I note that if that baby royal they’ve just done in Blighty were to ascend to the throne, he’d be George VII. Seventh?! We’ve already had six and we’re gonna have another one. How long do we intend to let this silliness persist? Surely it’s time for us to invest in a Fisher-Price guillotine.
At the time of the French Revolution, the powerful were corrupt and wealthy, whilst the poor were becoming more and more disenfranchised, with no legitimate means for creating real change. Well, apparently that’s what’s happening now, according to Ol’ Piketty. Our system, capitalism, is designed to behave like this: It generates wealth for the wealthy and further impoverishes those with nothing. Asking it to behave differently is like asking a microwave to wash your car.
In pre-revolutionary France, if the Dogtanian cartoons are to be believed (and if we’re going to start questioning their veracity, my entire philosophy will unravel), the clergy, monarchy, and aristocracy had become too rich and unaccountable, and the French got so wound up that the axes came out.
There had been unpopular wars, bad harvests, and a financial crisis, yet the upper tiers of French society were scoffing croissants like there was no tomorrow. It turned out they were right: For most of them, there wasn’t—they all had their head lopped off in the Revolution.
After which there was a lot of faffing and enlightenment-inspired political thinking, until the post-revolutionary ideas that dominated were nationalism and democracy.
These ideas have evolved to become the veils behind which a comparable elite are able to enforce an exploitative system that benefits them to the detriment of everyone else and the planet.
Instead of clergy and aristocracy, we have corporations and the financial sector. Instead of bad harvests, we have the decline of the manufacturing industry, and instead of a financial crisis, we have—well, a financial crisis.
When the French folk chopped off the king’s head, it sent shockwaves around the world; it was an unprecedented event, a hybrid of the 9/11 attacks and the death of Diana.
If The Sun had been in existence then, there definitely would’ve been a commemorative pull-out and Elton John would’ve sung a sad reworking of “Candle in the Wind” at the Bastille.
Goodbye, Louis’s head
Even though I’m
So glad you’re dead
I hope Marie Antoinette is next,
For offering cake for bread …
You get the idea. Anyway, aside from a lovely, carnivalesque period where Paris became a sort of urban Glastonbury, with folk hanging out and sharing and some bloody helpful ideas about human rights, recognizable power structures were soon reasserted under transitory leaders like Maximilien de Robespierre, who sounds like an untrustworthy Gallic Transformer. Then there were a few committees before Napoleon took control of the situation and became emperor, which doesn’t sound sufficiently different from “king” to have warranted all the bother. Except he was really good at wars and did his own butchery. Plus he was well into his missus, wrote her filthy letters insisting she keep her privates unkempt and unwashed. So there you go.
That may not be the most academically satisfactory rendering of the events around the French Revolution, derived as it was from the adventures of Dogtanian (and the three Muskehounds), one episode of Blackadder the Third and several “hunches,” but whatever it was that went down in revolutionary France, it has led to what’s happening in France now, and France now is once more as in need of a Revolution as anywhere else.
In the 1970s, the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai was asked if he thought the French Revolution was a success. “It’s too early to tell,” he said. Very clever. Well, I don’t bloody think it is and neither do the French; they can’t go half an hour without a riot or getting swept up in nationalism or crazy upside-down Sieg-Heiling crazes.
Professor John Dunn thinks our yearning for Revolution is a secular version of a Messiah fetish. The same as Mary Midgley’s assertion that Dickie Dawkins’s “Selfish Gene” theory is a retelling of the Protestant Genesis myth, that the sins of the father will be visited on the progeny and that man is condemned to follow a predestined path outside the uteral comfort of Eden. Or Joseph Campbell’s observation that all creation myths have a “cast out of paradise” component that is resonant for human beings who are “cast out” of the lovely, cozy womb, where all our needs are automatically met, and into this mad, chilly world.
All anyone’s got is theories, usually distorted by what they’ve been through or what they want.
This book, for example, was written by someone from a suburban, broken home, raised in Thatcher’s Britain, where inclusive ideas and family values were dismantled. A culture in which fame and celebrity became deified and drug use among the young extremely prevalent. Where modern manifestations of tribal identity like trade unions or guilds became redundant, manufacturing industries disappeared, neoliberalism emerged, and the welfare state was all but abolished. You could probably predict the contents of this book by looking at my weekly shopping receipt from Tesco’s. Alright, Waitrose.
I’m dying to paint myself as a lowborn, Wat Tyler, Essex messiah; fortunately, I’m not quite that mad. I know that that heroic myth is part of my programming. That I’m quite a funny, normal bloke, that there’s a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us, that any centralized power structure with an egocentric figure at its helm will become corrupt. The only solution is to develop a template built on ecological responsibility and equality.
It could be that our longing for Revolution is like our longing for perfect love, the impulse we all have for union that was for so long met by religion. However we assign these yearnings, it is difficult to ignore the obvious need for change. Some of us will ascribe it to romantic love, some to consumerism, some to utopianism. It doesn’t really matter. What is important is that for the first time in history we have the means to implement a truly representative system, the means to globally communicate it, and the conditions that require it.
Whilst a mystical and faith-based component may be helpful in bringing about significant change in consciousness and the planet, we must remember the objective is simple: to make life on the planet, and for the planet, better.
To be against this Revolution, you have to believe the system we have now is the best possible system, and I know there can’t be too many people who believe that. There aren’t enough places at Eton.
The Revolution that most decent folk are into—including George Orwell, who joined in with it, and Noam Chomsky—is the Spanish Revolution of 1936. In this recent uprising, there is much that will be of use to us, and although it eventually ended up being crushed by fascists, let’s optimistically assume that there is no modern-day equivalent of the Nazis, who lent Franco’s triumphant army the military hardware that ensured his victory.
I was once sneeringly instructed by a privilege-glazed bellend to “read some Orwell,” because I said democracy in its current form was pointless. Well, I have, and it turns out that Orwell agrees with me. In his autobiographical book Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes his experiences in Spain in the midst of their Revolution:
This was in late December, 1936.… I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.
George’s writing holiday went way off track, right from the “off.” He’s been swept up in revolutionary fervor. I like that he says he joined up because it was “the only conceivable thing to do.” He can’t’ve imagined that when he was doing his packing. I bet he just took Typex and coloring pens, but within an hour he was tooled up and killing fascists. He should’ve written a complaint to his travel agent.
It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists
.…
Ah, the sense of carnival and community is intoxicating. Also, it’s clear that we’ve been fed a lot of old codswallop about the Anarchists. Far from being a bunch of glue-sniffing ne’er-do-wells, they’re salt-of-the-earth community organizers.
… almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen.
Well, I can’t say I approve of all this sacrilegious church-smashing, but I suppose the Spanish had endured considerable hardship at the hands of that institution—the Inquisition and whatnot—and were clearly keen to see the back of it. I don’t know why they had to demolish them, though; they could’ve made them into multi-faith meditation centers—like you get in airports.
Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.
This collectivization is the most exciting and replicable aspect of the Spanish Revolution, if you ask me and dear George (whose work I am currently desecrating like an anarchist chiseling away at la Sagrada Família). The revolutionaries of Barcelona had removed the invisible structures behind industry and placed control in the hands of the people doing the work. There’s no reason why, say, Pret A Manger couldn’t be owned and run by the people that work there. The people that do the deliveries could own and run that operation. There may be some fundamental change to the menu due to the shipping of ingredients—you might not have all-year-round strawberries for your yogurt and granola—but, fuck it, man, I’ll live with that for freedom. The idea that you can’t have services or choice without international corporations crouched in the shadowy abstract is bollocks, and as those eighties incarnations of anarchy, the Sex Pistols, said, never mind that.
You can still have Pret A Manger without Ronald McDonald, their silent partner, craftily collecting the profit.
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
Lest we forget, the return of dignity to ordinary working people is the driving force behind our demand for change. Who is offering this? Hillary Clinton? Ed Miliband? That poor doomed sod in France, Hollande? None of them are because none of them can. True freedom cannot be offered from above; it must be taken from below.
Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”; everyone called everyone else “Comrade” and “Thou.”
Fuck me, Matt Stoller, you old bastard—with his policy of abolishing titles, he is spoiling us. In egalitarian cultures, people naturally dispense with the social accoutrements of power, calling people “mister” or “doctor,” being punched with a gigglesome flush on hearing your teacher’s first name. These niceties have no place in the real world.
Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy.
Who won’t be glad to see the back of that? I never know how much to give; I’m famous, so I go high. Sometimes, though, people are offended—far better to acknowledge tipping as a patronizing and derisory form of payment, unnecessary in a society where people are already treated fairly.
There were no private motor cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black.
This is where it gets tough for our consumer generation. I know a lot of blokes who won’t fancy giving up their motor. Plus the color scheme seems needlessly upsetting. I’d suggest involving Banksy or Shepard Fairey when it comes to the design element. Plus, if you have self-governing, decentralized syndicates, then you can just join one that still endorses car ownership, if you’re not ready to let go yet. That’s the beauty of governing yourself: No one can tell you what your society should look like.
Me, I don’t have a car, so I’m mellow. Suffice to say, I won’t be joining a syndicate that collectivizes Dior boots.
Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.
Sounds alright for the young folk, as long as there’s somewhere quiet for the likes of me, teetotalers that like to meditate. Shame they demolished all the churches. Bloody anarchists. This depiction of Las Ramblas being communally owned and communally used, not a de facto billboard for big business or tourist tidbits, is a tear-jerker. When I was last there, I bought a goldfish in a tiny bowl with a lid on it, then smuggled it home in my jacket. In addition to some heroin up my bottom—all in all, a city break gone awry.
In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no “well-dressed” people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.
After my time in the Marines, which was incidentally about twenty hours, not, as I continually suggest, a three-year tour, I learned that much of my identity is wrapped up in my clobber and haircut. Orwell’s description, then, of an anarcho-syndicalist utopia in which everyone is dressed like the Tetley Tea-Bag Men is terrifying for me. How important are these trinkets and delightful accessories that I prize if their true price is freedom? Where did this affection for waxed jeans with unnecessary zips in them come from? “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me,” said Pink Floyd. Is that possible? Is it true? Do I want things and pursue things because of conditioning? A kind of psychological implant? Almost certainly. Can I be free of this programming? Of course I can. Anyway, I’m sure for those of us of such a persuasion, locally made, ethically sourced, sexy-as-hell attire can be provided if need be in a post-revolutionary world.
There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.…
It seems that even Orwell was put off by the outfits—he was very much a cords and tweed-jacket type fella—but he’s prepared to put aside sartorial preference for a society that’s closer to our essential nature. This somewhat scruffy Spanish idyll appears to be that, an expression of higher human values. Capitalism is not the manifestation of our nature. “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all,” said economist John Maynard Keynes. We are now witnessing its implosion. What we have to decide is what will follow it—something just, or something more draconian than we have ever dared to consider.
… so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies.
Even in a society built on cooperation and mutual aid, the gypsies opted out. You’ve got to hand it to ’em, they’re sticking to their creed.
Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.
This is what we’re after. This is worth giving up the rooting-tooting boots for: belief, togetherness, equality. This is why people get obsessed with festivals, or clubs, or drugs, or football, or other temporal approximations of togetherness; these distilled vials of the elixir are craved by our starved souls. I’m as materialistic as the next man, probably more, given that the next man is George Orwell, and I am prepared to relinquish my trinkets for a shot at living in that ramshackle paradise.
Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
Orwell wrote this in the mid-thirties. Consider how radically capitalism has advanced since then. In his great dystopian fiction 1984, Orwell described a totalitarian regime where humans were constantly observed, scrutinized, and manipula
ted, where freedom had been entirely eroded, omnipotent institutions dominated, and every home glowed with the mandatory TV screen streaming state-sponsored data. Well, he was spot on, aside from a bit of glitter and the fact that we voluntarily install our own screens.
Orwell saw this brief period in Spanish history as a potential template for an alternative future. Ordinary workers took over their businesses and factories and ran them democratically. Naturally, they were brutally massacred by a multitude of enemies—the fascists, communists, and liberal democracies all coiled about them in a terrified asphyxiating clench.
I’d never heard of this Revolution. The reason for this is, of course, that it’s so fucking inspiring. The Revolutions that we’re taught about are ones that wind neatly back to repression of one flavor or another and convey the bleak, despairing narrative that makes the forms of impoverishment we live with now, whether financial or spiritual, seem preferable. No one, absolutely no one, will tell you that an alternative is possible, and the ways and means are strewn all about us.
A lot of other political struggles and social uprisings labeled “Revolutions” are, in my mind, unworthy of the term, in that they were simply a hegemonic exchange. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, which led to Stalinism, or the American Revolution, which led to corporate oligarchy. The Revolution we advocate ought to have two irrefutable components: 1) nonviolence, and 2) the radical improvement of the quality of life for ordinary people.
I still get choked when I reflect on the American Revolution—the violence, the humiliation, the wasted tea.
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