Simon Wigley introduces his

Simon Wigley introduces his talk ‘As a Marxist, frankly, I'm skeptical’: I would like to present a fundamental rethink of our position, based on a skeptical worldview. In particular, that rather than being isolated individuals navigating a social world, each of us is a social world. The explanation should be simple. I hope that you will give it a sympathetic first hearing – and then kick it till it breaks: it may be that what I think is extraordinary, is an ordinary misunderstanding. But if it stands – then we would need to view our current activity, of working for 'socialism', whatever that is, as fundamentally navigating capitalist space – suitable for the nineteenth century when we had to ride the coattails of the radical bourgeois, but not now. Instead we should be looking at our objective as being 'after capitalism', and looking at the actual day-to-day practice of our class, and work out how to support our class in its struggles to overthrow their own versions of capitalism rather than demanding that they join us in a 'back-to-the-future' crusade, fighting the class war of the last two centuries rather than this one and, if necessary, the next.