*35c3 preroll music*
Herald Angel: Our next speaker speaks British English. He writes books and he's
going to talk about those books. He's an economist and member of the Basic Income
Earth Network which has its 18th conference... had its 18th conference this
year. It's from 1986, 32 years going strong. Allow me to introduce Guy
Standing, talking about "The Precariat: A Disruptive Class for Disruptive Times".
*applause*
Guy Standing: In a book that I wrote in 2011 on page 1, I said that unless the
insecurities and the fears and the aspirations of the precariat were
addressed as a matter of urgency, we would see the emergence of a political monster.
You will not be surprised that in November 2016 I received a lot of emails from
around the world from people who said: "the monster has arrived". Today,
ironically, he is in Germany, inspecting his troops. Maybe a lot of Americans would
like him to stay in Germany, but I would not. What I'm going to talk about today is
something that has involved me in something I never expected in my life, an
adventure, because since that book was published it's been translated into 24
languages and taken me around the world to speak in over 500 places and about 40
countries. And the reason for that is not the book, but the fact is that the global
precariat is growing in every part of the world. And I want to talk about some of
the background of this disruptive class that is taking shape, because I think it
has a resonance with this conference and similar events taking place. Because as
someone like myself—I'm an economist—as I was walking around here this morning, I
thought: this is the future. You are the future—if, IF we are to have a future.
It's up to YOU to define that future. And I mean it very seriously. We are in the
midst of a global transformation. Those of you who are political scientists or know
political science will understand. Karl Polanyi wrote a great book in 1944 called
"The Great Transformation" and his book was fundamentally about what took place in
the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century. He described the mid-19th-
century until the Second World War as "the disembedded phase of the Great
Transformation". It was dominated initially by financial capital, by
laissez-faire economics and by a technological revolution that was taking
place at the time. It took place in which the dominant groups were around finance
and monopolies and imperialism. But what happened in that disembodied phase was
that insecurities multiplied, inequalities worsened, wealth inequality grew more than
income inequality. And in the process we had the emergence of a new class
structure, in which the bourgeoisie was confronted by a solidified proletariat.
The proletariat were the losers in the process of two world wars and the Great
Depression and we had what Polanyi said was the threat of the annihilation of
civilization. We all know what happened. But after the Second World War a new
embedded phase of his Great Transformation took place, in which finance was tamed, in
which social democracy became the dominant force. Labor based insecurities were
reduced, inequalities were reduced, and we had a period in which global trade grew in
competitive goods, but with similar standards in the industrialized capitalist
countries. But there were inherent contradictions in that embedded phase of
the Great Transformation. It became inflationary, it became sluggish. It was
no golden age. It was no golden age that prompted 1968, the riots, the revolt
against the system. It was a period of drabness in many ways, when full time
stable jobs were meant to be the Nirvana but it stultified the human creativities,
it stultified subversive thinking. It was a period in which there were many
improvements, but it had its limitations. As we all know that Great Transformation
collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s and ushered in the disembedded phase of the
global transformation. The disembedded phase was dominated by neoliberalism in
economics, by the emergence of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
to put those neoliberal ideas into practice. It was dominated by the
emergence of US dominated financial institutions like Goldman Sachs that
became great umbrellas around the world, and it ushered in to a new technological
revolution that you're all dealing with today. For my story, the most important
aspect of the early phase of that technological revolution was that it made
the relocation of production and employment much easier, so that the
relocation depended on relative costs. And it strengthened the power of capital over
labor. So we see around the world in EVERY country a shift in which more and more of
the income goes to capital and less and less goes to labor. It's a phenomenon that
spread around the world. And the technological revolution also meant that
capital mobility increased dramatically and we have some other interesting
developments which I come to in a moment. But inequalities have increased,
insecurities have become vastly greater in every part of the world. We have a new
gilded age at the top and at the bottom, and that gilded age has gone with a new
Kondratiev long wave of technological revolution, which has helped in the
relocation again of the geopolitical POWER that is so important today. We have, now,
moved away from the neoliberal era of the 1980s and 1990s and a pivotal event came
in 1994, when the passage of TRIPS by the World Trade Organization—TRIPS: Trade-
Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. What this did is globalize the American
system of intellectual property rights, with patents, with copyright, with brands,
with all of the adages that go with that system. So now we have a system in which
about a quarter of the world's GDP—national income—is attributable to
intellectual property rights. Some of you benefit from patents and other copyrights
rights and so on, but it's a system that has entrenched powerful big corporations.
So we have big pharma, we have big finance and above all, we have big tech. The big
tech are rentiers taking more and more from the world's income pile. And in
effect we have rentier capitalism today, not a free market. This is the most UNfree
market system ever created in history. Where more and more of the income is going
to the owners of property. Physical property, financial property, and
intellectual property. We've had a breakdown of the income distribution
system of the 20th century, it's broken. Wages have been stagnating in all
industrialized countries for three decades. Three decades! They are lower in
the United States in real wage terms than they were in the 1980s. The implications
are dramatic and above all we've got a new global class structure that has taken
shape. The class structure has a plutocracy at the top. It's not the top
1%, it's the top ZERO point one percent of multibillionaires striding the globe as
global citizens, taking more and more rental income. Take someone like Jeff
Bezos. His income has grown by four hundred million dollars per WEEK this
year. This is obscenity, multiplied. This plutocracy of course now have a
representative in the White House, as their spokesperson. We have other
plutocrats manipulating our politics, manipulating our technology, manipulating
our commons. These are the realities. Beneath the plutocracy is an elite who are
the servants of the plutocrats, who are making many millions of dollars, euros,
pounds or whatever and are servants. We don't have to feel sorry for them either.
Below them is the salariat. When I was a student, we were told and we were taught
and we believed that by the end of the 20th century the vast majority of us would
be part of the salariat with stable salaried employment, with pensions to look
forward to, paid holidays, paid medical leave, paid this, paid that, paid the
rest. The only problem is that the salariat has been shrinking everywhere in
the world. It won't disappear, but today many in the salariat worry about their
daughters and their sons because they're not going into the salariat. Below the
salariat, just, is what a group I call in the books the proficians, a combination of
professionals and technicians. Many in this hall this morning are part of the
proficians. But be careful: these people don't want full time stable jobs. They
don't want to be saying "yes", "no" to a boss. They're making good money, they're
rushing around with their laptops or what ever over their shoulders. They're making
a lot of money. They're making a lot of money and they are tending to be
complacent. But they should worry about burn out. They should worry about mental
illness at age 28 and a half, or thereabouts. The proficians are helping in
identifying the technological and political options for the future, they
have a responsibility. But they must not lose that responsibility in an egotistic
narcissistic pursuit, a private gain. It's a difficult balancing act. But they have a
responsibility because they have the skills, they have the knowledge, and they
know what's going on. Beneath these groups: the old proletariat, disappearing
everywhere. They were the ones that established social democracy, the trade
unions, collective bargaining, tripartism, all the institutions of the International
Labor Organization. But today they are shrinking everywhere, and along with them
their political representatives are effectively dead men walking. They are not
the future. They did many good things in the 20th century. I do not wish to
disparage them in any way, but they are not the future. Beneath the precariat in
terms of income is the precariat, beneath the proletariat is the precariat. The
precariat can be defined in three dimensions. The first dimension is that if
you're in a precariat you are being told and you are being habituated to accept a
life of unstable labour and insecure work. You don't have an occupational narrative
to give to your life, an occupational identity. "I am something." You worry that
tomorrow morning you'll have to be something else. You also have to do a lot
of work for labour, work that is not recognised, not remunerated, not in our
statistics, but you know you have to do it, otherwise you will pay a price. And in
being in the precariat you don't know the optimum use of your time. Should I spend a
little more time networking, doing this, retraining, going to a conference, doing
this, doing that. Looking after my baby, paying the rent. And therefore you suffer
from what I've called the precariatised mind. The precariatised mind, when you're
stressed, you're anxious all the time. You put a good face on it, but every now and
then you see your friends collapsing in one way or the other. That's how it feels
for many people. Every day I receive emails from various people from various
places who don't know me who want to explain their experience. Sometimes I get
very angry, sometimes I feel like crying. But the pain out there is part of the
process of liberation as well. It's not just a victimhood, it's about people
trying to make sense. Of a life of insecurity. And another feature is that
people in the precariat tend to have a level of agitation that is above the level
of labor they can expect to obtain. The second dimension of the precariat is that
people in it have distinctive relations of distribution. What that means is they have
to rely very largely on money wages, money payments. They don't get access to the
prospect of pensions or paid holidays or paid medical leave or subsidised this or
subsidised that, they have to live on wages. The only problem is that the value
of those wages is tending to go down and the volatility of their income is growing.
So basically the second aspect of this distributional question is that most
people in the precariat are living on the level of unsustainable debt. One mistake,
one illness, one bad decision and you could be tipped out into the lumpen-
precariat, outside society, without a voice. And of course at the same time the
state has been changing its social security and social protection system
towards more targeting on the poor. So it's reduced the social solidarity of the
social protection system, and this hits the precariat in a very big way. Because
state benefits, welfare benefits, have been shrinking and they've been means-
tested and behaviour-tested, drifting to Hartz 4 or the equivalent in other
countries, where you're expected to behave as the state tells you to behave.
Not enough people realise what is happening down at that end of the labour
market, the indignities that go with it. The shame, the stigma, the poverty traps.
Whereby if you do get a benefit and you then have the offer of a low wage job,
you're losing as much in benefits as you get from the low wage job. You're facing a
marginal tax rate of 80% in Germany, 86% in Denmark, 80% in Britain. If the middle
classes had to accept such marginal tax rates there would be riots in the street.
But that is what society expects of the precariat. It's NOT funny. And in
addition, and what I think is most importantly about the precariat: it has
distinctive relations to the state, the institutions of society and governance.
The precariat is losing the rights of citizenship often without realising it,
they're losing cultural rights because they cannot belong to organizations that
represent their cultural identity or aspirations. They're losing civil rights
because they cannot get access to due process and legal justice. They're losing
social rights because they don't have access to rights-based benefits and
services. They're losing economic rights because they cannot practice what they are
perfectly qualified to do. And above all they're losing political rights because
they don't see out there politicians or political parties that represent what they
are and what they want to be. Now in that context I've described the precariat today
in an old Marxian term: it's a class in the making. Not yet a class for itself.
And what I mean by that is that while millions of people share the objective
characteristics of being in the precariat, they have different consciousness of what
it is. And you can divide the precariat into three groups. The first I call the
atavists. These are those who do not have a lot of education, but their parents and
their families and communities used to be in the proletariat, used to have working
class backgrounds of being dockers or steelworkers or car workers or whatever.
This group is relating their deprivation of today to a lost Yesterday, real or
imagined. That lost Yesterday they want back. It's this group that supports the
Donald Trumps. It's this group that supported Brexit in Britain. It's this
group that supports the Marine Le Pen's, the Orbans and the equivalent in Germany
and elsewhere. This group supported the Liga in Italy. You can name right wing
populist groups. There's good news and bad news. The bad news here is that they are
proving to be profoundly strong. We risk today that that group could lead us into a
new dark political future, characterized by demonizing migrants and minorities,
authoritarian tendencies, destructive, vile outcomes. But there's good news. In
my view, they have reached their peak in terms of size. Many are getting older of
that type, and they will not lead the other two groups in the same direction.
The second group in the precariat are what I call the Nostalgics. These are made up
with the migrants, the minorities, the disabled, people who feel they have no
sense of home. They don't have a home there, they don't have a home here, but
they dream of a home. This group knows it's losing rights, it's being demonized,
it's being victimized. But they will not support a neofascist populism. They keep
their heads down because they have to survive. Every now and then, there are
days of rage when everything gets too much, but this group is LOOKING for a
home. It's LOOKING for a future. Its relative deprivation is: it's got a lost
now. The first group a lost past, the second group a lost now. The third group
in the precariat are what I call the progressives. These are the millions of
people who went to college, went to university and were told by their parents
and by their teachers: go to university and you will get a future! A future! A
career, status, influence, dignity. And they come out of university and college
knowing they don't have that future. All they have are debts, disillusions, and
difficulties. This group is entering the precariat. It will not support neofascist
populism, it is looking for a future. It is looking for a new politics of paradise.
There are many people at this conference I believe are in this third part. The bad
news is they've been dismissing politics because they know very wisely that it's
being cynically manipulated by the plutocrats and by others, and therefore
they have detached themselves from politics. The trouble with that is that it
surrenders the ground to the others with a regressive, antidemocratic, anti-
enlightenment perspective. But the good news is this: since the crisis of 2008 and
particularly since the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring in 2011 and the Indignado
movement, more of this third part of the precariat are reengaging with politics.
They're reengaging in different ways, beginning to forge an agenda for that
future. And I believe that if you take a historical perspective, then I only wish I
were 21. I would love to be 21 because if you are 21, you have a vacuum, you have an
opportunity to forge a fundamentally enlightenment-led future. Let me give you
by way of conclusion a few thoughts on what that might be. The thoughts are
these: today are income distribution system is broken. We can't put yesterday
back. Therefore we have to build a new income distribution system. We will not
get anywhere by trying to raise wages. But we WILL get somewhere if we decide that
what society has to do is recycle the rent from the technocrats, the financiers and
the property owners to the commons, to the commoners. We must build that distribution
system by returning to the values of the enlightenment, of egalité, liberté,
fraternité or solidarité. And to do that, I strongly believe that one part of this
new income distribution system should be a basic income that everybody has as a
right. *applause*
I have had the privilege of working for this for thirty years since before BIEN.
Anybody can join BIEN, we have many Germans who are part of it. We have
thousands and thousands of people who are members. For many years we were regarded
as crazy, mad, bad and dangerous, but suddenly in the last few years we've
suddenly become respectable, at least tolerated. I've had the privilege of
designing and conducting basic income pilots in four continents, the biggest
being in India. Anybody who's interested: I've written a book, "Basic income: and
how we can make it happen". But let me just tell you what happened in India, a
country that's poor, a country that poverty is terrifying. And when we decided
we would do it, and we mobilized money, we provided 6000 people, men, women and
children, with basic income. Sonia Gandhi told us, herself, she said you're wasting
the money, they're wasted on drink and drugs. Two years later, after we had done
the pilot and seen what had happened, she called us back to our house and she said
she wished she had known. What happened was that when they started receiving the
basic income they did what all of us in this room would do. They started giving
their children better food, so nutrition improved, health of the children improved,
schooling improved, health and nutrition of others, adults, improved. People with
disabilities suddenly had a basic income with which they could be citizens. Womens'
status improved, sanitation in the villages improved. Work increased,
production increased. If you go to those villages today, you would have seen a
transformation. Now that happened in a poor place. We also did it in Africa,
where very similar results were showing. We've now got pilots in Canada and some
hopefully launched soon in Scotland, and the opposition leadership in Britain has
asked me to prepare a plan for doing it in Britain. If you had told me 10 years ago
that any of those things would have happened, I would have said I must have
had something to smoke or drink, because I must be hallucinating. But change can come
quicker than we think. It is up to US. I want to tell you one story. I still have a
few minutes, I hope, I thought... is that... what's that figure? I don't know,
but I'm going to tell the story. When we were launching the pilot in India, we went
to one village and all the young women had veils. And we had to have their photo
taken for the cards, so that they could get their monthly basic income, and we had
to persuade them to go into a hut with other women to have their photos taken. 9
or 10 months later I went back to that particular village and I said to one of my
Indian colleagues, I said, "Have you noticed a difference here?" He said, "No,
no." I said, "What difference?" He said, "Nothing, perhaps better sanitation."
"No," I said, "None of the women are wearing veils." He said: "Yeah!". So we
called some of the women across and we said, "Look, excuse us, but you wore
veils, you're not wearing veils now. Why?" They were shy. They didn't want to speak
to a foreigner and so on. But after a while one of the young women spoke up and
she said, "You know, before we had to do what the elders told us to do. Now we have
a basic income, we can do what we want to do.
*applause* Standing: And there is an e– there is an
even more poignant story in our Namibian pilot. At the end of that one I went to
one of the villages and I asked some young women. I said, "What was the best thing
about having a basic income, what was the best thing?" They talked to each other,
giggled, you know, again, talking to a foreigner and so on. And then one of the
young women said, "You know, before, when the men came down from the fields at the
end of the month, with their wages in their pockets, we had to say: 'Yes'. Now
we have our basic income. We say 'No'." That's emancipation. And if you can put an
analogy in Germany or Britain or anywhere else, you will find that this ability to
say 'No' to exploitation and oppression is a fundamental part about a progressive
agenda for the 21st century. We have to find a way of liberating people to say
'No' and also to say 'Yes', to say 'Yes' to the ability to help people to do
things, to care, to participate in the ecological aspects of life. And I think it
will help in both respects. In that context, let me conclude by saying: a
basic income is not a panacea. It must be part of a new system. We need new forms of
voice. We need new forms of work. We need to realize today the new technologies are
potentially liberating us to escape from labour, so that we can do more work. Most
languages distinguishes the difference but only in the 20th century were we stupid
enough to think only labour counts as work. I have never worked harder than
since I stopped doing labour, since I stopped having a job.
*applause* Standing: And what we have to do, what we
have to do, is convince the politicians and the social scientists that they should
change their thinking about what is work and what is not work. Every feminist—and
we should all be feminists—every feminist should be demanding that they change their
concepts, because it means that most of the work women do doesn't count as work.
It's ridiculous, it's sexist, it's arbitrary.
*applause* For me, this has given a new dimension
because of the growth of the precariat, because if you're in the precariat you
know you have to do a lot of work. A lot of work. And you're treated as if you're
being lazy. But there's another wonderful opportunity here. We all know or should
know that we are threatened by extinction. Extinction that comes from the greenhouse
gas emissions, the pollution, the erosion of the commons, the privatization of our
spaces, our loss of nature, our loss of an ecological landscape. We know that. It's
the number one crisis charging towards us. We didn't need the panel of climate change
to tell us that, but we know it. And what are we doing? We've just seen in Poland,
hardly anything. We need big carbon taxes. Big carbon taxes.
*applause* But there are two problems. There are two
problems. First, taxes are unpopular. And second, if you just put a carbon tax, it
would worsen inequality. Because the poor person pays proportionately more than the
rich person. Therefore we need to combine carbon taxes with carbon dividends. So
that the proceeds of carbon taxes are recycled. I think most of you can work it
out where I'm ending this discussion. Recycled as basic incomes. The carbon tax
can pay for a large part of a basic income future, and therefore this perspective
leads to you thinking: we can advance the cause of ecological survival, advance the
cause of security, advance the cause of emancipation and do what every
transformative class should do. The precariat is a transformative class
because it wants, intuitively, to abolish the conditions that define its existence.
And therefore—abolish itself. We can do it. Thank you very much.
*applause* Herald: Thanks very much. They say on
Congress every time, every year we have a system that we don't want to use anymore,
I think it's capitalism. *laughter*
*applause* Herald: We're going to hold a Q&A
including your questions from the Internet. There are six microphones
scattered around the room, so if anybody wants to ask a question in public, we'll
start this now. And we'll start with mic six over there.
Question: Brilliant. So... Standing: Where is mike six?
Q: Here. Herald: Mike six is over there.
Standing: OK. Hello. So Q: Hi, I was wondering... you mentioned
basic income and you connected it with carbon taxes. I was wondering what other
strategies you're thinking towards tackling other systemic issues we have,
especially in regards to land, which to me– you mentioned different types of
property. But the thing that land today is the proxy to access to all the other
values. So... Standing: Shall I answer that one?
Herald: Yes. Standing: Okay, thank you very much. I've
got a new book coming out to make me more boring. It's called "Plunder of the
Commons". And basically, what you've touched on is the theme of this book. If
you think of the commons, the natural commons, the social commons, the civil
commons, all our commons including land, water, the air, our amenities and so on.
We've allowed the privatization and colonization of the commons to take profit
from our commons, and therefore we need a system of levies to say: Hey, we want the
rental income back for the commoners, and that includes land. That's why I strongly
favor a Land Value Tax. A Land Value Tax is a very efficient tax and it has to be
part of building this commons fund along the Alaska Permanent Fund. Principles of
those... you're all familiar with that. We also need it for water, for air, for
digital information. I don't believe taxing robots, as Bill Gates proposes, is
the answer. What I do believe is we should put a levy on all the information that
Amazon and Facebook and the others are taking from us free and making billions.
We should have a levy on that, *applause*
Standing: ... and the levy the levy should go to everybody equally. Because you
cannot attribute the profits they're making to any individual. We have to give
it to everybody. And if we do that we are all the time building the fund that can
help pay out towards a decent basic income. So that's my answer to your
question. Herald: Thanks very much. Mic four.
Q: Hi, thank you for being here. Great pleasure. Just recently, Sahra Wagenknecht
was invited in a talkshow about basic income and future of work. She's the
leader of the German party The Left, "Die Linke". She said that she don't like the
idea of basic income. Her two arguments are she don't like it. Regarding merchant
neoliberal powers, they also like the idea of basic income. For example the CEO of
Volkswagen and other big players and second, she said if you move to a basic
income, we will lose a lot of—we, as society—will lose a lot of protection and
social benefits. What would be your reaction on her opinion?
Standing: I address this question in my basic income book in the following way:
every new idea in history, in social policy in particular, has been greeted, at
the time, by people saying it will threaten something else and that it will
lead to unintended negative consequences. They said this about unemployment
benefits. They said it about family benefits. And then, when it's introduced,
suddenly the objections go away. To me, I asked myself the following question: Do I
want that person, or that person, or the person I meet in the street... do I want
that person to have the basic security of being able to pay for food, to pay for
their rent, and to buy decent clothes? Do I want that? And I say very easily to
myself: yes! I want that! Don't tell me that it's going to be a threat to
something else if that person has basic security! Why is it, that so many social
democrats make this argument? I've confronted many, including one major trade
union leader. I said, "why are you so hostile to having people base– have basic
income? Why?" And the man who was chairing the session when I was talking, he said,
"I think we'll have a coffee break now" before anybody could answer and when we
came back he said "Well now we'll move on to the next session" and the trade union
leader at the back stood up and he said "No, I think we should answer the
question". And he said "you know I think the answer is, that if people had basic
security, they wouldn't be dependent on us. They wouldn't join trade unions" and I
looked at him. *applause*
I looked at him and I said "just imagine the morality of what you've just said. The
morality is, you want people to be fearful and insecure, because you want to gain." I
said "But you're also wrong. Because you're wrong in the following respect:
people who are insecure and frightened don't engage in politics they don't engage
in society. They've got too many things to worry about. If they have basic security,
they're more likely to stand up and fight for rights, more likely to stand up and
fight for the ecology, more likely to be good citizens. Why don't you trust people
more? Why are you so bureaucratic and distrustful? Believe it. We need a new
distribution system. And don't tell me neo-liberalism is going to destroy it.
They're destroying what we've got anyhow. We can do better than that and if you
deny, you—people who say this not you, but people who say that—you are denying the
enlightenment freedoms that we should be fighting for! So I say, stop being so
negative, to those people. Sorry. I was a bit angry but apologized.
*applause* Herald: *laughs* you've got all reason to.
A question from the Internet. Internet: There was a popular vote in
Switzerland on basic income and it was massively rejected. How do you analyse
that, what should be the way forward, and how can we *inaudible* against the
globalists who oppose basic income? Standing: I ... again address that
particular referendum. I participated in the referendum. We had no money. We
mobilized a hundred twenty five thousand signatures, literally going in the
streets. All the banks were putting up money. The main political parties were
opposed, etc. But we were doing fantastically well. We got up to about 40
percent opinion poll support *applause* and then one of our leaders, one of our
leaders without permission from any of us, went on television and an interviewer
asked him, he said "Well how much do you think the basic income should be?" and the
man, instead of saying it's up to parliament and everything, which is what
the referendum said, he said it should be two thousand five hundred Swiss francs per
month. Which, for your information, is considerably higher than all the rural
areas, the rural cantons, in Switzerland. At that moment we lost the referendum. We
lost. I'm proud of the fact that in Geneva we got 38 percent. And that was where I
was campaigning—it had nothing to do with me, but the fact was that they had more
meetings and more people could understand what the politics were. But the greatest
thing about that referendum is that today people in Switzerland in the auberges, the
cafes, they're talking about basic income, they know what it means. I gave a talk
recently in a big theater in Geneva. There were hundreds and hundreds of people. Many
of those had not participated. If there is another referendum I think it will
succeed. Switzerland has a history of even very mild ideas losing in the first
referendum and then a few years later a second referendum, they pass. So I'm
actually optimistic that it will come in Switzerland—but not 2500.
Herald: Thank you. Mic six again. Mic 6: I think a lot of the ideas you
presented here are, like, respected in the community and the Congress. But how can we
change the society? How can we change the mind of all the other people to also
considers these ideas to transform to a new society?
Standing: I think this is the biggest question you could ask. I strongly believe
that it's up to us. It really is up to us. Politicians have spaghetti in backbones.
Our job is to strengthen the spaghetti. Our job is to desplain why dreaming of the
impossible leads to it becoming possible, and then happening. I believe that we have
to be taking part in any small way we can. I will tell you a secret. Yesterday a very
good friend of mine, an economist, very well-known economist. He contacted me and
we were talking and he said : "Guy, why are you wasting your time going to
Leipzig? On December the 27th, when you should be having relaxation with
Christmas?" and I said "John, that's not it. I hope that just one person, just one,
will leave this room, with more energy and with more thought than when I started.
Just one." That would be worth coming to Leipzig. I feel energized. I hope somebody
here feels energized. We have to realise that it is up to us. We have no excuse for
cynicism. We have to challenge the Trumps. We can't let them win. For our children
and grandchildren, we can't let them win. *applause*
Herald: Thank you very much. I think you'll be around for more questions. We're
out of time, sorry, but you can ask those questions directly and I think they will
be answered in great length. Standing: Thank you.
*35c3 postroll music*
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