thank you all for coming I was I was afraid that no one was actually going to come to a talk on capitalism so but as she was talking about this is based on the book of the same title that will be published by Rutledge sometime early next year and so today what I'm going to be talking about is not just the discourses of capitalism but really kind of framing it right from the beginning this idea of the important directions for critical pedagogy what's been called critical pedagogy of course has been contested among many scholars for many decades now but I would say briefly the definition of a critical pedagogy is to engage with the power of meaning makings in our society who controls the meanings how our meanings taking up and mediated by people in everyday society and then recently in the last five to ten years or so there's been another branch associated with critical pedagogy which has been called public pedagogy which I'll be talking about and public pedagogy is really looking at educational sites outside of the classroom and of course with the rise of social media and so forth there are ample opportunities for critical public pedagogy engagements with how people take up discourses ranging from you know gender class racial issues and so forth and so just not within our own students or all classrooms but with the public at large can educators and academics engage on a broader dia level with the general public so this is this that should be seen through that prism of this today's talk all right so let's we'll get through a little background first so once again we've had another economic crisis that's been ongoing now I know in Australia here they were largely you guys have been largely unaffected which was a good thing in 2007 but of course the rest of the world went through a major economic crisis in 2007 and that was about the 15th one in the last 30 years and so since the ongoing crisis that's been prevalent in the United States which I'm from when I'll be mainly talk because obviously that's a society I'm with my I'm most familiar millions have been affected while politicians and economists pundants and so forth still continue to debate and I think we've seen that highlighted in many dramatic ways with the president u.s. presidential election this year however there's been one real positive outcome and it's really given an opportunity for people and again going back to the online spaces to for everyday people to really start to discuss the economy and how it's affected them in their everyday lives and so Philip Morosky who's written about this has said that seemed like everyone with a web browser harbored a quick opinion about what had gone wrong with economics and was not at all shy about broadcasting it to the world so again there are these spaces of not only to social media but readers comments on newspapers around the world like New York Times in which people are engaging now with authorial voices usually privileged to commentators such as like Paul Krugman who's Nobel Prize winning economist who writes about the economy and where readers are able to kind of engage and debate with his viewpoints as well as others however many economists have dismissed a lot of the comments by the general public kind of saying well you know it's really they're informed that many of them have never taken an economics course and it had really kind of been some of them have gone so far usually on the on the right on the right side of things that their illiteracy has actually contributed to their own financial misfortunes okay and I think this is kind of a prevalent the discourse among many mainstream economists that the everyday knowledge of the economy is neither scientific nor grounded in so-called correct theories okay now this of course raises this important kind of questions for any society calling itself a democracy there are at least two questions that come to mind one of which is first of all should everyday people have a say in the economic policies affecting their lives now people might argue is like well they do because they go and vote in so-called democratic countries but that another issue and then the other another issue would be are the forms of economic knowledge produced by the general public as valid as those produced by professional economists we'll see some samples of this hmm okay now one of the reasons why I'm so interested in this as part of it as my own background as an undergraduate I had two degrees one of which was in economics and and it really kind of stemmed from that but it was also this idea that the economy plays a central role in our lives right and so whether it's the concerns over job security you know future employment prospects falling wages again I'm referencing to the u.s. Society so forgive the kind of almost American centric but again though that's the the sample database that I'm most familiar but in the last 35 years wages in the United States have stagnated and have actually declined okay and of course with the student debt in the United States I know that's it's that's becoming an issue here but with the student debt in the United States is now over one trillion US dollars so I think it's crucial to understand really how and why people make sense of the economy and importantly their own the possibilities they see in their own agencies in addressing these issues now kind of going back to this where maybe part of the the issue arises that you know in in American high schools economics is not a required subject and in the university if students do take an economics course they are coming up against a certain kind of orthodoxy so James KK Galbraith has written that the leading active members of today's economics profession have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking as a general rule as one might generally expect from a gentlemen's club this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue and not just recently but for decades they predict disaster were none occurs they denied the possibility of events that then happened they opposed the most basic decent and sensible reforms while offering placebos instead they are always surprised when so thing untoward like a recession actually occurs and when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained they do not rien their ideas they do not consider the possibility of a flaw in logic or theory rather they simply change the subject no one loses face in this club for having been wrong and it can be really traced back to what happened in the late 70s in the US where there was a systematic purge of economists who are specializing in methodology in history ok and journals as you can see such as the American Economic Review stop publications of articles in these research areas which then of course these were used to deny hiring and tenure promotion in university since those economists in those fields could no longer get published in the top journals and so by the 1990s very few courses in the u.s. remained addressing economic philosophy and history of doctrine ok so the title of course the main title today is this courses of capitalism so what is capitalism and Richard Wolfe the economists at University of Massachusetts in Amherst emeritus now as has written that like all important topics capitalism has been defined and understood quite differently by different people and groups throughout its history ok so one of the dominant themes about capitalism in the mainstream media oh and when we hear it from politicians when they frame capitalism as the free market capitalism is the free market capitalism is private enterprise right capitalism is democracy capitalism is the freedom to do what to create whatever business you want however if you look at the histories of economic Arrangements such as slavery slavery and feudalism in fact they also relate relied on free markets in feudal lists at times there were free markets they were able to set their own prices ok they were above the sells of goods whenever and wherever private enterprise it was a similar manner so in fact private enterprise and free markets are not specific or unique to capital as only so if those two are not unique to capitalism what actually defines capitalism the definition I'm going to be using and addressing how people take up the discourses is that it's the class structure of production of surplus-value produced by workers which is then appropriate and distributed by capitalists now what is surplus value mean so for example on a usual or typical in the Western world eight-hour working day ok we get paid yes we could pay for we feel like we get paid for eight hours right but in fact the P what we're producing okay for the eight hours of pay is actually we produce in four hours so those extra four hours that we're producing we're not getting paid that is that the surplus value so in other words that's what with the business is called profits right there but businesses are in business not just to break even but to make a profit and their profit lies into the surplus value that we actually produce we actually produce much more than we're actually getting paid in return now but there's a second part of that equation which is that that surplus then is appropriated from the workers from us without us having a democratic say in deciding how that surplus should be redistributed back to us in the form of bonuses or higher pay no it's appropriated from us we don't have the decision right this decision is usually within the board of directors right or the CEO and then that is also distributed throughout the rest so it was either distributed through different forms of channel whether it's to the government you know to rent and so forth when I explain this the definition to my graduate students back at Center University of Hong Kong where many of them were from mainland China one of them said that sounds like a dictatorship to me so then who is a capitalist you know there's a lot of debate around of calling people certain capitalists for example like my father who owned a small restaurant with the sever other partners was he a capitalist there is a deaf working definition of who are the capitalist and according to the economists at the University of Notre Dame David Rizzio has said that there's actually a core group of capitalists in the United States numbering no more than six thousand and they sit on the boards of directors of the corporations and so he identifies them as the capitalists these people who are actually deciding the overwhelming majority of the surplus value produced by workers which brings us the question of ideology is if we all have different ideas about what capitalism is why is that there are certain other words that of course that I think we would agree on the definition for example maybe a chair we would agree that it is an object upon which to sit or stand whatever you feel comfortable with right however capitalism might be classified at what Raymond Williams has talked about is the key word and a key word has had many contested ideological meanings throughout its history and of course thus used differently capitalism is no different and this idea of viewing capitalism through the prism of so-called ideology which is that prop part of the problem is if we're addressing any kind of critique of capitalism we first have to define what kind of ideologies were using now that brings all the whole issue of that Terry Eagleton has talked about and others that there are many competing definitions of ideology so when we do talk about our ideology what ideology are we talking about which one rather so he lists several covered current definitions as you can see okay the second one which was kind of attributed to Marx and Engels in the beginning but of course that their ideas were more complex than that they've been traditionally been represented okay this idea of kind of a false consciousness which I'll be talking about in a bit okay in the last several as you know they've been quite popular in terms of how this Euclid the idea of discourse has been taken up in the last 40 years or so in the post structuralist okay now the philosopher Flavio Jean Jacques has pointed out though there exists an important gap in our everyday ideological horizon this idea that so for he says so for examples the gap between real knowledge and symbolic belief determines our everyday ideological attitude so he cites the familiar psychological experience of commenting on something that is so horrific and traumatic that we say I know that is so but nevertheless I can't believe it alright so something where you know something huge event would happen would be you know something like 9/11 would be like well I know that happened but I really can't believe those twin towers fell down and so that could be almost equatable to this idea that I know there is no economic justice in the world but nevertheless I'll live my life as if I can't believe it okay now this is an idea of whose ideology right so and this is something that I addressed in my book which that Stewart Hall has talked about for those who possess the true scientific knowledge that enables them to recognize the real it's always other people never ourselves were in false consciousness who are bewitched by the dominant ideology what I call the matrix view of ideology if you remember that film with Kino Rees in 1999 where Morpheus you know tells neo you know this is there's this whole subterranean world out there and there's a seminal moment you know that you know neo realizes it he puts on these sunglasses and he sees how the workings of the world right that is the kind of idea matrix view of ideology now this idea though that the fundamental stratagems of ideology is that some kind of reference to some self evidence right look you can see for yourself how things are and this is how how politicians exactly address their the the potential voters the facts speak for themselves is perhaps the arched statement of ideology the point as usek said precisely that facts never speak for themselves but always made to speak by network of discursive devices right so this idea of false consciousness again Stuart Hall has something very important to say when he talks about that is the worker who lives his or her relation to the circuits of capitalist production exclusively through the categories of a fair price and fair wage and falls consciousness yes if by that we mean there's something about the situation which she cannot grasp but the category she's using something about the process as a whole which is systematically hidden because the available concepts only give her a grasp of one of its many sided moments no if by that we mean she is utterly deluded about what goes on under capitalism and so this is something that I also address in the book which this was based that this is from the the still is from the 1988 Hollywood horror film entitled they live by the filmmaker John Carpenter was famous for other horror films like Halloween and so forth but they live is a story kind of predating the The Matrix which is very interesting about our character named John nadda and for those of you know Spanish not it means nothing in in Spanish so John nada is a kind of unemployed construction worker in Los Angeles and he comes upon a group of rebels who give him a pair of sunglasses and he puts on these sunglasses and suddenly he sees things like this okay money something that we see every day with his sunglasses what's going on advertisements that litter the landscape notice I used the verb litter obey consume conform right and so on okay now what's interesting though is that in the film earlier his one of his friends as you can see here the man on the right one of his friends are having a conversation over lunch and the friend had talked about why he left Detroit to come to Los Angeles because of the collapse of the auto industry he was out of work so you had to come to Los Angeles and he's quite bitter about it he talks about how the auto manufacturers you know had basically you know promised the workers everything the work has had done their job and then the Automobile Manufacturers gave themselves raises and then shut down the plants and he tells uh his friend John artis is you know what we should do is take a sledgehammer to them right and smash their fancy cars now which is interesting though is afterward after John Odom comes upon the special magic sunglasses and puts them on and sees the world for how it actually is then gets into literally a seven-minute street fight with his best friend trying to force his friend to put on those glasses now what's interesting to me is since his friend had already seen what was happening in Detroit and knew exactly what was happening just ahead Stuart Hall it said why the struggle for him to put on the sunglasses okay and so I think this is also part of a paradox that we have to address for those of us who are engaged and committed to critical pedagogy that in fact people do have a sense do have a knowledge of things that are wrong in the world but why then don't they take the extra step okay or another it could be phrase another way is the classic question is why do people vote against their own interests okay and in the United States we've been seeing that and I know how the media has been framing it the kind of corporate liberal media framing it where they'll basically show voters of Donald Trump I'm sure you've seen the photo that's been gone viral and Facebook and so forth they focused on this one older white woman you know giving the Nazi salute but she was at a rally of thousands of people and it's so far from the photo documentation she seems to be the only one giving it I think it'd be quite different if ten thousand people were giving the salute at the same time in lockstep but she was the only one so that raises a question of why is she the focus of that and what is the media kind of ignoring in terms of not only her but in fact there are many people other than what's been presented in the media as traditional white working-class people who are supporting Donald Trump and in fact the New York Times actually surveyed and profiled his office in Tampa floor which is an upcoming primary and many of the volunteers there do not fit in the demographic of white working-class they also include people of Latino heritage and so when Trump is talking about Mexican immigrants you know the reporters like well your of Latino heritage why would you be voting for someone who's talking about and so I think this is very interesting kind of thing to explore and of course one of the people who has really who had really thought about it in the context of his times was the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci who was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s served ten years in prison before he died and he spent his life really kind of thinking about how and why it was that the Italian Communist Party of which he was a member collapsed in the face of Mussolini and and how and why fascism took over Italy and so some of these constructs that he developed which with which I use in the book and which I kind of addressed in terms of how participants take up capitalism is this idea of common sense so Gramsci's notion of common sense is not in the same translated meaning in the english usage of like common sense of you know don't touch a hot stove common sense but it's really as the shared kind of social thought ways of an viewing society incorporating historically embedded discourses or folklore philosophy called it mythologies and common beliefs okay green and knives have said this common sense embodies a variety of perspectives often contain elements of truth but also tend to be disjointed incoherent and contradictory okay and this is important the common sense is not seen as static but always constantly changing and evolving common sense is the site of resistance and struggle okay and furthermore it's to understand the ways in which masses think conceived the world and perceive their activity in order to ascertain what elements prevent them from effectively organizing and acting now one example I give to my students about common sense was that for example in pre-revolutionary China for example 100 and 100 10 20 years ago or so my great-grandmother was not able to leave the house more than 10 meters for the simple reason that her feet were this big because they were bound since birth and but that was an accepted practice among certain social class in China when I asked my students from from mainland China my graduate students I said well of the women there how many of you would accept that as a as a natural order of things of course no surprise no one day and I said well see this is an example of how common sense has obviously changed right so it's never fixed in stone and is never going to be the way it is always this and so we talked about in this in terms of this fragmentation of common sense within common sense is a nucleus called what gram she had said good sense okay and what he says it is not a question of introducing from scratch a scientific form of thought into everyone's life but a renovating and making critical and already existing activity and again that kind of perhaps goes back to that example of John not his friend in which John odda had already had that good sense in his outrage about the automobile manufacturing bosses giving themselves raises while shutting down the plants okay and Stuart Hall and Shea have talked about this kind of obvious apparently obvious taken-for-granted understandings that express a sense of unfairness and justice about how the world works and I think this is seen most dramatically in the recent years with those protest movements that was around the world but also within the United States both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party now the common sense was mobilized in different directions if you talk to both people in the Occupy movement in the Tea Party and I have both of them were very upset about the economic decline the loss of jobs and so forth but they attributed to different agents so the Occupy movement of course famously came up with a discourse of the 1% however the Tea Party targeted President Obama and the government as being the villains now which is interesting is because it's not clear it's not always cut and dried right because we do know that the government and to certain extent President Obama was complicit with corporate enabling of and in the past presidents as well of job loss okay and so this contradictory nature of common sense as Marcus green and Peter Ives talks about is not the product of some sort of intellectual psychological deficiency on the part of masses rather it's largely defined by the contradictory nature of the ensemble of social relations economic exploitation and various exclusions they produce and reproduce okay so going back to what I began the lecture with on public pedagogy and knowledge knowledge this idea that it's from the perspective of public pedagogy okay educational researchers and theorists no longer need to locate the school is at the center of educational activity rather than view informal in everyday space spaces and discourses themselves as innately and pervasively pedagogical and so this public pedagogy the aim is really to work at the intersection of Education and politics that is in the interest of the public condition of plurality all right and selected to the next part of the subtitle of everyday economists who are the everyday economists as I talked about and following claim ramune I categorized people who talk about the economies of the economy that is people like you and me as everyday economists okay and these are people obviously who are dealing with issues related in their everyday lives around the economy and they're most likely to personalize the economy right in terms of people doing things right and wrong okay victories and defeats special interests we've heard about that a lot and we're all among all of them we think in dramatic terms of winners or losers and of power right and along with that there is a lot of interesting work done on this idea of economic representations understanding how people think about conceptualize construct these representations of the economy okay and I think this is really raised as a central issue of whose representations and voices of heard okay and so again with social media enabling kind of a counter response to what has been before decades of dominant economic representations and newspapers for example and then television on the economy people were able to kind of talk back in a sense of their own ideas of what the economy is okay so part of that is the idea of public knowledge okay which which I talked about earlier before was kind of castigated by mainstream economists as Earth's that's the economics okay but this idea that academic economists consider these to be you know random set of irrational locutions okay but however we can examine these economic representations of having their own discursive structure okay so here are some examples of economic representations by everyday economists okay this one I like this was done this was from a BuzzFeed on students from Korea who were they were just the writing about their own futures mm-hmm this was taken from the Occupy movement from the famous song hmm this has been circulating recently especially that the candidacy of the US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who's actually talking about socialism which historically in the US has been a big no-no for several reasons associated with the Cold War and so forth okay so the man on the on the right here Steve Lambert an artist created this artwork called capitalism works for me as you can see with a voting console where people could just walk up to it and vote true or false okay and then they would have and it traveled around in Times Square New York City Boston he went to the Midwest in the u.s. des Moines Iowa and then traveled to London as far as I know I don't know if he has any plans to come here to Australia but I should write to him and ask him and so in addition to having people vote they interviewed several people who are willing and got their response why they voted for floss and that's we're going to see some examples so and here's the final tally in Times Square it came to Los Angeles but unfortunately the city government in Los Angeles and it's infinite wisdom did not allow it for to be publicly displayed on the street instead it went into some art gallery which I went to as you can see this was in 2012 okay and so let's hear from several of the participants about their views of both capitalism work for them or not can I comment on the vote dessert you've been tally - no okay sure thank you I think it's outrageous and it's even close to their limit capitalism is losing I mean I think that's kind of reflected and what's going on in the country today you know that's why we're on this downhill slide you know because people don't appreciate the opportunities of capitalism they would rather live in this world with entitlement and let supposedly somebody else pay you know somebody else but sooner or later even a run after somebody else's but of course there would be completely relying on the other government they want the government to make all kinds of decisions for here in New York we have a man that wants to decide how much soda we can drink you know like it's really getting that bad well when I voted it was a squadron and not against capitalism and a 360 something for it and as long as the attitude is like that in this country we're going to have no major problems with that I'm sure you did to vote in Detroit which that just went bankrupt it would probably be a unanimous against capitalism with meanwhile when when that Detroit was a capital of capitalism and the auto industry was centered there and people believe in capitalism it was a bustling very rich City now it's uh it's like when Hiroshima would look like if we were really met that's it capitalism what you still get vote okay Wow yeah you know and I think this is a you know he's he lays out a very interesting argument right and you know we're gonna actually spend several hours talking about it so I just kind of hit some of the highlights but it's interesting that throughout his discourse which I I basically categorized as now as we all know the well familiar kind of neoliberal discourse of you know he uses the word entitlement right and you know entitlement has become a big political key word in which somehow it's people like you and me are entitled even though we pay our taxes and we're getting part of those taxes that we pay for it return for whether it's Social Security or so forth but somehow you know corporations like General Electric who make billions of dollars in revenues but don't pay any federal income tax in the u.s. somehow they're not labeled as being entitled okay and he's also interesting right at the very end where he said you know vote for catabolism what you can still vote you know really equated which has been a very dominant theme and it's very difficult to disentangle the historical associations between capitalism and democracy but in effect he's equating capitalism with democracy the other thing I would mention that if you notice that throughout his his answer he seemed to keep blaming people for the collapse of capitalism right and so he said you know what Detroit when it was a cat of capitalism you know without mentioning of course that it was again as the John not is friend in the movie they live the automobile manufacturers who decided to outsource or all the jobs out of Detroit to search of cheaper labor which of course devastated the city so I think that that's kind of interesting where you know he kind of draws upon that kind of very strong neoliberal discourse of blaming people themselves for the collapse of capitalism and that somehow with the implication will not be not even the implication but quite blatantly saying that you know those who are voting against it are just kind of you know contributing it to the collapse of it the next participant organized society there is how does it work for me in particular well if you have all good habits and you work on stay straight you'll have a better life a capitalism doesn't do anything for me I do it for myself I don't need somebody to tell me to do anything I wanted to think of anybody I'll rise only on effort I need everybody else you know a lot of people think the government should give them everything well the government gives you everything can take away everything you know the premise is a little kind of wolf as a say you have to be organized somehow I mean it went 350 million revenue from I mean what what are our choices communism socialism capitalism capitalism sucks the least out of all of them put it that way you guys probably the Paris everything else is washed what else you want to go Russia Turan China Cuba North Korean the worker's paradise maybe not in my opinion whatever that's worth all right help me thank you I did quote him without his name of course it yeah and I gotta say I love this guy okay I love this guy because he's the kind of guy I grew up with in New York okay you know I give if you hear his accent to his demeanor his appearance his body language his facial expressions there's almost sneering kind of skeptical a few look that's the New York guy street guy that I grew up with and I think for me it's you know part of what he says really really kind of demonstrates that Gramsci's you know tension between the the common and good sense because a couple of things he says you cannot dispute when he does say well you know when you're comparing it with yes of course Stalinist Russia right North Korea I don't think I don't know how many people would say what voluntarily you know migrated to North Korea over living in a country like Canada or Australia or the US so in that sense you know he's absolutely correct there's a couple of things though that are they're intertwined or that that make it very complex where he says one of the things he says that capitalism is less destructive now if he buddy if you by what he means by destructive that is the economic policies and practices that lower material and living standards for the majority of the people and a specific time frame then I would say I would agree that yes capitalism in those instances had not been overly destructive however if we're looking at the the global picture in terms of climate change and so forth then perhaps one could argue the other thing that is interesting the thing he also talks about is the kind of fluctuation of the attribution of agency when he first says it worked capitalism works for everybody but then a few moments later said argues that capitalism doesn't do anything for me I do it for myself and his own work habits you know and staying straight as the reasons why he has a good life in society another line that he said that I found very interesting kind of biologically echoes Ronald Reagan's famous line when the participant says the government that gives you every can take away everything to me that echos President Ronald Reagan's famous line that the government a government isn't the solution government is the problem which again is one of the central components of neoliberal discourse now the this thing though when he talks about that capitalism sucks the least of them part of that is this kind of common sense thinking and framing as I said before most people who are like yeah well compared with yeah North Korea you know Stalinist Russia yeah however what it does is it has the effect of really kind of shutting down any kind of meaningful discussion of alternative economies that is to say just because the and and by the way which we don't have time to go into but the Economist Richard wolf and Steven Resnick did an in-depth study of the economy of the Soviet Union from the 1920s until the 1960s and basically the conclusion based on mountains of empirical data and research was that the Soviet Union was never communism which made me most people would say well it was actually state-run communism so in place of the Board of Directors as I talked about who the capitalists were appropriating surplice you've just basically replaced it with the Bolshevik Party apparatchiks who were sitting around in a room and deciding on the surplus value so but it what he does is basically shut found any kind of a meaningful exploration of how alternative ways we can organize our economy that doesn't necessarily mean to be labeled or lumped in with those totalitarian societies but he frames it in this kind of street-smart argument which is you know for me it's very appealing in some ways and you could see how that would resonate with a lot of people okay let's get on to the third one here not burning why so I guess on some level I go to capitalism for kappa let doesn't work for me what does it work for me as I think pretty easy to to evaluate how I work question so why doesn't capitalism work for me student that living in New York City and barely being able to get by even in order to stabilize Department address lack of health care making basically 1970s minimum wage and being told that you know I had lucky I have a job doing anything remotely near what I want with my dad at my age so when my dad was 28 I was 2 years old in this economy in this very emerging capitalist economy I can't even imagine us having kids so why is the good capitalism work on a big scale what I was actually really work my people money nothing else and what happens when your only metrics for goodness emotionality or efficiency why is the pediatric and and you got Emily coming up cool so you know in the past this is a period of the greatest inequality for the depression thank you Robert I forgot that and it doesn't work it doesn't work how the very small group of people very very rich and that huge swath of people very poor that's basically it's clear at the theater a social revolution I think we started having and we're out the real revelation 20 you know these are my god yeah but maybe I mean what what good is a society where a small group of people and most everybody else can barely make it by is that you know that the metrics on which we grade societies yeah I guess to continue and Lesley if we look back at society's we value politics and their their art and their music and their literature and their creation and how well they secure their people he were to look at American capitalist imperialist capitalist society today how would it measure out by those capitalist towel a little bit but okay I'm going to show the next part this minute and then talk about both mm-hmm No capitalism does not work for me for instance my mother works in a company she works all day sometimes she goes in on the weekends who gets all the money we don't have any money she's making all that money for somebody else who doesn't have to go out of the weekend yeah anybody who work anyway then what's there is maybe cut somebody for who themselves I don't know any rich people thank you okay it's interesting that these are the these last two participants and you know part of that could be may be attributed to the generational divide on our own oh you know with the the the first participant the young woman of 28 you know kind of categorize and the man as well perhaps as the so-called Millennials and which is very interesting because they've been served a poll after poll showing that majority of the Millennial Generation in the US has been supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders and I think that could be maybe a harbinger of things to come or divided so-called divide in which you know the two participants before the two older men perhaps grew up in that kind of house in time of of the 1945 to 1975 labor capital accord in the u.s. in which capital basically acceded to Labor's demands helped by the Roosevelt administration with the New Deal that really enabled the many Americans to kind of attain a middle-class lifestyle but that start to fall apart in the late 70s and early 80s accelerated that of course with Ronald Reagan so it's kind of interesting now the the two younger participants have a very kind of almost Syrian critique of capitalism particularly the the second of the last participant to I think is probably one of the most succinct and kind of paralleled of that good sense way of street-smart counter-argument to the second participant so kind of kind of concluding this is their this idea that though is there an alternative to capitalism Fredric Jameson has provocatively written someone once said it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism we can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world Mark Fisher said there is the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system but also that is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it ok so where do we go from here that you know a part of this thing is that what part of the problem is that you know critiques of capitalism some scholars have said that critiques of capitalism themselves serve renewal for capitalism itself as in the following short one-minute advertisement on your body Wall Street get an edge my Julian research in training with interactive floors many locations get better stock loan rates lower margin rates metal executions transplanted lung that lorry traffic laws yes yes Madison Avenue is brilliant above that kind of thing Thank You Don Draper and so you know how do we actually you know you know prevent that kind of co-optation of those messages here you know part of this idea of what the you know the 99% you know I want one possible you know this I did this was a from Dearborn in Michigan Dearborn is a community in in Michigan State in the u.s. in which forty percent of the population is our of American and you know of course with the mainstream media this course is of well if you're Muslim you must be you know anti-semitic and and hear this you know picture kind of you know plainly contradicts this and so this idea that again this kind of uh well it were in the last 34 years of the emphasis on identities around you know whether it's racial gender ethnic religious and sexual and so on and this idea of kind of class differences have been kind of obscured in some ways and it really kind of I think there's a seminal moment here in terms of which we were able to kind of address this now this particular historical juncture so a couple of questions I would raise in closing is how can we utilize these discussions to be part of an activist critical public pedagogy and then importantly though the ways in which this can engage with transforming common sense meaning making so that it does not take the form of an imposition of a superior worldview or understanding of the world originating outside the previously accepted common sense so in the examples I gave those two participants I think the challenges would be in to engaging on their own terrains instead of just kind of dismissing them as like you know you know your typical kind of like you know you know Joe Schmo who doesn't know what he's talking about in fact you know that they're talking they're narrating from their own lived experiences and obviously the two of them were fortunate to to be of a certain you know and social class ethnic background and so forth and situated in that time where they were able to at least carve out a defender class lifestyle so how do you actually engage with that in terms of their own lived experiences right in closing you know this is something very important I think that the late marshal Berman who passed away two years ago already but he wrote the seminal all that is solid melts into ear the experience of modernity in which he talks about and then he got into this debate with well not really debate but replied to a perry anderson who had a value who have reviewed his book in the new left review and in closing I just want to quote this kind of something very important that Marshall Berman wrote which he says hmm I think it's an occupational hazard for intellectuals regardless of their politics to lose touch with the stuff and flow of everyday life but this is a special problem for intellectuals on the left because we among all political movements they take special pride in noticing people respecting them listening to their voices caring about their needs bringing them together fighting for their freedom and happiness this is how we differ or try to differ from the world's assorted ruling classes and their ideologues who treat people they rule as animals or machines or number numbers or pieces on a chess board or who ignore their existence completely who dominate them all by playing them against each other teaching them they can be free and happy only at each other's expense intellectuals can make a special contribution to this ongoing project if our years of study have taught us anything we should be able to reach out further to look and listen more closely to see and feel beneath services to make comparisons over a wider range of space and time to grasp hidden patterns and forces and connections in order to show people who look and speak and think and feel differently from each other who are oblivious to each other or fearful with each other that they have more in common than they think we can contribute visions and ideas that will give people a shock of recognition recognitions of themselves in each other that will bring their lives together this is what we can do for solidarity and class consciousness but we can't do it we can't generate ideas that will bind people's lives together if we lose contact with what those lives are like unless we know how to recognize people as they look and feel and experience the world we'll never be able to help recognize themselves or change the world reading capital won't help us if we don't also know how to read the signs in the street thank you