert on Ukraine. And he's written lots and lots of books on Ukraine. He wrote an essay for the FT weekend, a few weeks ago about how Putin's entire narrative about Ukraine is based on these sort of ancient mythical texts, almost as if they were literal history, but in fact the mythical texts about how Ukraine, the ancestral lands of Ukraine are actually part of Russia. And if you ever had the misfortune to watch this excruciating three hour exchange between a guy called Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin, when Tucker Carlson left Fox, he went and sat, I think, in the Kremlin with Putin. And it was just the weirdest experience 'cause in Russian, Putin just lectured him about history. Why is it, why is it that the power of nostalgia has tended to be more effectively deployed by the right? Why is the right so good at affecting that for electoral purposes? - Well, I mean, nostalgia has always been used by fascist leaders, always. It's like the one tool that seems to work, Hitler, flood and soil, return to the fatherland. You know, it's always a mythical return. And I think it works particularly for the right because it's a return to a kind of harmony, you know, of this sort of racial purity or, you know, it's. - That social order. - Yeah, exactly. And when people feel weak and they feel unstable, the economy feels unstable, then it's a natural emotion if you feel vulnerable to look back on the past. You know, even childhood, everybody seems, you know, we look back with rose tinted glasses. And the thing is with nostalgia, it's a fantasy, you know, that's the main problem with it. It's not a true remembering of history. It's the lost home. It's not real. - It comes from the Greek nostalgia from homesickness. - Yeah. - It's a sense that you kind of, you literally, and it's interesting because a lot of the people, in fact, one of the earliest guests that we had on this podcast was Guy called James Orr, who's one of the big sort of intellectual figures in the nationalist conservative right, he's a sort of advisor, I think, to reform. Frontside called the center for a better Britain. And he said that his politics was about a politics of home. And actually, that's one of the chemibadenox big lines, which he says that a country is a home, not a hotel. Somehow, this feeling of a homesickness, it's just been a fundamental aspect of nationalist conservatism for a while, isn't it? But also, isn't nostalgia a bittersweet? And the danger is that you get the sweetness for something that's gone. But you just feel bitter about the fact that it's gone, and not here now. Yeah. And that's why it works so well. It encompasses both of those emotions, it encompasses the feeling of hatred towards another group, that's the bitterness, the loss. You can channel that somewhere. And then you can use that sweetness of the idea of home. I think it's-- So in my PhD isn't just about nostalgia in this really theoretical way. It's actually called neo-nostalgia, because it's about neoliberalism and nostalgia. It's about why now? Why do we feel like this now? And it's about loss. That's exactly what nostalgia comes from. It's loss. This is what I wanted to say. If I could, in the spirit of your warwick seminars, which you feel kind of slightly torn because between your Rochdale self and your warwick self there, I just wanted to challenge that for a second, because isn't there a sense in which nostalgia is rational? In this country, I feel really conflicted about this, because I've watched your videos and I was so persuaded by and compelled by a lot of what they said. But I've also got this particular thing. I'll just be really transparent about it. One of the enormous pleasures and privileges of my working life at the pub is that I've interviewed a lot of icons who are people in their 70s now, who came of age in the 1960s. And when I read about the '60s, which I wasn't around for because I was born in 1983, I sort of think, what a time to be young in Britain. And obviously, obviously, there was a huge amount of terrible stuff going on in the '60s. By the way, homosexuality was illegal until I think 1967. It lots of people who were poor and lived terrible, terrible lives completely forgotten by mainstream culture. But you know what, in other ways, the 1960s, maybe '70s, maybe 1980s, were pretty cool. They had 3% growth. They had six or seven workers per retiree. They had incredible music and the Beatles. If you were poor in the 1960s, you belonged to the working class. And the working class had certain compensations. I'm not saying it's a hatchet-onising way, but compensations and constellations, which the modern poor don't have. They had trade union membership, membership of great institutions that loved them for who they are. They had roots. And by the way, they had social ability, which we don't have anymore. Isn't it true that nostalgia in Britain, when we've had two lost decades, and when you think about what happened in this country, in the '60s, '70s, '80s, isn't it a nostalgia rational? Because there has been a sense of loss. Yeah, of course there's rational. Oh, damn, I thought you were going to say no, it's irrational, and we should have it. No, because at this time, it was also 95% tax rate. We can look at it. We can say all the past was better. OK, why? Yeah, so we need to ask what the next question is. We can't just say, OK, the past was better, because there was more white people. That's the problem. You can-- it's called historical materialism in theory. You look at the past in a way that is about remembering, and it's about critique. We are always in this gap between the future and the past, and you have to stand steadfast in this ability to call things into question. You have to constantly be asking and re-contextualising the moment. You know, that's why we see people like pull down statues, and all that kind of stuff. That is kind of historical materialism. It's like, OK, this doesn't belong in our present time. Let's change it. And that is how we need to look at the past. Why is the left in this country today being-- I think I can say this impartially-- being less than effective at really articulating an exciting vision of the future? I think it's-- well, we've had-- The left-- actually, do you know what? Just before I let you answer, sorry. I should carry out that, because the left is not one thing. Yeah. Sorry, do you know what? I should be specific. I'm talking about Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party. Because there's other parts of the left. Jeremy Corbyn's got a new party, I think. Zach Polanski's got the green. So they're big on the future. So I'm really talking about the Labour Party here. Sorry. Well, I think it's interesting that you rephrase that, because, like you said, it's all fragmented. That's part-- and what does Nigel Frage do? Unifies the anger. Unifies the-- he follows it the same way that Donald Trump will say he's speaking for the working class. All he's done is get hold of that anger. We call it in, like, psychoanalysis and theory, like the death drive, this feeling of oppression that needs someplace to get out. And it will always take the path of least resistance. It's like a current, you know? So it will-- if you say, oh, it's this person over there that doesn't look like you and does it speak like you, doesn't work, clothes like you, it will go to that. That's a very easy jump to me. It's a lot harder to think critically and ask questions and ask questions. Because that takes time. It takes effort. It takes somebody to teach you how to do that. And that's a lot of things people don't have these days, you know? But isn't it also about telling a story about where you want to get to, right? If I think of the three-- I mean, not quite in my lifetime-- the three most, electrically successful figures in America are written on the left that I can remember. In this country, it was Wilson and then Blair in America. It was a farmer. Wilson gave a speech at the Labour Party conference. I think it's Scarborough, coming over the year '63, maybe, where he talked about the white heat of technology. He evoked this idea that there was this incredible moment in modern history and that Britain should be on the right side of it. Tony Blair was all about, you know, a new dawn has broken. Has it not a farmer hope and change? And I remember, you know, as a 25-year-old being so interested in the Obama phenomenon that went out to Chicago to watch him get elected on election night. I can't-- it does feel to me like the great whole and British politics. Though maybe some people would say, "Narjafraj is filling it." I don't think you would. Some of you would say, "Exactly, let's keep filling it." It does seem to me like the hope you change your stuff as Sarah Paley called it. Yeah. Is the great vacancy. Why is there not-- why is no one talking more excitedly about the future? Because we live in like an age of disenchantment, you know? We live in this age of like nihilism, I think. If you talk to like most people, my age, you know, I'm Gen Z. So we have this-- there's all sorts of like cultural wording for it like quiet quitting, you know? People going to work and doing nothing because like, what's the point, you know? And there is-- there's no real hope in like social mobility. Everybody knows everything's rubbish. And you know, it's nothing-- no one-- no one is going anywhere. And it feels like there is a kind of-- I don't know-- like a giving up of something. And I think it's-- that comes down to this inability to understand what's going on. You know, if you can't point to the oppression or point to the problem, you can't do anything about it. And all those emotions, all those feelings just sort of move around and they get, you know, placed on blame and all these other places. And I think that's the problem with sort of like the economy. So mystified for people. We need to demystify these sort of things because that's where empowerment comes from. It's being able to understand it and question it. So where do you think we are as a country? You say, "Genzi, what does that mean for people to don't know what that means? How old are you if you don't mind me asking it?" I'm 26. What kind of-- if historians look back on this moment, post-financial crash, pre-something else, what do you think sort of-- defines as like guys and where Britain is in the year 2026? Well, I think, you know, in, we've had this age of neoliberalism since like the 1970s since Margaret Thatcher, we live in the age of Margaret Thatcher. And in 2008, neoliberalism crashed, it died, you know, it was over and everybody knew it, you know, and even I remember like feeling like some, I was eight years old at this point, I knew in my house there was something not right. Like we were having conversations about, well, Mum Carichop at Tesco anymore, she's going to have to go out there and like we were having assemblies in school about what a credit crunch meant and why we might not get many presents at Christmas and things like that. So it had a real feeling of the end of something, but there was no ideas left to pick up, you know, so we're living in like the end times of neoliberalism, the sort of like zombified neoliberalism that's still walking around, dragging us along and we're like, we're not going anywhere, this, it does feel nihilistic because there is no plan, you know, we're just insisting year on year, it'll get better. That's what Kirsten Amikip saying, doesn't it? It'll get better, it'll get better, we're not seeing it. So we're living in the sort of the embers of something. Yeah. Are we also living on the edge of something in that do you feel that we're kind of on the brink of, maybe it's something very bad, maybe it's something potentially could be good, but on the brink of a entirely new chapter because the older order can't be sustained anymore. It reminds me of this really nice quote that this guy called Gramsci said he wrote, "Gi-cool Gramsci." We know Gramsci is in here and Tony Gramsci, the old march for the institution. So I spent half my youth reading Gramsci anyway. Oh really? Yeah. Well anyway, yeah, and he I think I thought it was Gramsci at the time. Yeah, I said Gramsci on my tics, I could ever recite it out like that. But yeah, and he says, we live, there is this time of interregnant, he calls it, doesn't it? It's like, the future hasn't been born and the past hasn't quite died and now is the time for monsters. Yeah, exactly. And I think look around us, that's exactly what it looked like. And we know what won last time. So we need to be incredibly vigilant. What won last time? Fascism. That's what happened. You know, he lived in the interwar period. He was in prison. He wrote them prison notebooks in the interwar period. But you think we're on the brink of fascism now? Yeah. Britain in 2026 feels too lucky to country of the brink of fascism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why? You know, I've, I did this PhD, I started it in 2022. And at that time, it felt a little bit better because we, bad and was in, you know, Labour were going to win the election. I was like, okay, maybe things are going to start to count now. And my entire PhD is just critical theory. I am just bringing theorists into conversation who wrote about a similar time to us, the interwar period, you know, and they've wrote this after the war, you know, so like, Hannet Iran and Adorno. And they are begging us to be vigilant about the present, you know, and question things about the past and what's being said and not allow this to happen again. And I can't not read what people like Hannet Iran or people like Walter Benjamin were saying and not feel absolutely like anxiety, you know, fear that this is what they warned about happening. And this is what they wrote, they wrote this to ensure we didn't do this again. And, you know, like everybody always says, you know, it doesn't start with bloody matching army boots and stuff. What is the greatest story to turn to kind of the positive bits, maybe your kind of radical ideas? What is the better story that the left should be telling in this country? And do you find yourself when thinking about the future and how the left can create a positive vision in the future? Do you find yourself not harking back to the past but looking back to the tradition to the left and socialism as a way of describing that better future? In other words, do we need better versions of old ideas or do we need new ideas? I mean, there's always this big debate in theory about whether, you know, we should think of something new, we should go back. Like, I always think it's really interesting. The left nostalgia is always about struggle and the rights is always about harmony. That's so interesting. I think what unites the left nostalgia for struggle with the rights nostalgia for harmony and home is a sense of connection and membership. And I think that the biggest my personal obsession and say, all this mindful of my duty to be impartial is that in the collapse of the old working class and its replacement with a new alienated poor to use a Marxist or a Gaelian term. But what we have now is an alienated poor, a precarious, the bottom 10%, who don't have any of the old consolations and connections of the working class. And I feel like there's something interesting there which is that struggle and harmony all about this desire for connection and unity and membership of some great a whole. I think that sort of comes from, well, it comes from loss, you know, we wouldn't feel so nostalgic if we hadn't lost something. If we thought we were going somewhere, people don't feel nostalgic when things are going well. And we have lost this sense of home, you know, that is undeniable. And it's not this idea of necessarily home in sense of the nation, even though that is an extremely appealing idea. And that's exactly where nationalism comes from. And that's what's being utilized by the far right. But a sense of home in community, you know, we've got this loneliness epidemic, we've got social media that seems to be lying towards in this way, you know, it's meant to make us feel connected, but it makes us feel, you know, the least connected ever. So these sort of like contradictions, these paradoxes that we're being served something that doesn't quite fulfill us every single time. This like loss of, I mean, we are social creatures, you know, that is what we're, that's how we survive. That's what, you know, we can do. And the whole idea of like it takes a village and all these sort of, we have moved, neoliberalism has created an individualist society. Like this was always going to happen, you know, and that's why I have such an issue with like my students competing for grades because it's like, it's not about competition, it's not about the individual, you know, in that classroom, we are a group, you know, we're all on the same level and we're all here to challenge power because I, these hierarchies and, you know, these, even like social mobility and everybody needs to be an entrepreneur now, and die over CEO, podcast, and all that kind of stuff. I think it's so unhelpful, you know, we are social creatures, we need to work together. And that feels like a radical idea when we have such an individualist society as it. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Louise Amantj, at least half as much as I am because it's a cracker. If you are, please do us a favor and subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sound. That way, you won't miss future episodes. If you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never, ever miss out. Thank you. And now back to Louise Amantj. What's a better future look like? What do you want to see, including the radical ideas you'd like to see in the public domain that you think people could get behind? What does a, what does a kind of more positive left vision for Britain look like in the late 2020s and early 2030s? Well, one of the things one is free education. I want people to think about education is this thing that you do all your life. You know, that you always learning. I want that to be, I just want this, I just want this to be more socialism to be honest. Like I want more public libraries. I want people to be able to get, I want everything that the people on the far right want. Yeah, I want people to be able to get an appointment at the NHS. I want people to be able to send the kids to school and not worry about it. I want people to not worry about buying food in shops. You know, I want people to not worry about the pensions and how they're going to afford a house. I want people to have access to services and to basic human necessities that are free or that are publicly funded. I just think like we've been on this planet long enough now that we can ensure that humans have rights. Humans have basic needs met like housing, healthcare, education, you know, things like that. I don't think it's, I think it's such a simple idea but people, I don't, you know, it's been twisted into all these other different kinds of narratives and I think just getting it back to the basic fundamental questions. That's what critical thinking is about and I think if you do ask if you have like mate so for. our family members that do support reform, ask them what they want because really I think we do all want the same thing. But it's interesting that can I just ask you funny if you don't be understanding, which is the divide between the way which young men are leading towards reform and young women are leaning more left. There's a really interesting piece by a really smart poster called Skylin' Require in the new States when this week. And she talked about the sudden divergence between young men and young women. So she said in the previous decades young women were actually more likely to vote conservative the men. However, this trend started reversing in 2015, primarily driven by the younger end of the electorate. In 2019, 18-25 role women voted for Jeremy Corbyn at more than double the rate of the general population. And it's really interesting. So she goes on many of note at the last general election, young, that's 18-24-year-old men, were twice as likely as young women to vote reform, while young women were twice as likely to vote green as young men. What do you think is going on there? The fact is, when you've always been sort of, you know, you've had a birthright to be in, okay, you know, to be in a buff, you know, we live in a patriarchal society, men tend to be a buff woman in this society, equality feels like oppression. So what you will do in those scenarios, and as well, you know, in terms of like economic crisis, instability, men will dig their heels down into all the social conventions because they are useful to them, you know, obviously this whole idea of like women stay at home and oppressing women is quite useful if you want to, you know, be economically stable, you know, because somebody will be at home doing the unpaid labour. So I think that's what's going on kind of like whether they consciously know this or not. And it also feels, you know, old social conventions always feel like a safe retreat a lot of the time, you know. Because we could be nostalgic about them. Yeah, and nostalgia is the sweetness is the fact you know how it turned out, you know, you know, everything was okay in the end, which is kind of like a safe feeling is a safe distance as well. What about why women are leaning to the left? I think that's probably a lot. Yeah, I think that's probably a lot to do with like more women are going to university now, more women. And I think it's again, it's like you can name your oppression. If you are more educated, like you can say, right, okay, I understand feminism and it's a matter of survival, I think, for a lot of women, you know, I've, I'm 26 and I've had my fair share of like, you know, being treated badly by men and having that awakening and thinking, you know, this is probably the first time or first last couple of decades where I can actually do something about it, you know, I can go to HR and they won't just say, oh, it's just not, that's what men do. You know, it's kind of the first time where women have been able to claim agency and autonomy over these issues that we've felt for years, you know, things like me too, movement and stuff. The political landscape for women has felt like quite positive and I think, you know, they would obviously vote in your interest to a more left wing progressive society because that's what it offers. And just a tie those two things together, if the, if the left of British politics, as you were saying earlier, is fracturing as it is. And if the kind of not extremes of it, because I don't think it's useful to describe exactly the landscape, the greens is extreme, but the kind of the further the left bits of it, the pelansky green element of it is growing in the polls while Labour has been falling in the polls. What do you think the left in this country needs to do between now and the next general election, which might be through four years away, if it wants to stop what you describe as the coming fascism? I think we need to unify on, you know, a topic. If they want stop the votes, then we need to tax wealth, not work. You know, I think we need to establish what the real problem is here. And they've, they've already said, you know, the real problem is immigrants. And that's what we're offering. We'll get rid of that. I want us to be able to offer an actual solution that will help people, you know, policy change, things like that. I think, you know, sort of, and that's always a problem with the left, isn't it? We love to critique, like critical theories, all that critique. So we love fighting amongst each other. Everybody is always like, oh, I can't decide what's the most righteous path to take. So nobody takes a step. And I think we really need to just say, look, let's start imagining something that isn't this horrendous, you know, capitalism on steroids. Let's just imagine something different. But do you think it would actually get voted in? We've got people quite quitting. Well, over the bit where it's, you know, anti aspirational, they've made us anti aspirational. People don't believe in meritocracy, you know, Gen Z, don't believe that you'll ever be able to afford a house generally, you know, we don't feel, I don't think like young people are on the any illusion that if they work hard, they will do well. I know you spoke to Eliza with the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, that really is it. You know, if you don't have some sort of like social mobility that happened in the 80s with your parents, well, where are you going? So what gives you hope? Because that doctor Eliza Philby, so actually, it's a brilliant story. I wrote a book called Inheritocracy. We did a podcast, which is really, really flown off the shelves. A lot of people have listened to it and seen the clips on social media. And since then, we've had figures, official figures, which show record levels of emigrating from this country. And it's quite hard to be certain of this because the numbers on people leaving are necessarily the detail and the data's a bit obscure. But it looks like record numbers of young people are leaving, which is a sense that I've got just from chatting to people for a long time. You're 26, you're credentialed, you've got, you know, this academic career, you're a sub-style social media, not that that necessarily pays for it. Well, you bridging, you know, the M6, I love this image of you driving up and down the M6 twice a week because that is such a powerful metaphor for social ability, which you know, maybe next time we come in this podcast, we'll talk about. But what role do you want to play in this future and what would be your message to fellow Gen Z's about why they should stick around? You know, I started it because I didn't have much help, like I felt. You started your social media post? Yeah. And as an academic, as you know, you really, really struggle financially and you don't ever feel like it's going to end like it really, so, so tough. And like, people who, I get so many messages of people who are like, "Should I do a PhD?" You know, I really like what you're doing and I want to feel empowered and stuff and I'm a nurse, but I really want to. Can I sort of like financially like absorb it and I'm like, "I don't know because it's honestly so, so hard, like even on your mental health, I've had like three jobs and done this PhD and taught, like it's. And starting that social media completely changed the way that I was thinking about what I was doing. I got some. I never once thought that anybody would watch it or that never might never be sat here talking to you six months later, like what? It's honestly believable to me, but that gives me hope because I think there are so many people out there that just want to know, that just want to feel like they can do something. And, you know, I always say to people who say to me, "What can I do? What can I do?" It's just talk to me, you mates at the pub, talk to your family, ask them, "What is it?" You know, if you feel like they're not, you know, they're going down this route of, I don't know, like the far right or. Or you just don't really feel like what they believe in is necessarily the truth and you want to challenge it. Do that, just challenge it, but be compassionate, you know, be really, really compassionate because division is not going to help anybody, you know. We have to really, really hold compassion and talk, talk across, you know, talk across, don't talk down to people. If I may say to end on a note of hope, not only, I feel like I've learnt so much from you, not only in this conversation and through your social media, but also you, it's a weird person I think to say, but I've kind of through social media kind of looking at people like you who've made ideas accessible and popular to millions of people has restored my faith in social media and the fact that it can be used for good. So obviously, by people doing all sorts of terrible things. So I feel like you restored my hope and I know you restored a lot of other people's hopes because as I mentioned, when I put out a call for questions, we were absolutely inundated. I knew you said very kind that you're going to stick around to answer those questions, which is going to be in our Monday episode, your radical questions. But when you started out as podcast, you said you're a bit nervous. How are you feeling now? It's done. I feel good. I feel really good. I feel like I got a lot off my chest. Well, you're welcome to come and see your podcast therapist anytime. Louise is a much, it's such a privilege. Thank you so much for coming in and being, I guess, on radical. Oh, thank you. It's been so good. [Music] I shouldn't really say this because I'm not meant to reveal what happens in the green room. But Louisa Munch was. a little bit nervous before we embarked on that conversation and she had absolutely no reason to be. But it did give me a tremendous sense of satisfaction at the end there. She said that she felt good and excited and happy once she'd finished. I thought she was going to say she felt relieved, but I think she really enjoyed it. And I know I certainly did. There is so much in what she said that stood out for me. One thing which is where we started out in the first section was her kind of somewhat interestingly radical and unfashionable encounter intuitive defence of university. Maybe it's said something about the temper of our times, but her defence of university was not university as a way of equipping yourself with the economic skills and the kind of paper credentials with which you can go about getting a certain job. It wasn't a form of credentialism, it wasn't a form of job readiness. It was her defence of university, it was pedagogy. It was this old fashioned idea, if I may say, and I think rather charming idea, that university is there for everyone, which in her view should be free for everyone as it is in Scotland today, but really to give yourself the kind of intellectual toolkit with which you can go about your business in the world, with which you can have agency, with which you can question everything, with which you can dare to be wise as the old phrase 'Supere, our day goes'. And I thought that was a really interesting thing because you often hear people defend universities today in terms of economic utility, the so-called 'graduate premium', whether it's declining or not, and you hear the same said about apprenticeships and about technical qualifications that they're a better way of getting yourself ready for the world of work. But maybe education is not about getting yourself ready for the world of work, maybe it's about getting yourself ready for the world of thought, by which I mean, ready for the world itself. I thought that was really interesting. The thing about nostalgia, and that point that Louise has made, where the left often construes nostalgia in terms of a longing, a sense of loss for that world of struggle, whereas the right has a kind of sense of loss and a longing for a world of harmony. I thought it was so interesting how, in a weird sort of way, you often find this in politics where people on the extreme left or extreme right, people on the hard left, people on the hard right, share certain traits, which they don't want to talk about because they want to pit themselves as opponents. But actually, the longing for struggle on the left and the longing for harmony on the right both appealed to a desire for membership, a sense of being part of something greater than yourself, being part of a collective, whether it's the home, as the politics of reform and national conservatism, and James all might put it on the right, or the politics of the class struggle, as Billy Bragg, one of our other previous guests on this podcast would have it. I think that is a weird sort of unity there. But all of this was suffused, because after she said that, I couldn't stop thinking about it. This was suffused with a sense of my goodness, here is someone of tremendous intellect, growing and big influence, huge passion and moral fervor, but who's also a hundred grand in debt. That is it for this episode to make sure that you don't miss future conversations. Please do subscribe to Radical with a Mulrudge and on BBC Sounds. You can also watch episodes of Radical with a Mulrudge and on I play it. One of your new resolutions was to make sure that everyone you know gets to experience the glory of Britain's most exciting podcast, you could do as a tiny little favour and give us a nice, juicy five-star review, because they help us do our work. They give us really important feedback and they help other people discover the work we do, which we are very, very proud of. Thank you so much for your time. We'll speak to you next week. Goodbye. [BLANK_AUDIO]