I started from the beginning with Aristotle's politics which is kind of the foundation for most subsequent political theory and pointed out that he assumed that at them it's mostly a lot of it's about democracy and he took it for granted that a democracy would be a fully participatory and that it would aim for the common good but that in order to achieve that the democracy would have to be what we today call a welfare state and which would ensure lasting prosperity for the poor relative equality and moderate but sufficient property for everyone if there are extremes of who are enriched or if you don't account if you don't make sure that there's lasting prosperity for everyone then you can't talk seriously about a democracy and he went on to and then I mentioned that that idea was runs right through the good bit of the tradition up and to all cut through the Enlightenment and classical liberalism including the major figures like the Tocqueville than Adam Smith and others you know is just kind of assumed Jefferson and so on there's another point that Aristotle made which took a little twist in our own constitutional system he pointed out that if you had a perfect am i this is kind of theoretical this discussion in part if you have a perfect democracy and you do have you haven't granted blasting prosperity to the poor and you do have big differences of of wealth very rich and very small number very rich and a large number of very poor in that case in a perfect democracy the poor will use their democratic rights to take away the property the rich and he regards that as unjust and if it is unjust there two possible solutions one is to eliminate poverty the other is to eliminate democracy well James Madison who was no fool noticed the same problem but hid end whereas Aristotle solution you know a couple of thousand years earlier was to eliminate poverty Madison's was to eliminate democracy so he discusses quite explicitly in the Constitutional Convention that we have this problem that if we do have democracy then the majority of the poor may will use their power to do things like what we would nowadays call agrarian reform and that can't be tolerated that would be unjust since the goal of the primary goal of government is in his words to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority and in order to any he also no fool again pointed out that over time as time goes on this problem is going to get worse because there's going to be a growing percentage of a part of the population that will suffer from the serious inequities of the society and will secretly long for a more equal equitable distribution of life's blessings and if they have the vote they may do something about it which is unacceptable not for Aristotle's reasons but because it would threaten the wealth and power of the opulent mine our so he therefore designed a system which is pretty stable in which you would make sure that democracy didn't function that does he put it power would be in the hands of the more capable set of men those who hold the wealth of the nation and the rest would be factionalized and marginalized in various ways so that's one solution therefore the problem is real I mean if you I mean though that whether you decide it's a problem or not is another question but the fact is correct if you have a democratic system with a with large inequities of wealth and the great majority is impoverished and doesn't have access to to that and secretly sighs for a more equitable share of life's blessings in Madison's words then they all probably do something about it and they have mechanisms in a democracy that part is correct which means they will threaten the rights of the wealthy to control the property and remember property rights are not like other rights contrary to what Madison and other and a lot of modern political theory says if I have the right of free speech doesn't interfere with your right of free speech but if I have property that interferes with your right to have that property you don't have it I have it so the right to property is very different from the right to freedom of speech this is some often put very misleading ly about rights of property property has no right but if we just make sense out of this maybe there is a right to property one could debate that but it's very different from other rights and it is surely the case that if the majority lacks the property and his suffering and secretly desires a more equitable distribution they have mechanisms to do something about it that's right and as I say there were two solutions the classical one was to eliminate poverty the one on which our own society was founded was to eliminate democracy that's sort of worth understanding and it takes various forms over the years but the problem never ends and we're facing it right now I mean if a democratic society were allowed to function it's extremely unlikely that the things that are now called inevitable results of the market would ever be tolerated because they simply concentrate wealth and power and harm the vast majority there's certainly a reason for people to tolerate that against this backdrop of globalization and the growth and power of transnational corporations what actions should be taken to reverse this process depends what time span and range you're thinking of I mean there's you read constantly that this is somehow inevitable no way to stop it like Thomas Friedman and yesterday's times or whatever it was people who just mocks people who say you can do something about this well that's certainly not true for one thing we should be aware of the scale of globalization in many ways the what's called globalization is bringing about a situation which is not unlike what it was when said at the early part of the century if you look at gross measures like say trade and investment flow and so on its relative to the economy it's about its getting back to more or less where it was like the one major change is the style of financial flows which is extremely fast and overwhelms governments and so on okay that's new but there's nothing inevitable about that that's public policy I mean it resulted from two major things one a decision to break down the system of regulated currencies which is a policy decision made first by the Nixon administration and another by the telecommunications revolution which is just the normal form of public investment and public public cost in the pub of the public assuming vast costs and risks and then handing it over to private power to use but this these aren't things that are at all inevitable the fact that the whole system is coming to resemble in many ways what it was early in the century apart from things like this that's been made quite mainstream circles incidentally it's not a unusual idea though big differences are crucial but under control now beyond that the almost about three-quarters of the international transactions like trade for example an investment and so on are within Europe United States and Japan okay these are all areas where in principle at least mechanisms already exist which allow the public to control what happens that aside transnational corporations are also a public gift they were created their rights the rights of corporations altogether were created mostly by the judicial system they were granted extraordinary rights early in this century public doesn't have to agree to that in fact they don't have to exist at all all of us with input under public control that aside maybe we've talked about this if you look at the top transnationals they rely very heavily on public subsidy in fact about going the major study that exists about 20% of them wouldn't even survive that wouldn't wasn't for public takeovers well all of this is under control in principle up to the long-term goal which i think has very deep roots and working-class movements and enlightenment thought even in classical liberalism that these institutions have no right to exist at all they're fundamentally illegitimate and they're not a law of nature you know the fact their current form is rather reason they can be changed like other oppressive institutions have been changed so what are the limits without limit but where do you see the fissures where do you see those openings where we're popular resistance can be mobilized around well right now without anybody calling for it about 95% of the population which is not small thinks that corporations should sacrifice profits for the benefit of their work of working people and their communities well that's 95 percent is a good place to start now I don't see why notice that that call presupposes their their right to rule it says be kinder 95 percent of the public thinks they should be more benevolent autocrat all right that's place to start let's make them more benevolent autocrat but I think that same 95 percent can easily recover and may indeed already have the point of view that has been articulated all the way through the working class movements but they don't have any right to rule at all it's not that they should be more benevolent autocrat they shouldn't there should be no autocratic structures so to repeat what middle hands were saying around here about 150 years ago those who work in the mills went on okay so we move from the idea that the autocrats should be more benevolent which is direct and fair to the question of whether there should be a lot of Craddock structures and I don't think that's a long move