Rwy'n maith cyrchon o'r acenol iawn i ddweud. Rwy'n meddwl Achon, ddwy'n meddwl amser o'r llwyddoedd. Ond ydy o'r byd yw'r bydau o'r cychwynedd ymlaen i'r cyrnyddol, a'r bydau i'r cyfrannu hwnnw. Oni, mae'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu hwnnw yn y 7 ymlaen gyffredinol, gan yw y 2007, yw y 2008. Yn cyfrannu, mae o'r gweithio'n gweld. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Ond efallai, mae'n mynd i'r ysbryd yn ymwneud yma, Have no real recovery the 99%, we see stag mentally wages declining living standards, the rise of zero our contract precarious labour, and obviously continue de-starity and continually growing inequality as well.  Dyna'n bwysig i ni, mae'n bywyd ei gallwch arweinydd gweld o'r ffordd o ddweithio'r traddwyndau hynny. You know you can you can always zoom in on a graph and you'll see a slight up turn. You zoom back out, and you'll see that that's just a tiny flick upwards on on another wise downward trajectory, as far as the timeline of capitalism goes. Even a dying patient in a hospital will occasionally see a kind of spasm of life before the lights eventually go out. On a global scale really there is no real recovery at all. Mae'r gwneud yn fawr, bod yma'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd yma yn ymweld. Mae'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd Dr Nouriel Rabini, y profesor, yn America, yn ymweld yma'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd yma yn ymweld Dr Doom, ond rwy'n credu'r cyfnodd yn 2008. Mae'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd yma yn ymweld yma'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd. Mae'r gwahodd yma wedi'i gwahodd i'r olygu newid wedi'i'r gwahodd. Yn ymydd i gweithio ymweldod F Pointeig, llwy iawn i'r arddennau. Mae dyma'r gwahodd yma'r gwahodd yma. Mae'r gwahodd llwyddoedd ar yr ymddangos ym Mhwyl, ac mae'r gwahodd yr ymddangos yn cael eu rhaid, nad defnyddio ar gwaith, a wych yn cyn ymdau, y gallu llynwyr cyrraedd yma yn ddweud yn y llunwyr yma yn ymlaen, a mae'n gweithio'r ymlaen i'r ddweud, i'w ddweud yn ystod yn ystod yn ddweud. Mae'r ystod yn Chine mae'n ymlaen i'n ddweud yn y proses ymlaen i'r Unedd a'r Eurupol, a'u ddweud yn y ddweud. Mae'n ddweud yn bethau, ddweud yn ddweud, ddweud yn ddweud, ddweud yn ddweud, a ddweud yn ddweud yn ddweud. Felly, allwch chi'n rhannu i'w gweld y cyfnod yma o'r gwlad ymlaen iawn? Felly, mae'n gweld yn ymddi, yn cyflwyno'r wahanol, yn ymddir i'r Westerbwrdd, yn ymddi'r llyfr iawn, yn ymddi'r cyfnodol, ond mae'r bobl yn yr unig, ac oherwydd, mae'n cymryd yw'r Chynedd, yn ymddir i'r Westerbwrdd, ac yn ymddi'r cyflwno'r llyfr yw'r reisdiannau y 2008-2009. Mae Chino dyn nhw wedi gynllunio. Mae'r grwmhau cyfnodau lleiwyr yng Nghymru, o'r ddau cyfnodau yn gwneud, yn dweud, yn ddweud, yn ddwylo'r ddechrau, yn ddweud, yn ddweud mewn gwir yma, yn ddweud o'r ddechrau, fel y cyfnodau a'r ddweud. Rwy'n ei wneud o'r ddweud o'r ysgol yma. Rwy'n ei wneud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r wneud o'r ddweud o'r Ddweud, O'r cymdeithaslawr cymdeithaslaw, clyw y cyfrasiau, oherwydd yn byddai cwaf iawn gwylliant arno ar gl Gin yn Argynойwch yn Brytanoedd Unedig.  Mae Chynig yn dweud yr eich ddemol, mae'r ddemol yn ystod o'r tych o'r stil, mae'r ddemol yn ystod o'r tych o'r oed o'r oed o'r trech, mae'n dwylo'r prys oes oes oed o'r tych o'r ddechrau. Mae'r risult yn ystod o'r eich cyfaciliad hwnnw, y ffordd o'r cael ymddangos. Mae Maxus yn cael gwybod o'r ysgolig. Mae'r gweithio'r ffordd o ffordd o'r ysgolig yn wych. Mae'r cymdeithasol yn ffawr i'r ardei'r iawn i Europaid a Brin a'u cael ei ddweudio'r brifysgol a'r ysgolig o Ffartysgol Brin yn y cwysig. Bydd ymddangos o'r bwysig o'r adeiladau ar gyfer Tata. again Both jest on keg Cosmoe Jить And All of this is a reflection. End Lu skill down in China the stock market crash. Where he had the user massive stock bubble being formed output proddew circum alat edin needs and China that couldn't find an outlet a well they're for just seatma doctor abroad handoveracia exchange 부탁 couple months ago now and it's all a massive warning sign id.  Rhyw wc ddweud yn braeddau, oherwydd yn Rhaglŵr o'r rhaglŵr ac Mhysgu. Indonesia, South Africa, a lot of these countries that were reliant on exporting raw materials to China with the slowdown in China. You now see the slowdown in all of these countries. In other words, what you see is a real interconnectivity on a world scale. The whole world economy is interlinked and each obviously you don't get crisis occurring simultaneously everywhere. It's a kind of combined and uneven development if you like, but one after another like mountain climbers all attached by a rope as one falls, the rest fall with it. China is the latest one to go bringing down the rest of the world economy. It's obviously going to rebound back on the west and that's why you're seeing all these flash points occurring at the same time. It shows you the severity of the crisis on a world scale, but stepping back from the immediate kind of crisis or the crisis of the last seven years. I think it's also important to look at the kind of historical development of capitalism over the last few decades. And if we see that, if we take that even bigger view of history, we see that really capitalism is in a period of senile decay. It's very much become a system that can no longer develop the productive forces where you have this enormous technological scientific kind of cultural and industrial potential, but none of it can be fulfilled under capitalism. You've got so many symptoms of this we see such as automation. The idea that there is this incredible level of automation or potential technological development in society today, but rather than it leading to increase leisure time or to better wages, we're seeing basically all the technology as Marx pointed out in capital actually, he writes that all of the machinery, all of the technology, all of this investment actually doesn't lead to rising living standards at all, but what he said is it leads to the accumulation of misery and toil at one end and the accumulation of profits at the other. And that's what we see today where even bourgeois commentators, a pair of MIT economists wrote a book called Race Against the Machine, the idea that now mankind isn't benefiting from automation anymore. The technological progress we've seen is just leading to a polarization. It's leading to this greater inequality in society where labor is in a race against the machinery that rather than liberating us is enslaving us. We're seeing this contradiction of unemployment on the one hand, mass unemployment alongside overwork on the other, a completely irrational contradiction, that the idea of poverty emits plenty, the fact that we have these huge piles of idle cash actually, this contradiction of austerity alongside massive accumulation of wealth in the bank accounts of the world's biggest businesses, for example, in Britain, something like 750 billion accumulated in the bank accounts of British big business. In Europe, it's the figures about two trillion euros. In America, two trillion dollars, I think. And in fact, Apple alone sits on something like 150 or 200 billion dollars worth of cash reserves that it's built up, but that it's unable to use because of this huge excess capacity, this huge overproduction on a world scale. And it's for this reason, because of this enormous barrier to investment, to the development of the productive forces that you see, again, even the serious bourgeois commentators talking about things like secular stagnation. This is the term that was come up by Larry Summers, the former US treasurer, who basically said that because of this huge debt mountain that we've accumulated, this huge excess capacity in the system that's been built up, we're looking at a situation where the economies of the world aren't going to be growing not just for decades, but secular stagnation, which means lasting a century. And Paul Krugman, the Keynesian Nobel Prize-winning economist, called it a permanent slump, basically. The idea that we're not just talking about years of austerity here, but decades of low growth crisis and, as I say, the austerity to go with it. And the important point is in all of this, that the capitalists and the academic representatives, their political representatives, their apologists, none of these people really have a solution to this long-term slowdown and decay of the capitalist system. So the question we have to ask ourselves today is, well, how did we end up here? Because this is the question that's obviously never asked by the bourgeois economists. In fact, to ask the question genuinely to try and answer it would actually obviously reveal why we're still stuck in this crisis, and more importantly would reveal the only way out of it. Because in 2008, you had a situation where the crisis hit, and all the so-called experts were left scratching their head. They couldn't explain the real origins of the crisis. It was called a credit crunch, or just merely greedy bankers or just a financial crisis. But we'll see later how this is all very superficial analysis. Going back to Paul Krugman, he said everything we've learnt about economics in the last 30 years is at best wrong and at worst harmful. He's, as I say, one of the so-called experts. So it's obviously for this reason that you had a lot of people then turning not towards the kind of modern academic textbooks or papers, but actually to the writings of someone who died 130 years ago. A whole swath of articles came out in the wake of the crisis saying Marx was right. Time magazine, I think, was writing on Rolling Stone, and the BBC produced a whole series called Masters of Money where they looked at Marx as one of the leading economists in history. And all of these people were trying to therefore look back and say, well, what was it Marx said about capitalism that can help explain today? And obviously, from a bourgeois perspective, they always say, well, Marx was right about capitalism, but wrong about his conclusions. He had a good analysis of that, but couldn't explain a real alternative. But nevertheless, there was obviously a rising interest. There still is a rising interest in what Marx had to say about capitalism and crisis. You saw sales of the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital booming. I think there was even a manga version produced in Japan, apparently. But all of this shows that the traditional mainstream economics has reached an impasse. It can't explain what's going on. And therefore, it's important for us to go back and say, well, what did Marx really say in Capital? What did he really say about how capitalism worked? And I think to start off when we look at Marx's economics and his analysis of capitalism, we have to understand that Marx wasn't reinventing the wheel in the sense of he wasn't just plucking ideas out of nowhere, sucking them from his thumb. He based himself actually on the economists who'd come before him, people like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who were the high point of classical political economy. He basically wanted to say, look, even if we take everything you've said is true, you've developed a scientific analysis of the economy. You're treating economics like a science as it should be. We should treat all subjects in a scientific way, that to say in a materialist way, trying to uncover the general laws and patterns and tendencies of the system. But he said, I'm going to take your premises and show by developing them, by pointing out the limits and the logical next step, actually show how the very premises that these people had built themselves on actually led to a much more revolutionary understanding of what was needed as an alternative. Importantly, when we're understanding Marx's economics, we have to understand Marx's whole method. It's not like Marxism is split up into completely different subjects that each have their own analytical framework. Marxist economics was merely built on Marx's philosophy, the idea of dialectical materialism. If we really want to understand how the economy works, we have to look at it in a dialectical way. That is to say, we have to see it as a non-linear system, as a dialectical system where it's all interconnected, as I said, where there's particulars and generals, where there's general tendencies and patterns, but at the same time, each individual crisis is unique, but there is generally laws of crises, why capitalism goes into crisis, we can still understand. By analysing all the particulars, we can actually get a general sense of the laws and the tendencies within capitalism that interact to create this general pattern of crisis within the capitalist system. Importantly, Marx had, you know, he didn't see capitalism as a kind of ahistorical thing, but obviously something that had developed historically out of feudalism, and in fact, in its early stages, Marx said capitalism was a very progressive system, and its heyday had played a very progressive role from a historical point of view, in the sense that he said it had accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts. He said it had played a very revolutionary role, in fact, in the sense that it had swept aside all the old fetters of feudal relations. It had played a progressive role historically, and what he meant by progressive was not a moral question about how well it treated people. In fact, he said from a moral standpoint, capitalism was reprehensible. He said, come into existence with blood dripping from every pore, that was the words he writes in capital, but he understood from a historical point of view, it played a progressive role, and what did he mean by that? He meant that it was able to develop science and technology on agriculture and industry and so forth to such a level that it created the potential for a new form of society, for a socialist society, a society of superabundance. It had concentrated all the old scattered forces of production, whereas before you had peasants working on their own little plots of land or on the land of the feudal lords. Now you had the peasants ripped from the land, forcibly actually. Capitalism had come, as I say, into being with the help of the state, the forcible ripping of the peasants from the land to create this new class of people who didn't own their own means of production, who didn't have the land to work on to feed themselves, but were forced to basically go into the cities, go into the new emerging cities, into where the industry was developing, where the capitalists were, and where they had nothing to sell but their own labour power. In this respect, capitalism had concentrated the forces of production, created industry, created factories and in fact started to create monopolies, not just in one country, but global monopolies, worldwide businesses, and a world market that was an incredibly prophetic analysis of Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where he talks about capitalism, the driving force buying capitalism, chasing the capitalist across the world in search of new profits, in search of new markets, creating globalization. This is quite incredible to be writing about this at a time where really there was only a handful of genuinely capitalist countries in Britain and France and Germany, America, but yet he's describing a process that now we've only started talking about in the last 25 years, the idea of globalization, of an integrated world market. But as I say, what were the driving forces that Marx identified as being responsible for this motor force? What was the motor force of this progression? Well, he said it was profit, it was private ownership and competition, the basis of capitalism that drove it forward. It was ultimately capitalism, he said, this waved labour and capital relation. That's what Marx defined capitalism by. He said, if you read capital, he starts, you know, there's lots of different places he could have started the book, but he starts with the question of the commodity. He says capitalism is a system where commodity production is now universal. You'd always had commodity production throughout class society in the sense of people not producing for themselves, but producing for the market, producing to exchange. But capitalism is the first time where this becomes generalised, where it becomes the dominant mode of production, where now the vast majority of the economy is based around production for a market. You've still got on the fringes, obviously, people, peasants working on their own land and small craftsmen and so forth producing for themselves, whatever. But the vast majority of production becomes production for a market. And in this respect, he tried to identify what was the basis of commodity production. He said a commodity, what was a commodity? Well, it was something that had, on the one hand, a use value. It had some sort of utility. It was useful to people. There was a demand for it in society. It had some sort of need for it. But he said, at the same time as having a use value, commodity had an exchange value. In other words, there was some sort of quantitative relationship between one commodity and another. As soon as you bring your commodity to the market for exchange, and it then has an exchange value, as soon as you can exchange it, you've got to say, well, how much of one thing can you exchange for another? The real question that Marx identified and tried to answer, the one that baffled the economists who came before, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, they understood the question of value. They understood David Ricardo had a labour theory of value in the sense of understanding that value, this exchange value, what ultimately determined the amount of one commodity that could be exchanged for another, was the question of labour time. Commodities were exchanged. In general, Marx said, and Ricardo said, was on the question of labour time, of how much labour had gone into this commodity, not just the living labour in the form of wages, but all the previous labour in the form that's crystallised in the tools and the raw materials that had gone into producing these commodities. That exchange value represented the exchange in general. Well, Ricardo had said it was just individual labour time, but Marx took it a step further and said, no, it's about socially necessary labour time. In other words, if you were less efficient and tried to bring a commodity to market that had taken you longer than the socially average time needed to do that, then obviously you couldn't just charge more because you'd be out-competed by those who had more efficient production, who had better technological level and could produce in less time for lower costs, basically. In other words, there was what Marx called a socially necessary labour time that was constantly changing through investment and developments of technology and machinery and so forth. It was this that formed the exchange value, that formed the basis of how much of one commodity could be exchanged for another. In general, Marx said, obviously the idea of the lower value within Marxist economics, again, it's like all laws within Marxism. It's not an iron law that exists in a metaphysical realm, but rather is a general tendency where as long as you could infinitely reproduce such commodities, then the lower value would apply. Where you had some sort of scarcity or some sort of block or barrier to the development of that commodity, then obviously you would get mismatches between supply and demand and prices could diverge from the actual value, monopoly prices, for example. But in general, you had this lower value that operated behind the backs of people, if you like. It's not a law you can grasp or something that you can identify, but it was operating behind the backs of the capitalists and obviously asserted itself through the idea of competition and the invisible hand, as Adam Smith called it. But what was different in capitalism, Marx identified, was the question of now you had this generalised commodity production, generalised private ownership and competition and production for profit, and the question Marx tried to identify was where does profit actually come from? It's not just something that you can just cheat your neighbour. There's not just one set of people who are very good at basically buying cheap and selling dear. He said, if that was the case, you'd just generally get inflation in the economy. The real basis for profits, Marx said, could not lie in exchange and on the market, but actually had to be identified in the source of production itself. In this sense, he identified profit as ultimately coming from the unpaid labour of the working class. In the course of the day, workers would produce a certain amount of use values. The eight hour day, for example, that would be the value of the commodities produced in the course of the day, would have eight hours' worth of labour time, for example. But it would take workers only say four hours to actually produce the equivalent value of their own wages. The other four hours, therefore, were what Marx called surplus value, the fact that now in those four hours Marx identified saying that effectively the worker is working for free in that period of time. It was that that was the source of value, the unpaid labour of the working class. What was unique about capitalism now is that you have the system where the workers are selling their labour power, they're selling their ability to work. You've got this class of people who have nothing to sell but their ability to work. You have the capitalists who are buying that labour power, buying that ability to work for a period of time, whether it's a day or an hour or a week or a month or whatever. The point under capitalism is now you've got what makes it so revolutionary was because now the capitalists are buying that time and it's up to them to try and squeeze out of that labour power, out of the worker, as much actual labour as they can, trying to squeeze as much use value out of the period of time they've got. That meant there was an incentive for the first time to really invest in increasing productivity, in trying to produce more in the space of less time. It was that, that was the real driving force, trying to push down the hours of the day that were needed to go to wages, increase the proportion of the time that was going towards creation of surplus value. All of that was what gave capitalism a very dynamic nature to it because it allowed, it was driving the capitalists to constantly try and lower their costs of production, to invest in machinery and technology, increase productivity and decrease their costs in the hope of obviously ultimately increasing their market share, driving others out of business and thus gaining super profits. But Marx pointed out that all of that progressive side of capitalism, all of these forces that drove it forwards in terms of profit, private ownership and competition, all of these at a certain point turned into their opposite and actually become a barrier to the development of capitalism and that's because of a contradiction that Marx outlined at the heart of capitalism where, although each capitalist is acting very rationally in the sense that they're all trying to push down their own costs, replace labour with machinery, increase productivity all in the sake of increasing profits, that's all very rational from the point of view of the individual capitalist. But the point is that when all the capitalists now are doing this at the same time, you end up with a result that's very irrational for the system as a whole because each capitalist in driving down wages and replacing workers with machinery is basically cutting away the market, the ability to buy for the society as a whole. Driving down the wages is basically cutting away at the market for the very goods that capitalism as a whole is producing. So while it's very rational for one capitalist to drive down his costs, they're hoping that all the other capitalists, meanwhile, are going to keep paying their workers nicely so they can buy all the goods up that capitalism is producing. But obviously everyone's doing the same thing and the result is this contradiction of overproduction where suddenly the system finds itself in a situation where too much is being produced, where the productive forces are basically coming up against the limits of the market. And as I said, that is really an inherent contradiction within capitalism because of the nature of where profits come from. The fact that profit is merely the unpaid labour of the working class means that you've always got this situation within capitalism where the wages, the market for the goods that capitalism is producing are only a fraction of the wealth that's actually being created. And there's this huge surplus that cannot find an outlet. And that's why Marx called this overproduction, the idea that he said that you had for the first time in history famines, not because there was scarcity or not because there was too little, but because there was too much, he said, too much commerce, too much industry, too much means of subsistence. These are the words of the Communist Manifesto. As I said earlier, the idea of poverty amidst plenty is contradiction of overproduction. Now, the real question we have to ask ourselves in this situation is, well, if there's this inherent contradiction within capitalism, why aren't we in a permanent crisis? Why isn't capitalism for the last 200 years been in a permanent state of crisis? How does it overcome this contradiction? And, well, Marx, I understood and identified that as well in Capital Volume Two, for example. He talks about the idea of there being two different departments within the economy. The idea that capitalism produces, on the one hand, the goods, the consumer goods that go into reproducing the working class, consumer goods and so forth, Department One. On the other hand, it also produces capital goods, the goods that are actually new machinery, new infrastructure, new means of production. And it was this interplay between the two departments where capitalists constantly took that surplus and reinvested it back into new machinery, new inter-technology. That was how capitalism found an outlet for all of this surplus that was there, all of these profits. But obviously that, in itself, was only a temporary solution. It only creates a temporary kind of equilibrium in the economy, if you like. But it's a temporary equilibrium at the same time, creates even bigger contradictions for the future, because now you're building up more productive forces that are producing more commodities that need to find more of a market, but at the same time, the market's shriveling away as wages are driven down and so forth. That's kind of what you see, really, is the contradiction behind Keynesian policies. The idea of government stimulus is basically this idea. Keynes was trying to write in the 1930s at a time where you had the Great Depression, he was trying to explain why you had such mass unemployment, why the economies in the world found themselves mired in this crisis. He pointed out, there was a vicious circle, basically, where because of the inability of workers to absorb all the goods, capitalism would stop producing, but if capitalist stopped producing, then that means making more people unemployed. If they made more people unemployed, there'd be even less of a market. In other words, he was saying that capitalism in crisis was stuck in this vicious circle that would constantly drag it further and further down. What Keynes said was that it was a problem of what he called underconsumption. In other words, if only you could make up for the lack of the demand in the economy, then you could reverse this vicious circle and actually push capitalism out of crisis. He proposed that it was government spending ultimately that had to be used to actually get out of these vicious circles and stimulate the economy, make up for that lack of demand, and turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one. Obviously, the real question that Keynes never really asked was, where does the government get that money from in the first place? Government doesn't have any money of its own. Ultimately, it has to raise money through taxes, either through taxing the working class, which actually has the contradictory effect of reducing the spending power, or they have to tax the capitalist, which would drive down their profits and reduce their investment in the economy and would bring, therefore, a strike of capital and you'd actually make the crisis even worse. That's really what you see, the limits of Keynesianism, but you also see, as I say, the fact that all of that investment, all of that Keynesian investment, if it's going to be going into anything useful, and often it wasn't, often you see in new deals type programmes or in these massive Keynesian programmes you've seen in China today, it's a case of building bridges to nowhere or houses, giant cities that lie empty. In other words, it's mal investment that doesn't go into actually increasing real wealth in society. It's similar, and in fact, the army and military spending plays a similar role. It's like spending enormous amounts that don't go into exchange, that don't go into the real economy, but are just lying idle and wasted, and that's what you see today. Where it is invested into real production, this kind of Keynesian spending, all it does is actually create even bigger problems in the future, like in China, is it? It creates even bigger excess capacity and creates bigger instability on a world scale. This was the problem that obviously capitalism faced in general, that all this reinvestment in the economy to create new forces of production, eventually it meant actually saturating the world market you find by the First World War. All the big imperial powers through trying to find new sources of profit, through investing into new machinery, new technology, creating bigger forces of production, eventually they come up against each other as you find the world market becomes saturated. That's really the basis for the First World War. It's an imperialist war where all the different imperialist powers suddenly come up against each other and the new rising imperialist powers, like Germany for example, find themselves if they want to expand their market having to encroach on the markets of others, and that was really the cause behind First World War, which in turn acted to destroy much of the productive forces. It laid the basis for a brief re-emergence of growth in the 20s, although mainly in America and Britain actually you had the continuation of the crisis is British capitalism, which had been so dominant, suddenly found itself playing second fiddle to American capitalism, and you see actually the beginning of British capitalism's decline starts in the First World War and Britain becomes a second rate imperialist power from then on. You see a continued crisis through the 20s. In America though you have a brief boom, the roar in 20s based on a lot of stock market speculation and so forth, and all of that obviously came crashing down in the, it was a temporary phenomena, it came crashing down in the Great Depression of 1929, and that's when then as I say you see the emergence of Canesianism as an attempt to try and get out the crisis, but really it didn't work at all. You had 10 years of continued crisis with some ebbs and flows in the economy, but ultimately it was only the Second World War that mopped up all the unemployed with the state taking control of large sections of the economy and actually investing in new technologies, new machinery and so forth, and above all the destruction of the Second World War, you know Germany, Japan, large sections of Europe, all of these leveled, and that kind of destruction of the productive forces along with the emergence of America as a dominant global player, the dominant imperialist power, the hegemon if you like after 1945, able to break open the world market. The dollar basically becomes the international currency as good as gold with all of the gold in fort knocked backing it up and the Bretton Woods system of currency and world of world exchange backing up the whole monetary system. All of these factors along with the huge levels of expenditure into new machinery and productivity from the state during the Second World War, all of that, all of these different factors combine to give capitalism a new lease of life in the post-war period. It was that post-war boom and those factors combining together that meant you had this brief renaissance of capitalism where for 25 years you had continued economic growth and really that was the basis then for the reformist policies we see of the day, the creation of welfare states of the NHS here in Britain of course, all of that was the product of this post-war boom but within that whole period you've got obviously increasing investment going on, particularly this Keynesian spending going on, this demand side management. Keynesianism became the dominant paradigm in economics at the time and the economists thought that they could just control the whole economy through these levers but obviously even that boom whilst lasting for 25 years could not last forever and there were people who did think it could last forever. You had even people on the left so-called Marxists capitulating to Keynesianism thinking that capitalism had somehow overcome all its contradictions that you could just have permanent expenditure on military to keep the economy going, not understanding that actually that far from stimulating the economy that was a massive drain on the economy and in fact it's because of the huge Keynesian expenditure in arms military particularly in America with the Vietnam War and other wars in that period that actually becomes an enormous drain on the economy, it actually sucks the life out of capitalism, leads to massive inflation spreading across the world through the Bretton Woods system which eventually collapsed at the beginning of the 70s and eventually you see the oil crisis in the 70s being if you like the final straw that breaks the camel's back and tips the world into back into a world crisis and on that then what follows is the attempts by the capitalist to restore profitability to the system to try and attack the working class to get out of the crisis and you see obviously that represented politically through thatcherism and Reaganism and driving down the wages, taking on the trade unions and capitalism then gets a new lease of life particularly then with the reintroduction of capitalism in China, the fall of the Soviet Union beginning in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and suddenly the world markets opened up again to capitalism, all these new markets opened up in China with new sources of cheap labour providing the basis for capitalism to keep on growing but nevertheless throughout that period that contradiction is re-emerging, that contradiction of overproduction because you've got the driving down of wages thatcher and Reagan, the ruling class worldwide taking on the working class driving down the wages but again the question has to come about of well who's going to buy all the goods that capitalism is producing and you see therefore capitalism taking on a new lease of life through the expansion of credit which has always existed the idea of credit, Marx had explained actually even in the 19th century what the role of credit was in the sense of he said it was the means by which capitalism temporarily overcome the contradiction of overproduction by artificially expanding the market in the short term that was the role of credit not on the one hand it also kind of lubricated the whole system, allowed the capitalist to keep investing and reinvesting without having to save up loads of money in the meantime the whole banking system played that role but on this larger scale it plays the role also of basically temporarily artificially expanding the market and you see this role of credit really taking off in the 80s, financialisation, the big bang here in London of deregulation and the financial system, all these new ways of packaging up debt and expanding credit, mortgages, loans, credit cards, all of this taking off an unprecedented expansion of credit and this was really as I say a temporary way of overcoming the crisis but only as Marx always pointed out only by paving the way for even bigger crises in the future and it's worth actually just tangentially looking at the economist Hayek at this point who's a very right-wing economist, very neoliberal economist who's often cited as being you know the one along with Keynes and Marx, one of the leading economists who explained crisis and Hayek said that the crisis was because of this deregulation or because of basically actually there was too much encouragement in fact by the government in setting interest rates low they artificially expanded these credit bubbles, allowed bubbles to form and he said that was the basis behind crisis was allowing these bubbles to form, encouraging these bubbles to form and he said if only you never did that, if only the government didn't interfere actually by setting interest rates artificially low and so forth encouraging credit to expand then you wouldn't ever get these crises, the economy would work itself out, the invisible hand would keep everything under control. Now what Hayek never really pointed out was what would happen actually if the capitalist hadn't introduced measures to expand credit in the 80s, the point is that if you hadn't had the expansion of credit in the 80s it's not like the economy would have just kind of settled into a nice equilibrium, no what would have happened was basically the crisis we're in through today would have would have would have been brought forwards much earlier, the crisis that had hit in the 70s would never have been overcome and in fact the economy would have gone into a downward spiral much quicker, in other words it's not the expansion of credit that causes the crisis but rather it's merely a method by which the capitalist delay the crisis and the real contradiction is that of overproduction, the fact that capitalism produces far more than the market can absorb, that's the role of credit that Hayek never really explained and obviously this all exploded eventually in 2007, 2008 the default on the subprime mortgages spreading through the financial system and you get the credit crunch which again is it's not the the lack of credit caused the crisis but Mark said it was the crisis that caused the lack of credit, the fact that you have this enormous overproduction in the system and this becomes realised as people start defaulting on things like mortgages and then the banks which normally lend to each other start worrying about where all their debts are and suddenly they stop lending to each other and that you have the bailing out of the banks in order to keep the whole system going and in doing so what starts as a financial what seems to start as a financial crisis develops into a complete economic crisis that's the point it's not the crisis is not simply one of the banking system and of the financial system that is merely a symptom of this deep underlying crisis of capitalism, this crisis of overproduction that exists everywhere on a world scale and that's why we're seeing what we see today which is this seemingly intractable crisis where they can't get out of it and we would call it today really an organic crisis of capitalism where all the contradictions are now coming to the fore. It's not just one of these kind of temporary boom and slumps that capitalism occasionally goes through but you know there is that kind of more frequent like breathing almost of the capitalist system where you know occasionally purges itself of of individual sectors that might have excess capacity or so but no this isn't like that kind of that slow you know that faster rhythm of capitalism that it goes through. This is something much deeper all the different contradictions that have been building up for decades now coming to the fore and it's for that reason that you find that the capitalist well the capitalist find there's no real way out for themselves that there's no weapons in the arsenal left for them in terms of you know Keynesian measures impossible at a time really when government debts are sky high and the market is telling governments it has to cut interest rates that they would normally lower to stimulate the investment are already rock bottom and that's why you see increasingly desperate measures being taken by the capitalist the idea of quantitative easing for example which i don't have time to go to fully explain here but the point is it's it's not a sign of strength of capitalism that the that it has this quantitative easing at its disposal it's a sign of weakness actually it's a desperate measure that far from actually solving the problems of the economy is actually increasing the instability on a world scale all this money getting into the economy inflating asset prices across the world and so forth creating greater instability not not greater stability and and so you find find the situation where really both sides of the capitalist class in terms of the Keynesians and the neoliberals they're both arguing against each other but they're both right and they're both wrong and that in itself is a reflection of the impasse capitalism finds itself in where the Keynesians are right on the one hand to say well look austerity is cutting away at the market and the more austerity you have the the deeper the the recession becomes you see that very clearly obviously in a place like Greece today but on the other hand you know the neoliberals are right as well saying look we need to cut because there's these huge debts and and they're weighing down on the economy and they're demanding therefore austerity and and the point is therefore that austerity is not ideological it's not it's not a question simply of the nasty capitalist it's it's a reflection of the there is no way other no other way out for capitalism at this time and the fact that they've now used up all these reserves all these all the weapons in their arsenal that makes this this prospect of a new world slump even scarier for the capitalist because as I say now it's not just in europe and and britain and america but now china's being brought in all the other emerging economies the eurozone continuing to be in crisis and and therefore the the the situation is even worse now than in 2007 2008 because the all the methods they they used up basically all these methods already and there's there's no tools left if the for for when this new world slump kicks in and what makes it even worse from the capitalist point of view from the ruling classes point of view is obviously that it's not just an economic situation that's changed in the last seven years but the political and social situation has been transformed as well the the whole of consciousness has been changed on a world scale in the last seven years you've had all these political earthquakes in Greece in Spain uh in scotland and the rest of britain now with the corbin movement in the us with bernie sanders and occupy everywhere we look we see that obviously consciousness has changed massively since the crisis hit in 2008 and uh and that obviously makes the the prospect of a next world slump even scarier for the ruling class because now you have a a working class uh uh you know the 99 percent that are far more organised that are far more radicalized and uh and are looking for an alternative and the alternative as far as we're concerned is marxist is obviously sitting right under our notes we can see it in the form of the the huge quantities of wealth that are said are sitting there idly unable to be invested by the capitalist because of this huge overproduction on a world scale we can see the technologies that are potentially there um it's just reading uh the other day paul mason's new book post capitalism where he talks about how information technology digital digital media all these things have shown the enormous contradictions that capitalism's facing where we've got the potential to supply culture in infinite quantities in the sense of once you've produced an mp3 or a video whatever it's infinitely replicable at no extra cost it's price should be zero according to the the market and yet um and yet obviously the these monopolies like apple like facebook like google they have to they have to have a monopoly just to keep the prices high just to be able to keep making profits out of these kind of digital economies we see that in other words a potential there with all that technology not only on the hand one hand automation as i've just talked about earlier but the potential to have this super abundance of so many things and it's not just digital commodities but but obviously food and and medicines all these things that are held back but currently by the question of private ownership and production for profit and and and the control of these of this wealth and of this technology in the hands of the one percent in other words private ownership has become this enormous barrier to the development of society it's become an enormous fetter and therefore the the solution for us is is an easy and an obvious one the the need to get rid of this private ownership not of the of the small businesses and the the you know personal property that people have but the main levers of the economy the commanding heights as marx called them bringing these the banks and the major monopolies that dominate every sector of the global economy bringing these into public ownership in in nationalisation under under workers control getting rid of the anarchy of the market and utilising this planning that already exists actually in it within these giant monopolies every every giant monopoly has planning if you like internally producing according to a plan in order to decrease costs and increase efficiency and increase profits point is we want to take that same plan that exists within companies but now get rid of the competition the anarchy between these major monopolies and have a plan across the whole of of the economy a democratic rational plan that's what socialism and the and the transformation socialist transformation of society is about it's about you know getting rid of one set of laws the capitalist set of laws and and replacing them with a new set of laws an economy that operates according to a new you know a new paradigm if you like and and and that has to be a socialist plan of production in Britain and internationally and anyway that's that that's the the marxist analysis that's what marx had to say about crisis about capitalism and and importantly he pointed therefore to the way forward and that's what we're fighting for today I'll leave it there okay well it was very good discussion and thank you for all the all the contributions and questions um to just come back on some of the points um yeah i mean the housing question which uh several contributions have referred to um i mean really what you what you're seeing now as as several people have pointed out is really how housing uh as as more and more become a uh the kind of victim of speculation if you like um and it that itself is is a reflection of the crisis of overproduction where all of these kind of things that that should play some sort of useful role you know whether it's uh you know um certain raw materials you know you've got speculation of food uh there's speculation in in art and and and wines and you know very cultural or things you know but and then housing is is such an extreme part of this where basically obviously you've got properties being bought up not at all ever with the intention of actually living in them but purely as investment vehicles purely people trying to to make money out of money and getting on the the property bubble that's taking place particularly in in somewhere like London and obviously the the result is these extraordinary contradictions where uh where you have uh as people have pointed out homelessness alongside empty mansions and in fact it highlights the the political crisis as well or the the the social crisis in the sense that um here you've got a situation where people are trying to to overcome this this this dichotomy if you like by by by occupying the homes you have squatters and so forth but you see them evicted and it shows how the law i'm sure this is being discussed in the other session on the state the law ultimately is a question of the law of maintaining property rights and it's above all about those property rights because here you see with with housing so clearly how the right of of those people who've bought that house as an investment vehicle trumps the rights of those people to have a home uh you know the the squatters are evicted because uh it threatens the the the the the use of that that that property as a um as an investment vehicle for the rich um what else uh yeah the Jonas asked interesting question about quantitative easing how you'd expect all this money that's being printed i mean what well first of all what is quantitative easing well it's uh it's not it's not quite as simple as printing money because uh if that was the case then you'd expect some sort of situation like you know Weimar Germany where it's just hyperinflation as as uh Jonas pointed out um obviously that's not happening and the and part of the reason is the the way in which quantitative easing works which is whereby the the central bank uh basically creates money in order to buy up assets from the other banks um uh and in doing so tries to free up basically money that the bank has to then lend and make riskier loans if you like to to business and to houses um with the idea that that that will then cause them to consume and invest and uh and hopefully stimulate the economy but the fact is as as uh i think Scott pointed out most of these banks aren't then lending this money on you're not seeing an increase in investment you're not seeing an increase in in in demand in the economy but in fact the banks are just using this money to kind of shore up the their bank balances and and some of this money is obviously finding its way into the wider economy and in doing so inflating asset prices it's creating instability it's acting also as a kind of a way for for different currencies to try to competitively devalue to a certain degree as well you're getting a it's it's become a form of protectionism almost um which again shows you how it adds to the instability on the world scale but i think the important point is also that when we talk about money and and it's and the relationship between the money supply and inflation um we've got to understand that that that kind of law if you like like all laws that we talk about in the economy is only really a tendency and obviously there can always be countervailing tendencies and and the countervailing tendency you're seeing at the moment is the fact that although the money supply is being increased through through these kind of methods whether it's credit or quantitative easing or whatever you know in japan they've effectively doubled the money supply through quantitative easing in britain obviously we've printed 375 billion pounds worth in quantitative easing uh which is uh you know something like 20 percent of of of GDP but the the the countervailing side to this is the enormous downward pressure on prices because of the uh the the lack of of demand in the world economy the the huge excess capacity the in other words overproduction is is is is pushing uh is well it's pushing prices down it's pulling the whole economy downwards um and uh and therefore uh as has been said is that the fact that quantitative easing even doesn't have an effect it shows it's it's like uh you know the drug has already uh been used up the the the the body has already become immune to the drug uh it's that they've used you know tried they've tried so hard to to to you know constantly get that next kick into the economy that each extra addition is uh diminished returns if you like and um and you see this with the question of of credit itself where uh the i think in the chinese economy for example it used to be the everything something like every uh every every one dollar's worth of of debt would create one dollar's worth of uh of investment and now it's something like four dollars are needed to create one dollar's of investment so in other words that you're getting these diminished returns more and more the the economy is so sick so full of all these contradictions that that the the measures become more and more useless and futile uh that the capitalists have to to try and get out of these crises um rosa talked about the the so-called german economic miracle and uh and the and its basis in the exploitation of uh of the german workers and obviously alongside this you've also had the massive investment of machinery and uh and productivity in germany but obviously that has created this huge overproduction within the german economy and the the solution to that for the german capitalist was uh was the eurozone basically was there was the the the creation of a market uh a free market where they could basically lend money lend this huge excess uh you know this huge huge surplus that the german economy is producing lend it through german banks to uh and european banks through to the uh to the peripheral economies to buy back german goods and obviously you see therefore as as rosa pointed out our germany is very much interlinked to these countries around it and it and the the euro crisis is really exposed again exposed all these contradictions where uh whatever they do is is is kind of wrong from the point of view of capitalism then on the one hand uh they don't want Greece to leave the eurozone because they know it could unravel the whole eurozone that is the basis for for that uh for for for the german economies boom basically um but on the other hand they can't you know keep pouring money into a bottomless pit which is what Greece and uh and other countries have have become uh you know they they can't keep funding uh consumption in in these other places so uh you end up with a situation where whatever they do is wrong because the point is it's not a crisis of the eurozone it's a crisis of capitalism and uh and it's and it's just expressing itself in different ways in different countries the eurozone creates a particularly acute crisis because you have all the different countries locked together and uh and obviously as long as they're all going in the same general direction there's generally boom then everything can be kept together but as soon as in as soon as you've got a crisis then obviously all the economies are moving in different directions but they're all tied together and it creates uh it creates all those those national tensions coming to the fore we'll talk about it in this afternoon session on europe but you see really on a capitalist basis europe is falling to pieces frankly and uh and and and there's no way out for the for the european capitalists um whether it's inside the eurozone or outside um and uh and but with germany as well obviously it's linked to china it's an enormous amount of export of uh of capital goods that germany produces two places like china and again the chinese slow down having an effect on germany there so again uh all of these things are interlinked and um and and really it's a it's a question of uh when not if in terms of uh these stronger economies being brought into the crisis also um yes scott talked about this idea of creative destruction and other people have alluded to it as well in terms of the uh the coal and the steel industries this is always the the mantra of the capitalist is a phrase termed by a capitalist economist called schumpeter actually and um basically is the idea that you know capitalism would would would bring about progress would bring about technological revolutions and so forth through what you call creative destruction otherwise the the old industries were destroyed the uncompetitive ones that couldn't keep up um but in in doing so that would free up the capital free up the human resources and the uh and the money to then be poured into to um uh other new kind of innovative sections of the economy and obviously there is some historical basis to this idea it's not you know all all the bourgeois ideas in terms of economics and in fact in in all of society they always have some material historical basis you know obviously uh otherwise they they they wouldn't be able to exist at all they wouldn't be taken at all seriously they have to have some sort of grain of truth to them and obviously historically there is a grain of truth to the idea of creative destruction that you know once upon a time the vast majority of the population was involved in agriculture but as uh as innovation came about people were you know as you had increased productivity on the land more of those people could be taken from the land and into new innovative sections in industry and vice versa with automation you get people moving from industry into services the the real thing now though that that that that that is really worrying even the bourgeois economists is that this creative destruction is going to be very much destruction and not much creation in the sense that now you've uh you've freed up labour from agriculture and from industry it's all you know service-based economies in places like Britain we don't make anything anymore and there's already excess capacity of uh of kind of manufactured goods and so forth on a world scale so it's all in services and the point is now they're talking about well even the services sector is going to be absolutely uh kind of turned upside down by automation there was a study by some Oxford economists uh where they predicted 47 percent of jobs in the US could be uh automated away and made redundant by 2030 and they were saying the real sectors of the economy that were going to be hit hardest by this were not the the manufacturing and so forth which has already seen this process taking place but white collar jobs people even like doctors it could be replaced by you know you can get health apps on your iphone now and diagnose you apparently um you got lawyers and uh an accountancy uh translation for example all these kind of things that used to require human skill and and obviously highly educated workers now all of these people are uh are being uh thrown onto the scrap people will be thrown onto the scrap people as well and uh and and and uh there isn't uh any kind of obvious sign of where these people are going to go where the next uh of where the next wave of innovation is that's going to employ all these people uh because you know technology isn't some sort of deus ex that just it's not a manner from heaven that just kind of falls from the sky and suddenly you know you create jobs out of nowhere you have to have a material basis for innovation and for for the deployment of technology you know uh the famous example we have to use is how even in um uh i think it was ancient greek times in alexandria someone invented the the steam engine the the idea of a steam engine existed for thousands of years but the reason it didn't get fully deployed to increase productivity across society until the industrial revolution was because in a slave society it played no role there was no need to increase productivity it was uh you had slaves and the way you increased wealth was by getting more slaves through war and conquest and it was only with capitalism as i said earlier with the idea of wage labor where you were buying the ability of the worker to work the buying the labor power that there was an incentive to invest to have new technologies like steam that could uh rapidly increase productivity and today we find the same sort of thing there's a there's enormous potential if you like for technology we can see you know 3d printing uh all these digital technologies i talked about earlier you know you can see the potential to to to use these to to to increase leisure time to to to automate vast sections of society and and in fact it would make the old idea of planning economy very simple but obviously it can't be used within the material limits of capitalism within within the barrier of private ownership and production for profit and and even science itself and the whole process of innovation is ultimately limited by what capitalism and what the material basis in society can provide if you've got a situation where you've got artificial scarcity in society and competition over the limited resources that are kind of falling off the table of the capitalist for the rest of society then that in itself you know that that that creeps into every facet of society in other words you know the the logical competition asserts itself even in the public sector even in even in scientific research in in universities you have limited resources because of austerity and so academics now even they're all within even though they're all within the same public sphere and public funding they're ultimately forced to compete against each other to produce papers just for the sake of it in order to gain access to funding and and the result is that you're getting this huge degradation to science itself and the economist ran an article the other year where they said that something like you know 50% of scientific papers aren't validated and and could just be be bunked they said you know in other words it's just nonsense science being produced just for the sake of it in order for academics to get you know a quantity of papers out rather than quality in other words the very base the very quality of the scientific research we do is is being undermined because of competition because of the lack of resources that capitalism provides and and therefore you know there's there there's no obvious way in which you're seeing how science is going to be taken forwards how technology is going to be taken forwards how society is going to be taken forwards capitalism as I said has become unable to develop the the forces of production and it was that that marx ultimately said was the real test of whether a system was progressive or not and and when it could no longer take forward the the forces of production develop science and technology and culture and so at that point marx said you would get these these crises you would become obvious that a revolution was needed to to to let the productive forces to let standards of living carry on expanding and you know in terms of the this back to this creative destruction again we see obviously with coal mining and then the 80s in Britain now the steel industry see obviously that the capitalism you know if it's left up to the anarchy of the market it's left up left up to the invisible hand obviously it is that it has to go through this kind of chaotic process in order to reallocate jobs from one sector to another you know we would say obviously in the long run something like coal could not survive as an industry because obviously we would be wanting green technologies environmentally friendly ways of producing energy but obviously capitalism can't reallocate resources in society in that kind of way in a rational way from one sector to another it can only do it in that anarchic way in that destructive way where a whole generation is thrown on to the scrap heap and and obviously that's why we call really for for a socialist plan of production if it's only by taking control of the banks of of these major industries that you can retrain workers through a lifelong process to be able to move from one sector to another where you can allocate the resources take them out of one sector and place them in the you know the the green energy for example that we need and do it in a in a rational way that that means people aren't left on the left you know left to the the dogs of of competition um uh Steve and others talked about inequality and obviously the incredible inequality we see today with the the 1% owning something like 50% of the the world's wealth and obviously you've seen people like Piketty who've come forwards and tried to explain this Thomas Piketty become very popular with his book also called capital although I think like with superhero movies the original is always better so don't get the reboot it's and and he was I don't think anyone who actually reviewed the book could have read it because they've read it their reviews would have been very different because although he talks about he provides very good statistics on how a quality inequality has changed over time and and how it's reached such incredibly intense levels today he doesn't really ever explain the cause of inequality it's very much a historical description of its development but never actually looking at the the the laws within capitalism that give rise to inequality and that obviously means that you can't ever explain the solution really the solution according to Piketty and all these kind of reformists is you know the idea of just tax the rich basically a policy that's failed to work in Piketty's own country in with Francis Halland who tried to tax the rich was found that he couldn't because the rich had a strike of capital and then and and the result was he's actually now carrying out worse austerity than than his predecessors and and it's the same obviously in Greece today and what Piketty has said never really explains is how inequality is not some sort of byproduct of it's not like a a nasty kind of tumor on the side of capitalism you can just cut away you know this is really the idea of all reformists is that you can cut the nasty bits of capitalism away and create some sort of good capitalism get rid of the nasty finance and make nice manufacturing as though finance wasn't always an inherent part of the capitalist system and and the point is inequality itself is not it's not something that you can just a nasty symptom that you can cure it's it's it's it's an inherent part of the capitalist system the fact is capitalism is inequality in the sense that where does profit come from what is the basis for the capitalist system it is the production of profit a production for profit and and that profit is the unpaid labour of the working class in other words the the the wealth that accumulates for the few is very much necessitated upon the exploitation of the many you can't not have inequality within capitalism to get rid of inequality would be to get rid of capitalism and that is something that Piketty never points out and that all of these reformists never really point out and that I think is why just to sum up we we have to discuss the questions of Marxist economics we have to discuss the question of crisis of capitalism is to understand the real laws that are at play in society and and and you know look and understand these general lessons not just for academic interest as as people have pointed out in the from the contributions but because to understand you know why capitalism goes into crisis and and why it will go into crisis and continue to go into crisis and and this really is is is one of the last questions that was asked was you know when can we expect the next crisis well I think we're still going through the beginning it's not like you can say the last crisis ever really ended that's the point it's it's a continuation the whole of the last seven years it'll be ebbs and flows in the situation but but obviously we can talk about next slump which I think is very much around the corner but it's all part of the same ongoing crisis of capitalism we never really got out of the last one and obviously that the the fact that there is a new world slump on the horizon has enormous impacts on consciousness and that's what we need to understand that that you know the the material basis for reformism has been withered away the the post war boom is not going to come back you know there were particular circumstances that allowed that to happen that don't exist anymore it's much the crisis is much deeper now there's no recovery on the horizon let alone talk of a boom and therefore any party that comes into power on a reformist program is going to instantly find itself faced with that deep world slump and faced with the prospect of having to make deep cuts and deep austerity we see that in Greece we you know where within the space of six months a party elected on a radical left program ends up carrying out worse austerity than its predecessors that shows the the inability of reformism in this intense period of crisis to offer a way out and and that's the kind of prospect that's going to face a Corbyn Government from you know before he's even in power they're already attacking him and obviously once he's in power they'll be there'll be strikes of capital if he tries to take on the rich if he tries to tax them you'll have strikes of investment the the capitalist will use every tool in the box to to basically force him to retreat on the question of anti austerity politics and that means that we have to be prepared ourselves to argue for a for a genuine alternative to actually say look there is no reformist way out of this crisis there is a is a is not a crisis of of of of austerity or ideas it's it's you know it's not an ideological question that you can just get rid of the nasty Tories it's a it's a result of the actual system itself of the deep contradictions within the system on a world scale we need to understand those laws why capitalism is going through crisis understand that there is no way out within capitalism and therefore aren't you know give the only alternative that there is which is a revolutionary transformation where we understand these laws not just to reform them but to fundamentally transform them to to to to change the whole way in which society operates so that we can get rid of these crises get rid of this austerity and and as I say the the only solution therefore is a is a socialist one and that's obviously what we need to discuss here and and and have that conviction to be able to argue for in the labour movement


O'r fanhau yn da, i'n rhaid i ddod, ddodd yn fawr yn gweithio mwy o'r rhaglen cerddmusiciannol. Dyn ni, rwy'n gweithio, o'r ddiddordeb yn ymgyrch yn rhaid i gydag o'r rhaglen cyfrym, ac yn y cerdd musiciaeth cyflawni yn y Llyfrgellfaedd Cymru. ac rwyf i ni'n gweithio byddai gweithio gyda'r plan newydd, i ddiweddig gweithio'r bwysig, i gael gyda ffyrdd coronavirus yn y ffeith. Rwy'n cael ei gweithio ffyrdd coronavirus o'r pwysig, rwy'n cael ei gweithio'r bwysig, oherwydd i ni'n gweithio gyda'r vaccinatio. Yn cael ei gweithio arall wedi'u gweithio'r bwysig, i gael gweithio'r bwysig i gweithio'r bwysig i gweithio. Felly, mae'n gyrsbydd yma datblygu cyfnod, a mae'n gyrsbydd yma sy'n dweud y cyfnod coronavirus yn gweithio. Felly, roeddwn i gyd gan rŵr ysgrifennu ysgrifennu sefydliadau yma, sy'n mewn cyflwyno ar gyfer y cyfrddwyr hefyd, mae'n gyrsbydd ar gyfer y newydd. Yn ystod y cychwyn yma, yw'r wneud y lle bydd yn byw yw'r effeithio cychwyn, yn ymgyrch a'r Gwyl-Pcr testau, ond yw'r fawr cychwyn y gallu'r cyfyrdd o'r Omicron. Dwi'n credu i'r cyfreithio'r cychwyn yw'r fawr cychwyn yma yn y 2 yma, o'r deisemba yn cael ei ddechrau.  Rwy'n meddwl, rwy'n meddwl 160 cwysig per 100,000 o'r populatio yng Nghymru. Ond rwy'n meddwl bod rwy'n meddwl yw'n mynd i'ch gweithio'r ysgrifennu gwahanol yma, rwy'n meddwl i'ch gweithio'r pcr testau, rwy'n meddwl i'ch gweithio'r ysgrifennu o'r pandemig yn yng Nghymru. Rwy'n meddwl i'ch gweithio'r ysgrifennu gwahanol, rydym yn ysgrifennu gwahanol, ac rwy'n meddwl i'ch gweithio'r'u cwysig sydd wedi'i'ch gwahanol ar y cyflwyno rymell yn y toilet a yn y dyflaethol yma yng Nghymru. I'r wneud sydd dweud, mae'n dechau i gynnwys ar y dyflaethol yma yng Nghymru, Ddiwyng y Gweith. Dwyaint yng Nghymru, rwy'n meddwl am y gweithio'r ffordd, is represented by the red line. You will see that, just as in the last slide, it too shows the number of people testing positive for coronavirus falling in Wales. In the latest survey, those figures suggest that around one in 30 people in Wales had coronavirus at the end of February. As you can see, levels of infection were lower in Wales than in any other part of the United Kingdom, and that those levels continue to be on that gradual downwards trajectory. Now, we've also seen falls in the number of positive cases reported in Welsh universities and a reduction in the number of school pupils absent due to COVID-19 in recent weeks. The number of people in hospital with COVID-19 is stable at around 830. And while it's good news that that figure isn't rising at that level, still with nearly a thousand people in a hospital bed associated with COVID-19, the pressures that that creates in the wider NHS remain very real and with some serious and continuing knock-on consequences on other health services and treatments. Now, as I've said, the public health situation has improved thanks to the efforts that we have all made together in Wales over recent months. The result is that in this latest three-week review of the regulations, Wales can remain at alert level zero. Protection from vaccination is very high thanks to the incredible success of the vaccination programme and the willingness of people in Wales to come forward to be vaccinated. Almost 6.9 million doses of the vaccine have been delivered since the programme was launched, and that's only just over a year ago. All of that has saved thousands of lives and has significantly weakened the link between catching coronavirus and that becoming a serious illness. And the programme, of course, is not over. We'll be topping up people's protection by offering older and the most vulnerable people a further spring booster vaccine. And we'll be offering the vaccine to all 5 to 11-year-olds. And as I say, at each of these occasions, if you haven't yet had a vaccine or you haven't yet completed your course, it's never too late to come forward in Wales. Now that combination of high vaccination rates and improving level of infections means that we are able to think about moving beyond the emergency response to the pandemic. This does not mean that the pandemic is over, but it does mean that we are able to think now about how we can live safely with the virus just as we live with other infectious illnesses. Today, we've published a plan that sets out how we can do this. While ensuring that, we can respond quickly if a new variant emerges or if we have another pandemic wave putting unsustainable pressure on our NHS. If the public health position remains favourable, we will start this transition by removing the legal underpinning of the measures we have lived with for the last two years. And we'll remove the legal requirements from the 28th of March. From that date, the legal requirement to wear face coverings will end. The legal requirement to self-isolate will end. And the legal requirement for businesses to carry out specific COVID risk assessments and take reasonable measures will end as well. But I want to be clear that the ways we have learned to behave and which have kept us safe during the pandemic will continue to be important after the 28th of March. While we have moved away from legal requirements, the Welsh Government will continue to provide guidance which will make it clear, for example, that we should self-isolate if we are ill with the virus. Businesses and employers will still be subject to the general health and safety requirements. And schools will continue to operate using the national framework. And for now, we're recommending that face coverings continue to be worn in communal indoor areas by all staff and secondary school age students. Now, as part of living safely with coronavirus, we will also be making changes to testing. Between the end of this month and June, we will gradually move away from PCR and lateral flow tests being available to everyone, to those tests being targeted now towards the most vulnerable people and the most vulnerable places. We will do this in a phased and gradual way. From the 28th of March, the routine use of PCR tests for the general public will come to an end. Lateral flow tests instead will continue to be available to order free online for anyone with symptoms. PCR testing will continue to be used to test patients admitted to hospital, to test health and social care staff, care home residents and others in vulnerable settings. We'll make a level of testing still available for surveillance and our TTP service will continue to operate above and beyond what is available now in England, where the UK government has in a cliff edge way dismantled its testing capacity. Now, as we approach the second anniversary of the pandemic, we can look forward with growing confidence that the next year will be one in which we will have this very different relationship with the virus. As we move beyond the emergency response, I know that some people, especially the most vulnerable and those who have been shielding, will be anxious about this process. But I want to be clear that the plan that we have set out will go on protecting your health and wellbeing as we all learn to live safely with the virus. By acting in that way and by drawing on the lessons of everything we have been to over the last two years, together we can go on keeping one another safe. Diolch o galon i chi gyd. Today I'll take some questions from journalists and as usual all answers will be broadcast live on our own social media channels. First of all, today over to Adrian Masters at ITV Wales. Thank you First Minister and this is to pick up on your last point really, which is that there will be some people today and in the coming weeks to very anxious about the change in the regulations or the removal of the regulations. What is your apart from saying that the advice remains for them to remain cautious. What steps are you taking to ensure that people with disabilities or otherwise vulnerable more vulnerable to COVID are protected because you can understand their anxiety that they will see that the people are not wearing masks and not necessarily social distancing and they won't necessarily know whether that somebody that the meeting has COVID or not. How can you assure them in this situation? Well first of all to say that I entirely understand that people who've been at the sharpest end of the experience of the last two years and who've often only very cautiously themselves gone back into the world will be anxious as we move beyond the emergency stage. It's why I've been at pains to emphasise today that while we are moving beyond the legal requirements the advice of the Welsh Government will remain very clear that we should continue to draw on everything we have learned and everything we have done together. While there won't be a legal requirement to wear a face covering in a crowded public place for example, the advice will still be that wearing a face covering in such circumstances goes on offering a degree of protection to you and to others. So I think people in Wales have acted throughout the pandemic in a way that recognises not simply that those actions are helpful to them but they're keen to ensure that other people are kept safe as well. And as we move beyond legal requirements and into living safely with the virus, the greatest assurance people who are most vulnerable will have will be if everybody else continues to do those simple things that will keep us all safe into the future. Thank you. Is there a danger that phasing out mass testing by what I think about June as you've just said out will mean that a future variant may not be spotted and if so what contingencies have you got in place to try to ensure that doesn't happen? I think that is a genuine anxiety. It is why we have attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the UK Government to take a more gradual approach to the run down of testing and the infrastructure that has served us so well over the last two years. Here in Wales we will devote some of the testing that we have available to us through our own means through Public Health Wales, for example, in ways that will allow surveillance to continue. Now we're very lucky in Wales. We've had throughout the pandemic one of the best capacities for genomic sequencing anywhere in the world and we've been able to put that to very good use. By continuing to make that available and some other things which will remain in place, we're optimistic although not yet confirmed that the UK Government will continue, for example, with the ONS survey that I used in the slides earlier, that all of that together will give us a level of surveillance sufficient to be able to spot. Either a new variant arising spontaneously here in the United Kingdom as we saw with what was then called the Kent variant or with a variant from somewhere else in the world being imported into the United Kingdom. We continue to have conversations with the UK Government about the need to ensure both that there is sufficient surveillance in place and that should it be necessary to step up the level of protection again through a more widespread testing regime that there's a proper plan and a proper capacity to be able to do that. Adrian, thank you very much. Over to Gareth Breyer at BBC Wales. Thank you, First Minister. Os allwch i ateb y cwestiwn enesaf yn Gymraeg hefyd os welch yn dda. Whilst you have said the pandemic isn't over, is this the moment that Wales actually starts to live with the virus? Well, Gareth, I think Wales has been living with the virus for quite a long time now. During the summer of last year, the level of protections still required in Wales was at a pretty low level. And since we've come through the Omicron wave, we've been reducing that level of protection pretty steadily now for a number of weeks. What I think we are getting to is a steady state where we have stability in managing the virus. And that's why we are able to move from relying on the law to relying on the sort of guidance that, for example, kicks in if there's a measles outbreak somewhere. You know, there are other infectious diseases that we live with, and we have ways of managing them. We're on that part we hope about me of the coronavirus journey when we will be able to manage it in that more so everyday way. And managing it does not mean ignoring it. It means taking sensible measures of the sort we've described today. So, yng Nghymru, ni wedi bod yn fyw gyda coronavirus yn spell nawr. Mae'r cyfanyadau sydd anu a hyn o bryd wedi dod lawr, wrthnos ar ôl, wrthnos ar ôl y ton o Omicron. Y gobaith yw ni nawr mewn lle, ble, allwn i cynllunio i fyw ond i'n fyw yn diogel gyda'r coronavirus fel rhan o'r pethau sydd anu ond ni'n gallu amdopu gyda'r y level o'r coronavirus sydd ar gael. Fel ni'n amdopu gyda'r pethau eraill a fel awrach gwych, mae hwn yn codi am elwaith a yng Nghymru angen gwybod sut iddeliw gyda'r effaith. Yna dyfodol y cynllun sy'n dany yw ffordd i fyw gyda coronavirus ond mewn ffordd diogel achos bydd coronavirus yn dal dany. Mae'r virus ddim wedi deflanu. Yn ymgymru, ychwanegwch cyntaf y gweithiol sydd wedi'u gweithio y masgr yng Nghymru o'r holl i'r lleol? Y ddweud yn rhan o'r gwneud o'r holl gwneud ffasgrig o'r holl i'r holl yn ymgymru ac mae'r holl gweithio'r holl gweithio'r holl i'r holl. Mae'r holl yn gallu y byddol yn gwneud o'r holl. I think the history of coronavirus in Wales has been about people being very aware themselves of doing the right thing, of doing the safe thing. I don't think that we will see a sudden cliff edge in people no longer doing the right thing because the law doesn't require them to do it. There's a good natural experiment that has happened here. As it happens, Scotland has never had a legal requirement to self-isolate. It's only ever been strong guidance from the Scottish Government and there's no evidence that the levels of self-isolation in Scotland have been significantly different to the levels in Wales or in England where we've had the law to underpin it. So, I think, and it's a really important message today, that while the legal requirements, we hope, will be lifted on 28 March, the need to go on doing the right thing, particularly in vulnerable places like hospitals and care homes, will not have ended. So, am fymarn i, ben i wedi weld dros y cyfnodol pandemig i gyd, yw bobl yng Nghymru yn isheneid a pethau go iawn, a pethau sy'n rhoi cymorth i bobl eraill. O'r cwrs mae gyfraith wedi fod na, ond dim just achos y gyfraith yn dweud rhywbeth, am beth dwi wedi weld, a dydy hwnna ddim ar eswm pam mae pobol wedi burwm lan i defnyddio mwy gawdau i hwnna yn asu ac yn y blan, ac ar ôl arwythfedd yr i gain o fawrth. Dwi meddwl, bydd pobol yn dal i ishe neu dipethau sy'n cadw a hwnna yn ddiogel ond sy'n helpu bobol eraill a hefyd. Yn pan i'n siarad am ysbytau a ble mae catrefi preswyl ac yn y blan, dwi'n siwr byd pobol sy'n gweithio yn y maes na a bobol sy'n defnyddio ar gwasanaethau.  Gareth Diolch yn fawr. Overnaw to Dan Bevan at LBC. The Welsh safe is completely consistent with the step by step way in which we have a gone about dealing with the impact of coronavirus over the whole two years you saw on the slide that Wales has the lowest level of coronavirus of any of the four nations. I think that our way of doing things has succeeded. I think it has continued to secure the support of the bulk of the population in Wales and I don't intend to throw all that away in what we hope will be the final stages of dealing with the emergency phase of the pandemic. Thank you and we've been speaking with retail workers who say they've been receiving verbal abuse over mask wearing and people just simply not understanding the rules during the pandemic. Now one survey suggests that in the last 12 months 90% of shop workers have received verbal abuse. Now obviously they've made a big sacrifice throughout the pandemic being key workers. What protections are you going to implement going forward for them and I suppose how can it be made up? Well look the first thing to say is it is entirely unacceptable that anybody going about their ordinary every day earning a living should be abused by somebody else for any reason and then you're absolutely right you know at the in the worst days of the pandemic when we knew far less about it when we had no protections from a vaccine amongst those groups of people who went to work every day to make sure the rest of us could go on having food on the table were people in the retail sector so I very much pay tribute to the work that they have done on all behalf and as I say abuse is absolutely unacceptable from as you know when I speak to Asdor the trade union that represents those workers and people who've been on the front line they always emphasise that it is a small minority of people who behave in that way but most people continue to do what is asked of them to behave respectfully of other people and people who work in those settings but you know that small minority you go home at the end of the day and you remember them even when you are not thinking about all those other people who've done the right thing so the health and safety requirements will remain in law after the 28th of March we are removing the coronavirus specific requirements but that doesn't mean that obligations on employers to carry out a risk assessment in workplaces and to make sure that risks are properly mitigated those will remain in the law as they were before coronavirus began and we will be working with our trade union colleagues and with employers who in Wales in my experience want to do the right thing to make sure that where there are risks of the sort that you described that we still deal with them and it is a responsibility of managers of those premises not the people on the front line themselves to take the lead in making sure that where there is entirely unacceptable behaviour of that sort for any reason that you know that it is dealt with and that people on the front line are not expected simply to tolerate it or to absorb it as part of what it means to work in that setting. Dan Diolch yn fawr. Last of all today in a small but of course select group of contributors over to Will Haywood at Wales online. Yes perfectly formed group of contributors many. How much do you expect cases and hospitalisations to rise once you lift further measures and how different would this plan have been if the UK government had continued to fund things like PCR tests? I don't think we have an expectation that cases will necessarily rise because of the actions we're taking because you will see that we are timing our actions very carefully against the seasonality of coronavirus as well. By the time we move into the time of year when we move into a world in which the legal requirements have been removed and the testing availability has been reduced, we will be in the better time of year as well. So I think there'll be a combination of factors and it won't necessarily mean that we would expect to see a rise in numbers. Had we succeeded in persuading the UK government to take a more gradual and more proportionate approach to running down the testing regime, I think we would have been able to have kept more going for longer. And if we'd been in that position that is what we would have done. Now let me say I do think it was right and inevitable that the level of testing that you could sustain in the steady state part of coronavirus rather than the emergency phase was going to be lower. It's not an argument about reducing, it's an argument about the speed at which you reduce testing and what you have left when you reach that steady state. We would have slowed things down at a more proportionate rate and we would have liked to have seen a higher level of testing remaining. In the end when the UK government makes these decisions they have a direct effect on us when the IP5 laboratory in Newport is closed by the UK government as they intend to do, then that's a resource lost to Wales. When we don't have Barnett consequentials coming to us to help us to go on with a level of testing that we might have preferred, then we don't have the money to do everything we would have wished to do. So we've had to plan within the constraints that we unavoidably face. Simon Hart has said he wishes Wales hadn't made its own rules during the pandemic while prominent Conservative Lord Frost said it was nonsense that Wales had different rules to England. Given these repeated attacks how under threat do you think Wales's ability to make its own decisions independent of Westminster are in the future and are you concerned about this? Well I think it's just important for me to say that the level of responsibility that we had in Wales to make decisions was the level of responsibility that the Cabinet to which the Secretary of State of Wales belonged decided we should have at the outset. It was the UK government who made the original decisions about where responsibilities should lie and I think it's shocking that he should feel no responsibility at all for the decision of which he was a part. Now the broader history of the Johnson Government has been of, you know, muscular unionism, one in which the powers and the financial resources available to devolved governments have been under attack. I think that is bad for the United Kingdom. I've said this many times and I've said it directly to UK ministers. The Welsh Government believes that Wales is better off in the United Kingdom and that the United Kingdom is better off for having Wales in it. We need respectful relationships that recognise that the powers of the Senneth were confirmed in two referendums by people in Wales and that continual raids on the powers and the responsibilities of the Senneth is not the way in which to persuade people that the United Kingdom is a deal that they are keen to sign up to. There's a better future for the United Kingdom than that and I hope that the UK government will begin to realise that and to act accordingly. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you all very much indeed.


A Happy New Year to everyone. I hope that 24 brings good fortune to all of you and to your friends and family. Every new year is filled with new opportunities. And it also gives us a chance to reflect on how far we've come. To give you an example of a remarkable achievement this year, we celebrate 25 years of the Euro. On January 1st 1999, 25 years ago, the Euro was launched as a new common currency. Three years later, people were starting to hold banknotes and coins in their hands, in their pockets. Since then, the Euro continues to unite us. About 350 million people in 20 countries use it every day. Some of you watching may not even remember a time before the Euro, but its benefits are clear in all our lives. The Euro has made it easier to work, travel and conduct business wherever you are in the Euro area. Here at the ECB, we are the custodians of the Euro. We serve you by taking care of our currency, working for price stability and making sure that we keep the Euro fit for the future. We are 25 years old, but this is only the beginning of the Euro's journey, as we bring our currency into the digital age by preparing the foundation for a possible digital Euro to complement cash. By the way, by the same token, we are also working hard on even more beautiful banknotes. We will keep working towards greater European integration, in whichever way we can.


How many times a day do we do high five to a student? How many times do we say, you're doing a great job. You're working so hard. And so before writing, it's really important that we know what the students are writing about, that we've set a topic for today's writing. Because otherwise, I can't be informative. If I have no clue what you're writing about, I can't help look at what you've generated and give you informative feedback. But if I know that today you are writing about the fact that your mother was gone for two weeks, or today you're writing an email to your father and you want to tell him what you did this morning, or today you're writing about going to the movie Shrek. If I know that background information that I can give you informative feedback. So before we write, we set a topic so that I know what you're writing about. During writing, I do give you that reinforcement feedback.  I don't do it a lot because I don't want to interfere. But I give you a little bit of reinforcement feedback. Afterwards, you stop writing and I say, oh, you did such a great job. And then I start looking at it and I give you evaluative feedback. For example, I look at it and I say, oh my gosh, look. You were writing about the movie and I see an M here for movie. Or I can say, oh my goodness, I see some letters in here that are in your friend's names. Point to a letter. And we're gonna see if it's any of your friend's names. And then the student points to the P and I say P. Oh my gosh, P is for Patty. We gotta tell her Patty. Jake wrote a P for Patty today when he was writing. So I can find ways to give informative feedback if I know the topic and if I know your life and I can connect to your life. It's way more powerful if we use informative feedback instead of just reinforcement feedback.


the region, the co-founder of Ethereum Machines. We are a tech-based V2V hardware startup based on high level and we work towards bringing a conjunction between additive and subtractive manufacturing technologies. Ethereum Machines started a simple idea of enabling people to have access to technologies that were not available to them till now. Initially, me and Kaushik, we were into making drones and other different robotic applications and we realized to make better parts and more precise parts, we needed something called a CNC machine and buying a CNC machine for a college student was just sort of a question. So we decided, no, why not make one and after a lot of research and development, we were able to crack the CNC machine technology. Edited manufacturing is basically a combination of additive and subtractive manufacturing. Edited manufacturing, as we all know, is 3D printing in which you add material layer by layer and subtractive manufacturing is CNC machining in which you remove or cut material layer by layer and with the combination of these two technologies, it opens up a lot of doors in the generative design field, curving electronics, wearable tech, automotive and aerospace industry, multi-material structures and a lot more. On the global map and in working towards part-breaking technologies to redefine the manufacturing industry. So I think that those are two reasons why we think we have the potential to lead at least in the manufacturing space tomorrow.