Welcome to Tiskey Sour. I want to start the show with a big thank you to our viewers and especially our donors. Two weeks ago we launched a campaign to make 25,000 pounds so we could move studio and within those two weeks, just before midnight on Sunday, we got there. So we are now in a very good place to be moving slightly down the road and closer to the tube station in the next few weeks. That means we'll be in a bigger studio, it'll be comfier, and it will be easier to get guests here, though as ever we still rely on more of your support. You know, we don't just want a bigger comfier studio, we want some full-time staff in there. So to get us to that stage, please go to support.navaramedia.com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. I don't normally start with the call-out for money, but I'm doing it because it's a special occasion. We just finished our 25,000 pound fundraiser. To celebrate achieving our fundraiser goal, you got out the begging bowl at the beginning of the show. Exactly. I got carried away. In the studio today, I am joined by David Graber, world-renowned anthropologist and author of Debt, the first 5,000 years and Bullshit Jobs, a theory. I'm also joined by Aaron Bustani, co-founder of Navara Media and author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Thank you both for joining me this evening. We're going to start by talking about the grim news that Donald Trump has withdrawn support for the Syrian Kurds. I'll do an introduction. We start the show with the grim news that Donald Trump has announced the US will be removing their support for the Syrian Kurds in Rojava, giving the green light for Turkey to invade. Rojava, the name for the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria, has captured the imagination of the international left since the Kurds there gained de facto autonomy in 2012 amid the deadly chaos of the Syrian civil war. Since 2012, Rojava has been organised as a secular and democratic community inspired by libertarian socialist ideology. It has also been the key force on the ground in Syria responsible for the defeat of ISIS. Throughout the Syrian civil war the Kurds have been the most reliable ally of the United States with the latter providing the air cover necessary to defeat Islamic State and the US have up to now provided Syrian Kurds with protection from Turkish invasion. The background there is that Recep Erdogan, Turkey's president, has throughout the Syrian civil war seen the empowerment of Kurds as the biggest geostrategic threat to Turkish interest believing it will fuel the struggle for Kurdish autonomy and Kurdish self-determination within Turkish borders. But since Monday that American support has now been withdrawn, Trump announced yesterday on Twitter that the US would no longer provide military cover for the Syrian Kurds and the White House has confirmed with Erdogan that Turkey could, and this is in the words of the state, the White House press officers move forward with its long planned operation into northern Syria. And we're going to move on to the immediate implications of that decision, what that will say for people on the ground there. But I wanted to start with I suppose a bit of an introduction to the struggle in Rejava especially from your perspective you've been someone who's been following this for a while now. A few years. So I wonder if you could explain I suppose to the audience why you've been so interested in what's going on there and a bit of background to I suppose why do the left follow what's going on there? Well I mean this is one of the most exciting political experiments really since the anarchists in Spain in the 1930s. This is one of the few occasions when people have actually had an extensive stretch of territory in which to try to see if libertarian socialist ideas can really be put into practice and actually work on the ground with a lot of really startling success to be honest. I first found out about the revolution in Rejava when people there contacted me and you know at first I think everyone reacted of a certain degree of incredulity. I mean is this really true? Could this be happening? Could all of this been happening for all these years and I'd never heard about it. But you know the more I learned the more I was really struck by how profound an historical experiment it really was. In what way? What does that mean? I mean what we're talking about is really something that started within the PKK which is the guerrilla movement and it's a larger political movement within Turkey which is originally a separate Marxist-Leninist separatist movement. Over time it has evolved and often this is attributed almost exclusively to the personality of one person or the head of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan. Although in fact a lot of what happened within the PKK was the result of internal struggle, especially women's struggle within the organization itself. What Ocalan has to be credited is that he was open to it which for the most part these sort of old patriarchal Marxist-Leninist types are not and gradually over time PKK transformed from relatively traditional national liberation struggle to was pushing for a separate Kurdish state to something really different. A group whose major planks are social ecology a lot of inspired by Murray Bookchin although they have their own version of democratic and federalism that they've developed partly based on their own experience partly on Kurdish traditions and partly based on anarchist theory. So you have social ecology, direct democracy and women's liberation being sort of primary planks of a social struggle which no longer actually desires a separate state at all in fact sees itself as an essential opposition to the very idea of a state. This is something which we haven't seen anything really like it happen in many years and there's asapatistas some closest parallel one can think of but even asapatistas don't really control a contiguous territory whereas these people actually do. And there's been I suppose what could seem a somewhat bizarre or strange or unlikely alliance between this movement in Rajava, Liberationary, Libertarian Socialist and the United States. So it was the combination of those two forces that was capable of defeating ISIS since 2014 and it is protection from the United States. It's protected Rajava from other enemies well Turkey which is what we'll get on to in a moment. If you want me to do the background I can't. There's a PKK originally that had this profound transformation. What happened in Syria was PYD. It was a political party with very similar ideology also follows the writings of Ojalana whatnot. They are not directly connected but during the Syrian Revolution essentially the Syrian government pulled out of that area. It had been very strongly organized the Kurdish parts of Syria and negotiations ensued and they basically talked the Syrian forces into just pulling out and leaving people there to handle their own affairs. I mean they took everything when they left. I mean down to the light bulbs you know I mean all government offices were stripped of everything. The Syrian government essentially and the sort of lackeys and flunkies and sort of magnates who had privatized all the stuff and really sort of crony capitalists all took off too. So they were an incredibly advantageous situation. All the government buildings had nothing in them but they were empty and they suddenly had the situation where they were actually able to put the things they'd been working out and discussing in theory for 20 years into effect. Now at first basically nobody noticed them. Then there were several attacks from various jihadists largely who seemed to have been funded if not absolutely directed by the Turkish secret police but gradually the Kurdish region ended up in a conflict with ISIS. ISIS, well the origins of ISIS still remain obscure but it's very clear that Turkish intelligence along with various Gulf state intelligence had a lot to do with putting them together and they seem to have coordinated quite well with Turkish authorities of various kinds that are trading with Turkey. For example during the height of ISIS the caliphate was openly trading oil with Turkey while the Kurdish region was under total embargo. It's one of these situations where everyone in the region knows what's going on but you're not allowed to say it on TV outside of in Europe or America. I mean they constantly find high-ranking ISIS officers when they kill them. You know we have Turkish intelligence ID in their pockets. I mean really blatant stuff like that but still somehow it was like how could you possibly suggest that a NATO ally is dealing with ISIS here. We're all not supposed to talk about it but so ISIS which is essentially acting as a Turkish proxy was trying to take out the Kurdish region of North Syria to consolidate their power there and especially to you know consolidate the border with Turkey which is where they're getting their supplies. They went after Kobane which is the flattest area and the easiest to attack and it turned into this epic struggle in which essentially the U.S. was forced for various reasons to align themselves with people who are basically very close to a bunch of anarchists. It's a very weird historical situation but they were caught in the middle and eventually an alliance of convenience followed. I always emphasize this was a military alliance and not a political alliance. For example the American government has never supported Rojava being part of the peace process in Syria. They don't have a place at the table at all even though these tiny little political parties basically represent nobody on the ground. Russia actually supports Rojava being in the peace process and America doesn't. Most people don't know that. There was a military alliance simply because they both have the same enemy and as a result there have been certain attachments that particularly personal attachments you know a lot of the Americans who were down there ended up feeling well these guys are our friends are the only people who we could actually trust and feel very strongly that they shouldn't be thrown to the wolves. There's also a practical matter a lot of the American officers say well look if we align with someone and then allow them to be completely wiped out the moment they're no longer convenient to us by our own allies well no one's ever going to rely with us again. That's the debate that's going on in the United States right now right now. Yeah the thing about military alliances and you know this is something which most members of the British or American public will be completely unaware of. In Iraq in recent years the U.S. haven't just been working alongside Shia non-state actors they've been actively working alongside the Iranians. Oh yeah. U.S. special forces were you know were seen wearing for instance clothes of Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq at the same time like you say they're working alongside the SDF in Syria and Kurdistan and that's fine you know those are entirely pragmatic necessary alliances in times of war but it's incredibly odd the lack of journalistic coverage it's had from someone like the BBC you know just trying to give a decent impartial overview of what's going on because that complexity you know I think allows the audience allows the general public to appreciate that any solution will necessarily have to also be sufficiently complex there's no simple solution here when you have a military alliance in Iraq which includes Iran the U.S. Kurdish Iraqi Kurds similarly if you have something similar in de facto you had the same thing in in Syria and Kurdistan let's be real you've had you got Assad and the Russians and the Iranians on one side tacitly the SDF are not saying anything but they're not fighting one another and the Americans are providing the SDF air support but they still hate Assad and the Russians and the Iranians I just think a bit more of an honest national conversation about these these tensions would be very helpful sadly they're not you know what really summed this up for me was I saw some American Twitter account Trump supporter saying oh actually the the YPG you know the the sort of these fighting forces in Syria and Kurdistan ally to the PKK the YPG aren't all that good because they support Antifa you know they can't be good because Antifa are a terrorist organization you think well the only people these guys are killing are generally speaking you know ISIS and adjacent political organizations don't seem to understand that ISIS is far yeah that level of complexity I think you know again you know we should be talking about this it shouldn't just be like Navarra on the left and David Gray but you know once in a while on the BBC it should be a perfectly legitimate mainstream thing to be talking about but PVC has never put me on a dystopic okay I should I want to talk a bit more about the the relationship between the US and Turkey during this whole period because I think it's easy to understand how the military alliance against ISIS worked it was the United States wanted to defeat ISIS the Kurds were on the ground and willing to and and also needed to defeat ISIS and so you had air power American planes that were giving back up to Kurds on the ground right ISIS although obviously the threat hasn't subsided and we might come back to whether the latest developments risk risk their return but they haven't been the most mortal threat as it were to the Syrian Kurds for a while that's been coming from Turkey we want to destroy them for for geostrategic reasons how has and it's been America as far as I understand it that has been protecting the Syrian Kurds from a Turkish invasion this is actually a very fascinating story because um first of all when we're talking about the Kurds the Syrian Kurds at this point um well some people collapse the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Kurds into the same thing which is absurd but even saying the Syrian Kurds at this point isn't exactly accurate but what you have is the Democratic Confederation of North Syria like the SDF is now mainly Arab it's minority Kurds in the military forces now yeah and and what they have is a model which has actually been quite appealing when I last time I was there about a year and a half ago they said one of their big problems is what to do with former ISIS people who want to join can I ask a question then how can I ask a question so if if it's now minority Kurd to what extent can this accurately be called a national liberation struggle then or is it not well it's a they see it as a Syrian national liberation struggle they very much see what they're doing as in the in the context of Syria part of so they're not there's no there's no sort of broader conversation about United Kurdistan I thought I always thought it was confederalism within the context of broader it is it's both I mean what they want to do is can promote the confederal model within Iraq within Syria within Turkey hopefully Iran as a long-term goal and in that context they can also confederate across borders in various social cultural so forth ways but the ultimate idea is not to challenge the national borders and to accomplish the goal they have to actually operate on the national in the national field you know so so the democratization of Syria is actually their primary goal so they don't want to secede from Syria no not at all no anymore than than the pkk want to secede from Turkey anymore but in a way that makes them an even greater threat he's losing your territory it's a threat but having your entire system of government challenges is a lot more of one they become a revolutionary organization which wants to essentially democratize Turkish society or democratize Syria Syrian society in a deep very profound and fundamental way interesting and so but I mean the reason that Turkey is so keen to I suppose destroy this movement is because of its association with Kurdish liberation right even if it's not because the Turkish Kurds actually want to secede from Turkey it's that they want to have a bigger say democratize Turkey and that's that's a threat to to Erdogan yes and it's also a political threat I mean Erdogan is essentially a fascist um he's right being populist uh if you want to use that kind of language um tied with various Islamist fashion factions and you know these guys are their ultimate enemy it's not just that they're mostly Kurds the HDP which is the party that's come out of the originally came out of the Kurdish movement did a very successful bid to a rally much broader left-wing support uniting with everyone from other religious minorities to gay and lesbian groups to labor unions um thus getting themselves over the 20 percent market into parliament which was you know essentially created so as to ensure that Kurdish Kurdish based parties could never be in parliament and it was at that point that Erdogan sort of broke his his ceasefire with the pkk and started the war again when it became you know a credible left-wing threat in the country itself and so let's talk about the most recent developments right so the reason that Rojava has been somewhat insulated from from Turkish aggression up to now is because they've had air cover I think from the United States they've had air cover lines from the US they've had basically human shields um American troops are there they don't do a lot of combat but a lot of them are just simply sitting there so that if Turkey invades they would have to kill Americans which they know they can't do without creating a huge scandal interestingly enough um the Rojava sort of diplomatic people were trying their best to sort of balance sides against each other so originally they essentially had American human shields in the eastern part of Rojava there's a Afrin which is this isolated western count on which they had been trying somehow to unite with the rest um that one was allied with Russia uh so there were Russian human shields and observation posts that were called you know on the border there and the Russians basically screwed them um this is actually really important because a lot of people say well you know they chose their allies they could have allied with Russia the Syrian government instead they's lined with America now they you know yeah right it's not true they tried their best to make an alliance with both and to play them off against each other the Russians were the ones who stabbed them in the back first the Americans are doing it now which I found a little surprising I thought the Russians would have more of a sense of sort of futile honor you know and more to prove about sticking with their allies but no um they pulled the Russian observers out right before the Turkish invasion and that was that because of a Russian Turkish deal there must have been some kind of deal well we don't know but it was also the Russians who apparently blocked the deal that the Afrin authorities were trying to negotiate with the Syrian government um the Syrian government came in and originally said okay we'll send in the Syrian army and that way Turkey can't invade about starting an international war but only on condition you give us political and interior uh security control and of course Afrin was like no you can't bring the secret police back we'd rather literally rather die um but they said all right how about this we'll have joint external um security and we we keep internal security in our hands um the Syrian god the Syrian envoy said okay we'll take that back to Damascus and see what they said it looked like you know they didn't reject it out of hand but apparently Iran and Russia nuked it they're the ones whose um Iran has a their own Kurdish minority and really didn't want to set a precedent Russia presumably were concerned about ethnic minorities too i'm not quite sure what their motivation was but they're the ones who wouldn't allow it and that's why Afrin essentially was thrown to the walls yeah i mean that makes sense because the most logical thing here is the irrational self-interest of Assad um not to let another country occupy if he's of his own country yeah that's it's entirely his rational self-interest but on the other hand the Iranians have sunk billions of dollars not just militarily but also in propping up the the Syrian currency yeah um so i mean that that makes sense and also with the russians this one one of the the crucial pillars of russian domestic security policy which bleeds into foreign policy is basically the non-recognition of new nation states with muslim majorities yeah that's generally because because you let that you know you let that out of the box and obviously on their southern border yeah that's not what that's not want to stop and dagestan and asetia etc etc so that makes sense so let's go to two questions i suppose why of the united states we've drawn their support now and what will the consequences be well i think that essentially Erdogan was pushing and pushing and pushing and he knew that america is fairly inconstant um eventually you know trumped has a tendency to listen to whoever the last person he talked on the phone with was um there's been endless negotiation going on i'm not privy to the details of what was going on with the negotiations between the north syria democratic confederation and the Assad regime they were trying desperately to make some kind of arrangement their ultimate political goals as i say are to create a model for how syria could operate and resolve the war um so it was entirely within their interest to do so um and you have to bear in mind that this is a movement that you know to do this to to talk to the syrian regime is really painful for them when i was there you know whenever you mentioned the regime they would know absolutely no we cannot bring those guys back um i mean half of the pyd's original leadership are either dead or still in prison and i saw you know no one knows i mean these guys have all had experience being tortured or brutalized or fleeing and terror the prospect of being so um they really don't like to have to do this on the other hand they do they have every intention of remaining within syria so i don't know what was going on with those negotiations what seems to have happened was that Erdogan was demanding a some sort of zone called it a safe zone which is about his uh hypocritical term as you could possibly imagine considering it's essentially an ethnic cleansing zone um what he wanted was to take about five miles along the kilometer clear it out of its actual inhabitants and put in supplanted refugees that he no longer wanted to keep in Turkey um there was various negotiations going on at least he wanted a buffer zone uh in a military buffer zone and it seemed like um those negotiations had borne fruit the americans were guaranteeing some sort of joint patrol system in that area part of the um demands that turkey had made for that settlement was dismantling any defensive fortifications they had in the region along the border which they did but then almost as soon as they dismantled the defensive fortifications america said oh changing her mind actually we were pulling out and allowing turkey to invade um it seems that the reason why the syrian regime went along with this is that turkey assured them that they would basically clear out the sdf and then pull back to that five kilometer zone and let the syrian government have the rest of the territory whether they will really do that is very dubious if you look at what they're doing in afrin they're basically annexing the territory there they've set up schools to teach teach turkish they've ethnically cleansed most the court they're teaching turkish they're teaching teaching turkish in syrian territory yes well legally syrian territory yes um they're crazy and nato members doing that a nato member is doing this do you think about the the the the analog here is like Crimea and ukraine right oh yes it's so much more blatant than Crimea that's crazy sort of like rustification of what's meant to be ukrainian sovereign territory right well they already spoke russia russian i don't know but the claim the claim is you've got um you had various minorities which like you know tartars and so on right and they were going to be rustified which basically this is what you're talking about with afrin except the numbers are in reverse Crimea was about 95 russia whereas ifrin was about 95 kurdish and now it's no longer majority kurdish they've actually driven out and so what and so what so what it's not they're being there's being turkish settlers going there you're saying not just turkish this is very interesting and this is why they're being allowed to do this what essentially they have done is they've driven out the indigenous population and they've brought in refugees and essentially a lot of them are Arabs from other port of Syria but they're basically the families of jihadis and hardcore islamist militia people um what they've essentially said i don't we don't know how explicitly but basically the message they've sent to europe is if you let us invade this territory we'll take all those guys who you really don't want coming to europe and we'll resettle them there so this is why this is a nato power this is a nato army i mean their tanks are supplied by germany their planes are supplied by the us and and the second best funded army in nato right i believe the second largest in the second best funded and the thing i always point out is it's not just oh we sold them this stuff we we can't you know be responsible for what they do of it modern weaponry needs to be maintained constantly if you have a jet under combat conditions you know you need to have it checked in and fixed up in replacement parts were supplied pretty much every two or three days um that's repair and maintenance is not being done by turks that's being done by italians french people germans british people americans contractors are so so this is a nato army this is essentially a an imperialist army which which has a military advantage was entirely due to european and american support because you know you have to bear in mind the turkish army is a mess half their good officers are still in jail since the coup um they have very little command control they can't really use them reliably whenever they whenever they actually have a fair fight with another force which is equally well armed they always lose and they always will because they're fighting they have very little combat experience and they're fighting guys who've got nothing but can you explain something to me then obviously uh turkey is a nato army a lot of its hardware is coming from nato members so what's this relationship it has with russia whereby it buys pretty expensive kit from the russians because it's starting to do so it seems to have a foot in both camps so to speak well they're a very successfully playing the game that the that the people in rojava tried to do of balancing each off against each other but um it turned out that the Kurdish enclave in syria was not strategically important enough to be able to get away with it whereas turkey is but that's really important that that um their army is nothing without the high tech toys and the high tech toys are directly supplied and maintained by european america so this is why it's you know insane to think of you know the u.s. human shield sitting in syria as an imperialist venture but the nato army is about to come in and like actually commit ethnic cleansing on the local population somehow aren't and so what's going to happen now so so america has all these toys you know we're not america sorry turkey has has a very uh i mean high tech military that's yes i have any satellites they assume there's no one in rojava that can compete remotely with this well that's also important because despite the fact that the sdf was a military ally of the u.s the u.s basically supplied them with small arms and armored vehicles they did not supply them with anti tank weapons or anti aircraft weapons which are of course the things which give turkey a military advantage the tanks and the aircraft because they didn't want them to be an independent force because they knew yeah and and they didn't want because basically turkey said no um you know we're nato power you can't do this being a nato power gives turkey a lot of advantages that people don't acknowledge one of the key ones politically is the fact that the pkk is internationally termed a terrorist organization but you know it's only termed a terrorist organization within nato countries the un does not consider the pkk a terrorist organization because they're obviously not they're a guerrilla army um the you know any country that isn't part of nato basically i don't think there are any of them that consider the pkk a terrorist organization so essentially turkey used its nato connections to make the guerrilla force fighting it into something which you know wasn't even allowed to raise money or make a political statement in public without um legally anywhere in europe or north america i mean also i mean even if you compare like the yp because what the ypg have is very effective to fight a defensive guerrilla war but like you say it's not something you'd associate with the standing army even even the kit that's available to the houthi rebels in yemen which you know allegedly is provided by iran some of the stuff that they're able to do is far and excessive oh yeah of the Kurds in syria and like you say they just they just haven't got a major and actually i think this feeds in more broadly to the criticism i would have of the political ideology that's um behind it if we talk about that perhaps in a second all right it's michael's show i don't want to force his hand but i do think there's a one of the problems and we saw it in 19 in the mid 30s as well in spain with libertarian socialism and its limits and obviously its theory of state power which is a very powerful compelling one is that it doesn't really situate what's happening within the context of hegemonic nation states regional powers etc and there was there perhaps were you you've already sort of implied that's not the case with with the russian towers and isn't the argument that they did actually try and do states go up but they just have an excellent diplomatic course strategically important enough for it actually to work so you so yeah so basically you think that's a phony argument doesn't stand up that it was that it's sort of the intellectual foundations of this project politically always meant this was going to happen you say that's not correct yeah i would agree with that i mean uh it's not correct because you know these guys have been there once in seven years now i mean nobody's pulled that off think about the region there and think about how many enemies they have the fact that they're still there at all shows that you know they are consummate diplomats and is the only hope is the only hope now for what i suppose for the people that live there and for the movement that's going on that trump changes his mind or that he's put under pressure from trump has to be neutralized i mean it happened once before it wasn't as bad last time you know he had a phone call with Erdogan he was like oh we'll just let them fight ISIS and you know um the generals talked to him the thing you have to bear in mind about uh the US empire is that it's a little like Nazi Germany you know there were different forces um they're like to have you know the SA versus the SS versus the Gestapo you know having these different forces play off against each other and um in a way american empire is not that different the state department the CIA the pentagon all have their own foreign policy and one reason why in the early years of trump rogeville was doing relatively well was because trump had something against state he was basically trying to dismantle the state department to a large degree he would fill any political offices there um also he wasn't too fond of the CIA who was you know part of the whole trump was um a lighter of russia movement or at least a lot of people in it but he loved the army the army happened to be the one of those forces that was most fond of of the sdf because they were working with them and had formed you know the sort of sense of futile honor and loyalty to people that they had been fighting alongside and the state department was always hardcore pro turkey and this sort of thing and wanted to screw over rogeville as quickly as possible the CIA has its own policies but like it was more in that direction and the pentagon's briefing that they're against what trump's doing right yes exactly briefing that they want to keep supporting the syrian democratic so if there's a chance of something happening it's because a lot of army officers who are very angry about this and and even the ones who aren't you know being sentimental are are simply saying look we've got to work with allies if you know the last our last major ally gets you know ethnically cleansed and becomes a victim of genocide by us basically the moment they finish the job who's ever going to ally with us again they've said that yeah i mean that's the story of us alliances for like a hundred years well the army hasn't ever liked no no no but like if you look at iran to show if iran was was the united states best friend in the middle east right people couldn't talk about israel being you know the number one ally of the us in the region it was formerly iran even above israel until 1979 the guy had cancer the united states wouldn't even take him in to be treated for cancer as he died because it would be too much for diplomatic overhead for them there was too much downside not enough upside that's how the united states treats its friends you know they would drop the saudi royal family like a stone tomorrow if they could so i find it strange that anybody would ever think that there would be some some sort of code of honor coming out of the military people are somewhat different than that than the politicians in that regard um but they don't make the decisions ultimately well that's exactly right but but you know the weird thing about trump is he loves military officers and so if they're you know perversely enough if there is a chance of a socialist revolution being saved it's because trump likes military officers i mean in a way it would make sense that they don't feel like they have to reward people who've fought alongside them because i mean the whole story it seems like of rajava is that they kind of knew that everyone was very likely to screw them over but they didn't have any better options right so no one they were looking around yeah no one was under false pretenses that america would be a reliable ally it's just that you needed an ally with with who could who could bomb your enemies right so so they didn't i don't think they went into it with any illusions i did they disagree um they didn't i mean i'm sure there were individuals who did but i talked to people there and they just considered the whole thing hilarious i mean you know they're these lifelong anti-imperialists are like well i guess we're working with the americans now see how long that lasts um what i think a lot of them are worried about at the moment is the attitude of europe and this is actually an interesting thing um a lot of the people i was talking to both in rojava and who are part of the Kurdish diaspora in europe now actually think that what's going on now and one reason that this is going to be allowed to happen this is not that often that it's not just a nato army that's coming in and invading another country which is you know extreme enough already but it's evading another country we have the expressed intention of committing war crimes you know people who commit war crimes don't usually announce in advance that they're going to commit war crimes um and and despite this when they did it enough rein and now here they're without a peep you know nobody said wait a minute you can't definitely cleanse i mean have you heard any major power say this well what's going on that's i mean is there any not not to my knowledge not even the swedes nor we so well i mean corbin made a statement corbin made a statement but no no sort of european head of state i mean i'm sure there must be some occasionally merkel has said oh isn't this outrageous but you know while supplying them with tanks right um yeah um there has been very little principled opposition because they also all pretend like oh well you know i mean we'll have to look wait for the amnesty international report to make sure that the number is real you know he actually did do what he said he would do um so the fact that he announces in advance yes i will change the ethnic composition once i have conquered this place you know it doesn't seem to move them so they'll just because he says it doesn't mean it's true um seems to be the attitude um and and one reason why this seems to be happening is as i say Erdogan keeps pointing out like you know i've got all these refugees that you really don't want in europe and he's gotten to the point i actually don't know how he gets away with this stuff he actually openly threatens european civilians all the time you know there's a once between actually said you know if you continue to do something he didn't like um you know europeans will not be safe to walk the streets and there's they'll release all the terrorists and all the devices into europe yeah um and yeah so so so i've actually heard people in the Kurdish diaspora and rojava saying well i guess they decided they'd rather have us as refugees than the islamists you know i mean if you send like a bunch of displaced Kurd Kurdish leftists into cologne or berlin or you know all the various London for that matter well you know these are not going to blow any body up you know i mean they'll they'll blockade bridges or something uh but there'll be a nice sort of relatively civilized educated population now there would never have this principle no but i mean there is there is a justifiable point which is that 30 40 years ago that political tendency was much closer to the red army faction or the red brigades than where they presently are so the idea that oh these are the nice fluffy leftists and there is a history to the pkk and so obviously i don't think that's a national liberation struggle i think the pkk are entirely legitimate but there is a history there it seems we shouldn't evade that surely but what i'm saying is i think what the europeans are saying is yeah they're not going to do that now and it's not like letting isis guys here you know if i if i had a choice between having like isis adherence and pkk adherence living down the street from me i'll take the pkk guys anytime yeah um so in a way they're victims of their own sort of internal reforms you know they're no longer vicious scary guys so why not kick them out of their homes and let them come to european we'll have a higher quality of refugee we're going to move on to extinction rebellion if you have any questions about what's going on in rajava save them for the end we take audience questions at the end of the show yeah um but first of all actually before we go on to extinction rebellion you are watching tisky sour you're watching environmental media as you know this is only possible because of your kind support you demonstrated that very well over the last two weeks and now we we go back to our usual request which is the equivalent of one hour's wage a month so we can continue working around the clock hopefully get some full-time people soon uh so please go to support dot navara media dot com like this video keep your comments coming share it on twitter share it on facebook this week is the start of extinction rebellions autumn rebellion or autumn uprising uh that was so i suppose that started yesterday we're blocking lamb of and west minster bridges occupying white hall lots of people with tents up it all went better than there was a bit of a botched effort last week to spray um red paint on the treasury and they sort of lost control of the hose it was all very all very funny but what's what's happened since then has been has been much more functional uh so i want to start with a discussion of of i think probably their most controversial and newsworthy action from yesterday which was their occupation of smithfield market i don't think we're going to watch your video but you'll see some images of that um coming up uh so i wanted to know what you guys thought about that that tactic of of occupying smithfield market and filling it with me vegetable stalls um it was i i suppose it was somewhat controversial because people thought it got in the way of of the livelihoods of traders etc so it was seen as not having class analysis but at the same time we do need to stop eating so much meat i mean you go first yeah so the thing here the video is up now the thing is um agricultural processes how we feed ourselves as a planet 7.5 billion people all the milk cheese meat we consume already we're living over the plant's bio capacity we basically consume the resource of 1.6 planets that's with potentially demand for all this stuff doubling in the next 35 years because partially a population increase by about two and a half billion but also because the global south justifiably won't tweak the kind of diet that we have in the global north but the point is we can't do that the planet literally can't do that and so we clearly need to change consumption patterns around food and i think where the left is kind of lagging you know i don't think that's a particularly good action personally but i can understand the importance of making that statement politically because everybody talks about hydrocarbons we need to decarbonize by 2030 nobody really talks about how much water land is being used in meat production how much you know you know the relationship between agribusiness agri-entrepreneurs quote-unquote agricultural elites in brazil and what's going on on the amazon that kind of thing so i think that's a lacuna on the debate which hopefully at least this will elevate to a point but given all that you still don't think it was a good action you still got you think that the downsides override the personally i think it could have been more propositional and the thing is the power of an actual you know it's like what does that mean rome wasn't built in a day with the green you deal for instance yeah people who work in petrochemical and sort of engineering or you know oil rig workers these are good well-paid union jobs you say to them look we want you to be able to work in a similar sector in the future with great unionized jobs same salaries etc etc that message isn't going to these workers at um smithfield now what would the message you can trade vegetables instead of meat would be well this is it this is it it's very easy to point uh point to hydrocarbons and big big oil and say you're really your scumbags you've got all these oligarchs it's very very by virtue of the the fixed capital required to get this stuff out of the ground and to get gas and oil to distribute it to millions of people it has oligarchs it has billionaires it has some of the most valuable companies in the world meat is a global trillion dollar industry but it doesn't have BP it doesn't have shell it doesn't have these big CEOs it is going to be the the mum and dad operation you know smithfield's you know smithfield's market it is going to be the local butcher you know these will be the people that could potentially be put out of a business one set if we if we do change consumption habits to the level we have to and so i do i partially sympathize with them because for instance i i don't think abattoirs should exist i think the way that we kill animals for modern meat is outrageous it's disgusting it's unethical but also it's part of a wider system which is destroying the planet and somebody said well these are good jobs well being a bailiff is a good fucking job it pays your wages you could be a unionized bailiff we still shouldn't have them you know so being a mercenary is a quote-unquote good job you probably get quite a lot of money for it so you know we have to have a conversation on the left about how do we address this issue of meat consumption clearly it has to be massively reduced how do we do that in two ways which are really important firstly by not telling the global south they don't uh they shouldn't have they don't deserve the quality of of life that we expect and anticipate in the global north secondly how can we speak to workers in the global north as well who would be adversely affected by any transition away from contemporary um animal agricultural practices i'm kind of sympathetic to the whole because i think actually there's it's the analogy with hydrocarbons is is much closer than you make it out to be because there's the same thing with with when it comes to you know the airlines or or the people who are getting the oil out of the ground and there was a there was a big critique of extinct rebellion at the beginning that they didn't go after the the people who were financing fossil fuel extraction they went after consumption or they went to the middle of the city but i actually think it proved to be a more effective tactic because it's by going on a bridge that you get huge public uh engagement huge public awareness of what you're doing whereas if you go to after the business then it's only the bp staff but i know i mean because this is naughty of me to come back to you right which they could they could have gone to the abattoir but if they've gone to the abattoir no i wouldn't have noticed i wasn't suggesting that i'm suggesting there is no similar enemy so james meadway but it's very well you know in in contemporary politics in this era of populism you need an enemy you know these are the bad people over here what we're seeing right now in my cash in jeremy corbett for instance it's much easier to do that with oil right because literally some of the world's largest companies by market capitalization are fossil fuel companies it's much easier somebody said in the comments monsanto firstly monsanto isn't really that big compared to some of these companies secondly it's not doesn't do me does it doesn't do me just genetically modified seeds right um so you know it's a very different political terrain and also it's more of an ethical terrain right there is also the issue of animal rights um and suffering unnecessary suffering which is less less not not entirely missing let's finish when it comes to fossil fuels david we're giving you a lot of time now to uh go on we've gone on there we've gone on there what do you think about uh the extinction rebellion sort of latest iteration and and especially sort of coming onto that that occupying of smithfield's meat market when it comes to things like meat i mean i'm a little hesitant about the danger of making consumer practice the primary focus because it's you have to fight against the stream because that's essentially what everyone wants you to do there's a sort of neoliberal environmentalism macronism if you like which essentially wants to is willing to save the earth but is only willing to do it on the backs of the poor and if you give those guys any opening they will pursue it because that's where all the weight is going to go so you don't want to back that up you want to swim against that current as much as you can because the current's going to be there whether you like it or not and the political implications of too much of a focus on consumerism are disturbing to say the least unless you have a very explicit sort of libertarian socialist anti-state perspective i've heard people talk about rationing for example you know the need to actually talk seriously about rationing of different of meat of consumer goods of of energy so forth and so on remarkably little reflection on how that would be democratized if indeed it would where have you heard that where is that a dominant strain in extinction i don't think it's a dominant strain but i think it's a kind of a default instinct that people will fall back on it if you don't have a counter discourse you don't have an alternative proposal that's where it'll go and i've heard extinction rebellion people say well maybe you're right you know because they don't have a strong discourse about why that would be objectionable i mean i've been trying to come up with my own ideas i'm involved in this because i'm involved with the extinction rebellion brain trust i don't know if you know about i didn't know about that no yeah they asked um some of us to put together a group of heterodox economists who's um you know who could come up with a model for how it would be feasible to get to carbon neutrality by 2025 and it's partly just to show that it could be done and it's partly to give the citizens assemblies they want to convene something to work with um and there's a lot of different ways you could do it so the citizens assemblies would still have something to do but one of the things that we noticed quite early on is that you know there's a huge pressure to sort of turn this into an another version of austerity which i think would personally would be disastrous um you know people have had enough of oh no for the sake of your grandchildren and you all have to stop making do of less and you all have to suffer i mean they've been told this for 10 20 years and it's never true and in fact the result was like life for their grandchildren is likely to be even worse uh so people are you know not only skeptical of this they have every reason to be skeptical of it i'm sort of centralized authority giving them this yet again round of sacrifice logic however it's not clear how much of that sacrifice would really be necessary sure travel meat we'd have to cut down on that a little uh but it's also true that you know if you look at the major contributors to increased energy use which is indeed increasing all the time um you know what i call bullshit jobs is actually a really big one um quick mining yeah 35 percent of people are just sitting there doing nothing all day think about all the energy that takes think about all the buildings what it takes to keep those buildings heated and supplied um at the same time and this is something nobody talks about um i like to compliment bullshit jobs of bat shit construction projects um i mean it's amazing how much unnecessary building is going on in the world if you look at material throughput as jason hicko likes to put it i'm working on something with him on this topic um you know the amount total amount of stuff that's being produced every year keeps going up and often quite dramatically economists are quite confused by this because it shouldn't be happening um you know economic growth rates in rich countries are not very high and they keep arguing that the economy is shifting to service and information economy so the amount of material things should be going down but it's not and if you look at why this is happening it turns out it's all infrastructure there's enormous amounts of investment in new housing developments new office blocks airports i mean it's sort of like china was doing it you know to catch up for while india was doing it but you know once they filled up they just kept going so what are you defining as on that just because often on the var media we talk about how we need yes we need a strong socialist state to be investing in new housing and investing in quite a lot of new infrastructure well there's there's stuff that people actually need but this is not actually going to i mean there are airports there's like quite a number of airports that have been built now that no plane has ever landed on in the united kingdom no uh but in spain that's happening in east asia it's happening a lot there to give an example um and actually this is another element in in the argument i can't do the whole thing but i've been trying to construct this kind of 18th brumaire analysis of what are the major dynamic sectors of capital right now and what sort of political tendencies are they supporting and the conclusion i made is that well it's my initial conclusion so essentially you have two formations you have finance which is kind of a lie to the professional managerial classes in the interest those represent and those guys are the neoliberals um they're willing to save the planet but only in the backs of the poor and then you have not only the extractive industries which we all know about but construction and real estate um in a real in a way i think that the you know the election in america between hillary clinton and donald trump represented the divorce of finance and real estate who before 2008 had made this kind of devil's alliance fell apart again um now construction uh everywhere seems to be backing the populist right um trump himself as a construction real estate guy uh but if you look at it putin's party um you know he was really founded by marie luchkov in russia who was famous for putting up these giant blocks of office towers and there was you know before they had any idea what to put in them and then they have to make up the bullshit jobs modi's doing this kind of thing all over india erdoğan is doing this kind of thing all over turkey a modi neijand just shut me the shard locally right in london the sort of vacancy rates in the shard were just astronomical the gatteries built it basically as an asset which over which they project over 30 years would give them certain amounts of revenues certain amounts of prestige with the british government but they didn't really and even now occupancy is quite low i'm not quite sure what it is occupancy was very very low for very long time so you know the model for that was the twin towers it took them about 30 years to fill it up wow yeah almost but it only just really got to fill it when it blew up god yeah i want to know your opinion on the one thing that that i suppose on on left twitter is the most debated element i think of extinction rebellion and someone who has sort of written about uh street movements for for years and years their relationship to the police oh yeah well i mean you know what they did worked the first time around the question is what's going to happen now that the police are being told to clamp down i mean look every street movement has to adopt a position on this sort of thing and i think while they went a bit far it made a certain amount of sense to take the extreme nonviolent position at that particular historical moment it's not sustainable over long term the danger of taking a too conciliatory relation of the police of course is that you end up becoming an extension of the police you know you have to set up very very clear buffers between your own marshals and the cops or the cops will just turn them into their own adjunct adjuncts you know um but even more you have to create your own internal police to enforce these kind of pure nonviolence you know no harsh language kind of standards and there is a certain point where you have to make a decision between internal solidarity and you know looking nice in the eyes of the media who are going to start representing you as a bunch of savages anyway no matter what happens it's interesting that point like seeing a distinction between internal solidarity or or being conciliatory towards the police because i suppose what they'd argue is that actually the majority of people within that movement or the vast majority of people within that movement want to take a conciliatory attitude and so they're just enforcing basically the majority opinion and if someone goes there and shouts fuck the police you know the majority people will be like no no no that's not how we do things i mean i what's unsustainable about it i suppose is the question because for me it seems like it's still working quite well yes what's unsustainable is when the police decide it's unsustainable um the police you know i mean how the police feel about you is kind of irrelevant unless you're really talking end game and they like you know send in the army to kill people and they have to decide whether they're going to do it or not but you know until it gets to that point the police just do what they're told so their personal attitudes is really irrelevant the question is when they decide to crack down what do you do which they will do once you once they perceive you as a sufficient threat um actually people in extinction rebellion expected the cops were going to come down a lot heavier than they did this time around cops were pursuing a kind of clever approach you know what they've been doing they've been basically going straight after the bathrooms um they've been going after toilet facilities and food facilities so as to make it extremely difficult to me a while to understand what you meant but i thought they were arresting people in the bathroom but you're saying they go they go arresting the bathrooms themselves yeah yeah yeah yeah that makes it unsustainable to stay in that place for a long period of time right so so they're they're being more oppressive but they're doing it in a relatively clever and indirect fashion um how long that will be the case you know um that's a very interesting question i mean there's there i mean if you're talking about the basic strategy of nonviolent direct action um you know there's three factors there's the media coverage there's you know the whoever is giving the police the orders and what strategy the police take and then there's your own tactics the you know the what the police themselves feel as i say doesn't really matter until they order really violent repression and that's always the end game you know when you win it's when they send people to shoot you and the guys they send to shoot you don't do it uh but that's pretty far in the future in this case um so what are the immediate problems because that's obviously things i'm going to escalate like that in the foreseeable future right the immediate problem is image um they're fighting a battle of images because for example in america gandian tactics just don't work because in order for the idea of a gandian tactics is you make it clear that you're going to be totally nonviolent no matter what happens and then people get to witness just how vicious the the state will be to suppress people who clearly would never hurt anybody and that creates a kind of a moral crisis and it brings out the essentially repressive nature of the state that's a basic idea um that only works if the media reports it that way a problem you have in the us for example is the us media simply they can talk about rogue cops they can even talk about a small group of cops um as as engaged in violent activity but nothing done by say a hundred cops under order could possibly be violent or ever be described as such um you know the best they could possibly do if cops are just openly torturing people in the street as they did during um the the old old growth forest protests where they were just rubbing pepper sprays in the eyes of people in lockdown the most they could do is like have a kind of point counterpoint you know nonviolent activists are being tortured is that okay well on the left someone who says yeah no on the right is the counterpoint not to that though that because of social media etc not only could you put the police in moral crisis but you could put the mainstream media in moral crisis if there are people on twitter or on facebook seeing that there's an incredibly peaceful group of protesters who are getting tortured by the police in the street that's the interesting thing and and that might be a good practical demonstration of whether social media has become as hegemonica some people seem to think you know if people are getting most of their information from social media questions how much of that information they're getting from social media is news information that's recycled through social media and how much of it is actually coming from independent sources um you know it would be interesting to see whether we can get to the point that we can get beyond the sort of news spin of bbc and murdoch um but at this point the media seems to be playing along with the nonviolent angle i mean it's an interesting historical moment perhaps is the nature of the issue the nature of the protests um i haven't seen it in a very long time that we've seen such a massive movement both acting nonviolently and actually portrayed as being nonviolent i mean i find the way the bbc reports and the stuff just bizarre i was watching a report on hong kong protests yesterday and they're talking about violent protesters and you think they're dealing with the chinese state apparatus or or an adjunct to the chinese state apparatus like what china does in tebet what it does in uh you know it's in yang is like really really violent these people are like you know throwing smoke bombs back at the cops and it's just you got tanky lefties on twitter doing the same though what's that doing what tanky lefties sort of saying it's the hong kong protesters that are the violent ones i'm sure there's some bad i'm sure there's some bad people there or whatever but i mean ultimately ultimately um hong kong right now is an outlier in terms of the respects given towards civil liberties etc in a way that it's not it's not true in china although it's also true in i mean this is an interesting thing about china um i think it was about five or six years ago the chinese interior minister actually let slip that there had been i can't remember the exact number it was something like 35732 unauthorized incidents by which he meant riots it turns out you know violent acts who have more than 15 people evolved um that's insane i mean it shows something about china not only that they had that many but that they had people tabulating them all oh no we talked about at great length of our in previous years there was a real hot period about 2010 to 2015 like you say of of riots um of strikes of chinese models of repression just are very unfamiliar to us because they don't follow the same logic we're used to certain things you can get away with that you just couldn't possibly get away with in other places and other things they just come down like a ton of breaks immediately um i remember actually i is stuck in my head uh because i'd actually landed at beijing airport and i'd flown through china um for i was in a tour in east asia at the time i just remember um just how incredibly efficient it was they would come exactly the right moment everything was perfectly timed and i got back to america and you know if the plane was only 20 minutes late they seemed proud of themselves their missed connections everything was a disaster total chaos all the time and and i was like so what's going on are they just like more efficient this is a rising power and we're declining power and then i read a little article in the newspaper that said chinese airline passengers riot destroy computers over missed connection you know and i said oh i see we're sheep i mean they just don't take things lying down there is a tradition you know they were just sitting there smashing one computer every hour until they had a proper combination and this is considered totally normal in china consumer power all right red guards final story and then we'll briefly go to questions this is jeremy corbin and mike ashley's flame war i didn't tell you we're gonna be talking about this so don't worry if you don't have a hot take about jeremy corbin and mike ashley's flame war but this weekend jeremy corbin tweeted a video of him talking to a group of disgruntled new castle united fans where he explicitly called out new castle united owner mike ashley that's the owner of sports direct hopefully we can get that video up now i've 27 years two season tickets and i've given up because my money is going directly into his pocket it is not going towards the betterment of my football club for me it's a advertising hoardings for sports direct nothing more the identity's been completely lost and i think there's a group of fans who probably disagree that we want our identity back if necastle united does badly my fellow citizens do badly a small group of people are ruining our national game billionaire football owners like mike ashley who runs new castle united football club i've been meeting new castle fans who are trying to take back control of their club football is more than just a game it's more than just a club it's an institution rooted in the social fabric of our communities they're too important to be left in the hands of bad owners who put their business interests ahead of everything else marginalised supporters and even rip them off sport must be run for those who follow it those who love it not for a wealthy few under labor things will be different we'll review the failing system of football governments ensure supporters have a say in how their clubs are run and make sure the multi-billion-pound Premier League TV deals are invested in grassroots football we'll put football clubs back where they belong at the heart of our communities let's make sure the beautiful game is run in the interest of the people not the billionaire owners down so today the club has published a statement in response it states that financially other than sums provided to the club on a short term interest-free basis and repaid to him as intended we would like to make it clear that mike ashley has not taken a penny out of new castle united in interest salary or dividend as is customary at many clubs aron who's right here uh jeremy corbin's right the stadium was literally called the sports direct arena our cameras you know all the awnings like the fans walks about as sports directors basically it's basically a way of just getting sports direct branding out to the world and you have to understand that the Premier League is watched it's been into more than four billion households worldwide so it makes sports direct you know a global brand um so not really and also actually bought the club on the cheap he's not invested anything into it and he he's now sitting on an asset on an asset worth a lot more than what what he bought it for and the fans aren't happy with them they want him to leave he won't leave because as i've said he gets a fantastic deal basically on free advertising for sports direct he's certainly not in it for the football they've been relegated twice under his ownership they've really gone nowhere as a club they've got no identity and like i said he's sort of sold the soul of the club wonga the payday lender oh no was formerly the shirt sponsor oh that's terrible you know i know it was and then this year it was replaced by like online 888 which is like a chinese online betting company so it's like if you're if you're a newcastle fan it's just how sleazy it's horrific yes it's like the ultimate sleazy club so the idea that he's like some sort of you know patrician kind benefactor is complete bullshit it's like the sleaziest club in the premier league now because of mike ashley we'll see if mike ashley has a response because the statement did go on so he goes on to say we agree with or newcastle united go on to say we agree with mr corbin that a football club is more than just a club it is an institution at the heart of our communities that is why our vast work across the local community will continue with newcastle united foundation providing services and support to tens of thousands of people in our region each year who truly need them often newcastle united foundations projects fill in significant gaps that the public sector sadly cannot stretch to implicit critique of austerity there particularly at a time when government cuts are so prevalent oh it was a real critique of austerity interesting maybe they're labour people uh in any case this this this second part of the statement you said was a joke before the show yeah why well because newcastle united isn't they don't pay a living wage to their staff that's and the premier league there's 20 clubs four of them four of the 20 clubs in the premier league these are some of the most valuable sports businesses in the world manche united is valued between three and four billion pounds uh they don't pay a living wage to their staff mike ashley owner of sports direct you know the the the horror stories about how he treats a star for legion you know in work poverty is the norm for somebody working at sports direct in their warehouses there's stories of women giving birth while at work ambulances repeatedly going to sports direct warehouses he was cool to task for this actually and when he was speaking to a parliamentary committee on the matter he's like the amazon of sport it's exactly that's exactly it's the amazon of sport so if your business model is in work poverty if the football club you own which by the way i think this year is the 20th most valuable in europe even now newcastle because that's such a loyal fan base there's the tv rights there's also obviously the matchday ticket sales all that money all those revenues and you still can't pay a living wage to your staff and you have the temerity to say that you contribute to the local community and you make up for gaps because of austerity mike ashley and his business model is austerity that's why we've got eight million people in households in this country where somebody is working and they're in poverty it's because of people like mike ashley it's the idea that he is the solution on newcastle united's projects as the other solution no mike ashley you are the problem you are very much the epitome of what is wrong with the british economy piss off do you agree i thought you're going to come back with a huge defense of mike ashley there but you know probably we can't expect that now can we uh some questions if you have some audience questions please now put them in the comments and i'll put them to david and aron while you're doing that again you're watching tisky sour you're watching navara media as you know this is only possible because of your kind support if you are already a supporter to navara media thank you very much uh if not please go to support dot navara media dot com and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month also make sure you are subscribed to the cortado which is navara media's weekly newsletter written by ash sarkar herself it is always hilarious very much worth getting so sign up to that now let's see put your questions in the comments right i love these like little twitter tanks a bunch of white people that don't know what's going on like pastani where'd you think that's from you said this on twitter or in our comments well no it's just it's just in the youtube comments i mean i'm you know i'm only half ryanian i guess and iranians you know we're the ones in the middle east that we aren't really brown we just time quite well so i'll take that speaking into european language oh this is true that's true that's true that's true this question is challenging the revolution renus of of of what's going on in rejava so thomas murr asks has there been a social revolution in rejava given private enterprises and large-scale landholding still remain the property of former owners and there's actually a um reference schmidge schmidinga 2018 is this just anarchism confined to showpieces no actually um it is definitely the case that there has been redistribution of land i mean some of that had already been accomplished under the bath regime and some of the reprivatization was de facto it was a sort of crony capitalist thing those guys all fled um i was told that you know the old sort of the old great landlords um now find it almost impossible some of them do have more land than other people they can't get labor because everyone has their own plots at this point and enough land has been redistributed that essentially you know they're forced to um give up a lot of their lands just because they can't get anybody to work it there's no dependent labor force and there's nobody desperate enough to work for them so there hasn't been a cooperatization of the entire economy in fact uh people have said the cooperatization is one of the less least advanced aspects of the revolution but it's also true that there are no large enterprises i mean there it's not like there are private factories in this part of syria um in so far as there are large workshops and factories they are socially owned and and collectives rather than rather than privately owned but most of the economy is you know independent craftsman independent merchants is a small scale or to petty bourgeois traditional mercantile stuff this this is a really interesting question that i'm going to put to both of you daniel edin does the left need to reevaluate its gut reaction to western intervention in the middle east the socialist Kurds have clearly benefited from western interventionism you know yes and no i mean that came from a particular situation i don't think that anybody wants the u.s military to remain in the middle east i certainly don't i don't know any Kurdish people in the region or within the Kurdish movement to say yeah we want the americans to stay i mean maybe they want them to stay six months to a year but what people really want is to be able to get anti air and anti tank weapons to defend themselves and then they don't need those guys around um you know as it happens there's a play of imperial forces going on and you know the americans at this point it's a declining power there's just one of many forces uh you know there's russia there's iran uh there's the gulf states who all have their own sort of separate foreign policy initiatives going on you have turkey um you know is reels doing various things there are any number of different imperial and semi-imperial powers pursuing different agendas um and you know nato being one of them now it would be nice of all of them clear out there might be certain occasions when owing to the play of forces one of those imperial powers which actually is the one which comes from most far away and you know least obviously belongs in the region might happen to play a role saving a socialist revolution but that idea that validates their being there in first place i don't agree at all but it validates their staying there presumably well i mean what what should be the left's demand here because presumably we still want america in in this situation as it already exists to be giving if it were me i would call for a no fly zone um i mean turk turkish air power is completely supplied by western powers western powers um could easily take that away uh if they declared a no fly zone over rojava and allowed the sdf to acquire anti tank and anti air weapons to defend themselves i don't think that any american troops would would be helpful at all and if there is a no fly zone in over rojava so one demand that i suppose the left was quite resistant to was the idea of a no fly zone across the whole of syria well that's because it would be an imperial violation of the sovereignty of the syrian government i don't think the syrian government would necessarily mind the imposition of a no fly zone um against people not from syria coming in all right yes really strange one isn't it um but at the same time david's right we're already selling weapons to one side so the idea that non intervention should just mean you know the non-intervention of uh military forces i mean it obviously has to be expanded as well to what economic support are you giving to one side what military support logistical support for instance in the mn war we're doing precisely that with the saudis so yeah we don't have boots on the ground we well we probably do to be honest we don't have regular armed forces on the ground uh but we're still very much involved in that conflict personally speaking i would never want to see british armed forces anywhere in the middle east whatsoever uh but like you say with regards to weapons logistical support of some kind i can see how it can have its merits and under a corbin government you know this is something which we've lagged on uh on the left because obviously the left's not been empowering many of these countries for a long time and it's been one of um sort of oppositional politics who would we want britain's allies to be in the middle east in the event of a socialist government and it's a really important question how would we relate to iran now i would like to see the iran deal for instance brought back on the table i would like to see an end to sanctions at the same time britain has to engage with the reality of how iran treats its lgbt community how it treats curds etc so i think you know we're going to have to have a really sophisticated debate around foreign policy more generally obviously because the middle east has been a a crucible of of foreign policy fuck ups for more than a century particularly relevant there it's yeah i mean if you look at what's going on in the middle east one of the things that really strikes me is that the way european racism toward the middle east operates is it's a little counterintuitive um i mean i think is if you look at the the alignment you have with the turkish army essentially for foot soldiers they're not using turkish troops they're using arab jihadis they're using you know often former supposedly former isis guys former al-qaeda guys i mean and then you know they have the turkish army backing that up and then you have these americans germans british people you know operating machinery from behind the scenes backing up the turkish army so there's a three three times removed but ultimately that means that you know you have americans and brits who are sitting there you know ultimately running an army whose foot soldiers are isis guys how hell did that happen and i think essentially you know these people people have decided that well that's all you can expect from the middle east these guys are a bunch of savages are all a bunch of crazy islamists oh well you know um rather than seeing the people who seem to have the same value as you do that are feminists that are ecologists that believe in some direct democracy um basically believe in the values europeans largely falsely profess to believe in and actually take them seriously as being some kind of allies you know you actually hear european diplomats saying well you know it's just going to cause like more violence and terrorism because they're going to shake things up traditionals are going to get angry there seem to be this idea these are a bunch of savages you can't expect this uh in them to act like civilized people like us if even the suggestion starts it'll probably make things worse um and and thus you end up with preferring isis as an ally to a group of eco feminists i mean which is essentially what's happening right now john w what possible route to statehood is there for the Kurds in the long term if it exists at all well as you've already thought you've already talked about how you've complicated the idea that what they want is stated they don't want to say explicitly says all the time democratic and federalism yeah is there any i suppose you talked about that they want democratic and federalism is there any route to getting it and what would it be it's just you know they've got to be just as patient as Erdogan the reason Erdogan got to his end point where he's up ways to invade as he was utterly single-minded he knew what he wanted and he just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and essentially that's what the Kurdish movement is doing as well there's a very large territory and anytime they have an opportunity to start developing a democratic and federalist model um they do i mean there's like parts of iraq now uh where those kind of models are taking off um it was started by Kurdish refugees but it's becoming very popular you know people see it works people see that um it creates a kind of a feeling of community that doesn't exist elsewhere um and you know the actual the iraqi Kurdish government is becoming quite worried about the sort of young people are going over to that sort of thing uh the htp was doing it in in i mean you have to admire the patients you know they keep coming out a generation gets arrested tortured people killed and this another one comes in five years and keeps at it and keeps at it and keeps at it eventually it's going to work david we're going to move on to it can i just say one thing also the asbra you know if young turkish people today become the politicians um the influencers the journalists of tomorrow in germany france the united states the uk you know people talk about the israel lobby and it comes as a thing if you mention it the reality is there is funded you know funded sets of organizations in washington very good at helping influence your u.s foreign policy in the region nothing wrong with that that's that's what you should try and do as a nation state so i suppose it's a bit of about Kurdish agency it's also about you know how do you shape the policy decisions of countries in the global north Kurdistan is not going to find any allies in the middle east for the reasons that david's talked about because four countries are affected by any potential you know ins insurgent sort of separatist sentiment however it could be very different if you have you know if a labor government has four or five Kurdish MPs and they have a powerful caucus in parliament and there are powerful Kurdish business people and a powerful Kurdish lobbying in terms of shaping british foreign policy that's where you could probably see something change and the idea of democratic and federalism also i mean one of the most interesting things i've seen is um that a lot of people involved in the Kurdish movement have been talking to people in other movements and saying well you know have you thought about this as a solution to problems where which seem intractable otherwise um for example they're starting to be a lot of palestinians um and people on either side these really palestinian lines saying well you know we've talked about two-state we've talked about one state you know democratic and federalism might actually work as a way of resolving some of this stuff i mean that's to be honest palestine is an example of where you have got a very effective external lobbying movement for that nation state and to be honest it's been a limited strategy because when you i mean i suppose that they're just companies are up against they're up against a overwhelming force yeah and they're up against actually yeah a movement that's doing a similar thing even more effectively with a state helping it as well right and has been doing it for a lot longer you know um palestinians are simply a more recent diaspora yeah there's a question about extinction rebellion david p4f new castle uh but it's not about new castle what's the point of extinction rebellion now that labor have backed a green new deal well there's one thing to back it and there's another thing to actually do something about it and and you know extinction rebellion isn't just saying we want labor to endorse this and win the election they want to change the entire political discourse so that nobody can avoid it i mean even if the Tories end up there they will be forced to do something yeah that's entirely right you know you need just refashion the political common sense around the issue so that it's not i don't we don't want climate change to be a part of the political issue obviously i want labor to implement a green new deal but it should just be the default for every political party if you don't do it you're unelectable yeah and that's what yeah exiles for yeah i mean my argument's always the same so whenever you go it's interesting actually if you're talking about the consumer choice what the right wing shock jocks are always trying to do is say these people want you to have no meat no cars no food no holidays by 2025 and they sort of construe the stuff in there have they got a manifesto or in you know their statement of principles on the website or whatever and i always say look i think the solution to climate change is labor's green new deal because i'm often going on they're defending labor policy but the reason i have so much respect for extinction rebellion and what you know why i support what they do even though you know i don't necessarily subscribe to all of the demands is because they have been remarkably effective at putting this issue onto the top of the agenda and making sure that when people vote at the next election they will keep climate change in their minds so i don't think you need to see labor's green new deal and extinction rebellion in in conflict with one another not at all which to be honest never did the labor leadership because john mcdonnell had a big had a big section in his labor conference speech where he sort of got everyone to give a round of applause to to extinction rebellion and climate movement because he said they made the space for us to deliver these dramatic i mean we have to bear i mean i'm an anarchist right i mean i'm not um someone who's going to join a political party but the reason i respect the people who are now guiding the direction of the labor party people like john mcdonnell is because they don't want to co-opt the extra parliamentary left they understand that the only way we're ever going to get anywhere is between a synergy with people working within the system and people working outside it so having something like extinction rebellion is exactly what they want aron i want to so we so we get a question on each section uh where did i find this question oh i've lost it but anyway someone asked will the premier league still be able to get decent players if jeremy corbin's plans for football come into place well depends which club you ask they're not getting decent players in anyway um there are four or five a bit of a cop out is there no there are four no there are four or five clubs which basically first of all which who've rubbed a good yeah first of all first of all the success of the premier league is is is arguably to the active detriment to the rest of professional football in the country right we have uh four professional leagues in this country the premier league is just one of them there's a great book out there by a guy called adrian tempani i hope i said his name correctly about um and the sun also shines maybe somebody can find it in the comments um and it's he was at hillsborough in the 80s and he talks about basically the premier league as a cultural vehicle for neoliberalism really from the early 1990s amazing book makes sense um and uh basically the rest of the games really suffer as a result you look at the collapse recently of berry bolton went into administration portsmouth went into administration you've got all these local clubs which is what's interesting is a lot of them are in brexit voting areas which is why i think as a politics this could be a really interesting way of sort of pivoting a lot of people who right now are very ambivalent about labour at best towards a more socialist kind of political disposition um it's very smart going up yeah i mean in terms of the in terms of the premier league i personally think it would be a net a socialist fan ownership vision of football would mean that there's a far greater emphasis on youth development so you'd have more clubs being like iax for instance iax by the way last year and iax have a essentially something resembling fan ownership even though they also have some of their equities listed on the stock market um they emphasise good young players they got to the champions league um semi-finals last year by munich uh effectively all the clubs in germany apart from few are fan owned 50 plus one that's my understanding yeah by munich one of my successful clubs in europe similar with borussia dormand one of my successful clubs in europe you know by munich i think apart from liverpool and mancity will be any english team very easily so i don't think the idea that oh if you have these proposals you would necessarily have inferior teams basalona realm adrid iax by munich all of these have an element of fan ownership so i don't think it would mean you know less less quality football no i think i'm going to end on oliver cant's comment not a question also thanks david for being a legend i found navara through following you funnily enough so so isn't that nice that is nice um i'm even going to end it there thank you david graver so much for joining us this evening it's a little pleasure a rombestani a pleasure as always and the sun shines now as the book thank you and thank you for watching navara media thank you for watching tisky sour as you know this is only possible because of your kind support so if you haven't already please go to support dot navara media dot com and get the equivalent of one hour's wage a month potentially our next show will be in our new studio so you can look forward to a backdrop other than uh and i won't have to take us to the uber you know yeah you can get there by tube next time oh god don't say that yeah that's how the mini cab goes i was late that's fine good night


Hello everyone, so this is a teaser to my talk Random Sources in Secure Computation. It's a joint work with Ady Rosena. So the model we look at is that of information theoretic secure computation, and parties have inputs x1 to xn, the adversary can corrupt at most t-parties, and the goal is computing some public function f without revealing anything more. We know that secure computation cannot be done without randomness. We need the ability to toss coins to securely compute a function, and a well-known natural equation is to understand how much randomness is needed to securely compute a function. It has been studied in many previous work, and the motivation for that is that producing high-quality cryptographic randomness is hard, it should be treated as a scarce resource. In this work we ask a related question which, to our knowledge, was never asked before. We ask how many parties need to have the ability to toss coins to be able to securely compute a function. The motivation is somewhat similar. In the real world, it's not always easy to produce high-quality randomness, because we might not have a proper device to do so. We might be using a phone that does not have a good way to produce high-quality randomness, or maybe we're using some code which was not correctly written and does not use the correct libraries to generate cryptographic quality randomness. So it might be that in Secure Computation protocol, we might want to avoid relying on the ability of some clients that use weaker devices to toss coins correctly. So for example, here, it would be possible to compute this five-party protocol without requiring the two holders of phones to use any random coins, relying only on the ability to generate randomness of these more trusted servers, trusted in the sense that they generate high-quality randomness. We have several results. The first result is a complete characterization of the random source complexity of T-private computation, a characterization of the number of parties who can toss random coins. So previous work showed that at least T-random sources are needed to securely compute a functionality with T-privacy. We show that T-plus-one parties are needed if you want to compute a randomized functionality and that T-plus-one parties are sufficient. And those turn out to be relatively easy results. It's quite natural if T-parties are corrupted, then you need to have at least one uncorrupted parties that then can toss random coins, hence the T-plus-one. But the most surprising result and the core result of our work is that actually if you only want to compute deterministic functionalities, which is still a very wide variety of functionalities, it is sufficient that T-parties have the ability to toss coins to T-privately compute all deterministic functionalities. And this is a quite surprising result because what this means is that even though secure computation is impossible deterministically, it becomes possible to securely compute all deterministic functionalities even in a setting where the adversary could potentially corrupt all parties that can toss random coins. And so in particular, the adversary could be able to see all coins ever tossed in the protocols. A second result that we study is a relation between the randomness complexity and the randomness complexity for some simple functionalities. More specifically, we look at the end functionality in the setting of one privacy, and we ask, is it possible to match the best known protocol that uses eight bits and two sources using the minimum number of sources, which by our previous result is a single source? And surprisingly, we managed to improve both the randomness complexity and the number of sources of this protocol and obtain a protocol that use only six random bits and a single source. So it's a result of independent interest for the randomness complexity of end, but also clarifies a bit the relation between randomness complexity and random source complexity. So for our first result, I'm giving here a high level summary of the protocol. So the key idea is that we will find a way to make sure that the sources never see anything private during the protocol, anything that depends on the private input so that when the adversary corrupts all the sources, then he cannot see anything non-trivial about the inputs. And if he corrupts someone else in the sources, then one of the sources has to be honest and we can exploit the fact that one of the sources is honest to guarantee that the parties can produce high quality randomness throughout the protocol. And for the second result, we maintain a very careful invariant throughout the protocol using only four random bits, and we transmit in a line this invariant throughout the parties, putting them in a line this way. And then we use two more random bits to complete the end of the protocol. We're using in very careful ways some of the bits that we used at the beginning of the protocol. I'm not giving more details for now, but I encourage you to come and see the online talk to hear more about that. And I'll be happy to see you soon. Goodbye.