Revolution

by Russell Brand

  Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.

  This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.

  After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?

  What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.

  It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.

  “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”

  They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar. Maybe as they talked us through the suffering our indifference caused, we’d gag too.

  “I’ve got plenty of room in my flat,” I think as I pass Jason, the lad who sleeps under the bridge at the end of my street. “I could just let him live here with me.” Why don’t I? I did once, as a younger and more chaotic man, take that line of inquiry to its natural conclusion and moved James, a homeless Scottish bloke, into my flat.

  It was a fucking disaster, actually. He slept in my bed with me, I had a bath with him—it was a total nightmare. Most disturbing of all is the fact that he got tired of the arrangement before I did and fucked off. I had to book him a cab, which was bloody stupid because he was home as soon as he stepped out the flat; that’s the only benefit of being homeless. The point of the experiment was, obviously, to do something shocking on TV—I lived for that in those days—but also to humanize a homeless man, because it’s appalling that they’ve been dehumanized in the first place. This, though, is a necessary negotiation to enable the aberrance to continue. We all routinely do it; we make a learned moral evaluation. “This is fine,” we tell ourselves as we pass, ignoring the gentle tug of the angel within. “Don’t give them any money; they’ll only spend it on drugs.” Jesus, so what? I find it hard enough to not take smack sleeping in my cozy flat. Take that away and I’ll need at least a ten-pound bag of brown warmth to take the edge off.

  If, as the Washington, D.C., meditation experiment implies, we are all invisibly connected, then this suffering is dragging us all down. We don’t need even to look at academic studies; just feel what happens to you when you walk past. Some inner alarm goes off to remind you that there is a problem, and it’s your problem.

  “The problem is …” I tell myself as I squintily smile at Jason, key in hand. “… that he’s bloody disagreeable. He’s not like a jolly tramp in a Quentin Blake book. He’s a junkie and he’s stinky and he’s slippery.” I issue an inner evaluation that makes my inaction acceptable. It is not.

  We are nearing the apex. Global change requires social change, and social change requires personal change.

  “You’ve got all that money—give it to the homeless if you care so much.” It’s a fair point.

  Are we all doing all we can? Interestingly, those of us with less give more. People with an annual income below £5,000 give an average of 4.5 percent, but the proportion falls as income increases. People earning £40,000 or more donate just over 2 percent to charity.

  “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is a maxim that won’t leave after a century-long saccharine rinse, capitalist lies, and communist misadventure. Why is the idea that the pursuit of self-centered happiness will lead to contentment so adhesive? I wake up every day newly baptized into the cult of individualism. I wish I was more like my mum or my nan, who find joy in nourishing others; they’ve sussed it.

  I daily renew my pledge to adorn, forgetting again in the light of the morning what lessons I’d learned as I stretch out and yawn. The greed is reborn, the crucifix fallen, and again with a groan the greed rises and the heart is overthrown, the dissonant drone resumes: What can I do for me? My mind runs commercials for the tingling gut. What can I do for me? A jingling I can’t unhear, or a fractal screensaver burrowing down like a tick on my collarbone that I dug out with scissors in a shaving mirror.

  What would happen if I brought Jason home? If I brought him across the fifty yards that separate his squalor from my splendor? Would the inconvenience and disruption be compensated by some holy glow?

  I saw a woman on Stamford Bridge, embarrassed as the traffic stacked behind her broken-down car. She stood in a gesture of impotence at the rear passenger door, where her young child waited. “You all right, love?” I inquired, and she told me—in English more reliable than her car, but only just—that someone was coming. A passing cyclist heard the exchange and said, “Shall we push it to the side of the road?” I agreed, and he propped up his bike on the iron railings and we assumed the Sisyphean position at the rear, prematurely crouched. “Is the hand brake off?” says Tom, who’s trim and posh and is taking the lead in all this. We roll the car uphill—it’s on a humpback bridge—to the crest and then downhill from there. With the job done, Tom and I, unified by our momentary endeavor, shake hands. The woman seems pleased too as she waves from the driver’s seat.

  As he departed, Tom said he’d started a new business venture that day, and he’d been debating whether to stick to his initial plan to give a third of all profits away. “Sometimes there are things like this,” he said, “y’know: signs.” Off he cycled, and subsequent to this minor act of public spiritedness as I marched down Kings Road, I felt like Jesus.

  I know, it was nothing, but some gland or neurological zone saw fit to flood me with rewarding endorphins. I felt better. In that moment I was better. It was a connection between the three of us. My last consumer purchase, a pair of orange-rimmed Paul Smith sunglasses, didn’t give me as good a kick as that did. Maybe a life of devotion doesn’t need to be robes and chanting; maybe it’s just going through life with open eyes and an open mind, looking out for chances to help people and buzz on the altruistic zip it gives, like coins in Mario Land.

  29

  Granma, We Love You

  AS WE APPROACH THE BOOK’S CONCLUSION, THE ANSWER TO THE question “What would this Revolution look like?” begins to emerge.

  It is defined and achieved by a sustained, mass-supported attack on the hegemony of corporations and the regulations that allow them to dominate us. It is the radical decentralization of power, whether private or state. It is the return of power to us, the people, at the level of community. It is the assertion of spirituality, of whatever form, to the heart of our social structures.

  We do eat food, so we need a reassessment of global trade agreements to make them favorable to localized organic farming, not reckless profiteering.

  Economics is at the heart of our nation-state philosophy. The nation state may have served its purpose and have to be dissolved, but that’s not a big deal: Ask the Bavarians or Persians or Mesopotamians.

  A measure other than GNP must be used to judge a nation’s success, as in Bhutan, and we must revoke the corporate charters for corporations that have behaved criminally: e.g., Monsanto, General Motors, Philip Morris, Pfizer. The assets of “killed” corporations will be handed over to the people who work in them, to become worker-run co-operatives.

  State power to dissolve wherever possible to empowe
r autonomous democratic communities.

  Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work—in government, on Fox News or MSNBC or in op-eds in The Guardian or in The Spectator or wherever—are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.

  I’ll level with you: You know me, when I started this book I really thought I might be able to write my version of, I dunno, Mein Kampf (whatever happened to that guy?) or Das Kapital, that I’d contrive some brilliant manifesto where I would, on a wave of roaring adulation, be carried from celebrity to political office. Now I know that nobody should ever be in that position, that the structures that elevate, rarefy, or in any way concentrate power have to themselves be eradicated.

  There is no heroic revolutionary figure in whom we can invest hope, except for ourselves as individuals together.

  I really hate it when I think I’m on the precipice of saying something deep and empowering when it’s actually more or less a quote from Rocky IV (“If I can change and you can change, everybody can change”) or a lyric from an M People song (“search for the hero inside yourself”) but I’ve really got very little to add to these scattered and perennial pop cultural artifacts.

  There’s no dearth of alternatives; there just aren’t many people in power who want things to change. Buckminster Fuller is the fella to return to on the practical stuff; he is only interested in the efficacy of systems and the truth of our situation. Capitalism isn’t irreducible and absolute, but the depletion of earth’s resources due to the free market is. Do we ditch capitalism or the planet? We can’t have both. Obviously we know capitalism has to go—everyone does, especially the elites that benefit from it most. They know that the majority of people would benefit from radical change and the implementation of the type of systems we have been discussing. This means they do two things: They disparage our viable alternatives to prevent us pursuing them actively and collectively, and, in the event that their propaganda and distractions don’t work, they are prepared for confrontation. They are prepared for activism, protest, and moaning. They aren’t prepared for Revolution.

  The Cuban Revolution was a remarkable success in many respects: It was recent, it was initiated by a small number of people, and it scared the shit out of America.

  Che Guevara was unusually fond of making pronouncements seemingly designed to ensure his eventual CIA execution. Soon after the Revolution, he said, “Our revolution is endangering all American possessions in Latin America. We are telling these countries to make their own revolution.” Which is basically revolutionary for: “Come on, then, you mugs.”

  After numerous victories in the mountains and jungles, including one incredible strategic victory where Castro negotiated a cease-fire when his troops were surrounded, then snuck ’em out, the rebels made their way to the major cities of Cuba, forming alliances as they went with other militias and kicking ass.

  Batista, the corrupt U.S. puppet, bricked it and legged it at the first sign of agro, and Castro marched victoriously into Havana on January 8, 1959, just over two years after he’d arrived on a yacht called Granma with a bunch of shit sailors.

  During one notable speech given by Castro, a white dove landed on his shoulder, anointing him divinely with a globally recognized totem of unity between man and a higher ideal.

  The revolutionary movement did some pretty cool things, which you’ll never really hear about because most of them were a real kick in the balls to U.S. foreign policy (in fact, when you look at it, the U.S. military’s reputation for being invincible is a bit shaky: WWII, unpunctual; Vietnam, nil–nil draw; Gulf II, cock up; Cuba, decked in their own backyard). All private corporations were booted out of the country, and 75 percent of privately owned land was renationalized and given over to collectives—including, in a “practice what you preach” move of epic proportions, Castro handing his own family’s land over. The priorities of the new government were land reform—sharing land—and making sure everyone had food and literacy, making sure the population was educated.

  Now, I’m a big fan of Castro and Guevara and all their beret-wearing, gun-toting, cigar-chuffing pals. They were sexy, cool, tough, and they won. They fuckin’ won a Revolution against America, which is to say, the big companies that America runs rackets for.

  However, in the interests of balance, I am obliged to tell you they are not as pure and innocent as the dove that alighted on Fidel’s shoulder as he addressed the devoted Havana crowd. In way of mitigation I will say this: The Cuban people and their Revolution became a bit of a pawn in a game of international eyeballing between Russia and America and communism and capitalism; this skewed their ideals. It became necessary, under intense military and economic pressure, for Cuba to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, who had wandered way off track with their own Revolution, which started off as a lovely ritualistic murder of the royal family and empowerment of the serf class but went a bit mad and dictatorial.

  So the Cubans did shut down all the churches, which is a bit of a drag, because we all need somebody to lean on. Again, this lot were dealing with a version of organized religion that had become crazily exploitative and corrupt, so I suppose Fidel and the gang thought, “Knock it on the head; less said, soonest mended.” This attitude of “nipping problems in the bud” led to a bit too much of the ol’ execution of “traitors” and “counterrevolutionaries.” This is notoriously the big problem of ideologues, the forcible imposition of the ideal: “My idea is fantastic, but it’s complicated and I haven’t got time to explain it to everyone, but if you knew what I know, you’d do what I’m telling you. However, we are in a bit of a rush, so anyone who gets in the way of the idea might get a little bit murdered in cold blood.”

  This is what Dave Graeber is keen to avoid. “Can there be an intermittent regime that imposes the changes that give birth to utopia?” I ask him. “No,” he says. “Those operations always end up clinging to power and dispatching brutal justice.”

  Then they start taking shortcuts, like: “Probably all Jews/gays/gypsies/Muslims/women/fat people are as bad as each other; to save time, let’s do them as a job lot.”

  This is why Revolutions require a spiritual creed. It doesn’t matter who is doing violence or to what end. Violence is wrong. It’s not that violence by the people we disagree with is wrong but our violence in overthrowing them in order to assert our brilliant idea is “a means to an end.” All violence is wrong.

  This leads to some challenging and absolute ideas: Capital punishment is wrong, torture is wrong, armed struggle is wrong, revenge is wrong. The only way to grasp this idea is by transcending the individual or material expression of violence and regarding violence in and of itself as taboo. Nonviolent Palestinians and nonviolent Israelis have to nonviolently unite to oppose violence.

  So all my class-war rhetoric about lopping off the Queen’s bonce is counterproductive—counterrevolutionary, in fact. The rounding up and execution of executives at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs is counterrevolutionary.

  Political rhetoric cannot ever solve these conflicts; it doesn’t have the language. Religion does. When Jesus, or whoever, says, “The lion will lay down with the lamb,” what this symbol infers is a time where the shared act of “lying down” is given preeminence over the distinct, temporary forms of “lion” or “lamb.”

  When people get all worked up about which religion is superior, that is not religion; that is individualistic, materialistic, territorial ideology asserted through the language of religion. As Joseph Campbell says, “All religions are true, in that the metaphor is true,” and all religions have a bit in them where it says: “Don’t kill other people.”

  All that fire-and-brimstone, blood-and-thunder, jihadi, Crusades stuff is expedient materialism.

  The point of religion is to remind us that we are a temporary expression of a subtler and connected electromagnetic realm unknowable on our narrow bandwidth of consciousness. The defining principle is oneness, not division, not opposition. Regard geometry: circles, spheres, spi
rals. From the subatomic realm to Jupiter and beyond, not a single right angle or square to be found. We are fractally dissolving and reconfiguring into infinite oneness; harmonize it here, now, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

  If one autonomous collective wants to live as the most extreme and fundamentalist version of Muslims conceivable, cool, they can. As long as it doesn’t contravene the autonomy and self-governance of any other collective or damage the planet we share.

  If another autonomous collective wants to live as an orgiastic, homoerotic, polygamous cult, cool. As long as it doesn’t contravene the autonomy or self-governance of any other collective or the planet and the members all voted for it. It’s no one’s business but theirs.

  Same for the bankers’ collective. Or the Zapatista collective, or even the secular, mixed, ecologically responsible, electronically democratic collectives that I secretly hope will be most prominent.

  The Cuban Revolution did a lot right—education for everyone, land sharing, emancipation of women, and equal rights for black Cubans—but they went a bit wayward with the homophobia and authoritarianism. I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for them—don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take the stuff we like, leave the stuff we don’t. It’s our collective future we’re building and the sanctity of those yet born, as long as we return to Buckminster’s theorem “To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”