Namaste. Good evening to all of you. Typography Society of India extends a warm welcome to all of you to the 16th edition of Online Design Lecture Series. Today, we have an upcoming typographer from the younger generation. Typography Society of India is committed to give encouragement to all generations of graphic designers and typographers and calligraphers and we are extremely proud to present to you one upcoming designer from the very young generation, Shaili Patel. She is a fresh graduate from the Department of Applied Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Emerson City, Veruda with a keen interest in type design and typography. She has been developing typefaces since three years now in Indian scripts as well as in English. While attending one Milano's display type class at Cooper Union, Shaili designed a high contrast Latin font named Maya with peculiar triangular serifs and lots of interesting improvisations in form. Shaili launched her first type family, Balcony, a type family inspired by safety grills on my fonts in February 2021. Her work has been organized alongside seven other women as women of typographic excellence in the Mali scholarship 2020. By sharp type New York. She is also winner of the prestigious certificate of typographic excellence in 24th annual TDC typeface design competition by the type directors club in the students category. The winning project Balcony has been featured in the Page Magazine, a German publication focusing on the creative industry. Typography Society of India wishes all of you a very happy Diwali. And we are again wishing you all the best and we are proud to introduce you to a very young type designer, Shaili Patel. Over to you Shaili. Thanks for joining in. I want to firstly thank Professor Shaili Kumar and Professor Tarundi for inviting me to speak at the Typography Society of India. I think it's a great initiative. I have thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot from the previous session. So today I'm going to be talking about my typeface Balcony and a couple of other projects that I've done in the Latin script. So Balcony was the first typeface that I've ever designed. It is a very experimental decorative typeface that is inspired by the middle groups that be around us. And so basically the idea started while doing a college project. I have been documenting groups that would resemble any letter forms or motifs or just beautiful designs. Yeah, so I've been documenting these since a long time now and whenever I see these, I kind of resemble letter forms. And once there was a college assignment where I wanted, I was looking for some typeface that was geometric and more specifically I was looking for something that had squareish letter forms. But since I couldn't find anything of such sorts or the very specific thing that I was looking for, I decided to make a typeface of my own using these real patterns that I've been documenting. So as you can see over here how I've taken few motifs and converted them into letter forms. For example, these heart shaped bills are very commonly seen around us. So I just made a heart motif or these arrows resemble. So for that particular assignment, I just had made the base characters that's a few like all the letters, numerals and a few punctuations. And later on, I happened to show this project as in the whole concept to Jocky Hitesh Madhavya and he encouraged me to expand the typeface, like expanded it to a fully functional typeface. And he also helped me out while learning the font editing software and he'd also give me feedback on these letter forms. Also, I would not conduct like tiny surveys where I'll ask my parents or people around me to help me out if they can read these letter forms or not. I need a couple of options all the time for people to select from. So this is the final character set that I'm showing. And so while designing the typeface, I remember I started it an illustrator and whenever I, you know, I could see a second, you know, design language that was being carried out in a few letter forms. I really liked that language. So I created a stylistic set. The first one over here, as you can see, is the first stylistic set. And the second stylistic set is Dingbat, which has the motives of the drills that we see around us. So, yeah, and when expanding the typeface, I had to put die critic marks and usually die critic marks are above or below the letter forms, but I still wanted to confine them into the squarish thing that I was using for all the letter forms for characters. So what I did was I just squeeze them like geometrically the circles remain so close. And so I put the diacritics above and below as they as they were needed. And basically has four ways, like regular medium and bold. And yeah, this is, as you can see over here, you can see how the letter forms look in the four ways and also the stylistic set. So a little more about the process is that, as I said, I started the typeface on illustrator first and then I kind of like I imported it to lips. So what I did was I did not make shapes, I just used these parts to draw my letter form, because they were like geometrics I did not have to do much, but so I use these parts and what I did was, in the instances, I put a parameter for every date or instance where I defined the line width and every instance would take the line width and that's how the typeface was created. And this worked for me because none of my letter forms have no ink traps or where my parts narrow down or get thinner, so it really worked out for me in that case. And this is a screen shot from the interface of how the typeface looked on lips software. And as you can see, because of the parts, they're not shapes, so this is how the interface would look so every time I had to test the typeface I had to generate a file and put it in in design and check it out. So this is the full character set. It has about 650 characters, and there's only uppercase, lowercase, the personal case are hard to find in a square shape. Yeah. And as you can see this is how the patterns are made using the motives of the team that's also you can make patterns of a while using letter forms or punctuation sort of symbols, for example, I've used OK and for the title here. So I've been testing this typeface, and I found out that, you know, it gets it's very decorative you cannot need to go full sentence you just you can use this typeface for a word or for a face. And if the phrase is longer, and you can maybe use it for a popular phase. So I've tried to explain how you can use this typeface by making few specimens. For example, you can use it as a postcard, or you can take these negative, negative parts of the letter forms as different shapes and pattern out of it. Or you can put marks behind them. Maybe you want to make, you know, get a fabricator to make some proper grill out of these typeface on there. Yeah, so maybe you can take like some objects or images and play around with them. And maybe you can use it on for editorial purposes, for a drop cap, or maybe you can use numbers in such a way. So I was designing my first business card, and since that can be the first typeface I designed, so I thought I'll use it in such a way, so this is my current business card, I haven't designed it yet. And this is also an old version that I used for making a sticker with my friends that we made a few stickers for a college event. Can you back me for that? Also, I cut out some coasters and see how I am also very interested in seeing how this typeface can be used and given a physical form to itself. And I do make sure that the typeface isn't only confined to screen or print and can have a physicality for itself. So I was discussing this with my brother, who also happens to be an industrial designer. So he helped me out with a few renders of furniture ideas like this. A coffee table or a couch or some laundry. So earlier this year in February, I launched the typeface on my funds and luckily I've been able to sell a lot of licensed typefaces. Also last year in 2020, I applied for the Mealy Scholarship. Unfortunately, I did not get the scholarship, but they showcased my work among with other seven designers, women, type designers from all over the world. And Balcony is showcased in the women of type section. You can check out other works as well on their website. Also, Balcony won me the TDC certificate of excellence, the 24th TDC awards. And so the winners of the 24 TDC awards were showcased in the Page Magazine. They have a section separately for type and typography as a whole. And Balcony was like mentioned in the article. Page is a German magazine and they focus on a lot of aspects of the creative field. Another typeface that I'm going to talk about is Maya. I designed Maya as a part of my display type class, which is organized by the Cooper Union Supertype. And it was taught by Juan Villano. He is a very well-born designer. He is currently based in New York and he has done a lot for the B-POP community. He has this thing where people can fund for the B-POP community. B-POP is basically brown, indigenous and people of colors. So yeah, I was part of the class. It is a two-month class where Juan teaches how to... He starts from the very basic anatomy of letter forms and then he teaches principles of type design and by the end you have to make a typeface on your own. So by making this typeface, the first thing that we were supposed to do is we were supposed to list out a few adjectives that we want our typeface to look like. I mean, how we want to define our typeface and by that time I came across feminist poems and I came across the poems that I raised by Maya and Chidu. And that really inspired me because that kind of became the defining moment for me. And so I started catching letter forms with different features, but at the same part of time those, you know, those letter forms will define or reflect these strong feminine forms. So over the weeks, when I started, I put a lot of different features into the typeface, but over the weeks one would give feedback every week or twice a week and then we would have guest critiques who also gave us feedback. And that really helped me out and it smoothed in my texture. We filtered out the different features that I was including. So yeah, so this is the base character set. And this was the first time I was working with serifs and it is a tough job to work with serifs because a lot of inner spacing issues and all happening when you're working with serifs and yeah, but it was a fun learning medium for me. So this is the full character set and for now it's just one way, but I do intend to expand the typeface into a family with multiple dates, probably with the optical corrections. Yeah. Another typeface that I recently completed working on is Oprah. We're still juggling with the name, but I really like the name Oprah for this typeface because it is very dramatic. I worked on this typeface for the Indian type boundary and it'll be soon launched from their platforms. Hopefully soon, don't you? And yeah, so Oprah is again a dramatic typeface I'd say because what I've done in this typeface is that all the circular letter forms like O, C, G, the lowercase B, P, D, all these letter forms are circular, like full circles, whereas the other letter forms, I've squeezed them. The other letter forms are basically more condensed than normal and so that you can see the difference and yeah, I've included weights. There are four weights and now it looks, it actually looks. And Satya really gave me the freedom to introduce whatever figures I wanted to. So I introduced a few alternates. Also, I made a lot of ligatures and these are the upper case ligatures. And I think the more features you add in a typeface, the more interesting it becomes. So now I wanted to play around and see how many ligatures I could make. I think I made more ligatures than these but then I had to cut them. Then these are the lowercase ligatures. And then while expanding, what I did was I made two sets of accents on the left, the accents above A. They are the normal width accents, whereas on the O. So every letter form which is wider, I made another set of accents for them which are also wide in the width. So I did the same thing for lowercase as well. And apart from the normal numerals, what I did was I introduced old style numerals. I'm a huge fan of old style numerals. Also I introduced superior and inferior numerals. Then I introduced a long set of fractions. And this is the full character set so far. It's been a really fun journey to make these. And as for the use, I think the typeface can be used for something that is in a luxury like cosmetic brand or fashion brand or hospitality. So yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for wearing me. And yeah, you can get in touch with me on Instagram. This is my Instagram handle. And yeah, the end of this session. Shaili, thank you very much for the interesting talk you gave. We were all looking forward to hearing about balcony because it is a very, very interesting font. So a lot of people including students and professionals, we found the anatomy of balcony very, very fresh and very innovative. Nobody has thought about coming up with such a font. And what you said is very interesting that the implications of this, the possibilities of this being used as three dimensional artifacts. It is a very interesting thing. It opens up a lot of possibilities for product designers and three dimensional explorations. A lot of that can be done in this font. Very interesting. Can you talk a little bit about Maya because personally I found it very interesting. And especially the lower case Y and F. I found it very cute. It is very, very high contrast. But the forms, there are a lot of innovations in many characters and it is very interesting. So can you share some more experience, your thoughts about how this Maya started. And how you developed it further and how did you manage to get this kind of innovative forms in this kind of short, lower case Y, F and J. The name of you. All the characters are very interesting, but three of them are very, very cute. So can you talk a little bit more about Maya. Sure. So actually before we started working on our typefaces, we had a lot of exercises how to develop ideas. So there is this platform called type cooker. So we used to do a lot of exercises from type cooker. And yeah, so that helped me a lot. And so before we also started developing the typefaces, what we had to do is we had to, you know, list out a few words describing words how we want our typeface to look like. And later on we had to start sketching and develop the idea. So if I say feminine, so feminine can be a lot of things. If I say that playful, the playful can be a lot of things. So that's how I started in a sketching thing. And I saw I used a lot of different genres of design. And I saw what all I could do. And while sketching one of the ideas, I came up with these triangular terminals. And I really liked that particular feature. And I tried to incorporate that feature in more characters I could. No, but what led you to making this kind of very peculiar curve structure in F and Y and J? So I don't think it's something new. I have seen some similar features in some existing typefaces. So I just tried to make them in a sharp or pointy, I'd say, in that angle. But what led you to make a structure like a triangle? So you cannot call it series force, you can't call it terminal. You know, you need to give a good new name to it. But how did you get this triangle as the stroke ending? Well, I just say that I sketched and I just like that form and I took it. And what are your future plans as a type design? Well, I do not have any future plans as such. But I do want to work more in index scripts. That's what I know. I see that the index type design scene is a very young in itself compared to Latin. So yeah, I think there is a lot of room to play around with. And yeah, I just want to see how I can play with these scripts and I want to explore what all new things we can do with them. What kind of work are you doing in here with your Madhatran Gujarati script? Are you planning on doing anything now? Well, currently I have just started working on a project that I started earlier that is Climax Gujarati. So I am in the process of completing it right now. It needs a lot of work. So yeah, this year I do plan to complete it hopefully. Is it a body copy book or a headline book? I would not say it is a body copy. It is a very display typeface. It is a Gujarati companion of the typeface, which is a Climax standard.  So I started with the black and later I formed the hairline as well. There was a time in MSU, now City Faculty of Finance, when we were students, there was a Gujarati type also we could compose and take a print. So there was a nice letterpress facility also. That was the first time I saw Gilson and Universe and all that in action. They had Century School book also. That's amazing. I think it was somewhere near the pottery section. Yeah, just beside the culture. I still remember the first time I was seeing all the weights of Universe and we could play around with it and take a print. That would have been such an amazing time I am sure. So there were a lot of Gujarati fonts in that way, different weights. That's amazing. Do you practice calligraphy? I do, but it is mostly to learn the anatomy. I do not do the kind of calligraphy that most calligraphers do. I am a huge fan of dealboxing and that's a dream to achieve that level of skills someday. Yesterday I reminded him that you are talking today. He wrote to me saying you have seen your work and he is very impressed with your work. That's good to hear. Since you are a fresh graduate from MSU, there are a lot of students who are much younger to you who really want to take up type design as a profession. Do you have any advice for your junior batch students or people who are interested in taking up type design as a profession? How do you go about it? I think I have just started so I cannot say anything much serious. But I just say that you got to be focused. Every time you see the type phase, there would be something or the other that would nag you and you want to change it. So you have to be ready to change it every time you see the type phase. It's a serious job. It takes a lot of patience. A lot of publishers keep saying that they are badly in need of a real good body text in Gujarati which is an open type format which supports Unicode. So a lot of demand is there for Indian language scripts now. I will read out the next question. Type phase design always seems to me as a tedious and satisfying task. Can you share your process of designing a type phase? Well, I'd agree it is a tedious job and that's what I said. It takes a lot of patience because of the process. If it's mostly if it's an index script, it would take you at least four to six months. That's what I've been said by the seniors. But for right now, I haven't completed a whole project in one go. You cannot say how tedious it is. So I start from sketching as usual. I see a lot of ideas and maybe something would come up with a mixture of that. And I start sketching. I practice type cooker exercises in index scripts as well. So that helps a lot. And yeah, I think you just also you've got to show it to some type designer and you can get their feedback on it. That is very important actually. Yeah. I hope that answers the question is how do you decide the visual grammar of letter forms? How do you make sure all letter forms belong to the same visual language? Well, in the beginning, what I have observed is that in the beginning you start putting every idea that you have and a lot of like all the characters, the letter forms can have a different personality to itself. And then you've got to try to filter it out that what suits with what and after putting it into a text trial. So, you know, you start seeing what is what looks bumpy and how you can smoothen the texture out. So that I think that helps. Okay. The next question is how many forms have you designed so far, which is your favorite and why? Very tricky question. Yes, I have I just I think so far I've just completed two type projects and more of the many of them are incomplete. I think I've made six type faces that hasn't the concepts are in the middle somewhere. And I think Climax Gujarati is my favorite project because I've never seen something so cool in Gujarati script before. And I'm just fascinated with the possibility of how, you know, these things can work. So, yeah. Next question is what are your favorite forms? Well, that is the most tricky. That is the most tricky question.  But the typeface is that I would know regularly want to use our graphics. And so that is a text typeface and for something that would be for display, I think my favorite typeface would be domain sounds by Climtype. I really love the features of that typeface. What got you interested in typography? Well, what got me interested in typography is that I have been somewhat I had been somewhat practicing type before, you know, it was introduced introduced to me as a formal subject or anything. And in school, our teacher used to, you know, give us these exercises, we had to play with the letter forms, mostly like Latin only. So we had to play with these letter forms, we had to add characters to it and all. And I used to love that thing. Both of my parents have such lovely handwriting, so now they would help me out with it. And I've always had some, you know, some interesting connection with that. So yeah, that that I think that got me to like typography more. And after I think in my first year, Hitesh Malaviya Rocky, he came to the college to give a presentation on of his work. So, and I, I never knew that something like that could exist. It was so fascinating to me and I got in touch with him. And he kind of took a workshop in the college of, you know, calligraphy, basic anatomy. And I started liking it. And I had just decided that I will, you know, I'll try this genre. And if it works for me, if I like, I'll just go further. Otherwise, something new the next day. And I kind of went into it and here I am, am I right now? Okay, so we will wind up here. I will take a minute to show the concluding slides. And then I will just come back to you. So I'd like to thank the organizing team. Thank you. Special thanks to the Hasgeek team for all the help in getting this event. And this are the places where the audience can get in touch with us through our email ID, Sampark.tsi at the rate gmail.com. And I'd like to thank our speaker, Shaili, for sharing her interesting projects with us. With that, we will conclude the session. Thank you very much, Shaili. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Bye-bye.


So I'm joined by Leo Panic, Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto, editor at the Socialist Register, mental to Max Shanley. We're in TWT, we're in Liverpool, we're covering all things Labour Party related. Great to have you here. Great to be here, Eric. I'll start with them, I think probably the most important question one can ask. What are your politics? I'm a socialist, proudly so. And I would say, honestly, that my generation of socialists has failed in our attempt since the late 1960s to build an alternative to either the old Leninist Communist parties or to the Social Democratic parties, both of whom by the 60s had run their historical courses, agents of transformation. There were some of us who thought they could go off and find a better Leninism, a non-Stalinist Leninism. There were others of us who, following in the trajectory of Benism and the Greater London Council, felt that you couldn't change social democracy into socialist agency any longer. And we hope that we'd be able to create mass socialist parties outside of social democracy. We haven't done it. Not yet. No, and I don't think we're going to. I think what we're seeing, I think what we're seeing in the Labour Party is that it is going to have to go through those parties. We'll see what happens with them. It'll inevitably lead to splits in those parties. One would hope that it'll be socialists who hold on to the party apparatus, the party tradition, et cetera. But it looks like that's the way to go, whereas back in 1979, when I wrote a piece on Socialists in the Labour Party in the Socialist Register, it was the first piece I ever published in the Register. I challenged Ken Coates, who was part of the Institute for Workers' Control, close to Ben, and was part of the attempt to change the party. And he had said, where have you seen a new mass socialist democratic party built outside of the old ones? And I ended my essay saying, where have you seen a social democratic party transformed into a socialist one? It looks like what you guys are engaged in here is the way we're going to have to go. And it's very exciting. It's very impressive. It's very fraught, enormous responsibilities on your shoulders, the whole world's looking at it. But it's where things are at right now if you're a socialist. You often talk about the importance of democracy for socialist parties. What are the functions of having a democratic party? Because it's not just a moral ask, is it? You're not just saying democracy in and of itself is a positive thing, therefore these parties should be good. That democracy also serves quite important political functions. Can you sort of go over those briefly? Yeah. I mean, it is obviously partly a matter of the experience over the last hundred years with mass working class parties not having been internally democratic. And that doesn't only apply to the communist, you know, democratic, centralist, Leninist parties, which then evolved into Stalinism, it also applied to all of the social democratic ones. If you look even at the Swedish party, it, you know, could make communist parties blush in terms of how top-down bureaucratic it is. Conferences every three years, you know, it can be good in policy terms but in terms of democracy not at all. And why that matters is not just the matter of the accountability of the leadership. It matters especially because an undemocratic socialist party is not developing the capacities of its members, of its supporters, to govern their lives, to engage what is socialism except the ability of ordinary people collectively to engage in the broad range of decision making that collective life is all about, whether it's in the community, whether it's at the workplace, whether it's in the school, whether it's in the media. The assumption that people know how to do this is wrong. I think that's the anarchist assumption. The assumption that people can never do it leads you to technocracy and bureaucracy, you know, which is not socialism. So party democracy, for instance, the Labour Party, that would, if it was successful, that continued exercise of party democracy necessarily prefigures radical democratic socialist government. Yes. Insofar as it isn't just a matter of securing reselection, it isn't just a matter of securing the accountability of members of parliament, it isn't just a matter of making sure that conference resolutions appear in the manifesto. No, it's a matter of the people who are voting for the party, who are engaged in the party, developing their capacities as political actors, developing their understanding of how this bloody capitalist system works, so they don't have to depend on some professor to tell them. So successful socialist project necessarily has to have this. It has to have that capacity-developing capacity project. And if it doesn't, it will not yield, I don't think it will yield socialism at all, it certainly won't yield the kind of socialism we're aiming for. Because often people in the Labour Party, people on the good side, the right side of things will say, we need more political education, but it sounds to me like you view political education and democratisation of a socialist party as more or less one and the same thing. Yes, certainly as part of the same trajectory, that's right. Let's move to mandatory selection. That's been the big conversation for conference so far. We're sort of doing the sort of theoretical underpinnings of mandatory selection. Why is mandatory selection so important? I guess we've already talked about that a bit, but in the present context, why is it so important? And in particular, why has it caused such consternation from the establishment both outside the Labour Party, but also within it? Well, the achievement of the British establishment has been that the Labour Party has produced a class of career politicians who have no interest in transforming this society. In fact, they are opposed to socialism. That may be because they think it's romantic, because it'll lead to bad outcomes, etc., but the vast majority of Labour MPs are opposed to it. And how do you then have a socialist project where the parliamentary party, the vast majority of people in it, are against the project? Even those, let us say, who are sympathetic to Corbyn, I think, are not themselves well-developed enough politically as the people close to Corbyn are to be able to see this through, to take the initiatives they need to take, etc. Blair engaged in his policy forums in an explicit project of educating people into the project of accommodating to thatcherism, accommodating to the City of London, trying to ride the airsets prosperity that that gave you. And the same thing now has to happen, not only with developing the political education at the level of the base of the party, it has to happen with the MPs. Reslection therefore can be a bit of a fetish. You can get rid of a MP who has signed the letter against Corbyn, who is very vocal about his opposition or her opposition, etc. And you put someone in place who has been riding the wave, is involved in it, etc. But is quickly absorbed into the Westminster Boys' Club that Parliament is. And it is modeled on a gentleman's club, it is very structured. And you therefore can put too much emphasis on reselection and accountability itself. So I think that while the victories that have been won on this are important, it is elementary democratically principle, it seems to me, that someone who gets a nomination in one round should have to stand in an open selection the next round, obviously. It's only the British Parliamentarist tradition which sees the Parliamentary Representative as accountable to the Crown and to Parliamentary sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty that makes it seem so scandalous in the society. It's not scandalous in a republic, not scandalous in the United States. It's true that most congressmen do keep on getting nominated and running again, normally because they have the funds from businesses in real estate companies in their local area to be able to do more advertising than anybody else. But it's taken for granted that there is no automatic incumbency. So this is an elementary democratic struggle, but it needs much, much more than this. And if it's just a matter of turning out MPs and putting in new ones, you'll find that the majority of those MPs won't be all that different from the old ones. What should the role of MPs be? Because if you speak to most Labour MPs, well MPs from any party, but obviously we care more about Labour MPs because these are the people we're trying to either persuade or ideally I think to have somebody who's more in agreement with the political project we're involved in, they would say, well look, the system in this country is, I'm elected, I go to Parliament, you delegate your sovereignty like you say to me. So you've criticised that, and you've said that's an outgrowth of sovereign power representing the Crown or serving the Crown rather than the people. What should the demand be on MPs? What kinds of functions should MPs be performing when they are elected on the behalf of the Socialist Party? And Tony Ben stood in Bristol for his first nomination in 1950, 51. And he was asked how he would define the role of an MP. He said then I would see my function as educating people to socialism. He said that in 51. And he often said it to me later that he saw his role as that of a political educator. And I think that's the responsibility that an MP should have. A Socialist member of Parliament should of course be concerned with introducing legislation and if it's government engaging in the process of being at the head of a department in order to transform it from being the type of institution which in its pores is organized to reproduce capitalism and its social relations into the type of institution that is oriented to building a democratic socialist society. That's a big task. But in order to be able to do that, the representative needs to be a political educator, needs to be able to develop the ambitions and the capacities of the people who have elected them to be capable of seeing through the democratic socialist project. You can't leave it to the career representatives, those people who when they go study PPE at Oxford and join the old-style young labor and then end up working in one of the MPs or offices in Westminster are going to have a career and feel they have a job entitlement. No, this is not the way forward and this is being challenged and successfully. A rejoinder from those kinds of people, they would say all of the things you just outlined holding the government to account when you're in opposition being part of government means that you can't, it's not possible to do that properly and also be as you say a socialist educator to be somebody that's serving a movement outside Parliament as much as representing them inside Parliament. So what's your answer to that? Because they would say there's only 24 hours in a day. There are always constraints on resources, on time, of course. And we're engaged in something very ambitious that involves expanding our own capacities to operate more efficiently but also to have a sense of priorities. And I think that if we only have 24 hours a day then people who are representatives need to recalibrate their priorities. There's no recipe for this. We are engaged in the 21st century in a process of discovery. It's increasingly desperate that the path of discovery we're on be realized because if it isn't, what's clear in the 21st century is that capitalism is throwing up undemocratic alternatives, not even liberal or bourgeois democratic ones. It's, you know, Adorno once said he who speaks of fascism and doesn't speak of capitalism should remain silent. What I fear in the 21st century is that he who speaks of capitalism and does not speak of fascism should remain silent. So we are in a process in the 21st century of figuring out how to do socialism as a political project that goes beyond the failures of socialists in the 20th century. It's an enormous responsibility. Final question. We had a debate, a small debate I suppose in this country on the left about the general secretary of the Labour Party. And my view was the general secretary should be elected because once Labour, hopefully under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and obviously after him as well, once a socialist Labour Party or a socialist leader is in government, I can't understand how the Prime Minister can serve both the country and implement a radical platform of changes that would transform society. I can't see how they can do both that and transform the party into, because clearly it would have to be elevated in the context of a Labour government, right? That movement would be what keeps them in power. And that's why I said, well, you need to have a separate head almost at the head of the Labour Party, because when we are in government, when Labour is in government, this movement will no longer be a movement, it will be a machine and it will be something that's occasionally mobilized rather than. Absolutely. I totally agree with this. One of the things I found most astonishing about the Syriza experience, and that was the one radical Labour government that emerged in the whole world out of the crisis of 2008. I mean, really astonishing. And what they were engaged in was very difficult as a government and they were given very little time to do it by the bloody EU. With virtually no support from the Northern European Labour movements, when they finally were forced to sign the Memorandum of Agreement, it was either that or get out of the European Union, not just the Euros out. So they did it in the hope that they would eventually be able to get it to a situation where their social agenda a few years down the road might be taken up, the General Secretary resigned and left the party. The General Secretary of the party resigned and left the party. On the contrary, what should have happened was that people in the party should have redoubled their efforts to build the party, to build capacities. That's what should have happened. It's essential, I think therefore, that the General Secretary be elected, see his or her responsibility as changing the party so it is an educated, developmental force. And of course, we're not going to be able to achieve socialism in one government. The forces that are arraigned against this are immense. That government will need itself to discover how to introduce non-reformist reforms, reforms that people need, but don't close off the possibility of going beyond them. It'll be constrained in all kinds of ways. It can't simply expect the party to be a supportive, mobilizing device for that government, precisely because that government is so constrained in the struggle it's engaged in. So yes, the party has to have its own thrust, its own dynamic. And the tragedy of the Labour Party, of course, is that for so long its regional organizers have been highly skilled at expelling people. And that's a terrible, terrible, not simply waste of resources, but misuse of resources. Great. On that note, thank you very much, Leo. My pleasure, as always. And before we go, this is the 2019 edition of Socialist Register. Yes, it is. Where can our viewers find this? They can pick it up in good bookstores everywhere. They can order it from the Merlin Press, which is a wonderful socialist publisher. We couldn't do what we do without really quite impoverished socialist publishers. Even more impoverished than social media guys like you. And so just go to www.merlinpress.com or www.socialistregister.com and you can order it. And you can subscribe very cheaply to a E-edition as well. Founding out it's a rough middleman, says it all. Thank you again. Good to be here.