Russell Brand's
'Revolution' - Part 1, 'The Fun Bus'
On October 23, 2013, Russell Brand appeared to crash through
the filter system protecting the public from dissident opinion.
His 10-minute interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC's
Newsnight programme not only attracted millions of viewers - the YouTube
hit-counter stands at 10.6 million - it won considerable praise and support
from corporate journalists on Twitter. Brand was arguing for 'revolution' and yet
was flavour of the month, cool to like. Something didn't add up.
The hook for the interview was Brand's guest-editing of New
Statesman magazine, promoted by him in a video that featured editor Jason
Cowley giggling excitedly in the background among besuited corporate
journalists. Again, this seemed curious: why would a drab, 'left of centre' (i.e.,
corporate party political) magazine support someone calling for a 'Revolution
of consciousness'?
The answer is perhaps easier to fathom now than it was then,
for time has not been kind either to the Newsnight interview or the New
Statesman guest issue.
It is clear that an unprepared Brand was largely winging it
with Paxman. In response to the predictable question of what political
alternative he was proposing, Brand replied:
'Well, I've not invented it yet, Jeremy. I had to do a magazine last
week. I had a lot on my plate. But here's the thing it shouldn't do. Shouldn't
destroy the planet. Shouldn't create massive economic disparity.
Shouldn't ignore the needs of the people. The burden of
proof is on the people with the power, not people doing a magazine.'
In his new book, 'Revolution,' Brand recognises that the
first part of this response 'ain't gonna butter no spuds on Newsnight or Fox
News' (Brand, 'Revolution', Century, 2014, ebook, p.415) and he is clearly keen
to move on from 'the policy-bare days of the Paxman interview' (p.417). On the
other hand, the second part of Brand's answer helps explain the huge impact of
the interview – he was speaking out with a level of passionate sincerity and
conviction that are just not seen in today's manufactured, conformist,
marketing-led media. Brand looked real, human. He was telling the truth!
Similarly, the New Statesman guest edition was a curious
hodgepodge, with good articles by Brand, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky alongside
offerings from BBC sports presenter Gary Lineker, rock squib Noel Gallagher,
actors Alec Baldwin and Rupert Everett, multi-millionaire entrepreneur Martha
Lane-Fox, and even Russian media oligarch, Evgeny Lebedev. This was revolution
as some kind of unscripted celebrity panto mime.
Brand's Newsnight performance, then, was an inspiring cri de
coeur. But a 10-minute, impassioned, ill-formed demand for 'Change!' from a
lone comedian is not a problem for the media's gatekeepers. It makes for great
television, enhances the illusion that the media is open and inclusive, and can
be quickly forgotten – no harm done.
Killing Corporate Power
– Humanity's Stark Choice
Brand's new book, 'Revolution,' is different – the focus is
clear, specific and fiercely anti-corporate. As we will see in Part 2 of this
alert, the media reaction is also different.
Brand begins by describing the grotesque levels of modern
inequality:
'Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the
world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the
earth's population – that's three-and-a-half billion people.' (p.34)
And:
'The richest 1 per cent of British people have as much as
the poorest 55 per cent.' (p.34)
But even these facts do not begin to describe the full scale
of the current crisis:
'The same interests that benefit from this... need, in order
to maintain it, to deplete the earth's resources so rapidly, violently and
irresponsibly that our planet's ability to support human life is being
threatened.' (p.36)
For example:
'Global warming is totally real, it has been empirically
proven, and the only people who tell you it's not real are, yes, people who
make money from creating the conditions that cause it. (pp.539-540)
We are therefore at a crossroads:
'Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet
and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.'
'The reason the occupants of the [elite] fun bus are so
draconian in their defence of the economy is that they have decided to ditch
the planet.' (p.345)
And so 'we require radical action fast, and that radical
action will not come from the very interests that created and benefit from
things being the way they are. The one place we cannot look for change is to
the occupants of the bejewelled bus.' (p.42)
The problem, then, is that 'we live under a tyranny'.
(p.550) The US, in particular, 'acts like
an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied
to'. (p.493)
But this is more than just a crude, Big Brother totalitarian
state:
'A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority,
so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannised or anaesthetised into
compliance...' which means 'the colonisation of consciousness by corporations'.
(p.165)
Brand notes that 70 per cent of the UK press is controlled
by three companies, 90 per cent of the US press by six:
'The people that own the means for conveying information,
who decide what knowledge enters our minds, are on the fun bus.' (p.592)
He even manages a swipe at the 'quality' liberal press:
'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 the
Spectator, or wherever, are people with a vested interest in things staying the
same.' (p.514)
Thus, the 'political process' is a nonsense: 'voting is
pointless, democracy a façade' (p.45): 'a bloke with a nice smile and an angle
is swept into power after a more obviously despicable regime and then behaves
more or less exactly like his predecessors'. (p.431)
The highly debatable merit of voting aside, anyone with an
ounce of awareness will accept pretty much everything Brand has to say above.
Put simply, he's right – this is the current state of people, planet and
politics. A catastrophic environmental collapse is very rapidly approaching
with nothing substantive being done to make it better and everything being done
to make it worse.
Even if we disagree with everything else he has to say,
every sane person has an interest in supporting Brand's call to action to stop
this corporate genocide and biocide. A thought we might bear in mind when we
subsequently turn to the corporate media reaction.
'Wow, I'd Like To Be
Him'
Even more astutely – and this is where he leaves most
head-trapped leftists behind – Brand understands that progressive change is
stifled by the shiny, silvery lures of corporate consumerism that hook into our
desires and egos. He understands that focused awareness on the truth of our own
personal experience is a key aspect of liberation from these iChains:
'Get money. I got money, I got the stuff on the other side
of the glass and it didn't work.' (p.56)
And:
'I have seen what fame and fortune have to offer and I know
it's not the answer. That doesn't diminish these arguments, it enhances them.'
(p.202)
And:
'We have been told that freedom is the ability to pursue
petty, trivial desires when true freedom is freedom from these petty, trivial
desires.' (p.66)
In a wonderfully candid passage – unthinkable from most
leftists, who write as though they were brains in jars rather than
flesh-and-blood sexual beings – Brand describes seeing a paparazzi photo of
himself emerging from an exclusive London nightclub at 2 a.m with a beautiful
woman on each arm: 'I can still be
deceived into thinking, 'Wow, I'd like to be him,' then I remember
that I was him.' (p.314)
Brand tells his millions of admirers and wannabe,
girl-guzzling emulators:
'That night with those two immaculate girls... did not feel
like it looked.' (p.315)
So how did it feel?
'Kisses are exchanged and lips get derivatively bitten, and
I am unsmitten and unforgiven, and when they leave I sit broken and longing on
the chaise.' (p.316)
The point, again:
'This looks how it's supposed to look but it doesn't feel
how it's supposed to feel.' (p.186)
Exactly reversing the usual role of the 'celebrity' ('how I
loathe the word' (p.191)) - Brand sets a demolition charge under one of the
great delusions of our time: 'Fame after a while seems ordinary.' (p.189)
Everything, after a while, seems ordinary – external,
material pleasures do not deliver on their promises.
So why are we destroying humanity and the planet for a vampiric
corporate dream that enriches a tiny elite and brings alienation and
dissatisfaction to all? The answer? Thought control:
'We are living in a zoo, or more accurately a farm, our
collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a
power structure that needs us to remain atomised and disconnected.' (p.66)
And:
'Incrementally indoctrinated, we have forgotten how to
dream, we have forgotten who we are. We have abandoned our connection to wonder
and placed our destiny in unclean hands.' (p.600)
Again leaving most 'mainstream' and leftist thought far
behind, Brand urges us to liberate ourselves from the marketised dreams of
future happiness 'out there' – the fame, the indulgence, the wealth – to focus
on a bliss that is available here, now, inside ourselves. What is he talking
about? Is this just 'mumbo-jumbo', as critics claim? Far from it, this is a
truth that is subtle, elusive, but real:
'You never know when you will encounter magic. Some solitary moment in a
park can suddenly burst open with a spray of pre-school children in high-vis
vests, hand in hand; maybe the teacher will ask you for directions and the
children will look at you curious and open, and you'll see that they are
perfect.' (p.105)
Bliss is there in that tiny, fleeting instant when the mind,
for once – for a moment! – stops its ceaseless chatter to make space for
'another awareness. A distinct awareness. An awareness beyond, behind and
around these thoughts'. (p.82)
This is brave and truthful; in fact, it is the central
message of all the world's spiritual traditions freed from their political,
theistic and superstitious baggage.
Yes, the hard-headed Chomskys and Pilgers are of course
right, the world is shackled by economic and political chains. But these hook
into our most personal dreams and desires. Activism often does, and perhaps
more often should, arise from the ultimate inactivism of sitting silently,
doing nothing, thinking nothing, realising deeply that the bliss we seek 'out
there' is an imposed illusion that obstructs an authentic bliss only available,
in fact, 'in here'.
This is the crucial, perennially-ignored link between
spirituality and politics, between meditation and the ability to relinquish our
dependence on corporate trinkets and 'service', and it has been made by far too
few people in the history of Western thought.
If all of this wasn't enough to earn Brand support and
applause, he even challenges the taboo that associates seriousness with virtue:
'people mistake solemnity for seriousness, [assuming] that by being all stern
and joyless their ideas are somehow levitated'. (p.399)
And indeed leftist writers are almost universally angry,
solemn and stern – seriousness is worn like a badge of sincerity by people who
are supposed to abhor conformity and uniformity. Brand has the self-belief to
joke and jape with childish abandon when discussing even the most serious
subjects. Again, he is asserting the right to be whoever he chooses to be - an
authentic, juicy human being, rather than a hard-boiled 'intellectual'.
In the effort to escape from illusions, both political and
personal, Brand throws all kinds of ideas for action at his readers. He argues
for the rewriting of trade agreements to support the needs of people and planet
through localised farming. He wants to cancel personal debt, for communities to
use modern high tech communications to take control of politics. He wants to
'kill' particular corporations like General Motors, 'sell them off and use the
money to compensate victims and former workers, or we could collectivise it and
run it as a worker-based cooperative'. (p.409) He wants genuinely participatory
democracy along the lines of Porto Alegre in Brazil. Energy companies need to
be stopped from wrecking the climate through oil refining and fracking, and so
on.
All of this is courageous for another reason. Brand writes: 'I know too with each word I type that I am
building a bridge of words that leads me back to the poverty I've come from,
that by decrying this inequality, I will have to relinquish the benefits that
this system has given me. I'd be lying if I said that didn't frighten me.'
(p.62)
If by this he means that, in writing of the need for
revolution, he will lose the support of the corporate media that lifted him to
a place of prominence, he certainly has a point, as we will see.
Part 2 will follow shortly...
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