Revolution (37 page)

Noam Chomsky is too fastidious, diligent, and brilliant a man to cry “Revolution” at this time in his life of peerless truth-telling. But this final paragraph, to me, suggests but one course of action:

“As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human history. There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying the prospects for decent existence—and not in the distant future. For this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.”

Thanks, Noam, I’ll take it from here. So we’re fucked unless we organize and disobey. They’ve got this sewn up. They own both the teams that are competing, the stadium they play in, the grass they play on, and we’re the ball they’re kicking around. They have removed all possibility for reform or redirection within the system; the change must come from us. Our only hope of survival is to overthrow their structures and take our power back.

O
F THE SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTIONS WE’VE THUS FAR DISCUSSED
, the one we ought most emulate is the Spanish Revolution. One thing we don’t want to do is replace one ruling class with another; we want power to be shared, not concentrated, and the role of the diminished state to be administrative and responsive. The means by which we achieve this, too, is important. Perhaps there is a corollary between the violence that brings about Revolution and the corruption that tends to follow.

The Indian Revolution was a roaring success but took ages. I always thought that the British colonized India and thought of it as being tied up with our empire, which, in spite of everything I’ve written, I still am programmed to be a bit proud of. However, it was a blag. India was controlled by the East India Company.

Queen Victoria an’ all that mob were just the Ronald McDonalds of the day, weirdly dressed clowns to look at while the real caper took place out of view. Or maybe she was a brand ambassador, like Scarlett Johansson knocking out SodaStreams on the West Bank to make the persecution of Palestinians seem sexy and fizzy.

I think with brands and their branding, that if you want to understand the truth of what they are, you have to first look at what they’re telling you, then track back from that point as far as you can and you’ll be closer to reality. So with a monarch like Queen Victoria, representing the brand of Britain and its economic interests, what is the message they’re giving us? Firstly, respectability: This woman is super-stiff, she never smiles, she’s serious and well behaved.
Secondly, authority: Listen to their jingle, “God Save Our Queen”—she’s tied up with God; that means divinely sanctioned—the Americans must’ve nicked that idea when they took the lingo. Everything about the empire screams respectability, legitimacy, authority, and permanence. Using my theory, we must move as far away from that as possible and we’ll be closer to the reality that they are masking, like a tramp smothered in deodorant.

So, then, the British Empire was not respectable—we know that now; they were vicious thugs using violence to get their way, reneging on deals and nicking the resources of whole nations. Are they legit? Of course not. The whole Christian mythology they loosely appropriated, whilst still clinging on to bizarre pagan symbols like lions and unicorns and pyramids, is all about empathy and sharing—what a swizz. Is there any real authority? No, only that which is achieved through coercion and violence, and as for permanence, where the fuck is it now?

The same is true for Coke or Apple or any of them. If they sell you community, they are in fact individualistic; if they sell you youth, they’re steeped in decaying tradition and antiquated ideas like materialism. How can Coke, a brown drink with too much sugar in it, represent coolness or youth or America or sex? How can Apple, a bunch of needlessly elaborate, too frequently updated, deliberately expiring, digital pools for cyber-narcissism, do anything but lock us into binary solipsism? How does it create community?

Any corporation selling us products on the basis of anything other than utility should be revoked and shut down. Any corporation that at this time of fast-diminishing resources designs products that have in-built doomsday devices, planned obsolescence, should be shut down. All this glamour and clamor and blagging and skanking has to end.

“This drink. This drink will fuck you from your gums to your guts, but cold enough, the sugar and fizz will provide a blip, just long enough, to stop you opening a vein. Coke. Or Pepsi—doesn’t matter.”

“This phone will connect you to people everywhere, except for where you are, and sever you from God forever. Apple.”

You’ve seen their logo—it’s an apple with a bite taken out of it. That bite is the symbol of the moment mankind broke their pact with God, transgressed their own innocent nature, and chewed into consuming and consumerism. We have externalized all wonder, materialized our inherent magic.

There is an old river where I write; it’s grimy and dirty and ancient. From a distance it’s all very chocolate box: swans and cygnets, willows weeping and long grasses. When you stand on the bank, though, it’s brown and full of pungent gunk and natural funk and it’s cold, British cold.

As I plunge in, my skin tightens and I stare; I reach for strangled breath. Forgotten capacities stir and a noise I’ve never heard emerges—a roar, an animal roar, unrefined and naked. Unexplored depths and vibrations, neglected and unstirred. We are nature; we are nature as we munch gum and check the phone; we are nature as we queasily regret our imperfection, turning the glossy page, turning our glossy stomachs; we are nature as we hear them witter inanely on the radio, desecrating the silence with the violence of their idiocy and dumb verdicts, chattering and grooming, picking through the ticks in their hair, marveling at new minutia.

These boys that throw off Birmingham for Baghdad: What are they looking for there? What’s in that crimson desert that they can’t find in the bullring? Untangled from Spaghetti Junction and aspiring to spaghetti westerns, these loaded kids of Charlton Heston declaring their jihad.

To end this hapless meander through a mapless expanse, a hopeful and myopic grope, a listless disconnected kiss smothered, like Magritte’s shrouded lovers, whose hand can guide us through this abyss, what cartographers of consciousness can we look to now?

I’d take Gandhi over ISIS when it comes to making maps for new worlds. Gandhi is a bit of a placeholder hero for me, a kind of unthinking grab for an easily identifiable brand of hero. Einstein said of him: “Future generations will scarce believe one such as he ever
existed.” My own love of him is founded upon early exposure to the film; in which scene after scene he challenges authority and stands up to corruption and bullying. Gandhi knew too that defiance had to come from somewhere other than rage. That you can’t build love from hate, that the world we live in is the manifestation of a sublime source. The most practical application of what a lot of people would regard as wishy-washy claptrap was his popularization of nonviolent protest.

Gandhi organized the Indian people around this principle: total civil disobedience and nonviolence. Gandhi deplored violence but hated cowardice more, so he walked face-first into a bloody good hiding from British colonial forces during his decades-long leadership of the campaign for self-rule.

When we think about former colonial nations campaigning for self-rule, we can see the legitimacy of their demands. They only want to determine their own lives without constantly being exploited and controlled by an invading economic power—perfectly reasonable, we conclude.

Today, in our apparently free Western secular democracies, we live under a tyranny that is only superficially distinct. The only connection that, say, David Cameron can claim is that he was born on the same land mass as the majority of the people his party governs. But as we now know from the contributions of Chomsky, Graeber, Norberg-Hodge, and Goldsmith, and our intuitive understanding of life, our governments are not accountable to us but to transnational corporations. Is that really any different from the Indian people being exploited by the East India Company, give or take a few Xboxes?

There’s a lovely bit of Pathé newsreel footage of Gandhi in Lancashire and east London when he came to Britain in the forties to mug off Churchill and everyone with his pithy lyrics and demands for self-rule.

“What do you think of Western civilization, Mr. Gandhi?”

“I think it’d be a good idea,” he said, the rascal.

Like any dignitary, they’ve dragged him round the joint, meeting
folk and seeing sights. I like to think Gandhi went: “Yeah, I like the Tower of London and that; can I meet some real people now?”

Who knows? Regardless, when you see Gandhi with the female mill workers of Lancashire, whose livelihoods his ideas threatened—he didn’t want pointless importation of textiles from Britain that had been sent from India, manufactured, then sent back, for profit; he wanted Indian folk to make their own stuff—you can see that the workers really dig him. Even though he’s a mad-looking little Indian bloke all dressed up in a nappy, only in England to fuck off the empire and superficially negatively impact them, the women know a kindred spirit when they see one. They know that Gandhi is fighting for the rights of the oppressed against the powerful, a struggle they know well. The insight of these women, the inherent connection shared between the world’s exploited people in the struggle for autonomy, matters now more than ever.

We can no longer dopily believe that we have more in common with billionaire warlords and their slick white political acolytes than the populations of the nations that they’re up for bombing this week.

“Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over.” Morrissey’s mid-eighties wail, the administratively unlikely rallying cry for the world’s dispossessed to organize, the way they have organized, to ensure their hymn sheet is the one we end up singing from.

According to Chomsky, the hijacked ghostwriter of the last chapter, Revolutions that concentrate power in the hands of a new elite are pointless; Revolutions that spread power across society succeed.

So let’s review the situation: We know the world needs to change—we’re on the brink of destruction. We know the majority of people—I would argue everyone—would benefit from Revolution, and we know what has to change: corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility, and economic inequality. We know how to change them: Remove all systems that contravene Buckminster Fuller’s theorem—trade agreements, monopolies, unrepresentative
democratic institutions. We know to a degree what will replace them: localized self-governing communities and businesses.

Do we know 100 percent what this will look like? No. We don’t know if there will still be some inequality, some hierarchies, some conflict. We do know that there are alternatives and we can no longer remain pallid and listless in the cellar, like Fritzl’s kids, unaware that there’s a big wide world out there where getting raped by your dad isn’t mandatory.

The democratic models that some of our contributors have mentioned are contingent on participation; this is where we really address the accusation that the withdrawal of participation in fraudulent democracy is apathetic. It’s not “Don’t vote, watch porn,” it’s “Don’t vote, build your own system.”

Have you ever participated in any horizontal, nonhierarchal organizations as they make plans? I have; it’s really challenging. Everyone has something to say and everyone has their own version of what would be best. After about ten minutes of trying to fairly and democratically organize a charity event in a committee of twelve where everyone has an equal voice, I want to shout, “Fuck you lot! I know what I’m doing; we’re doing it my way.” The ego marches to the forefront and tries to seize control. And it’s not just my ego—they all have egos too, and everybody’s ego wants to be heard. It’s like a dog park where we, the human owners, stand back and our canine representatives sniff arse and yap.

Quickly you realize that your job is to negotiate with your own ego and let collective power that is not allied to any individual govern. Hand over your power; trust the common consciousness, guided by consensual, trusted principles to be the authority. This is not a lethargic and laissez-faire process; it is dynamic, time-consuming, and requires patience. We will probably always require some form of representative democracy; it just has to be the two things that conjunction implies: representative—the people’s will is represented; and democratic—entirely answerable to the electorate.

When you look at the House of Commons, or Congress, the reason you feel bored and disengaged is because you know it is
a masquerade. The exceptions—the Tony Benns and Caroline Lucases—are well-intentioned dinghies bobbing along in an ocean of treachery.

That is why I do not vote; that is why I will never vote. Let’s instead participate in a system that is truly representative. In the next chapter we are going to look at some stuff that, if we don’t really concentrate and determinedly remain upbeat, could get all boring, and we hate that. The fact is, though, if we’re to shut up Paxman and the naysayers (good name for a band), we have to show our working out. Like in a boring maths GCSE, which I knew was pointless even as I was failing it.

H
ERE ARE THE PRINCIPLES OF A SUCCESSFUL, WORLDWIDE, LEADERLESS
, anarchist collective with millions of members, that helps people to deal with substance misuse issues and is defined by anonymity so, as you will see when you read it, I am forbidden to declare whether I belong to or not. They are known as the Twelve Traditions. I believe that this social code has much in it that we can replicate and benefit from.

This first edict establishes an important spiritual principle: Our power is in unity; we must always prioritize our collective well-being above individual advantage. If you look at the way the world is currently governed, it runs almost diametrically averse to this mandate. Individual success and happiness is prioritized through the prevailing consumer mentality and the dominant, elitist capitalist system.