- Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for coming on
this absolutely glorious, gorgeous day. Some of you for the third time, some for the second time. You're gonna get really
tired of hearing me, but I promise not to go on very long. It's my pleasure and this is the last in our series of public lectures to welcome you for the 2019 series of the The Institute for
Critical Social Inquiry's week-long intensive summer session. And for the few of you who
haven't been here before, my name is Ann Stoler. I'm it's Founding Director. I take it as a special privilege
to welcome Nancy Fraser. A cherished colleague and a friend whose presence at The New School helped convince me that
I needed to be here. And she convinced me
why it mattered to be. So she was really persistent. Got a lot of wine in
me many, many evenings. I said last night that I would not, and did not need to list
the numerous accolades of this year's extraordinary
speakers and seminar leaders. I mean, for Ettiene, I
said, I'm not gonna do that. Etienne Balibar was our first speaker. I showed members said,
I'm not gonna do it. And I don't need to do
it at all for Nancy, but there is one accolade
that I just have to mention because it's so cool. And it just happened a few months ago. And it's an honor that's
pretty hard to ignore given who Nancy is. She was named in October
the (speaking in French) a knight of the Legion of Honor in France. The highest award and reward for what the nominating
committee called her outstanding political and philosophical work. Now we have to get this, right? This is not only an
amazing award to receive, but more importantly, an amazing one to receive
as a feminist scholar, as a critical theorist. When one is so irreverent toward contemporary gender
hierarchies in France. So subversive of business as usual in the French and American academy, and so prolific in her capacity to always remind her audience. And that's whether they
wanna hear it or not, that gender inequities are
foundational to capitalism and threaded through it. And that it is our
collective responsibility, all of us to undo it,
to undo them no matter. And this is really important too, whether feminism is in
high gear or in low ebb. And I think that's what's really striking also about Nancy Fraser's work. She doesn't abandon it
when it's in low ebb, and only stick with it when
everybody is on the bandwagon. The last point is crucial
because Nancy Fraser has consistently
persistently been a bulk work in her own right for
making sure that feminism remains vibrantly, self-critical,
self-reflexive, and supple enough to respond to every new and renewed forms of discrimination and counter the multiple political
forces that undermine it. She's garner a stature. She just told me that this last book is translated in 20 languages, which I think is just the
most extraordinary feat. Fantastic. That defies disciplinary boundaries and parochial expertise
with a clarity and a rigor, hard to argue against. She has challenged
politically correct positions and those people holding them, which is rarely ever ad
feminam or ad hominem attack. It's really on the principle
of what a position looks like. But what's more striking is her capacity to find the enabling, generative frame as she has in analyzing the relationship, and the misconstrued antagonisms between a politics of
recognition and redistribution. And she insists that she's
always fought for the two. The places where she's found
and seeks the mix of both. She keeps looking for those sites and the danger she nails
in not thinking hard about and acting upon the
institutions and infrastructures that keep distribution off our
collective political radars and allow identity politics
rather to substitute for them. What Nancy Fraser does
is make the conversation something that can be had. So she provides a frame
to have that conversation that doesn't reduce to a polemic. As she outlines with always
an acute sense of urgency, the consequences of not
asking these questions and asking them better. Nancy has a way of
teaching us about scales and common sense frames that
she dissembles before our eyes, so that they appear only
afterwards black mark sore spots clouding our vision, once she has strained them
through her analytics sieve. She has done that work for
the politics of recognition at not least in insisting
that the Westphalian frame cannot come close to get
at the scales of injustice with which we live. And I don't know about you, but I am one. I can't even hear the word Westphalian without thinking of Nancy. It's everywhere throughout her work. That really disabling Westphalian frame. She so powerfully has made that argument so ahead of the curve. And so ahead because she has her eyes. That's mine. (audience laughing) Oh, dear. That was like getting the days wrong in which people were
speaking the other day. Oh, well. She has her eyes set on the
distribution of inequalities and the mechanisms that sustain them. But she reminds us in capitalism, a conversation in critical
theory of her book, the issue of redistribution, which I think a lot of
people just sort of reduce what she's saying to that
incorrectly is not only economic. There is, as she writes the
problem of what counts as well in the first place and how
that wealth is produced. It's so, so important. It's such a deeper,
deeper level of analysis. And it is in the plethora of
urgencies around employment, ecology, care deficits,
and de-democratization that she asks the harder question. And I think this is kind of a question to share among all of us
about Achille, Etienne, myself, and Nancy about the
connectivities that join these multiple sites of
eminent or ongoing failure. There are a few people who
want things of as a paradigm of how The New School imagines itself, outspoken and heretical. And Nancy really is at
the top of that list for a very good reason. There is her persistence to tackle the hard questions of our time and what we should be
doing to confront them. She is nothing short of relentless. I think that's fair in her vision for a feminism that can lead the way in her last manifesto
"Feminism for the 99%" which I'm sure most of you know about that was just translated in 20 languages. Written with Cinzia Arruzza
and Tithi Bhattacharya is a reminder that what she is
after are strategies, I quote "for profound far-reaching
social transformation." That's kind of the bottom
line for her and nothing less, meaning that feminist politics
and scholarship can never and never should be a world apart. Join me in welcoming her
to share her reflections on that battle front. Now, thank you. (audience applauding) - Well, I have to say I'm really glad that I did was relentlessly persistent in getting you to come here. That's one thing that I've done that I'm really happy about
to the degree I played a role. Thank you so much and for the very generous introduction. Let me just see if I can get
myself the way I want to be. And for inviting me to be part
of this incredible institute, which I'm enjoying so much, and I'm finding the conversation, the two lectures we've already heard, the seminar discussions really enlivening. I feel like I'm taking away from this much, much more than I've
actually myself contributed. So it's wonderful to be here. My title is a bit, I don't know, trepidatious at least for me. What should socialism
mean in the 21st century? A small question. Fortunately it resonates
and to some degree overlaps with things that Etienne has said and things that Achille has said, but I wanna start from a
specifically U.S. phenomenon. And that's the surprising way
in which socialism is back. For decades, this word was
considered an embarrassment, a despised failure, a
relic of a bygone era. No more. Today politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
wear this label proudly and they win support. Organizations like Democratic
Socialists of America, DSA attract new members in
drove under that precise banner. But what exactly do
they mean by socialism? However, welcome enthusiasm for the word does not translate automatically into serious reflection on its content. What exactly does or
should socialism signify in the present era? Well, in this lecture, I'm going to provide
some extremely sketchy and preliminary thoughts that
do not add up to an answer, but may begin to sketch
a path toward an answer. Drawing on an expanded
conception of capitalism, I shall suggest that we need an expanded conception of socialism. One that overcomes the narrow economism of received understandings. Disclosing the capitalist economies, contradictory and destructive relations to its "non-economic presuppositions". I shall contend that
socialism must do more than only transform
the realm of production over and above that desideratum which I wholeheartedly endorse. Socialism must also transform
productions relations to its background
conditions of possibility, namely to social
reproduction, state power, non-human nature, and a
variety of forms of wealth that lie outside capital's
official circuits, but are within its reach. In other words, as I'll explain, a socialism for our time must overcome not only capital's
exploitation of wage labor, but also its free riding
on unwage care work, on public goods, and
on wealth expropriated from racialized subjects
and from non-human nature. The result, as I said, if we could get such a conception would be an expanded
conception of socialism, but expansion here does
not mean mere addition. The point is not to add more features to received understandings while leaving the ladder unchanged. It's rather to revise our
views of both capitalism and socialism by incorporating
into them structural accounts of matters that are usually
considered secondary, gender, sexuality, race,
ethnicity, nationality, empire, ecology, and democracy. The result should, if it's
successful be to cast a new light on all the classical
topoi of socialist thought on the concepts of
domination and emancipation on class and crisis, on
property markets and planning, on necessary labor free
time and social surplus. Now, obviously I won't
be able to give anything close to even a sketchy account of all of those matters in this lecture, but I will have something to say, however preliminary about
three of these topoi, namely institutional
boundaries, social surplus, and the role of markets. In each case, I'm going
to try to show that and how the topic in question
assumes a different guys. Once we view capitalism as
something more than an economy and once we view socialism as something more than an alternative economic system. The view of socialism that I hope will emerge from this
exercise would differ sharply from Soviet style
communism on the one hand and from social democracy on the other. However, I have to begin with capitalism. In my view, this is the
necessary starting point for any discussion of socialism. Socialism after all is no mere ought or utopian dream. If it's worth discussing now, it is rather because it encapsulates real historically emergent possibilities, real societal potentials
for human freedom, wellbeing, and happiness that capitalism has itself
has brought into being as potentials, but cannot realize. Equally important, socialism is a response to capitalism's impasses and injustices. Both to the problem, the system
generates non-accidentally and that it cannot solve. And to the structural
domination and social divisions that are built into capitalist society. In other words, socialism claims to
remedy capitalism's ills. And so it is there that we must begin only by identifying capitalism's
constitutive dynamics and institutional structures. Can we grasp exactly what it
is that must be transformed. And only by proceeding on that basis, can we envision the positive outlines of a socialist alternative. So my first question here is
what exactly is capitalism and what is wrong with it? All right, well that's two questions. First, often capitalism is
understood as an economic system who's defining components
are private property and market exchange, wage
labor, and commodity production, credit, and finance,
profit, interest, and rent. All elements denominated in money and combined in such a
way as to institutionalize economic growth as a system imperative. On this view, capitalism coincides with the range of activities,
relations, and objects that are monetized, held to embody or produce economic value. I'm going to call this the narrow or restricted view of capitalism held by most businessmen
and business women and most mainstream economists. It is also, I would say the unreflective common sense of society at large, so much so that even many of capitalism's critics on the left tend
unwittingly to subscribe to versions of this narrow view of it. That's the case of what I will call following Moishe Postone,
traditional Marxism. It views capitalism as a
system of class exploitation centered on the relation
between capitalists and workers at the point of production. The key relation is thought to be between those who own
the means of production as their private property on the one hand and those who own nothing
but their capacity to work, and must therefore sell
that peculiar commodity to a capitalist in order
to live on the other hand. This relation is crystallized
in a market transaction in which labor powers exchanged for wages, but it is not an exchange of equivalence. I'm outlining now this
traditional Marxist view. On the contrary, the capitalist pays only for the workers' socially
necessary labor time. Meaning the hours needed
to produce a sum of value that equals the cost of
the worker's subsistence or reproduction. Capitalist appropriates the
rest of the worker's labor time as surplus value. So that's the meaning of the idea that this is a relationship
of exploitation. Exploitation on the
narrow view of capitalism is the very crux of the system. It is the secret of surplus value, the driver of technological innovation and of rising productivity, but also the source of
poverty and class inequality, the motor of wholesale irrationality of non-accidental bouts
of mass unemployment and periodic outbreaks of economic crisis. Now clearly the traditional
Marxian view of capitalism is a big improvement over the standard. Let's say mainstream bourgeoisie view, and yet it too remains overly narrow. This view focuses single-mindedly on what Marx's called the
hidden boat of production while failing to interrogate the ladders productions conditions of possibility. These must be sought elsewhere, I claim in other non-economic abodes that are more hidden still. While traditional Marxism captures the front story of capitalist
society, so to speak, it glosses over the backstory, which makes it not so
much wrong as incomplete to complete the picture
and thereby to arrive at a full understanding
of capitalist society. We need to go beyond
not only the mainstream economic conception,
but also the traditional Marxian alternative, plumbing the more hidden
depth beneath production. We need to disclose the
non-economic conditions that make it possible. I'm going to mention briefly four such non-economic conditions for the possibility of
a capitalist society. And you will see soon why it's important that socialism be constructed as an alternative to this
whole enlarged order. Now the first condition is a
sizeable fund of unwaged labor devoted to what feminists
call social reproduction. This labor includes housework, the birthing and rearing of
children, the care of adults, including waged workers, the
elderly and the unemployed. In effect, these are
forms of people making, which constitute an
indispensable precondition for profit making. Without them, there could be
no workers, no labor power, no necessary or surplus
labor time, no exploitation, no surplus value, no accumulation
of capital, no profit. And yet essential as they are, capital accords them no value is totally unconcerned to replenish them and seeks to avoid paying
for them in so far as it can. There's also a second
non-economic precondition for a capitalist economy, and
that's a large fund of wealth expropriated from subjugated peoples, especially from racialized peoples. This wealth includes
dependent unfree and unwaged or underwaged labor, but
also expropriated land, looted mineral and energy deposits, human bodies and bodily organs, even children and reproductive capacities, all serving in one way or another throughout capitalism's history as inputs to capital's production, for which capital pays little or nothing. Expropriated wealth was an indispensable source of capital's stockpiling at the start of the system's
history as Marx maintained in his discussion of
primitive accumulation. But it did not cease with
the system's maturation. On the contrary, the capitalist
economy relies even now on a continuing stream
of free or cheap inputs as a major source feeding
into accumulation alongside, and inter imbricated with exploitation. Absent such expropriation
of subject peoples, the exploitation of free
workers would not be profitable. Yet capital disavows its
reliance on such wealth and refuses again to pay
for its replenishment. A third non-economic precondition
for a capitalist economy is a large fund of free gifts. That's a phrase Marx used, and or cheap, Jason Morris phrase inputs
from non-human nature. These supply the indispensable
material substratum of capitalist production. The raw materials that labor transforms, the energy that powers machines, and the food stuffs that power bodies, hence arable land, breathable
air, potable water. And of course, as we are
now increasingly aware, the carbon-carrying capacities
of the Earth's atmosphere. Absent these natural
ecological conditions, there could be no economic
producers or social reproducers, no wealth to expropriate or
no free labor to exploit, no capital, no capitalists. Yet again, capital treats
nature as a source of free or very cheap gifts to
which it helps itself, but fails to replenish or repair. A fourth and final
non-economic precondition for a capitalist economy is
a large fund of public goods supplied by states and
other public powers. These include legal orders
that guarantee property rights, contracts, and free exchange. Also repressive forces that ensure order, put down rebellions, manage dissent, and enable expropriation both within and beyond state territory. Also a money supply that stores value and enables transactions across broad swaths of time and space. Transport and communications
infrastructure, and a whole variety of mechanisms for managing system crises. Absent these public goods,
there could be no social order, no trust, hence no exchange,
no sustained accumulation. And yet capital tends
to resent public power and seeks to evade the
taxes that are necessary to sustain it. And in general, to weaken it in the immediate interest
of its accumulation. Now each of these four conditions
represents, as I've said, an indispensable presupposition
of a capitalist economy. Each harbors social
relations, social activities, and forms of social wealth that together form the sine
qua non of accumulation. Behind capitalism's official institutions, wage, labor, production, exchange, finance stand their necessary supports
and enabling conditions, families, communities,
nature, territorial states, political organizations, civil society, and not least of all massive amounts and multiple forms of unwaged
and expropriated labor. Fundamentally integral
to capitalist society, these two are all
constitutive elements of it. Capitalism in other
words is no mere economy. It's something much larger. It's an institutionalized social order in which an arena of economized activities and relations is marked out and set apart from other non-economized zones
on which the former depend, but which they disavow. A capitalist society
then comprises an economy that is distinct from
and dependent on a polity or political order, an
arena of economic production that is distinct from and dependent on a zone of social reproduction. A set of relations of exploitation that is distinct from independent on background relations of expropriation and a socio-historical
realm of human activity that is held to be distinct
from and dependent on what is envisioned as an a
historical material substratum of non-human nature. So what I'm suggesting then
is that we now leave behind the narrow view of
capitalism as an economy. Conceiving it rather as an
institutionalized social order, we arrive at an expanded view. This expanded view of capitalist society has major consequences, I believe for the project of reimagining socialism. It indeed enlarges our sense of what exactly is wrong with capitalism and what must be done to transform it. So now let me take up
that second question. What's wrong with capitalism. On the narrow view, there
are three main wrongs built into capitalism. I would say namely injustice,
irrationality, and unfreedom. I want to say I don't disagree with that, but I want to say a word
about how each is interpreted within the narrow view. On the narrow view, as
I already suggested, capitalism's core injustice
consists in the exploitation by capital of the class of
free property list of workers, wage workers. The latter, as I said
work many hours for free producing enormous wealth in which they have very little share. The benefits flow rather
to the capitalist class, which appropriates their surplus labor and the surplus value generated by it, reinvesting the latter
for that class's own purposes of further and
ever expanding accumulation. The larger consequence
is the relentless indeed exponential growth of
capital as a hostile power that dominates the very
workers who produce it. That is the core injustice
on the narrow view. And it's already a pretty
big one, let's face it, namely the class
exploitation of wage labor at the point of production. This is a wrong whose locus
is the capitalist economy, specifically the sphere of
commodity or economic production. Now on the narrow view, capitalism's chief irrationality
is it's built-in tendency to economic crisis and economic system oriented to the limitless
accumulation of surplus value appropriated privately
in the form of profit is inherently self-destabilizing. The drive to increase profit
by increasing productivity through technical advances
results in periodic falls in the rate of profit, which may or may not be compensated for, by counter tendencies in
the overproduction of goods and in the over accumulation of capital. Attempted fixes like financialization only postpone the day of reckoning while ensuring it will
be all the more severe when it does finally arrive. In general then, the course of capitalist
development on this view is punctuated by periodic economic crises by boom bus cycles, stock market crashes, financial panics, bankruptcy chains, mass liquidations of value
and mass unemployment. This is all the narrow view. And believe me, there's a lot
that's impressive about it. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Finally, the narrow view
entails that capitalism is deeply in inconstitutively
undemocratic. Granted it often promises
democracy in the political realm, but that promise is
systematically undercut by social inequality on the one hand and class power on the other. Then two, the capitalist workplace is thoroughly exempt from any pretense of democratic self-governance. That's a sphere where capital
commands and workers obey. On the narrow view then, capitalism non accidentally entrenches three chief wrongs. First, it lives by exploiting
and nominating wage laborers. I'm summarizing here. Second, it's structurally prime to spawn periodic economic crises. And finally, it's
constitutively non-democratic. Now the trouble arises in
each one of these cases from the inherent dynamics
of capitalism's economy. Built into the DNA of that system, the wrongs of capitalism
reside on the narrow view in its economic organization. Once again, I wanna say that that picture is not so much wrong as incomplete while correctly disclosing something about capitalism's inherent economic ills. It fails to register a range
of non-economic injustices and crisis tendencies that
are equally constitutive of and grounded in this mode
of social organization. These come clearly into view when we adopt the expanded conception of capitalist societies. So now I want to go
through those three wrongs and show you how they look
from the expanded perspective. First, the expanded view
of capitalism discloses and expanded catalog
of systemic injustices. Far from residing within its economy, these tend to be grounded
rather in the divisions between the capitalist economy and its non-economic
conditions of possibility. The division between economic production, where labor is remunerated in cash wages and social reproduction,
where it is often, although not always unwage, sentimentalized, recompensed in love. That's a case in point. Historically gendered, this division entrenches a
fundamental gender asymmetry at the heart of capitalist society. It grounds the subordination of women, gender binarism and is closely connected. They're not identical
with heteronormativity. Similarly capitalist societies institute a structural division between free workers who can exchange their labor power for the costs of their reproduction and depend on others whose persons and assets can simply be seized. Unable to access rights protections or the full costs of
their own reproduction in the form of a wage, the latter group provides
capital with a stream of free or cheap inputs that
swell the tide of profit. The status division between
the merely exploitable and the downright
expropriable is fundamental to capitalist society,
and it coincides roughly, but unmistakably in my view,
with the global color line. It undergirds a range of
structural injustices, including racial oppression,
imperialisms both old and new, indigenous, dispossession, and genocide. Then two, capitalist societies institute a sharp division
between human beings and non-human nature, which cease to belong to the
same ontological universe. Reduced to a tap on the one
hand and a sink on the other, non-human nature is open
to brute extractivism and instrumentalization. Now if we don't want to say, and I'm open to either possibility that this is an injustice against nature or perhaps against non-human animals. It is at the very least an
injustice against existing and future generations of human beings who are left with an increasingly
uninhabitable planet. Finally, capitalism institutes
a structural division between the economic and the political. On one side stands the
private power of capital to organized production using only the lash of hunger and need. On the other side stands the
public power of the state, which is supposed to
monopolize legitimate violence and represent or incarnate law. The effect of this division is to truncate the scope of the political, expelling from the public agenda, a range of life and death questions as I will shortly explain. Devolving those matters to capital, capitalist societies offer only a poor and shrunken facsimile of democracy, subjecting supposedly
self-governing citizens to capital's arbitrary rule. These societies are veritable cauldrons of political injustice. So in general, an expanded
view of capitalist society makes visible and expanded
catalog of structural injustices. Every bit as deep seated
and non-accidental as class exploitation, these injustices really are structural. A socialist alternative
to capitalist society must remedy them too. Far from merely transforming
the organization of economic production, it must also transform
the latter's relation to social reproduction, and with it to the
gender and sexual orders. It must end capital's free
riding on nature's free or cheap gifts and expropriation of the wealth of racialized populations. It must expand the scope
of democratic self-rule beyond their current miserable limits. In some, if socialism is to
remedy capitalism's injustices, it must change not just the economy, but the entire
institutionalized social order that is capitalist society. But if that sounds like
a big job, it's not all. The expanded view of capitalism also enlarges our sense of what counts as a capitalist crisis. This is down to the irrationality problem. This view discloses some built-in self-destabilizing propensity above and beyond those
internal to its economy. It discloses first a structural tendency to social reproductive crisis. And so far as capital
tries to avoid paying for the unwaged care
work on which it depends, and therefore periodically
puts enormous pressure on the chief providers of that work, namely families, communities,
and above all women. The current financialized
form of capitalist society is especially guilty on this point. It is generating just such a crisis today as it demands simultaneously both retrenchment of public
provision of social services and vastly increased hours
of waged work per household and from women. That's a huge pincer movement
on social reproduction. The expanded view also
discloses an inherent tendency within capitalism to ecological crisis. Insofar as capital works over time to avoid paying anything close
to the true replacement costs of the inputs it takes
from non-human nature, depleting the soil and befouling the seas. This system floods carbon sinks and overwhelms the carbon
carrying capacity of the planet, helping itself to all of
those things while disavowing their repair and replacement costs, it periodically destabilizes
the metabolic interaction between the human and
non-human components of nature. I don't need to belabor here how acute is our present ecological crisis. Capitalism's tendency to ecological and social reproductive
crises are inseparable from its constitutive reliance
on expropriated wealth from racialized populations. Its reliance, as I said on stolen lands, coerced labor and looted minerals on racialized zones as dumping
grounds for toxic waste and as suppliers of underpaid care work now increasingly organized
in global care chains. The result is an intertwining of economic, ecological and social crisis with racial or ethnic antagonism. Neoliberalism has clearly
upped the ante here as well. Finally, the enlarged view of capitalism discloses a deep seated
tendency to political crisis. Here too, capital tries
to have it both ways, living off of public goods
for which it tries not to pay, avoiding taxes to the degree it can and scheming constantly to weaken state regulatory capacities. It tends to hollow out
the very public powers on which it depends. The current financialized
form of capitalism takes this game to a whole new level. Mega corporations outgun territorially tethered public powers, while global finance takes it upon itself to discipline states, making
a mockery of elections as in Greece and preventing
elected governments from addressing popular claims, even if some of them might have wanted to. Not all of them even want to, of course. The result is a major
crisis of governance. The EU could be like the
poster child for this, which is now reflected in an
actual crisis of hegemony. That's political crisis
at a different level, as masses of people
across the globe defect from established political parties and established political common sense. So in general, the expanded view discloses that capitalism harbors
multiple crisis tendencies above and beyond the economic. I understand these other crisis tendencies as premised on what I would
call inter-realm contradictions. I'm really thinking kind of
Polanyi here more than Marx. Contradictions that are lodged at the joints that separate and simultaneously connect
the capitalist economy to its non-economic background
conditions of possibility. In a nutshell, capital has
a built-in tendency to erode or destroy or deplete, but
in any case to destabilize its own conditions of possibility, which is to say, to eat its own tail. This too is part and parcel of what is wrong with capitalist society and of what socialism must overcome. Finally, the expanded
view of capitalist society discloses an enlarged view
of its democratic deficits. The problem is not only
that economic inequality and class power for the possibility of equal democratic voice
in the political realm, nor is it only that bosses
command on the factory floor. Equally if not more important
is the preemptive removal of the most consequential
matters from the scope of democratic decision making altogether. How should we organize
the production of goods of use values that satisfy our needs? On what analgic basis and through what sorts
of social relations. How should we relate
the production of goods to the reproductions of
persons on the one hand and to that of non-human
nature on the other? And perhaps most important of all, how shall we dispose
over the social surplus we collectively produce? In capitalist societies, we have virtually no say in these matters. Investors bent on maximal accumulation, decide them behind our backs. In general then, an expanded
view of capitalist society discloses an expanded
view of the system's ills. If socialism aims to
remedy capitalism's wrongs, it faces a very big job. It must invent a new social
order that overcomes not only, again in quotes, class domination, but also asymmetries of gender and sex, racial, ethnic, imperial oppressions, and political domination across the board. Then two, it must deinstitutionalize multiple crisis tendencies, not just economic and financial, but also ecological, social
reproductive, and political. Finally, a socialism for the 21st century must vastly enlarge the purview
of democracy to encompass, not just decision making within
a predefined political zone, but more fundamentally, it must democratize the
very process of definition and demarcation, the very frames that constitute the political. Now that brings me to the hard part. What then is socialism
on this expanded view? Clearly the project of
rethinking socialism for the 21st century is
itself a pretty big job, far too big for any single person or for even a single group of
persons engaged in theorizing. If the job gets done at all, which I admit is a pretty big if, it will be through the
combined efforts of activists and theorists as insights
gained through social struggle, synergized with programmatic thinking and with political organization. Nevertheless, I want to offer three sets of very brief reflections that
seem to me to follow somehow from what I have already said. And these have to do with
institutional boundaries, the question of the
joints with social surplus and with the role of markets. Now I have to point very soon, switch to my handwritten text that I didn't have time
to type into the computer. I hope I can read these notes. I already dropped them. So first of all, boundary questions. Now I wanna say that boundary questions. What I mean by that are
the institutional divisions where the boundaries between
the realms are drawn by whom, in what form and so on. Boundary questions, I think are at least as important as questions about the
internal organization of supposedly pre-given spheres, such as the economic and the political. Instead of focusing
exclusively or one-sidedly on the organization of the economy or of production as socialists
have often tended to do. Socialists in the 21st century need to think about the economy's relation to its background
conditions of possibility, again, to social reproduction,
non-human nature, non-capitalized forms of
wealth and public power. If socialism is to
overcome institutionalized irrationality, domination, and unfreedom, it must reimagine the
relations between production and reproduction between
society and nature between the social and the political. Now I do not think that
it follows that socialism. Let me get now to my other text. That socialism must aim to
liquidate these divisions. So the Soviet attempt to abolish the polity economy distinction can stand as a very powerful warning against any kind of brute
liquidation project here. But that doesn't prevent us
from trying to reenvision these boundaries, which
might mean relocating them, changing where they're
drawn, softening them, rendering them more porous, and perhaps most important reversing the direction of priority. In other words, taking what
is now in the background that is supporting the main thing, the production of value
within the official economy and putting them as the front story. In other words, elevate people
making or social reproduction and ecological sustainability
and democratic self-rule over growth and efficiency imperatives to which they are now subordinated. Most important, I would say that socialism must think about what it
could mean to democratize the very process of boundary
setting and boundary division. That means democratizing what I think of as the metaphysical. How did I say that? Meta-political, excuse me. Wow. The meta-political task that some legal theorist call redomaning. That's a nice word. And that includes redomaning the spaces of first order
political participation. One thing involved here is
that historically sedimented territorial political units, the states and nations that we know. They may not need to be
completely abolished, but they certainly need to be resituated in relation to other, let's call them functionally
demarcated units based on what I've elsewhere called the all subjected principle. Anybody subjected to a given power needs to be part of the demos that governs the exercise of that power. And these power relations don't all coincide with
national territorial units. Many of them are quite
transnational or global. So that's a kind of redomaining that I would say has to be guided by the principle of non-domination, including along all those
major axis of domination, entrenched in capitalist society, as well as any other axis of domination that we might not yet be aware of, or that might emerge in the future. Equally important, such
redomaining must be guided by the principle of no free riding, namely pay-as-you-go. In effect, socialism has
to institute sustainability at the very least to
minimize crisis tendencies and irrationality. I'm going to say a bit more
about that in just a minute. Oh, in fact, right now. A socialist society must
undertake to replenish and replace all the wealth it uses up in production/reproduction is most replenish care
work, people making work just as it replenishes. As capitalism today, at least in theory, replenishes work that produces. No, I'm sorry, my text is so screwed up. Let me restate that. Socialism must replenish care
work and people making work just as it must also replenish work that produces use values
in the form of objects. It must replace all the work it takes from the quote unquote,
outside from nature, from peripheral societies, from populations who remain distant from and outside the official orbits of capital accumulation today. Socialism must replace all
the political capacities and public goods it draws on in the course of meeting our other needs. The principle here is no
free riding, no tail eating. And this proviso seems to
me to be a sine qua non for overcoming those
intergenerational injustices that are endemic to capitalism. We can't leave it off to
our kids and grandkids and so on down the line. This is I think, a principle that at least begins to let us think about what it would mean to overcome the multiple crisis tendencies that are built into capitalism. Now I wanna say a few words. I hope I still have another few minutes. I wanna say a few words about the question of social surplus. I would say that in my view of
socialism, this is the core. Democratic control over social surplus. Surplus after all is whatever
wealth our society generates in excess of what we require
to reproduce the society at the given existing level
at which we find ourselves. In capitalism as we saw, surplus is treated as private property of the capitalist class or
of individual capitalists and is invested by its
owners as they see fit, generally with the aim to
produce yet more surplus and on and on without limit. This I think as I've already
indicated is both unjust and self-destabilizing. A socialist society, I
wanna say must democratize control over social surplus. It must allocate surplus democratically deciding collectively exactly
what to do with the excess, as well as how much excess
to produce in the first place or indeed whether to produce any at all. We might wanna just take it more easy and not worry about having
such a huge surplus. In other words, although I'll
qualify that in just a minute. In other words, socialism
must treat all those questions I listed before as political questions. What and how much to produce, how many hours to devote
to surplus production over and above work time that is needed to reproduce society at its current level. That is how much free time
versus how much work time as well as what projects
improvements and so on we should invest our
surplus labor time in. Now as I said, surplus labor time means time left over after social
reproduction in the broad sense, the reproduction of the society to meet our given social needs. It's time that could in
principle be free time. Although here we have
to ask free for what. In the early stages of socialism, I actually doubt that surplus
time would loom very large. This is very different from Marx's view in the famous fragment on the machines. The reason has to do with
the enormous unpaid bill that socialist society would
inherit from capitalism. Although capitalism prides
itself on its productivity. And although Marx himself
thought it was a veritable engine for producing surplus, I have my doubts. The reason is that we tend
conventionally to reckon surplus pretty much exclusively in the labor time that capital has taken from waged workers after they produced enough value sufficient to cover their own
immediate costs of living. That after all we recall is Marx's definition of surplus value. By contrast, I think Marx
paid much less attention to those various free gifts and cheaps that capital expropriated or appropriated, and still less attention to its failure to cover their reproduction costs. What if we included those
costs in our reckoning? What if capital had had to pay
for free reproductive work, for ecological repair and replenishment, for expropriated wealth of racialized, subjugated and peripheral peoples, for the public goods it enjoys. How much surplus would
capital really have produced? Now that's a rhetorical question 'cause I myself wouldn't
even begin to know how to go about arriving
at an actual answer. Although maybe there are some feminists or environmental
economists who have an idea about how to think about that one. In any case, what I'm saying
is that socialist society would inherit a very hefty bill for centuries of unpaid
ecological reproduction costs and all those other
categories of unpaid costs that I mentioned. It would also inherit, or maybe this is another way
of saying the same thing, a very hefty bill for massive
unmet basic human needs across the globe, needs for
healthcare, shelter, housing, transportation, education,
food, security, nutrition, environmental sustainable conditions. These two don't count as surplus. These are necessities,
absolute necessities, and the same holds for the
pressing an enormous job of defossilizing the world economy. This is not optional. It's something you could decide. Oh, we'll leave that. That's a surplus matter, not optional. Shifting the entire basis of the economy to renewable energy. So this question of what is
surplus and what is necessary, leads me to some observations, which concern my third topic, the role and character
of markets in social. In other words, what I'm saying is that this expanded view recast
the whole problem of surplus, I think in a fundamental way. And now I want to say a word, which also seems to me, I'm not sure, but seems to follow from
this line of thought about the role of markets
in a socialist society. And I will stop. I'm very close to the end. Let me just then just cut to the chase and state this in a very crude formula. Markets should have no
place at the very top or at the very bottom, but they might have a
role in the in between. What I mean by the very top is what I've just been talking about, the allocation of social surplus. Assuming there is a social
surplus to be allocated, it must be considered
the collective wealth of the society as a whole. No private person or entity can own it or have the right to dispose of it. It's truly collective
property to be allocated through a collective process
of self-determination, which somehow I don't have a vague idea of how it's to be
organized democratically. So market mechanisms for
determining surplus allegations should have no role, zero at this level. That's the top. Now the same holds I claim for
what I'm calling the bottom by which I mean the level
of basic human needs, shelter, clothing, food,
education, transport, healthcare, leisure,
and so on and so forth. Now I have no illusions that we or I could specify once and for all, what exactly count as a basic need, what exactly is required
to satisfy basic needs on a global scale. That too is a political question, which somehow has to be subjected to democratic decision making, but whatever is decided must be provided as a matter of right, not on
the basis of ability to pay. This is where I think
that famous principle from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or
her needs really applies. This rings true. This means that the use values we produce to meet these needs cannot be commodities. They must rather be public goods. No markets at the bottom,
no markets in education, no private educational commodities, no markets in healthcare, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera, just as at the top. And I should say that this is why. Incidentally, I am not a big
fan of universal basic income, which tends to want to pay people cash to buy the stuff they need
to meet their basic needs. And thus treats fundamental
needs satisfactions effectively as commodities. I'm saying that socialist society must treat them rather as public goods. Now if no private ownership or market exchange at the
bottom and at the top, that leaves a huge amount
of space in the middle. And I don't have a worked
out view about that, but am open to experimentation. Ann is signaling that I should go faster. And since I don't really know
what I wanna say here anyway, I'm going to grab at her
invitation to speed up. But this is the realm in
which market socialism could make some sense. Okay. I'm gonna conclude. Let me just conclude this way. I realize how very crude and
rudimentary and preliminary. This view it's not even a real conception, but some elements of one of socialism is that I have been sketching here. It's only the very, very barest beginning of only a few of the
many important questions that have to in the end be answered. But I do hope that even
this poor beginning might have some worth. I'm not gonna say value. I hope specifically that it convinces you that the socialist project is worth considering and pursuing. But I also want to say
that I hope I've shown you that socialism is not or can't
remain as simply a buzzword. It's got to become the name
for a genuine alternative to the system that is
destroying the planet. The system that is mocking our
capacities for living freely democratically and well. I hope too that I have
convinced you that socialism, whatever it means cannot today be broached in the old school way. Only by starting with an
expanded view of capitalism and of what is wrong with it. And by proceeding from there to expand our view of socialism, can we envision a conception of it that can speak to our full
set of 21st century concerns and needs. If I've persuaded you of that and inspired you to
want to do this project or pursue this project
further, I will be satisfied. Thank you. (audience applauding) - Thank you, Nancy. Queries, questions, comments, reactions are more than welcome. Please. - Hi, there. Thank you
so much for your talk. I found it so enlightening
and your work in general, highlighting the non-economic
conditions of capitalism. I just find so illuminating. My question is that, given this new understanding of capitalism and socialism and in light of these non-economic
conditions of its existence. Are there insights that you
could offer on tactically, the priorities of a socialist
strategy and in particular, the question of which of these realms should we focus our energies? My intuition is that if it is capital that requires these
non-economic conditions for its existence, should we
focus on abolishing capital at its point of production? Or is that the old way
of thinking about it? Thank you. - Thank you. It's a really great question. It's an absolutely essential question. Without pretending to have
anything remotely resembling a real persuasive answer, I would say that the focus on traditional labor exploitation. That can't be ignored. And there are places where that resistance and organization at that
level are developing. It will be extremely important to see how labor struggle
develops in China, for example. And we already have seen a whole set of interesting labor struggles that have to do with paid work in the sphere of social reproduction. I'm thinking of that massive
wave of Wildcat teacher strikes in the United States, the recent nurses strike in New York city. It's here and not manufacturing that we are finding
the sort of front lines of labor militancy in
this country at least. What I've already said tells you that, it's not a question of, should we focus on labor exploitation or social reproduction? These are crossing and inter
imbricated in some cases. And what is kind of interesting
about some of the struggles I just mentioned is that they combine sort of traditional
demands about wages, hours, and working conditions with
demands for public goods for state or public
investment in what is needed to do the job that the
workers are being asked to do. So limitations on class size for teachers. This historic win for
the New York nurses for, I think it's the first ever contract, which puts a cap on patient load, how many patients they
can be asked to care for and still be able to do their job. Here we're crossing more than one thing. In many places, ecological struggles are also very inter imbricated with social reproduction struggles. People are trying to defend a form of life that is implicated in
a place and a habitat and so on and so forth. So I don't think we can
neatly separate these realms even if we wanted to. And I don't know that it's for theory to decide where to focus. I think people are deciding
what is pressing for them and where they think they have a chance to, you know, win some victories and maybe the task of theory. But I don't wanna just say theory, but sort of reflective
political imagination, whether it's in activist
context or in the academy. The task would be to think about how the tremendous proliferation of social struggles around all the issues that I've mentioned might be connected up in order to have the breadth of vision and the social power to, you know, actually make a social
transformation of great magnitude. I think that's more the
question about connection rather than choosing this versus that. - Just before we go any further, I just want to say that
before we leave this evening, I'd like to announce. I'd like to announce next
year's three master classes, so don't run out in the middle. - Oh, I thought you were gonna just do it. - Oh, well, I mean, I don't wanna. - Okay. We're all on the edge of our seats. - Thank you very much for that talk. I have two questions. I just want to go back to
your opening statement. You said socialism is back, like in a big way in the United States. Do you see the United
States taking a leading role in redefining socialism
in the 21st century? And the second question has to do with the idea where you explained that. To rethink socialism, we also
have to rethink capitalism, and it just drew me back to the 1960s to the African statesmen at that time and how they critiqued the idea that you always have to think of socialism as something that arises out
of the ills of capitalism. And in a way that sort of
stops us thinking about ways in which we can think of an alternative without having to think of capitalism, but maybe for instance, thinking about maybe ideas of communism. Okay. Yeah, so I'm saying if you
always have to think of socialism as a remedy to the ills of capitalism, then you're always thinking
within this frame of capitalism of exploitation of labor
and stuff like that. But if we think of it, not as something arising
out of capitalism, then we can think of it. For instance, we can go back
maybe to ideas of community, for instance, of how do
we share, just share land, or have, you know, freehold
land, things like that. And in that way, we can
think of something else and not be trapped in
this language of money. So do you see any room for this... I know there projects
didn't quite work out, the Nyerere's and the Nkrumah's, but do you see any room for
their thoughts in your thinking to go back to the ideas they argued about, maybe communism, about an attitude, of having a communal sense
of belonging, of sharing. Do you see any room for
that in your thought? - Yeah. Thank you. Well, you raised two very good questions. I think the first one about, do I see U.S. is taking a leading role in rethinking socialism? I have no reason to assume that at all. I would say that if some
massive socialist movement were to develop in the U.S, it would have world
historical repercussions since the U.S. is
basically the great Satan, and anything that reoriented it would be a huge opening for
a lot of people elsewhere. But that doesn't mean
I'm counting on that. I'd love to hear more
from people from elsewhere about the connotations of
this term socialism today. In much of Europe, the term is trashed. It's just the various socialist parties that consolidated neoliberalism, last thing anyone probably wants to do is to call themselves a socialist. Maybe the UK Labour Party
is a little different, but since we never haven't
in many, many decades had a socialist power as party that's ever been anywhere close to power. The term here has a radical charge, and the fact that people are
willing to self-describe in it. With the exception of some Republicans, a lot of people don't seem to bat an eye, that's a really interesting
moment for the U.S. It suggests that maybe the Cold
War really is finally over, there's still plenty of
Russophobia, that's for sure. The second question is a hard one. And I have a feeling that
this might be very central in tomorrow's discussion. I know that the theme of
the common and the community is central in Etienne's Seminar. And that he'll have a lot to say about it. And I imagine Achile will as well, but I'm going to sort
of take the provocation and register a skepticism that for me, that had to do with your
use in posing the question several times about going back. It's that word back. We discussed this question
actually a little bit in our own seminar about
sort of motivations for struggle and resistance. In some cases, draw on
experiences of either entitlement or social relationship
of which there is memory, or even past experience that
function, that people draw on, their sense of entitlement or whatever. That sort of thing happens all the time, but it doesn't follow that
the memories, the traditions, the experiences or histories
that are being drawn on are themselves fully adequate for what we need to think of today. We're really talking about some kind of planetary transformation here. Socialism was never
possible in one country, but my God today, how could
we even imagine such a thing? So I think there are
forms of coordination, very large scale coordination. And yes, I would use a
word that Etienne invoked and planning, democratic planning, not
nomenclature or dominated planning. But that shouldn't mean that
that's not an alternative to more local and face to
face forms of community, but somehow we have to
be able to integrate forms of relationship
at many different scales and different levels of
concreteness, abstraction and so on. I'll have to stop. - Not at all. I'm gonna take the liberty
of playing devil's advocate. And as someone who was sort of raised on the social reproduction argument and wages for house work in London and people in the streets, and certainly on a colonial
and imperial history, in which all of these issues have basically been on
the table for years. The notion that there's this unfree labor, every form from slavery to
indenture, to convict labor, the carceral entire system. We didn't even mention
carceral capitalism yet. These are things that we
have known for so long and that we have imagined
could be changed. I'm worried that there's
a little bit of the... Well, if everybody just
understood capitalism to be about social reproduction too, then we'd be on the right track. Well, we've been saying that
for some 50 years or more, that social reproduction, there is no capitalism without
this articulation and modes. The whole thing's been
all that anthropology and history has done in most
of the rest of the world is to make that argument
from Rosa Luxemburg, but way before that, right. So I'm kind of wondering if
this is a bit utopian to say, well, if we only knew it. It worries me in the sense of, if we just tell the kids not
to be racist, they won't be, you know, if we change attitudes. In the sense that like, I
don't mean to be facetious. - I'm really talking
about structural change. - But you're talking
about structural changes that I'm concerned have
already been assaulted, attacked in so many ways
that you've been part of and that I've been part of, you know. So tell me why you feel. I mean, I think really the key, and it seems to me to
Etienne's talk and yours and to Achiles is the connectivities of all these forms of crisis together. That's seems to be what's
really what you're setting out. But not that if we get
the social reproduction and we expand our notion of capital, that will be on the road. - And you're absolutely right. A lot of what I have done has
been to sort of take insights developed over decades by anti-imperialist and post-colonial theory
by feminist theory, by well, in a more recent and
very exciting development, by sort of eco-socialist, eco-feminist, eco-Marx thinking, and democratic theory,
et cetera, et cetera. There's probably not one
single idea in this talk that is just somehow totally
invented out of thin air. I am weaving together a range of what I would call
the general intellect. The sort of ideas of our time, the best ideas of our time. Now why do I think that
it's worth doing this now. This is a question about the now, and it's precisely because I believe, could be proven wrong in the end, but I suspect we might be well be in, at least at the beginning
of one of these rare moments of general crisis that have maybe happened two or three times in the past, in the history of capital society. A moment where many
strands of crisis converge, the economic, the
financial, the ecological, the social, the political. There is a widespread sense
that the whole thing is broken, that we can't go on this way. And unfortunately, many people
who are right in sensing that and who are actually, you know, defecting from politics as usual, have very bad interpretations about what the real
cause of the trouble is and what must be done, namely hardening the borders
and all of that stuff to make sure that the Mexicans,
the Muslims, et cetera, don't take our jobs and our stuff. So this is an attempt for now. I mean, granted it's in a
overly esoteric form, I guess, theoretical form, but maybe
it could be translated. I mean, that's what the
Feminist Manifesto for the 99%, that's a piece of agitational
writing aimed at translating, what would otherwise
be a kind of esoteric, theoretical political
perspective for a broader public. And I think if people are
talking about socialism now, at least in the United States and calling themselves socialists, then maybe there are
people who are interested in actually giving some real thought, maybe DSA would be interested. It's attracting members
in droves right now. So I'm trying to use whatever I've learned from all those decades and all that work that you've referenced and you know, whatever moves, let's say, intellectual moves I've developed, I'm trying to use that and
put them at the service of whatever emancipatory
forces might be out there listening at this moment. - Thank you. Great. - Hello. Thank you for speaking. In the beginning, you kind of touched on
three tropes that applied. - Can you speak into the mic. - Oh, sorry. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes. You talked about three tropes that kind of define how
we think about capitalism, irrationality on freedom and injustice. And in terms of irrationality, I'm wondering kind of who gets
to define what's irrational, especially like even within
democratic, whatever. It's like in terms of gender issue, sexuality, race, that is
also something that's been, you know, an issue, especially
within the democratic forum. So how do you kind of get
to define what's rational, who gets to define that? - That's a really good question. And I have to say that I sort
of threw that word in there in a sort of narrow sense
to raise big question. But I intended it in
this very simple sense of crisis proneness. Your rationality in the sense of a system that is instinctively primed to destroy its own conditions of possibility and therefore to stabilize itself. I meant only that, but there are plenty. I mean, if a system is
constitutively prone to destroy the planet, I
would call it irrational. Maybe we could have an argument, maybe there are some people, that's only a very small slice of what we might need, right? Irrationality. And I guess in a somewhat technical sense of a self-undermining system. I think that there are many other things that could be called irrational,
but you'd have an argument. So you're right about that
it's a matter for discussion and rather than a prioritize
theoretical definition. - Completely agree. And Nancy, you actually
answered it in another form. You said to democratize redomaining. - Right.
- Right? - That's absolutely central here. - We're after six, five
after six, I guess. I know you asked a
question yesterday, right? - [Student] Two days ago. - Two days ago. (audience laughing) I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure
that if there was anyone else who hasn't gotten to, because
this may be our last question. Anyone else? - [Student] It's a totally
different question. (Nancy laughs) - She's not gonna ask the same question, that's great. Okay. - You were questioning how
we are redefining socialism. And I thought that when
I was a fierce activist, Marxist. I never called myself a socialist. There was a word, and I'm not altering
this word to be agitated or to be, you know, rhetorical,
it's called revolutionary. - [Nancy] Right or maybe even communist. - We were not communist because
Soviet Union was communist, so we were not communist. But the whole idea of revolutionary actually says a lot in our
revisiting of socialist tenants. I mean, for example, every time
we talk about care workers, why are you imagining a female? So revolution does not mean
storming the white palace. It means, we can go to
Gramsci or to Engels, the trenches of life. I mean the fact that
Bernie Sanders says that, he's trying to do what, (indistinct) to do. The aspect of revolutionary is not there, which connects to my second. This is a question actually. Second question, which is if we are going to... We will try to understand capitalism. Somehow there's one element of capitalism that has been surviving since the days of any
revolution we know of, that's consumerism,
which we do not address. And as long as consumerism is around, every single labor
movement we see around us is actually a movement where
people want to buy more. So in that sense, in all these discussions of socialism. Great analysis, I have no question about Dana. I don't see the element of revolution and not in the rhetorical form. - Thank you. So I don't object to the word revolutionary, if what that means is not a kind of aura of maneuver, as you say, storming the winter palace or whatever. But if it means that we're talking about deep structural change, that's a good enough sense
of a revolution for me. As I say, the sort of hook of
this particular bit of writing is just the reemergence in
U.S. political discourse of the term socialism. So that's my hook. I'm saying, okay, let's figure out. If you wanna call yourself that, then what does it mean
and so on and so forth. If the word revolutionary were being used, maybe I would've stressed that word, that's sort of the rhetorical thing, and in general, the grammar of life. Consumerism is obviously deeply connected with everything I talked about, right? The wage enables you to buy commodities, the split between social
reproduction and production means that the home is the space of consumer commodity consumption. The weakness and pressures
for public divestment in public goods is a
new spur to consumerism, and the ecological impact of much of this is truly devastating. The other question, which I
didn't raise at all is that, I mean, we have to ask, you know, does this really make us happy to just be buying glitzy new stuff that turns out to be junk anyway once you have it for a while. There are questions about not just justice irrationality on freedom, but you know, the actual quality of life and whether it's satisfying,
whether it is effectively, emotionally, psychically, satisfying. And there's a lot to be said
about consumerism there, 'cause it's addictive
and yet empty somehow. - Before we thank Nancy for
a really incredible talk and for giving us some hope, I'd like to just let you
know who the master classes will be taught by next
year in a continuation, I think very much of some
of these conversations. One of them will be Eyal Weizman, who works on architectural
forensic and an architect who is just an amazing, well, I don't need to say more about him. Saskia Sassen who is going to be doing her seminar on expulsions, and last but not least Noam Chomsky who is going to probably... One of the last things that
he's going to be doing, he has been very hesitant and felt he wasn't sure he could do it, but he was really excited by this project. I hope this will continue, just the bar that's been set this year for just amazing, amazing conversations. So thank you all and thank you, Nancy. (audience applauding)
