Protest | Steven Pinker, Tariq Ali, Paul Mason, Aaron Bastani, Yassmin Abdel-Magied & more

[Music] the constant challenging of something if we're all using the same rules should be actually desired non-violent resistance movements were three times as effective as uh violent ones i am very concerned that things will become violent every movement needs to have an agenda with an abc plan so the choice is either to sit down and do nothing or to hope that peaceful agitation wins the day which it never has [Music] i mean the struggle of people for their freedom has always involved violence are there occasions when the use of violence can and should be justified in seeking political ends i think so and i think history teaches us that i mean there are of course different forms of violence i'm not and never have been a supporter of terrorism uh defined as it should be defined either individual or that used by states but i am a strong supporter of historically speaking of all the revolutions that have taken place the slave rebellions that have taken place in history starting if you like with the american revolution against british colonialism carrying on to the french revolution the revolution of the enlightenment the link between the intellectuals prior to the revolution and the revolutionaries was very strong the english revolution which laid the foundations of democracy which is why cromwell's statue is still outside the house of commons so far no one has argued that it should be removed though they don't allow stamps with cromwell's head on it because it requires the monarch's head on it too and of course in the 20th century we've had a whole wave of revolutions in revolutionary struggles which have deployed violence the russian revolution the chinese vietnamese cuban the huge anti-colonial struggles waged by the vietnamese so i'm afraid it's very difficult studying modern and all medieval history or early modern history to get away from this idea of violence and i think we have to detach the violence used by masses in motion uh from acts of individual terror carried out for whatever reason or suicide terrorism or whatever i mean the struggle of people for their freedom has always involved violence because the people they're trying to gain independence from deploy it as well so the choice is either to sit down and do nothing or to hope that peaceful agitation wins the day which it never has with very few exceptions and to throw the path open to those who occupy oppress and kill people at nausea i mean this goes on today even as we're sitting here six wars are being waged in the united uh in the world by the united states the most brutal of which which is hardly mentioned is the war in the yemen being waged by saudi arabia and its allies backed by the united states and britain too often protest movements say what they're against but not what they're for i don't think it's a choice of either or i think both political parties and social activism have a role and indeed if you look throughout history you will find that nearly all the great social reform movements began outside of parliament outside of formal political parties they began as grassroots movements and eventually got translated and adopted by political parties so if you want to bring about change the mechanism in our society is through a parliamentary legislative process ultimately all social movements need to elect members of parliament who will make those changes happen i would say that one of the big problems with a lot of activism has been it's often negative oppositionist nature too often protest movements say what they're against but not what they're for and that to me undermines their credibility and success because to persuade the public you not only have to critique what is you have to have an agenda for what could be and i think that's one of the great failings sadly of the occupy movement which i was very supportive of it didn't really have a plan about how the ideas that it espoused could be translated in practical legislative reforms at the end of the day every movement needs to have an agenda with an abc plan i'll just give you one example as you will recall up until the mid-1990s the lgbti community was a victim of grave harassment by the police throughout the country with thousands of gay men being arrested every year for consenting adult same-sex behavior which was not a crime between heterosexual men and women we went to initially do negotiations with the police new scotland yard and other police services around the country they were polite they smiled they shook our hands they gave us tea and sandwiches but then went away and continued their pattern of arrests and harassment so the group that i was involved in outrage decided to leave we thought this was just a police pr exercise they were inviting us to pretend and project that they were actually engaging with the lgbti community when in reality nothing had changed so we began a very high profile campaign of direct action against the police we occupied police stations we interrupted the press conferences other than metropolitan police commissioner paul condon we exposed undercover police entrapment operate operations secretly photographing undercover police officers who were going into parks and public toilets waving their willies and then arresting any man who responded at the end of the day that direct action campaign is what forced the police to rethink they were so embarrassed because we got acres and acres of newsprint and uh hours and hours of tv and radio coverage our argument was the police were pursuing a campaign of persecution against people who engaged in victimless behavior this was a irresponsible waste of police resources at a time when officers were claiming they didn't have enough staff or resources to tackle domestic violence rape racist attacks queer-bashing violence so we won the pr battle through our direct action campaign which got in the headlines the police invited us back to new scotland yard thinking they could then buy us off again but we came back with a concrete program of 12 policies for a non-homophobic policing policy practical ideas partly drawn from the progressive policies of police services in copenhagen and amsterdam but partly ones we'd invented ourselves it completely threw the police they just saw us as a protest group but when we came back with practical ideas they were put on the spot at the end of the day they couldn't argue against the policies we proposed the fly in the ointment they threw us was one of our proposals was to argue for a lesbian and gay liaison officer so they appointed a right-wing evangelical christian inspector john brown as the liaison officer we decided rather than rubbishing we decided to try and persuade him so we took him to meet victims of police harassment who told their personal stories and over a period of about three months he became convinced the police were acting inappropriately and not fulfilling their duty he actually became our greatest champion in the metropolitan police service so there's an example of how protest backed up with practical credible plausible ideas can actually bring about change so challenge is actually an important in fact the most important part of the process now the difference perhaps for me between engineering and you know if we're talking about political um realms is that in engineering no matter what position you're in in this hierarchy you all work on the same rules you're all using the laws of physics and nobody no matter how high they are in a particular company no matter where they are in society they can't use different rules they are not going to be able to operate on different rules of physics so therefore the the playing field is one that is transparent is one that i understand no matter where i come in in the hierarchy and i can understand that the status that somebody has earned as a very good engineer is one that is credible and legitimate so i trust in that if this person is in an in an elite position if they're at the top of the hierarchy they've earned it in the kind of the social contract that we have in the engineering world what i would argue is that when we talk about illi in this room in the political realm the difference is that we don't all play on the same rules and so the question that i was asked in this topic is should we challenge those who are elites and should we possibly eradicate them as an engineer i believe we should always be challenging those who are in any position that is how you stress test whether something is actually any good the constant challenging of something if we're all using the same rules should be actually desired because in the engineering world to get to the best solution you iterate in the science world you perform tests over and over and over again in order to get to the best result so challenge is actually an important in fact the most important part of the process so why should that same process not apply to society if we think about elite then not only thinking about status but also about power and i think the conversation about power is really important power tends to be something that people want to accrue and accumulate more of no people rarely sort of sit back and say well i have enough power now i'm done i'm gonna go to sleep no for some reason something inherently about power asks us to continue wanting more but i don't think it necessarily is going to not exist i think for me power is like fire is like energy it is something that is neither created nor destroyed only the form changes you can never create or destroy energy it only is transformed into different you go from light to heat to so on and so the question for me is how are we distributing that power who gets to choose how how that power is being distributed and perhaps it's not about whether um an elite should exist or not but how we make sure that we're all playing by the same rules because right now we're not and i think part of the reason there is this distrust is because i know that the rules that the elite in the political world are playing but are completely different rules to me they've set them they've set it up for themselves they're not interested in in changing them and there is very little that i can do as someone who plays on a different ball game completely they're playing chess and i'm here playing handball right completely different set of rules and yet we're supposed to exist in the same space and use the same resources and so on so for me it is a question of first principles in that how do we make sure that the rules that we're all playing on are the same and then how do we make sure that the power's power is distributed so that you might in the engineering world power is distributed but i know that i'm going to listen to that person because they have a better understanding of the rules than i and i'm actually okay with that we really need systems change or yes i am very concerned that things will become violent are peace and stability just necessary casualties when there's so much at stake i'd want to start with a critique of the question itself because it's premised upon an assumption that britain has been a historically stable society and of course this country had a revolutionary civil war in the mid 17th century 150 years before the french revolution more recently we have the rise of chartism the movements for democratic suffrage during the 19th century suffragettes and of course we had a civil war effectively uh with the republic of ireland and sessions the free state only a century ago and then more recently of course you've got the minor strike you've got all grief you've got what happened with murdoch and the press unions in the 1980s immense social strife but where mary is absolutely right is that more or less that was managed through political institutions a lot of people were hurt a lot of people saw their lives then their their way of life decimated but it didn't descend into the things we would normally think of as insurrectional civil war it probably got closer than many of us think but it didn't similarly you have austerity since 2010 british medical journal says that there are 120 to 130 000 excess debts which correlate with austerity now we can have an argument as to whether or not it caused it we've got life expectancy falling the average male from a working class background in sheffield or in glasgow of 65 years that's when the tourists now want to increase the pension to 70. so even within the present moment there's a great deal of violence um if you're on low pay if you're sick life isn't necessarily that good if you're in in poverty as a pensioner speaking of excess debts about 30 000 people die every year they're called excess deaths by the civil service this is people that die of the cold because of fuel poverty and they tend to be older but of course because we're not interested in disrupting the status quo nobody calls that what it is which is effectively a form of social murder 30 000 people it's a lot we're not talking about 10 or 20 people and yet we do nothing about it why because it would disrupt the economic orthodoxy and then i'll finish with this the book i've written fully automated luxury communism it's a bit more pragmatic and practical than it sounds and its suggestions it starts actually with a set of analyses which probably on this panel we agree on i think in the 21st century we are facing several crises which i think are existential to market capitalism demographic aging very difficult to care for an aging population with a market-based system climate change that has problems with regard to geopolitics resource scarcity has problems with regards to mass migrations you have automation and what that could do for under unemployment and then finally you have what i would call basically the continuation of the crisis we've seen since 2018 crisis today in the u.s 40 million people still use food stamps it's 26 million in 2007. people here are using food banks home ownership in the us is now its lowest level since the mid-1960s homeownership here is its lowest level since the mid-1980s that's only going to get worse so i think together that panoply of crises mean that we are going to face significant challenges to our democratic system so either as a society we accept the reality of those problems we say you know what we really need systems change or yes i am very concerned that things will become violent wars and revolutions kill people by the millions and tens of millions stephen we've heard that case that peaceful engagement on its own simply hasn't been a useful way of changing society with the exception of a very few cases you have spoken out for better angels very very publicly would you agree with the case that tariq has made uh no i wouldn't agree i guess i start from the premise that killing people is bad and killing uh more people is worse than killing fewer people so even though i i also don't support terrorism terrorists have killed a tiny number of people the worst terrorist attack in history 911 killed 3 000 typical terrorist attack kills uh a handful uh whereas wars and revolutions kill people by the millions and tens of millions and often uh it is true tariq listed a number of violent events in human history uh we did not make the argument that these are uh are good or justifiable these were history's disasters now i do believe that there are arguments that there can be occasions in which violence is justified if it is the only way to prevent greater violence again i'm assuming that that murdering people is bad if you disagree with that then you can disagree with the whole argument and that murdering 2 million people 4 million people 20 million people is really really bad now did the events that we just heard result in uh the reduction of violence prevention of killing of even greater numbers which i suppose could be used as a utilitarian argument justifying violence the answer is in virtually all the cases no the french revolution was a disaster killed two million people led to the rise of napoleon perhaps the world's first totalitarian fascist dictator who began wars of conquest that killed another an additional four million people led to the restoration of slavery to the restoration of the uh monarchy and a delay of democracy in france by perhaps a century russian revolution killed several million led to the russian civil war which killed another 9 million led to the rise of stalin who killed 20 million there's an old cliche you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs well it ignores the fact that people aren't eggs and that generally does not result in an omelet again the chinese revolution perhaps the most disastrous event in history led to the great leap forward and the cultural revolution which killed perhaps uh 30 to 40 million people uh altogether time and again a violent revolution violent war in addition to the moral harm of mass murder and again i mean murder we're talking about millions or tens of millions of people does not result in a stable peaceful state that saves the lives of even more quite the contrary now a recent study by um maria stefan and erica chenoweth actually looked over the last century at violent and non-violent resistant movement resistance movements to put the gandhian hypothesis to a test that it that there are ways of overcoming tyranny uh using the all of the tactics that that gandhi worked out now you could of course be cynical about the gandhian hypothesis by saying well he uh tugged at the heartstrings of of the british at an opportune moment and he just got lucky so they decided to count uh of the all of the resistance movements of the 20th century they divided them into violent ones and non-violent ones putting aside the question of which was more moral that is which murdered fewer people just ask the question of which is more effective now it's not the case that violent resistance movements always succeed or that non-violent ones fail or vice versa if you count them up they found that non-violent resistance movements were three times as effective as uh violent ones doesn't mean the violence are never effective but even in terms of sheer efficacy the non-violent ones uh tend to have a higher success when you say three times as effective stephen do you mean they killed one third as few people no they uh three times more often they resulted in regime change okay that's an interesting definition and one that i think we will have to come back to in the in the discussion final observation is that in a survey of what leads to stable democracies uh inspired in part by the uh 2003 invasion of iraq which i think we all agree was not a successful uh measure to to install a peaceful liberal democracy it in that actually fits into a pattern that uh decapitations of a uh existing tyrannical regime generally don't result in a stable democracy i'll add with one final observation i'm canadian so uh we actually did achieve independence from uh britain non-violently and uh uh we had took a little bit longer than the united states uh but the american revolution was a pretty bloody uh and and brutal mess as well and uh canada has a result it is today one of the uh most stable least violent and most democratic societies on earth you can't denetwork a society you can't unliberate a generation it's going to take a little bit of time to win because we're not just up against the state nor even is the state the biggest enemy of xr or of the other groups like me too or black lives matter even black lives matter the problem is what what the german philosopher hannah aaron called the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob we're up against a temporary alliance of authoritarian elites who who keep their money offshore who are heavily invested in fossil fuels surveillance technologies yeah these are what these guys and of course by by investing in offshore that is anti-taxation they're effectively investing in anti-society now that's on one hand there are large numbers of people who need to believe that climate change is not real who need to believe that uh women are subordinate to men because in their their world will disintegrate in the next 20 years because of the changes we need to make your generation cannot go back into the box that my grandmother's generation of women could have to live in or gay men or transgender people or black people xr for me is the latest iteration of the new kind of protist that is there almost a son and daughter of 2011 and the occupy movement the occupy movement imagined a new society and we assembled the forms of that society on the internet the networks and then we took it into physical space in the form of tent camps and square occupation they didn't last they were easily repressed extinction rebellion me too and black lives matter take it to a visceral level to a granular level if you think about what blm is saying is that the wages of whiteness is that if a policeman arrives on a trouble scene black people get shot and white people generally don't that's why these races spend all their time on the phone trying to call the cops on black people for selling water on the street what they hope is the cop will arrive and shoot somebody and it ain't going to be there no that's a very different thing than saying i need civil rights i need civil rights for martin luther king for malcolm x etc stokely carmichael was really angela davis was re was a real thing but to say you no longer have the right to shoot me when the cops turn up is a different more granular thing it demands changes of human behavior me too demands a change in human behavior i work in the theater sometime the theater is undergoing a revolution because of the demand of female actors and producers no longer for their physical invasion of their body space under the excuse of the theater i'm not just talking about directors saying you know let's let's have a drink after work you know by the way you're getting a lovely part in my next film no it's about the actual physicality of theater is changing there's no movement that helps people act through whether they have to do a sex scene or a sexual violence scene both these things exist in reality and should be portrayed on stage but now we have movements where we mediate those and we allow people to explore what is happening to them in a much more reflective way reflective way than before so what i'm describing though is the way me too is not just transforming kind of the agenda of feminism it's transforming a real industry it's also transforming um parts of corporate life not enough there are now tests and courses they call them the weinstein test in corporate life you can you pass the test otherwise you don't become a director of this bank uh so the amazing thing is that going back to exile that we've got here what's xr's number one demand tell the truth we're at a philosophy festival where routinely people question the possibility of truth but i don't and i think that's another thing there are truths they're provisional they're scientifically verified we need to fight for them of course the states are going to repress it it's going to be wake up time when some quite you know i'd say you know young and therefore inexperienced protesters my generation of climate protesters the people i collaborated with and reported on have been trying to say luke the cops will come soon there will be people arriving in your camps who look unstable you need to deal with them in a good way you need to educate and care for people but what the cops then do is that they like the evil doctor they look they look at the thing and they go that's an entity this occasionally it doesn't have to be our place another country's police it can be a private security company you've never heard of they say what are they what are the illnesses and weaknesses of this thing how can we make them worse that's what happens so what happened to the tent camp outside london stock exchange that it was quite clear somebody was exacerbating all the problems and i don't believe it's the british state i believe you know that the whole world is now a kind of outsourced there's a kind of state mischief making that's outsourced to private companies we've never heard of you you saw it around cambridge analytica this parent company but we can we can defeat them we are millions of people and what is more they have sons and daughters who don't want to live in a burning planet so in the end we can have an argument we even with the kind of shittiest uh private uh intelligence company do you really want to live on a burning planet with chaos with millions of refugees unstoppably moving from the global south to the north if you want to live in that planet go on disrupting the climate change movement if you don't then even it might you know you don't like people with green hair and nose rings fine just do it yourself lobby your tory mp or your republican congressperson tell them to stop funding climate chaos you know violence isn't just physical violence there's structures of violence there's systems of violence i think it's important to understand or do you know when we talk about violence because you know obviously violence and the different you know violence isn't just physical violence there's structures of violence there's systems of violence so you know when we if just because there's the absence of physical violence in a in a country like even here for example it doesn't mean there aren't structures of violence um in the u.s you know having having abortion banned in a state that is a system and structure of violence and you know in that case it's obviously a direct physical effect on people but you know austerity is the structure of violence um and so on and so forth so you know i think you know when we talk about violence especially in the kurdish case you know it's never been violence in an offensive way it's been self-defense you know the kurdish movement and therefore the guerrilla uh guerrillas of the gerald army or units have never gone on on offensive uh attacks or wars to invade somewhere else it's always about it been about defending defending its people and defending its lands so in that sense yes it's it's it's been a necessary and unfortunately necessary aspect of the self-defense has been the use of violence in some ways but it's it's been necessary because you know whether it's the whether we see from the examples whether it's the mothers of peace or uh people demonstrating on on streets um and therefore the violent repression of the you know in that case the turkish state against it you know dragging mothers across the floor who are peacefully demonstrating who um you know when there's demonstrations uh tear-gassing people when people democratically uh run for whether it's me as mayors or mps imprisoning them as you know so-called terrorists even though they were democratically elected you know in many ways that kind of leaves you that kind of takes away the option of non-violence from you even though it's still tried and it's there is still that going on and the aim is always for peace and it always should be for peace because when there isn't pieces people in you know in places like the middle east people like the kurds and and um other oppressed peoples of the world wherever there may be ones who are affected the most so the aim is for peace but unfortunately sometimes in achieving that certain methods don't work for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to the institute of art and ideas at iai tv [Music] you

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: learning, education, debate, lecture, IAItv, institute of art and ideas, IAI, black lives matter, steven pinker, BLM, XR, extinction rebellion, Tariq Ali, Paul Mason, Peter Tatchell, Elif Sarican, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, yassmin abdel-magied ted talk, Elif Sarican, rojava, kurds, kurdistan, news, protest, Peter Tatchell, lgbt, human rights, Tariq Ali, tariq ali interview, uc, social justice, Aaron Bastani, Aaron Bastani, aaron bastani luxury communism, socialism, politics

Id: LOQUkC-5L1o

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2020