which i will try to say again we're just perfect to start our final panel and it's yeah you guys might know see this is people who know how to do shit hi um okay so our final panel sort of provocatively is called what is to be done and you know obviously this is a reference to the very famous  like rewritten like a bajillion times i bought just one example of this like that's extremely the sort of weird and obscure but this is doctor ali shariati is what is to be done which is an islamic marxist right and i do you think there's a little bit of like the specter of vanguard ism haunts always this question when it is sort of a gathering of people to say well what the fuck should we do and actually that's one of the funniest things about that phrase  one of my favorite contemporary critical theorist season buck morris says that that what is to be done is actually a mistranslation of a much simpler phrase which is literally just what to do and that's what this panel is about  specialists academics and activists and while most of this weekend's panels have been primarily analytic i mean there's been practical discussion as well but primarily analysis description right looking at questions of economics identity ecology technology and art and more this panel even if only an opening attempt is in part prescriptive right talking about concrete things from action to policy to politics and beyond that people might do and i also want you know this is meant to be a sort of plenary right so i want you all you know we always do q and a right at the end of everything that's pretty conference standard but like do you take a moment like if you have a notebook like think about questions that you want to ask and you want answered or that you're thinking about in terms of practice in terms of what you think needs to be done so without any more from me i'll and the thing is like vaguely in order i'll try my best to my left and again i'll make my joke but that's not a political designation is maria's fart murray's fart is the national director of the democratic socialists of america she studied social movement history and gender studies at u chicago before becoming a campus environmental organizer being busted while trying to form a union and then spending almost decade in the labor movement before moving to dsa in tw those are her specializations to my immediate left as my notes will allow me is erika smiley i will not read the whole thing but erika smiley oversees the organizing tip a jobs with justice which includes local and national campaign work and a team dedicated to developing innovative strategies to expand collective bargaining power she has written i used this line before but for basically everywhere a ton of places and she is organized basically everywhere like seriously he works on antitrust competition policy the labor market high red and student debt he is the co author all editor of after piketty which is actually on my bookshelf to read right now and has written for all so kind of like everywhere so please and i'm gonna ask maria to go first if she doesn't mind so the task we have before us is to transform society that's not a small task and in order to do that we have to build working class power so the question becomes how do we do that it comes down to a couple of basic questions the first is how do we learn what people are willing to fight for we can't make assumptions about that and how do we learn who they are willing to follow when they're afraid and i think those are the core questions that as an organizer i want to ask myself so i think there are five key things that will probably take less than five minutes that are big concepts that i want to bring up and hope we can talk about the first is in the era of facebook and celebrity we have to scale up our messaging we have to do it while we can and this is partly because we don't own facebook we know the state is surveilling us more and more we also know that we don't know we have to transform society for all the reasons we talked about in the climate panel we have to really scale up our messaging to a mass scale and it has to be created by and resonate with the diversity of the working class in this country and across the globe we can't afford to leave anyone behind and i think the the study was referenced earlier out of minnesota about having a class plus race narrative being really critical i absolutely agree with that and i also think we need to realize that we have to have as much poetry as prose and a little too often the left has a lot of prose so that's number one number two we have to create mechanisms for people to learn and we have to make mechanisms for masses of people to learn and we also have to learn ourselves so we have to learn to listen another thing the left is not great at but which organizers have to do out of necessity we have to reach beyond the choir and listen and dsa we do this by canvassing we're doing canvassing on a million different  issues in all fifty states and because we we have chapters in all fifty states canvassing isn't the only way to reach people but it is a really clear and effective way to get beyond that the choir that is the left and then we have to debrief what we're hearing and apply those lessons we have to debrief collectively because that's how we all learn and we democratize information and we have to apply the lessons because we have to evolve and grow  the third thing that i'd like to mention is think about teaching history and teaching ideas and that is the social reproduction for our movements that is really really necessary to do that means teaching people to question and think critically and setting space up for debates and for people to apply the things that they've learned when they're talking to people outside the choir means learning about past experiments like we talked about last night and it really means being willing to be changed number four we have to join the struggles because otherwise what's the point and i think that's the most important lesson is it's not enough to talk about and try to understand the world that's partly because we as the left don't have the trust of working people and the poor we have to build that we have to build credibility we have to build that by being in the trenches with folks and that's also how we build trust across difference and i coming out of the labor movement i feel incredibly strongly that the best way to build trust and build a stronger movement across difference is by being together in struggle and struggle is the only way we're gonna build power so in dsa there are three main national priorities that we democratically chose at our last convention which had almost i want to say seven hundred delegates i i can't remember at this point one arena is in workplaces this is where people most quickly realize who their enemy is and they most quickly realize that they have common interests across their differences and it's also the place where we can disrupt the economy particularly in strategic sectors of the economy but  reason i mentioned about people you know quickly understanding through their common enemy is all workplaces are our sites of resistance second is in the political realm the formal political realm and i used to some people say that it's it's the place that we should engage because that's where most people do politics in this country but i actually think that that's becoming less the case as people mention less almost barely fifty percent of people vote and i think that's something we have to take seriously the reason i think that we need to be involved in politics is because the results matter who has power who controls the state matters and what's critical is that we don't lie to people about what it means to be politically engaged right  what happened with obama is a whole generation of people became inspired and then hit the wall right and and that de mobilizes people so we have really honest about what we're doing when we engage in politics and in dsa our political strategy is to build independent political power and the way we do that is we train our chapters to power map their community and assess what the balance of forces is assess how how the parties function in their state and in their community because it really is different everywhere we don't apply a cookie cutter approach but you assess the situation and then we train them to run their own canvasses run their own campaign run their own messaging negotiate with candidates about what we'll bring to the table and retain some control over that so we come out the other side with better capacity a more organized membership a list  and more credibility and visibility so it really is about building our own power but not doing it in a dogmatic way or a knee jerk way but really doing it thoughtfully and strategically and then finally you know generally organizing communities for transformative reforms and other wise reforms that take power from the capitalist class that empower the working class where people begin to feel their agency and understand that collective action is how we're gonna win and in dsa the campaign that we're working on is medicare for all it's something that has a clear enemy the insurance industry it can engage with people that aren't even in the formal workplace in a lot of ways it would d commodify a huge sector of the economy and it is deeply and widely felt so when we're out on doors talking to folks and even you know when we go out and talk about political candidates if you lead with the candidate and then you bring up the issue people are like yeah that's nice if you lead with the issue people become deeply involved you find out what their self interest is in changing the system and then you can bring up the candidate and they're much more inspired about the candidate and the way we do our organizing around medicare for all we actually work in are organized around a set of values and princip s we you know we will mention the specific legislation because there are several options out there there is true medicare for all and then they a number of other market based solutions and we really want folks to understand what medicare for all means and what what it does not so getting out into communities is is really central and then the fifth of course i'm with dsa so i will reiterate why we're building  because we need to build institutions to organize folks and we need institutions that open as many doors as possible to the movement so people can join and trains as many people as possible and moves them into motion and community so we have regional leadership trainings that we do across the country to teach folks about how to do all of this kind of activity and we do the political education and facilitating debate so you know having a really holistic approach is really critical for the left and trying to bridge the divide between the academic left and the rest of the ninety nine percent is incredibly critical and i hope we can talk about some of these concepts  thought i do is take an opportunity to debrief a bit also about what's been said last night and today so kali akuno was asking how do we actually transform the take a step back and just think about where we actually are so marx predicted that capitalism would collapse but that hasn't happened right so what has kept capitalism alive have we reached a breaking point so you know the in the in the in the s and s right after the the battles of two world wars the depression capitalism picked up again sustained during the war and to basically go back to the technological frontier so capitalism was kept alive by convergence economics demographic growth but this has come to an end at least for the richer countries and will indeed be for the world as a whole after the the breaks catch up so what we have in the seventies is growth starts to slow down we get the thatcher reagan revolutions the neoliberal turn and capitalism seemingly reverts back to the form it had in the late th century which is a world characterized by slow growth now that the crash  of two thousand and eight was the last but only the latest in a long sequence of political and economic disorders in response to a crisis that began in the s so the question here is how is capitalism kept alive during that period something that marx couldn't fully appreciate because of course he didn't have the full historical perspective he didn't see this ability that capitalism has to morph and evolve and find new strategies and new energy to sustain so the question what is financialization what is it about well it's finance emerges as a locus of profit right instead of industry and production and increasingly a share of corporate profits is derived from financial investments investments made in financial assets rather than productive assets okay you so think here you you also get a u s squeeze on wages right so the the wage in the seventy starts to become stagnant productivity is increasing but not not real wages and the ability here to impose that project in  the u s happened through a kind of artificial stimulation of the maintenance of standard of living so even though the wages are low we can buy cheap imports the us starts to run twin deficits trade deficits s importing more than it's exporting and it's using the dollars that the us can print and these dollars are recycled into the us economy because there's a demand for us assets so in short you get rising public debt in in the us but the public debt isn't necessarily of concern unlike the greek debt as long as china wants to keep selling stuff to the us and wants to reinvest it in us assets so capitalism morphs into a creature calls the global minotaur i like the expression because foreign capital keeps being fed to the us economy as some sort of a foreign tribute in this model there's heavy reliance on the attractiveness of the us dollar as a world reserve currency but rising public debt isn't sufficient to keep delivering high standards of living to the us population so the third moment of this neoliberal sequence a rise in private debt people keep borrowing to maintain the standard of living and this of course is made possible by the very squeeze on wages people have to borrow to maintain the quality on life so that takes us to the two thousand and eight crisis  hmm what's interesting here is that the survival of capitalism was shown to depend on on master technicians namely the central bank's right that provided the system with unlimited liquid creating reserves injecting those reserves in the economy to the tune of a three three trillion dollar increase in the balance sheet of the fed doing what saving the bank's right the banks are key to the functioning of the of the economy you know schmitt was mentioned earlier in the this was a very schmitt thean moment where the normal rules were suspended  there was very little democratic control of the process so the response to the crisis was quantitative easing what's next even larry summers has given up the hope that close to zero interest rates can produce significant economic growth in the foreseeable future so can we anticipate the next move of capitalism right kali akuno also asked what are the forces of production today right he raised the possibility of a transition to a new regime of accumulation driven by ai and yes this important question of social control and could this be the next phase of capital accumulation in terms of value extraction but also in terms of political repression michelle miller's inspiring answer to this is to remind us of the potential for ai to do great things for us right we need to think about how to not make it about resource extraction but how to assert our own ownership of the data that we produce both at an individual level and at a collective level and this  brings us to the issue of monopolies which is a real challenge because this data is controlled by the these behemoth digital platforms right the facebook and google and amazon et so the question here for economists is potentially increasing returns to scale that it's a new world right with network effects this is not the world that economists have been describing yeah final issue to think about is how we how we collaborate i i thought it was interesting drusilla cornell's anecdote about obama that she said that he at least understood that he was ruling on behalf of people but then she added that of course he didn't so there's this issue of power and the illusion of electoral democracies right falling apart if we're going to transition to something else we have to understand the structures of power and how to disrupt those the structures because even with the best intentions if certain incentive structures are in place and power structures are in place then you don't get to the results that you want because you're trapped in the kind of a prisoner's dilemma right where the short term incentives prevent us from reaching the goals that are socially optimum and desirable so there's an invitation there also to rethink our views of productivity  business models that aren't driven by productivity jay you said something really interesting that capitalism can't account for its own costs so what we think of as productive isn't actually productive right so things like g aren't properly measured we need economists to step up to the task and incorporate the true social costs and environmental costs so that everyone can see  that the where the problem lies and we need everyone to be convinced of this issue that financial this financial version of capitalism that we have is actually destroying us all i think i want to end  invoking linen i'm very that's fantastic my name is erica smiley most of my friends call me smiley and i should just start with a quick disclaimer because in my tradition i am both southern and you know a longtime member of the cpusa which which dictates that i speak very long like a long time and i will do my best to curtail that my long winded this just for this program at least that we can hear a little bit about what marshall has to think has to say i'm with jobs with justice which is a national network of permanent community labor coalition's with the mission of expanding collective bargaining and collective bargaining power both the theory of what it is who gets to negotiate with who as well as you know the actual practice of it and i i'm gonna focus most of my talk on that specifically not because i don't think that political power is also key but i think that the the fight for economic power and economic democracy gets separated from the fight for democracy and a healthy democracy in general and then that you know comes back and bites us in the ass  and so we really have a mission to demonstrate how the fight for economic power and collective bargaining power is critical and central to a healthy democracy and it's interesting because when you look at it this way when you look at expanded collective bargaining power like the framework we have now is very much anchored in the situation that workers were able to create in the nineteen one thousand nine hundred and eight so which culminated after much struggle which culminated in the in the new deal and and so there's kind of a twentieth century framework for collective bargaining which by today's terms and frankly even by thenns is quite narrow and but when you look at the the map of the country you know a lot of organizers they like to break up the map and you know what's the blue stayed and the red state in the purple state i actually think there's it's the wrong map and when you look at the map in relationship to not who elects democrats and republicans but who  what relationship to people in a given area have to th century power that creates a much different landscape and in that context what's happening in the south and the teacher strikes and in kentucky and west virginia in arizona and oklahoma aren't actually that surprising because those who are in places that have not had th century political or economic power if they ever had it are much hungrier to find new creative and militant ways to build  century movement st century protections to surround the the the power building that they're currently modeling so i say that and i'm also very proud this week i should say you know jobs  justice was recently named by the us chamber of commerce as an organization that should be counted as a union i feel like i'll be framing that on my wall even though we don't organize individual workers or collectively bargain in any way  we have been considered a union by the chamber of commerce and for those without a real class analysis that can be shocking like why would the chamber want more unions but of course they want it because being defined as a union under the twentieth century framework is very limiting it's very regular very regulated you're very restricted and what you can and can't do and like all the other tax classifications c three c four whatever you are very much tracked and regulated into your ability to organize mass movement and mass organization and so again looking at this in the context of this current moment this shouldn't be a surprise for those who have a class analysis and understand the relationship between the th century th century power that we currently somewhat have or at least the th century framework of collective bargaining and politics in the country which is anchored in commerce and keeping commerce moving and anchored in this idea of labor peace as opposed to what i would argue should be a st century approach to building power for working people which should be anchored more in the bill of rights the freedom of speech the freedom of association the freedom of assembly the the freedom against to not be forced into indentured servitude of any kind these are the protections that should actually anchor a powerful labor movement and so when you have a labor movement regulations and laws that are actually anchored in commerce then of course the interests of capital will prevail as we are seeing now all the compromises and and all the holes and the gaps and in the the th century framework that's supposed to protect working people are now beginning exposed and exploded and then thus you have in may of two thousand and eighteen the us chamber saying that jobs would justice among other community and organizations and worker centers should be counted as a union i will be framing that i'm very excited so you know again the the question for for a lot of what i like to say it really is whose interests are ultimately protected in the end because this is a question that we have to to really tackle in making day to day decisions about campaigns a thing that i like to say often to our affiliates and to our organizers is you know it's it's sure the the arc of justice is long it may take a very long time for us to win stuff but what we do right now really matters and we'll you know really dictate what our victories mean and look like in the future and so asking this question is really critical and it may be this is my southern tradition but i don't like to actually like start saying what is to be done or what should be done without at least qualifying a little bit of who i am trying to tell you what has to be done so i'll just start with that i'm originally from north carolina from greensboro north carolina i'm southern and my first action was with my church saint james presbyterian and we were out  boycotting kmart because they were from what i understood from what my teenage mine got they were discriminating against black workers that's what i understood i didn't know that it was a fight with actu i didn't get that it was a union campaign right i just knew that they were being discriminated against and that we all the the black people of greensboro were not going to be a kmart until they got what they wanted and they did win right and i could very much see again as a teenager that collective action and militancy actually got the goods right that was a very key lesson but i say this because i've questioned you know over the last thirty years you know why how do i get to be you know anyone in the labor movement saying what is to be done what to do in the labor movement i don't come from a union family i come from north carolina which is a two percent density even when i was there right like what is it that that can't qualifies me but here's the kicker you realize that you don't build a movement for democracy you don't build a movement for collective bargaining power amongst people who already have it you build movement amongst people who don't have it and one it's just a very simple fact right like if my ancestor said somehow waited for the voting rights act to pass before they started trying to show up at the polls right like i'd still be working on some cotton field today it would be it would be complete disaster and so it's really important for us to know and it's important for me to know in terms of my role here and the role of jobs with justice is that we're trying to build a movement of this ninety percent plus but what will be will be liberal let's say ninety percent plus but really only six seven percent of the country is a member of a union right in the private sector so it's really higher than that okay well totally be flexible ninety percent plus of the part of the population has no relationship no membership to a union or even a worker center or some other organization that organizes working people if we're going to reach them and get them excited about the idea that in order to live and be active in a healthy democracy they should have governing power in their communities and at their work sites and in all frameworks through where their capital is having some impact on their lives that's the kind of movement that could actually change the paradigm of our country that could that's the kind of movement that could challenge and actually make the right demands when there is a crisis in capital that's the kind of movement that when there's a bailout of the auto companies is that's the kind of movement that will then say well how much do we own  then do we get a seat on the board you know like that's there's a kind of advance those are the types of subtle things that happen when you build a movement of people who don't necessarily have economic power but want it so i wanted to give a couple of  examples i have a whole bunch of stuff written here i wasn't quite sure how to prepare for this to be honest i have a you know i have like a complete like no it's okay it's like i totally destroyed the new deal it's beautiful one day we can talk about it i'll write a blog i don't know but i just want to go into some examples of what is being done and and talk through like some of the things that we could potentially do in the future together so we like when i say jobs with justice looks at collective bargaining power and seeks to expand expand the framework of it as well as a practice of it the number of people doing it whose bargaining with who over what that's ultimately what i mean right so i'm not just talking about at the worksite although that's you know if you can still traditional first contract after a fight at a worksite i mean look do you boo like you were really working it right now your your your anyway good for you so but there are other there other means and there are other things that people are testing one is what i like to put in a category of expanded traditional bargaining and these people use frameworks like bargaining for the common good and things like that it's really like a twenty st century version of social justice social justice unionism and these are where at the bargaining table like maria was saying earlier that that the worksite is in fact seen as a site of struggle as a site of resistance not just for the issues at that worksite but also for the issues of a broader community and this can happen in the public sector and in fact most of the popular examples are amongst say teachers or nurses who are negotiating also for some of the issues and rights that parents and students and patients care about and incorporating the those demands in their bargaining and as well as trying to fight for them politically or legislatively this is also true in the private sector i mean historically the united auto workers you know they you know fault  dad in michigan trying to not just negotiate over wages but over the cost of cars right for the look for the community being able to afford them ford what they were making so this is often what we like to call expanded traditional bargaining the next one is what i w put in the category of negotiating with the ultimate benefactor or the ultimate profit tier or bargaining with steven learner says bargaining with the point zero one one tenth of the one percent and and this is really important because a lot of times in this moment in this moment of our global of global capitalism the the person who is actually calling the shots is not always as clear it's not always the boss or the store manager on the factory floor it's it's often a financier or some hedge fund manager or whatever and what we have found that is that when we define the bargaining unit to go beyond just that specific site but to actually look at the the ultimate benefactor  bargain units around that person around that guy and it's almost always a guy then we actually are able to leverage a different form of power one example greg penner who knows who greg penner is okay one person that is a problem you should sister or and look at them right so like you know he owns a whole charter school growth fund and he's on the board of the hyatt and he's of course chair of the board of walmart like imagine if you actually combined workers at each of small town boss this owner of cj seafood they instead decided to go after the biggest buyer which in fact was sam club which of course was run by greg penner and so from day one after they marched on their local boss  they started targeting they treated themselves as a bargaining unit for walmart and greg penner and wouldn't you know before even though retail clerks have been organizing and big unions and putting a lot of money into walmart and all this kind of stuff eleven loosely protected not really protected at all guest workers from southern mexico got a meeting with walmart over conditions with cj's so when we actually look at the the class forces in play and organize our bargaining units based on those we actually can win the last one and and then i'll wrap here is what we like to call community different community driven strategies and this is when working people are organized not just as workers at one given worksite but as community members or as any any group of people that has impacted by some force of capital so perhaps they are tenants perhaps they are homeowners are underwater homeowners perhaps they debtors or student debtors or something like that right but that they organize and that they themselves are then able to form a bargaining unit and collecting to negotiate with capital in that framework and right here in new york you've got one of one of my favorite examples to tout  which is the crown heights tenants union rights on the one hand you've got you know some of the largest most powerful real estate moguls in the world here right and some of these huge building owners and and thousands of people who live and work in these buildings on the one hand you've got seiu bj organizing the building staff in many of these places and on the other hand you've got the crown heights tenant union actually organizing tenants in units to negotiate with capital with the same forces now  what the union organizes what they what they form as a collective bargaining agreement will be great it'll be more of a traditional collective bargaining agreement under the current th century labor framework the crown heights tenants union negotiates will also be an enforceable well i would consider that also a collective bargain agreement but not under the twentieth century framework something much different that allows working people as whole people to negotiate against capital in smart ways so i'll end with this and i end with this not because it's the least of the priorities but in fact because it's it's the most important and that's with the understanding of the role of white supremacy and confronting white supremacy as a way to expand economic power and economic democracy not because it's the right thing to do but because not doing so well undeniably guarantee our failure and i appreciate some of what maria was saying earlier about approaching marxism the best solutions to marxism in this day and age are non dogmatic are more flexible and actually have a very clear sense of the hegemony with which we are currently living under it has a very clear sense of how white supremacy hurts white people just as much as it hurts people of color but in very very different ways and of the ultimate bargain that is whiteness that separates working class white people from people of color and the best thing is is that when when unions and community organizations and other campaigns do this they went and they win big it's not just that it's the cool moral  charitable thing to do but that they actually went and historically this is what happened when we looked at the auto workers and their organization at ford after much pressure from black workers to actually organize in a way that centered equal demands amongst black workers and white workers as well as with canton mills orton aco and modern examples in the southern region or smithfield where workers came together in a way that was equally confronting white supremacy just as much as it was trying to win a first contract so i'll wrap up there because i think there's probably a lot of questions and discussion we can have after this but like i said lots more to say about the about the new deal well well no i won't do that anyway thank you i want to speak on the matter of opening up the black box of capitalism looking at the complicated wiring of exploitation inside and getting our hands dirty rewiring it growing up as we all have living through the last decades of labor's immiseration and rising barriers to obtaining life's necessities onerous burdens control and surveillance on people who want to live decently and independently has encouraged many of us to figure out a way around capitalism by d commodifying health education housing and even labor and that is all necessary but in that context figuring out how to change the way capitalism works rather than figuring out a way around it smacks of  incrementalism today i want to try to convince you that rewiring capitalism is not just also radical it is also necessary i'm gonna start with tax policy we once had a top marginal income tax rate of ninety one percent in this country not make their money by working but rather by owning therefore we need to go after the income from owning and of ownership itself and the best way to do that is to deploy the power of the state on behalf of economic liberation using progressive taxation to make it illegal to be rich second on antitrust policy long derided as either the preserve of corporate lawyers and their economic consultants or as a throwback to rural populism with little relevance to the twentieth century working class let alone the st century i now realize that it played an enormous role in bringing about the d concentration of corporate power and that happened not because big business was broken up or busted but because the set of predatory business models at their disposal was severely curtailed and they were forced to operate and profit insofar as they were allowed to profit not by sucking wealth out of workers consumers suppliers and of the business itself but by investing in those stakeholders more recently as right wing and see even some ostensibly left core siddhart i trust policy and it's enforcement was entrusted to white shoe lawyers on leave from corner offices weakening standards have allowed companies to outsource the workforce while still retaining control over it that is very much a labor problem but it is also an antitrust problem earlier michelle miller raised the possibility that employers would be able to surveil their workers and discern who was likely to be looking for another job and who would find one and then wage discriminate on that basis and given how race and gender work in the labor market this will exacerbate long standing disparities to michelle's nightmare scenario i would add two things first of all this is already happening and second of all it is the direct result of weakened antitrust policy both in making that data available to employers and in giving them the power to use it the housing and healthcare cost crises are also antitrust problems we need the countervailing power of the state to protect our interests but the healthcare establishment and the developers and reits well know how to profit at public expense if we want to make the public those public and universal options work for us we need antitrust as well i could go on to communications and financial regulation corporate governance all of these are necessary tools like taxes and antitrust the point is even if these policies require making state agencies like the justice department the irs the ftc the sec our battlegrounds not to mention the federal courts they are just as subversive in fact more threatening to establish power thanks to the force of law then a protest in the street or even at the site of production the left has to learn to fight and win in the walls of these agencies we created them after all but we lost when their initial purpose to challenge subvert and overthrow concentrated private power with the countervailing power of the state was forgotten and their policy think i'm only gonna ask sort of like one threaded question to the panel and then i'm gonna turn it over because as i said at the beginning like we want this to be you know as as as involved a sort that there is a tension and i feel like you're gonna get as much time to talk about a new deal now as you want to right beat there's always a question of sort of reform incrementalism revolution there's always a question of delivering goods  members delivering goods to constituencies or trying to build for something greater that might require as maria was saying right not lying about sacrifices and so i'm curious to hear so and this this question of the power of concentrated capital is i think one of the things that we've been talking about for the past few days so i'm curious to hear what people think about these various strategies these these various strategies and tactics and how we might revolution it's also incrementalism it's also are we saving capitalism or doing something else well so the you know our movement ancestors in the u s answered this question one way and before the new deal and and some of the movement leaders use their leverage in europe and in some other places to answer this question very differently this question of whose responsibility is it to provide for the good and welfare of the people now you know i am not for retooling capitalism so i'll just be transparent about that and definitely for building something different but i think that what that looks like on a day to day basis it's different depending on the where you're at and what you're building but all that is to say that the decisions we make now and the types of campaigns we win now really matter so for example instead of just trying to get you know enterprise based contract after contract after contract with all these small companies like what's the actual sectoral play what's the actual industry why play or what demands are we making on the state simultaneously that create leverage and also relieve pressure on on regular working people i often cringe the idea of this reform versus revolution question because you know it's like you know the people who are equai remember just like one of my favorite stories of being in college and there is a huge group that came in to our peace meeting or whatever and was like you know you're gonna call for strike tomorrow you know yeah you know in all six peeps all six of them struck the next day and it was like amazingly ineffective and i just think that and yet meanwhile so anyway the working people need to see their ability to win they need to see impact in what they're doing not just ideas but they need the ideological framework to then draw the lines and make much bolder and more successful more more successful demands so i think that's a really important and why i often bring the new deal into that it's because the new we're still kind of of living off of and struggling under depending on where you said the new deal compromises that were more about saving capital and not actually about building something different or protecting at the very least protecting workers for its own sake as opposed to keeping labor peace  commerce could flow more freely and i was actually in a room recently where a labor president who shall remain unnamed you know stood up and gave this rousing speech about this moment and the class struggle and how we need to just get things back to the way they were in the  like wow okay you know like i don't know if you were black in north carolina in the s but i don't think that was a really cool situation so i so i do think that because of that it really matters and that's not to say that our brothers and sisters in europe have done it perfectly by any scope of the imagination but i do think that those types of decisions in this moment as capital is you know reorganizing itself to be even more dastardly in the coming century  all of us and more deadly that this is the type of moment where we have to ask this question not just to say no we aren't trying to just save capital we're trying to to build something new but also to then sit there and say that and if in effect is going to lead to revolutionary changes like those types of small campaigns in order to have a revolution you actually have to have a bunch of people in motion thinking that something needs to change and that starts with with regular everyday campaigns that impact their lives and let them know that something can be won if they come together collectively to do something about it yeah i totally agree with that and i would there's a thinker that has been revived recently at least in the dsa world andre gort's who's talking about the idea of non reformist reforms i prefer the much more evocative transformative reforms because we need we cannot have collective liberation under capitalism i believe and the one way to think about this is talk you know doing a campaign because you have to confront capital otherwise people are not going to feel their own power and they're not going to see their conditions change recently dsa and austin worked with the labor coalition a community labor coalition and as part of our campaign for medicare for all they canvassed on five thousand doors but they also they talked about this visionary alternative and they also talked about passing a paid sick leave ordinance in the city of austin and they won and i was the kind of thing that illustrates why  it's so important we fight for small reforms but that alter the relations of power because people i would say not only can't we lie to people but a lot of people already know the risks  people have seen then when you push power it pushes back but what they don't have is a belief that they can actually win so it has to be close enough that it's winnable but also will make a difference in their lives and they need to see the path and then when they make it happen collectively then they're ready for the next fight and they feel more powerful organization i mean you know i don't think anybody here disagrees that you need to do both and you know we spoke earlier today about the teachers strikes in you know not in tentionally giving rise to a backlash in the cotton the state legislators that can seemingly end the strike with a you know concession to the immediate demands of the teachers but then are able to roll back those those gains when the spotlight is often when everyone's sort of safely back to work and it's very hard to keep doing that and keep pressure on on organs of power like that when you know that you know essentially the the power that is you know in control of the legislature you know ninety nine point eight percent of the time is you know they exist in order to disempower state employees or the workforce in the state in general in order to profit from its policies so i think you know there the i guess i would just speak to the necessity of having you know multiple prongs strategy for how do you win concessions from capital and then how do you make sure that they cannot be  back on the issue of the power of concentrated capital which i think you brought up a jay it's interesting so anwar sheikh said that you know the the real problem with capitalism isn't monopolies its competition  right but interestingly if you listen to people like peter thiel right like listen to it from the devil's mouth peter thiel likes monopolies much better than he likes competition right so for peter thiel the examples that he gives  is if you run a restaurant it's very difficult to make money by running restaurants because the margins are very tight there's a lot of competition so he prefers to look for investment opportunities in what he calls monopolies right the google facebook's of the world much more lucrative and so he looks for ideas secrets that will lead to monopol positions which leads us to antitrust as the vital question i couldn't agree more the problem is there hasn't really been a willingness on the part of the government to really tackle antitrust so that needs to change right and i'm particularly interested in in in the the big platforms right the googles and facebooks etc that end up really creating their own forms of regulations right they almost become states zuckerberg recently said about facebook that yeah we're a collection of individuals we're almost like our own state and we create our own rules same with amazon right they they almost become legislators right and that's a real problem so we need to think about how we change that i want to give you all an opportunity if you have any questions for each other before so on the matter of the state not enforcing the antitrust policy that we currently have or at least that we used to that is absolutely right the key problem in terms of kind of what went wrong is that they adopted an ideology that says if you have a large powerful corporation like amazon google and facebook then that is a technologically innovative corporation and so did deploy antitrust policy to attempt to tame it would get in the way of the true purpose of the capitalist economy which is to to grow and i you know i think that that's just  flagrantly false as a matter of economic reality but in terms of kind of changing the status quo the problem that is that you know that and it like dates back directly to the sherman act the foundational antitrust law of this country the second section one says basically you're not allowed to get together to restrain trade and section two says you can't monopolize trade and we have always had a dis an inconsistency in how we enforce those two sections where the first is essentially an attack on the little guy and it makes them much more it makes a smaller and relatively less empowered entities more viable under the law and the second section against the big guy has been has much weaker enforcement regime and that's given rise to the situation that we have now where you know basically not you know not only is there no antitrust enforcement against these powerful dominant tech platforms there is antitrust enforcement against the the dis powered entities trying to negotiate and bargain with them so we have for example antitrust attack on goober drivers and ride sharing drivers in general and seattle and i would be very afraid under the current law about the the set up that erica described in terms of tenants getting together to organize with landlords again the antitrust law has favored the one single powerful entity where you could where you have all control in one place as against the negotiation and collective  power of multiple entities and that so if we're looking for well what how do we have to how do we alter the law to go after the platforms and where we know that power really lies in the in the economy now it's exactly to reverse that tip that  historical imbalance i just want to say something i can't resist which is that the ideas of the ruling class shape our reality and that's why people consent to their ideas and go along with them but how do we yes it matters what the law is but what how is the law chosen i mean all politicians respond to popular pressure so we have to organize it's a lack of political will because people don't have power and the only we're gonna have powers we organize and this is why it comes back to my my original saying we have to understand what people are willing to fight for and who they're willing to follow when power pushes back but without popular i mean all positive change and changes in this country came about because people organized and there were riots in the streets so we have to organize and make that happen for the next time there is a crisis in capital yeah thanks i was also gonna respond a don't i i agree around this question of antitrust and you know we've been moving a lot of work on amazon both in terms of how to organize workers there as well as the communities in which amazon has been growing both for their new headquarters as well as for various distribution and sorting centers and all that stuff so in any trust has certainly been a big issue and a big topic amongst different organizations and unions who are paying attention to amazon at the same time when was the last time you knocked on someone's door and antitrust was the first issue they told you about that they cared about anybody anybody not even one this time so in order to build a movement right not even and she was she was trying  trying to help me out if we're trying to build a movement to change to rewire or even ultimately change the foundation of our economy and of capital we actually have to meet people in a very diff place and one thing that i would argue here is that and i think you actually said this earlier raquelle is is really redefining what a functional business is and i would argue on the flip side of that for us redefining the role of a union the current th century framework is set up and that in a way that incentivizes union leaders even the best of them to ultimately protect the interests of their small group of members usually at another equally small company right that can't really compete with amazon and ultimately then you know either falls apart or whatever do unionize us and so all i think is said you know if we're going to make antitrust an issue it's actually something that has to be it has to come up through the process of organizing regular everyday working people and in their experience with with capital on a daily basis whether it's through a landlord or a building owner which is different than the super right and or banker or their employer and so just like we might want to redefine say a healthy business as one that can is good to the environment pay sustainable wages provides a set of benefits or whatever you know i think we also have to define what a unions role is and this brings me to an issue that i didn't get to talk a lot about but i wanted to just bring in which is this issue of governing right there's political power and then there's governing and we don't actually have we don't do a lot of like discourse on what it actually means to govern because governing isn't just something that happens in like city hall or in you know whatever congress whatever the rotunda is called but governing also happens at each company it happens at each building and each enterprise and union should actually be buying for governing power in each of those places whether it's at general motors after we bailed them out or a different wall street banks after we bail them out right like there's a there's a step towards changing in shape shifting the entire society that involves this demand and creating a desire and a demand amongst people who don't currently have it to want to be able to govern and control not just how much they get from a company and from working but how a company itself operate what it produces what its business map practices are right that that should actually be the role and function of a union or any democratic organization that is organizing working people that's how you get to these bigger questions of antitrust or trade or some of these other issues that people you know will just gloss over unless they mean i think it's i mean it's it's a really interesting question to think about governance and replacing the profit motive right which is just basic finance you look at the p and l right is this profitable or not this came up a lot our main problem right now is that a lot of what we see in society is entirely driven by this profitability that's what's really crushing us but what do you replace it with so and how do you measure these things that's a challenge needs to be articulated conceptually so yeah i think that's that's the key project it all goes back to you know  and we'll take we'll do the same thing we've been doing which is gather a few thank you i'm interested in hearing more about the question of ai and machine learning and that came up in the in the context of ex so forth they're most likely going to be automated out of their jobs in two or three years so what could be organizing do when there aren't or there are many fewer workers to organize in the first place so i would love to hear in the campaign's that y'all run and in the imaginary campaigns for antitrust whoo how we together as part of the campaign start to envision and articulate a good life like it seems to me that part of what we lost in the new deal and then the further capitulations in the labor movement is the right to talk about what a good life might be outside of and imagine that together and so i would just invite some of  that so it seems to me that there are two big challenges to articulating this kind of transformative vision that we were all talking about one is the the incredibly diffuse set of laws that we have in the united states of which vary by state and also which make it very difficult to to create a kind of concerted political movement and secondly which is might be more specific to our own organizational capacity is that  ba so with with automation which is a real threat i think that and it's with relationship to amazon workers and many others particularly more so in manufacturing because the drones are not actually coming as fast as bezos would like us to think there are still be people delivering things but i actually think that this fear of robots who which which has been very much kind of perpetuated by the mainstream kind of dominant narratives is almost reminds me of like the old luddite you know smash the machines when in fact again back to the basic premise of like what we do right now matters for the future if we're just about smashing the  machine then this machine's will smash us we'll move on and we'll talk about wasn't it great when we had manual they were doing these the center third but if the demands we make right now are hey okay so you're going to automate you know twenty percent of these jobs either a twenty percent of us could lose our jobs and not have any kind of protection or safety net or the productivity that you get from that increase in automation goes to workers either through pensions benefits some increase to the social safety net some increase to the the tax base i don't  know we could decide workers and those places could decide what it should go to but why aren't we looking at these technological gains and then saying okay well what's our claim to them and i think michelle miller probably said some of this and in her i've certainly heard her talk about access and our control over data and control over the technology we create but the question in all of this whether it's automation or new resources or attractive resources it's what is the claim of working people over that how do we actually have power and how do we benefit over the the new productivity so that's something that certainly at amazon and some other manufacturing institutions is that we're looking at because if if we can work less and make more and have a more dignified life i mean i don't know anyone who would turn that down that i'm working with it this time um and then i think on universal basic income it's not that it's a bad idea although how but i think that how it has been projected by and and what what we're saying is robust social safety net that includes income when people are out of work right if we're saying like and at the same time holding capital accountable in the short term and ultimately figuring out how to  reshape the role of businesses and this profitability motive in the long term then sure yeah universal basic income within that context is fantastic but in its own as a policy without that like sans the the confronting of capital is clothing yeah i'm going to agree with that you know ubi it's interesting right there's the issue of increasing inequality that's a real problem and ubi could help to reduce the inequality from wages so that that's a good thing but at the same time it's not necessarily tackling the problem of institutions right it's just sort of throwing money at people but not really asking the question of what social capital looks like and education right is it equally available to people the other thing too is that ubi is is really endorsed by a lot of libertarian silicon valley types so that's interesting so i think you know when when the robots take over so here's the question right which so marx thought that that that capital would replace labor right as as the process of capital accumulation developed and that that's the the downfall right that the contradiction as there's more and more capital there's actually less and less extraction of surplus value right so th where does the spending come from so in the world of robots who is buying the product that the robots are making right if if the robots are doing all the work people don't have a wait to spend and i kind of think that  is a bit of a way to prevent that and keep the system alive and and perhaps that's why it's sort of it's popular on you know in silicon valley i don't know  so i want to start by the somewhat insider question about dsa there is a debate in the organization right now and the challenge is how do we make an impact when the resistance is so diffuse and also every place is different i mean i would turn that on its head and say every place is different therefore it needs to be somewhat diffuse that's why we can't have cookie cutter approaches to fighting back  also as an organizer we need to have as many doors as possible for people to come into the movement because it will take all of us to win and i think what i've seen as an organizer and the decade that i've been organizing is people people are attracted to winning and they're attracted to good campaigns so when there is an exciting campaign or people and feel their  power it creates what is it centrifugal or maybe say the way around it brings people in when there's energy and there's something really exciting where they they feel like we're gonna win and i'm it creates it's like a magnet it brings people  and that's the kind of thing we want to do because people need to be self motivated to do this fight and the other thing i would say is folks learn through experience and i want to just repeat something i said earlier which is collective debrief are incredibly important because you can learn what worked and what didn't work you can democratize that and then apply those lessons and i guess the one caveat is we all have limited resources particularly time which is a very limited resource for working class and poor people and that's why you have to have democratic process to decide you know how you're going to structure the work and what work you're going to focus on and then respect that to respect those decisions and then on the question of how to articulate what is the good life how to create this collective vision in the u s context i think it's talking about freedom and that and reclaiming that word from the right and it's not it's not not only important to reclaim that word from the right  it's also important for bringing new people in because people in this country think of terms and in terms of think of life in terms of positive freedoms so without glossing over the problems in our past i think we have to understand where we are in an american context so we need to understand around history we need to talk about the unfinished fight for freedom and that gets into the question of what does it mean to be free it means not having to go hungry not suffering without health care being able to live to your full potential and have dignity and respect and live the good life and that is a message that resonates with that's why bernie sanders was so successful it it's a message that resonates very widely in this country so a very very interesting set of questions i'll just go down the list i guess i have a fairly idiosyncratic view of the whole issue of ai and the robot revolution or whatever which is to say you know i think that that is actually mischaracterizing the threat that technology poses to the economy and to workers i don't think the issue is that workers will be replaced by technology i don't think i mean the phrase artificial intelligence implies that you have a constructed machine that is able to do the work of a human being and that is not anywhere near by on the horizon  i think what technology is used for in our economy and the threat that it poses not replacing workers but rather disciplining them and threatening them certainly through surveillance i think you know these issues  like for example you know the drones aren't coming as fast as death freezes wants them to come well he's it's not that he's you know doesn't know that or miss miss forecasted the future trajectory of technology he's talking about that because he wants to threaten his workers and keep their demands in check and so it's not really a technological point but rather basically that the use of technology in the economy and in the workplace is one one  given that i want to sort of recast the discussion of basic income in a what i consider to be a much more empirically grounded view as not kind of standing in for when wages are eventually becoming obsolete because no one's working anymore but rather a way to uphold worker power in the workplace i mean i studied this the phenomenon of monopsony which is basically wage setting power on the part of employers and the ability to dictate wages and discriminate among employees in terms of how much they make and in that context when employers have monopsony power what they do is reduce employment and increase quit rates in order to  downward pressure on wages and if they have less discretion over wage setting then it is no longer economic for them to reduce employment and and and i have downward pressure on an increase quit  rates because they lack that discretion and that's what basic income does so it is actually it has the flavor i think in the contemporary discussion of an anti labor or post labor policy post wages it has in fact a very very pro labor policy in in  it increases wages and therefore it's great it's certainly better than the in the in what has been the evolution of the welfare state at least in recent decades of basically making everything contingent on work on working  i should say on unemployment and therefore putting discretion in the hands of an employer as to who's going to get a government benefit that enhances monopsony power it allows employers to discriminate and to essentially auction off these the benefits to who's ever willing to bid the lowest in the form of taking the lowest wage and they're forced sharing that benefit with the employer and so therefore a basic income that is unconditional being it's its fundamental attribute is a very pro worker policy as to i'll speak so actually let me go to the last question and the issue of how do you deal with diffuse laws and and structures you know i deal mostly i work mostly on issues that  are basically federal that is tax policy and antitrust and i think that that's not an accident you know we we have tried to tame corporate power in many ways and it's not to say that it never works if you operate at another level than the federal level but when it comes to moving the locus of power say away from a given workplace that is going to defeat basically any purely localized campaign to to redistribute  power and so i mean that this the the view that you know the federal government is really the one kind of all or nothing place that matters in terms of articulating a progressive and and liberationist agenda his intention i would say with the very good points that both maria and erica have made about how you have to in organizing present victory basically because the federal government is a very hard to change its policy it is very much out of reach even when  you you know elect a president you know however you want to consider obama you know he obviously didn't get a lot of what he wanted because having a president doesn't necessarily mean you held all the organs of power and you know me i mean a lot of what i imagined you would have to criticize about the new deal rightly is do the fact that manipulating the the powerful the sources of power within the federal government is hard but nonetheless i would say it is necessary and this is also true of  race and finally to the question of the good life you know that is definitely way out of my area of expertise but you know i guess iii think the the move to discuss  freedom is important and and a good one i think i would phrase it more pointedly in freedom from control by by private power at least when i have felt most  disempowered or most aggrieved politically it is when i feel like my own fate in life is completely at the discretion of a hostile power you know that can basically do whatever the hell they want just how most of us feel all the time now right i'm actually gonna say just a quick thing because its ties into so much into the panel we were doing earlier you know like the the the ebi question like is it a good is it a bad well there's like shitty ways of doing it and they're good ways of doing it and it's often framed as like oh we should have a universal basic income or a job guarantee well honestly there's shitty ways of doing a job guarantee and good ways of doing a job guarantee in every one of these cases when these kinds of things are being measured automation right oh do you want to stand in that way or do you want that to be decreasing like decreasing the amount of time being spent working while maintaining a certain standard of living these are the kinds of questions i think you want to be asking got i'm a both end like you bi that one of the the best books written on ub i was by a philosopher actually uh philip van bridges in the s and he argued for a universal maximum basic income it was like the most money you could like problem but in in like theoretically in an automated world that's not a problem now is that feasible within all these other boundaries politically feasible all these things i don't know but it does bring me back to one of the key things that just like a marx thing  he says when the working class can dispose of its leisure time as it chooses it is literally stealing from the boss it is stealing from capital and this ties into the good life right it's wait we're not trying to buy everyone a job right like we're like we're supply we freedom is also freedom to do whatever freedom is freedom to study freedom is freedom to to do all the friends including people who work on wall street complain you know saying i wish i could make half of my income and work even if it was just like seventy percent of the hours like everyone wants to do that when you study economics in the beginning it's like oh you know as a worker you can pick how much you work and how much the leisure right and there's a utility function and it and in reality like the terms are imposed to you right this is not a choice that you have it's like either you don't work or you work as many hours and tends to be kind of crushing so there's a real problem of why we're working so much there's a interesting piece by keynes economic possibilities for our grandchildren where  like predicts right that hundred years from from now he was writing in one thousand nine hundred and thirty so we're almost there right hundred years from from that at that time we will have successfully met the human race will have successfully tackled the problem of our material the conditions of our material reproduction we'll be able to just work couple hours a day right and the rest will be leisure and the challenge will be what to do with ourselves with  that's and you said it much much better than i would have said it so i appreciate it matai a didge in relationship to the question about the good life which i think is is actually one of the things that we've been challenging ourselves on at java justice quite frequently because the ultimate question and and again the name of the panel is you know what to do and i think i think your original name was going to be something like marx now remember the to what end it's not just ok for me to like you know go to my family reunion and say you know i'm fighting for a socialist economy that works for all of us this is what it's going to look like and i'm fighting for freedom it's actually important for me to really understand from them what they consider or would consider a dignified life and more than likely it's very much what we've just been talking about particularly as it relates to time and control over our time to do the things that we want to do but that's actually the core value and the core motivator in all of our work it's not the issue or even the campaign although those are the things that ultimately make our values real in the world but it is our values and starting they're something that  left and our movement has been weak at and it's not a surprise that it's not any of our strengths not just yours marshall but it's something that we're gonna have to really work at because meeting people at that level is what's going to ultimately motivate them to make some of these bigger changes in the world yeah i believe beers are part of the good life this is a burning question how do we explain the fact that a large part of the industrial working class loaded for trump in the last presidential election  let me piggyback on that question do any of you expect that given the antagonism that trump has engendered in certain places that the election this fall will be any different than usual or might it actually have some point of change p the question about why the working class i voted for trump i recently read a piece by nancy frasier where she suggests that basically the past thirty years have really been about two versions of neoliberalism right the and that they defer chiefly on an axis of recognition and not distribution so recognition is really the idea of who from a given social class makes it to the top and so under putin the idea here was that we were diversifying right the social hierarchy ensuring that deserving individuals from underrepresented groups could actually attain positions that were on par with the white male salary which was great but not enough right because it neglected distributional issues which is all these other people who are left behind right that didn't have the requisite diplomas or degrees so these are all the victims of neoliberal paradigm and so she argues that those are the victims the victims are the ones that voted for trump thinking that it would sort of  that there was a void in representation right in politics and that trump was able to sort of seduce those people but the good news is that she also thinks that there's there's a real possibility for a counter hegemonic bloc right that could sort of steal those voters back she calls it the she suggests the formation of a progressive populist bloc which is essentially an alliance between progressive populist and working class strata who voted for trump so i don't know that's the full explanation but at least it gave me some some reason for hope well going back to the a couple of the earlier points i made when you look at the map of who has access to twentieth century power political and economic and who has long not had it or a recently know that in essence actually predicted trump's victory more than anything else to me i mean trump trump's victory of course we all know it was  a the result of a right wing overwrite populist movement but just to quote another nancy with nancy mclean with her democracy in chains right i mean it it was still a pretty significant disruption to capital capital wanted everybody else to win now there don't get me twisted they're gonna use trump to their all their heart's content but the voter base was voting for a populist economic  yeah message and framework against capital and that's why a lot of the polls show that bernie actually had a much better chance of beating trump than had and in fact i think the real question is why did people who voted for bernie then vote for  think that's actually where the secret sauce is and yeah it's not that many of them but there is a question of who then stayed home as well so which is a much bigger number i think the just like the the key thing to come back to on this is again the role of white supremacy not just in manipulating the white working class because of course they do have some say in the matter right but to the degree that in addition to other m with people of color immigrants refugees who were seen as as worse and taking their jobs and all this kind of stuff the the working class white person was also suffering because of under neoliberalism and no one had an answer for that outside of maybe in part bernie although i have lots of problems with how bernie address race i we could talk about the bernie campaign all day over drinks but the long and short is that that i think that there is a and in in response to that the progressive movement almost overcorrected you hear like foundations doing all kinds of symposium on the white working class and we should all go back to the white working class and and that's not i mean there are some people have been doing that right and organizing in their home communities in oregon class working white working class white people and i'm certainly i actually think that the key is not just to organize working class white people and the key is also not just to treat communities of color as the vanguard i actually think there again how we shape our campaigns really matters and so when we are shaping our fights in our struggles and our values around the shared interests of working class people as a whole which in itself is confronting white supremacy because if you're in a majority white community and you aren't talking about our shared interests and our shared values for people of color then you my friend are not i don't think it will create a big shift neither will two thousand and twenty and some of those people will still vote for trump again it is his election to lose but that's not the point the point is not just figuring out each election cycle after each election cycle the point is how do we actually build a bigger movement for democracy economic and political that's able to make demands on every city hall every state house and nationally in a way that's very different than now that goes beyond just the current framework for elections and i'll let somebody else answer the question about ubs so every single thing you said plus one that was great so i would say couple things yes we have to move the fifty percent that are not voting or we're not gonna win and they're not gonna come out unless something changes about who's involved in politics i would also say that it is not just a u s phenomenon trump is part of a global phenomenon it's a phenomenon based on the failures of the left that means we need to be self reflective about what we've been failing at and that and what we've been failing at is actually communicating with working class people around all the ways that they self identify and move in the world so that's again why i agree with everything that smiley just mmense tested program by creating an identity of who the parasitic other is versus a virtuous white hard hard working working class person and this actually this trend at this point  it is it's functioning across racial lines so what we need to do is as the left is really fight for universal basic services because these are the kind of demands that everyone can get behind this why dsa is fighting for a medicare for all system  that everyone can buy into because we have a shared interest and we have to have a tool for talking to people about that so ye after what i would consider to be the abject failure of neoliberalism in the two thousand and sixteen election that there would be some more ideological coherence to the backlash to what followed and i must say that i don't see that now absent this room this has been fantastic conference congratulations jay but i you know i think that in terms of sort of discerning the political tenor in more widely in the country there's there's i would say there were in a period of danger that people are inchoate in their anger at trump and there's a bit of a similar dynamic as to what i saw playing out in the bush administration which is that you know this is just a terrible regime and we have to get rid of it and just get  it out and that gave rise to what i consider to be the failures of the obama administration and that it was viewed politically as a success the day they took office or the day they won the election and thus you know ever the rest of us could finally i mean breathe out you know i think first of all i should say that having said that about that that is speaking to some degree from my own privilege but nonetheless there was definitely you know the the economic crisis was still very much ongoing and you know if the forces of of public grievance are you know feel as though well they've already accomplished their political agenda when the key decisions are being made you know you know what direction those decisions are going to be going in i mean that's ultimately what happened  concerned and i think resigned to the view that there's not going to be a really an ideological character to the two thousand and eighteen election i must say i'm not totally resigned to the two thousand and twenty election maybe i should probably share your cynicism but i'm i hold out hope  that there will be a very concrete ideological content to the two thousand and twenty democratic primary whatever your views of the last time this went down and you know potentially doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go down any differently next time but i think there is at least that potential as of today as to the question of universal basic services i i you know completely agree that the alternative has been tried and failed as a redistributionist agenda i want to kind of lift up the the view that though it's not just that everyone has access to these as a right which is true i would say that that the danger and phrasing it that way is to individualize  the the concern whereas the the real political agenda is to elevate the public over the private and you know anything that is democratically controlled or we should  the i guess it was two thousand and sixteen charter school referendum in massachusetts where all these right wing foundations were saying oh you know we were saying all of these arguments about how the charter schools were so great for students but we were beaten when the aft said that we should have free public education at for you high quality public education available to all how can we possibly do you know mount a campaign against that like simplistic overly populistic a political agenda where it was like yeah you know they showed us the way in that case and it is very hard indeed for the kind of strategies of separation and and atomization to prevail in the face of challenge this cycle and in the next couple of years we and yes they believe that single payer is the fight and if you're out talking to folks that we're doing on doors everywhere we have a joke that people are either not home or they're socialist because everybody has a health care story even if they have come it's terrible coverage so the challenge really is in the primaries how do we bring up this fight how do we continue the fight after the primaries into the general how do we continue it after november and it requires having a universal demand that allows you to talk to people  it's you know if we're not i mean this is i would i wouldn't even say that when we're on doors people are excited about so i'd say that people are spontaneously i mean it's in the newspaper people are bringing it up on their own you talked to nurses and they're pissed and they're hearing it fro patients so it really it's in the air right now so this is the fight to have and i think that's going to bring us very close to a close i'm gonna turn it over to gary bachman from the goethe institute in just one second before i do just want to thank everyone for attending everyone who spoke everyone on this panel all of you for listening people at home for watching if you know we opened this conference with people reciting lines and what they thought they might mean today and in reaction to this panel i couldn't how i couldn't help myself it's this it's the second most famous line marks ever wrote right the philosopher's have only interpreted the world in various ways the point is to change it can all join it through the internet so we have to have this platform you so thank you so much to the audience to all these exciting panelists and in particular world thank you