Cardiff Transformed takes place in the capital this weekend. Billed as a day of anti-capitalist debate, it is the first of the World Transformed festivals which emerged under Corbynism to come to Wales.
Tickets for the event range from £10 – £1 and it will take place in Shift, Cardiff city centre, on Saturday 2nd April.
We asked one of the organisers of the event, Steve Davies, what the festival was about, the role of the events post-Corbyn and why the leader of possibly Wales’ most pro-business council had been invited to an anti-capitalist festival.
Cover image: The World Transformed festival, courtesy of TWT.
Question 1-What made you set up Cardiff Transformed?
We felt that there is a need in Cardiff for a platform to bring the Left together – inside and outside the Labour party – for political education and debate at a time when society faces a many-sided series of crises.”
It’s been a grim few years. First there was the re-election of the Conservatives with their determination to look after the top 1% at the expense of everybody else. We’ve had the economic impact of Brexit, which the Tories have failed to plan for, then the disaster of COVID and what that’s done to lives, health, jobs and living standards and now the war in Ukraine. And all of that against the background of deepening climate catastrophe.
But it’s not all been doom and gloom. The positives have included the community organising around COVID and the continuing support for the NHS – despite the funding crisis caused by Conservative cutbacks; the support for BLM and the campaign to Kill the Bill; the outrage over violence against women (including the police response to that); the growing support for Palestinian rights – particularly among young people, shown in the huge demonstration in May 2021; and the growth in action by workers through their unions fighting for jobs, decent pay, good conditions and against insecurity and fire and rehire.
We wanted to create a place in Cardiff where activists could learn from defeats as well as victories, celebrate successes, meet and collectively educate ourselves so that we can first understand and, then change, what’s going on in Britain in 2022.
2-What do you hope to get out of the festival and what are you looking forward to the most?
First of all we hope that it will be a big success on 2 April. Tickets are selling well. We think it will be exciting, inspiring, educational and fun.
We have a fantastic line up of speakers and five different panels that cover: Where we live (about housing, gentrification and communities in the city); How we live (about policing and racism); Wales in the World (internationalism, refugees, migration); Climate Catastrophe and Wales (how climate change impacts Wales and what we can do about it); Ways of Seeing (culture and political change). And we finish the day with a closing rally on the theme of Building a Movement.
We also have exhibitions of the lodge banners of the South Wales miners and political posters, not to mention fantastic food provided by Women Connect First’s Wales World Café.
We want Cardiff Transformed to be part of a revival of the Left, a rejuvenation, re-energising and pulling together the various strands of left thinking in Cardiff and South Wales. We want it to be a celebration of possibility.
We hope to be able to create a lasting network and links that will lead to people working together in the future on radical change in Cardiff and Wales in the interests of ordinary people.And we’ll be back with future events as well
All of the sessions look fantastic. With our very limited resources of volunteers and generous donations from local trade unions, we’ve done our best to provide a range of panels covering key political issues of the day. Inevitably we’ve been unable to cover everything we’d like to have done.
The two sessions I’m most looking forward to are the one on climate and the closing rally. Climate is the overarching issue that dominates everything – after all there will be no socialism or anything else on a dead planet. The key thing about this is for us to discuss where the responsibility for climate catastrophe lies and what we can concretely do about it. People often feel helpless in facing such a huge challenge and, individually that might be true, but collectively we can effect real change.
And I’m looking forward to the rally about Building A Movement, because we want people to leave Cardiff Transformed with the idea that change is in their hands – if we create the movement to do it. Our aim is to put into practice Raymond Williams’ observation that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’.
3- We recently published an article exposing chronic low pay among Cardiff’s domestic violence workforce, who are commissioned by Cardiff Council. Many would argue that Cardiff Council is the most pro-business and pro-property developer authority in Wales. Can its leader Huw Thomas really discuss anti Capitalism?
Huw Thomas can, of course, speak for himself and he will do at Cardiff Transformed on 2 April. But he hasn’t been invited to speak on anti-capitalism. He’s been invited to speak at Cardiff Transformed because he is the most important municipal politician in Cardiff and, by extension, in Wales.
We welcome his participation in our panel ‘Where We Live’ because it provides an opportunity for people to hear his vision about the sort of Cardiff he’d like to see and allows others to question him and the other panellists and debate that issue. Taking part in our panel is a form of accountability which we strongly welcome. Debate is a key part of building a movement and this panel with Huw Thomas’s involvement is a vital element of that.
4- Finally, what is the role of the Transformed festivals in the wake of the defeat of Corbynism?
One of the factors that exacerbated the crisis faced by Corbynism after the 2019 election was the lack of political education in the movement, or maybe more accurately the uneven level of political education across the movement. It explains the illusions that some had in Starmer for example. But we think that need for political education applies pretty generally, not just within the Labour Left.
Political education should allow us to collectively understand where we are, what the opportunities and challenges are for radical social change and how we can help to make the apparently impossible, inevitable. Political education should act like a compass to help us navigate through troubled times, but it should also inoculate us against episodic defeats and allow us to view the long game.
We see Cardiff Transformed as a contribution to overcoming the demoralisation, fragmentation and, to a certain extent, demobilisation of some of the Left in the wake of the 2019 election. We want to reach new audiences, go beyond the comfort zone of Left politics, engage in debating the big issues of the day as a precursor to action on these questions and build power in the community and the workplace.
For more information on the Cardiff Transformed lineup and tickets, please see the event page.
