It was around this point in Edward’s recital that I realized the tale was allegorical, that he wasn’t inexplicably giving me a highly specific and probably redundant lesson on ancient Oriental carpentry but in fact describing how to materialize concepts from a higher realm.
First transcend the lower, basic requirements of the animal self, the hungers, desires—I suppose that’s why most religions have “fasting” as a ritual, to see what lies on the other side of hunger, on the other side of these basic drives. Then look, without prejudice, at the nature of the challenge—in his case trees, in our case the machinery of global capitalism—wait until the solution reveals itself, then remove what is surfeit. In his case twigs, bark, leaves; in ours anything that isn’t in the service of justly catering for our common requirements.
This story also reminds us of the need for this process to be peacefully undertaken.
Sometimes when we’re incensed by the rancid tide of injustice, the impulse is to attack. We must avoid this. We have learned that violence as a means is always unsuccessful.
* * *
* I am not suggesting that Apple literally pilfer and steal like a big, giant, glossy artful dodger, more that the corporate world in its entirety is a kind of thief of more wholesome values, such as sharing. Through the dominance of organizations like Apple, whose products I continually use, we are all robbed of something more valuable than the trinkets they provide. Furthermore their exploitation of tax loopholes and policies of maximizing tax avoidance opportunities, like most big firms, is a kind of social robbery.
8
I Am An Anarchist-a
GANDHI, AN EXTREMELY EFFICIENT REVOLUTIONARY, IS PERHAPS most admired for his excellent deployment of “nonviolent protest.” The ingenuity of nonviolence is not immediately obvious to us, the inheritors of a world built upon martial means, but the principle is almost like mathematics. Authorities are trained to deal with a particular kind of conflict, violent conflict, so by using violent means you are entering the territory that they are best qualified to control. Also, by becoming violent you are tuning in to the frequency that you are trying to overcome, the frequency of violation, violence FM.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Gandhi. If you want a nonviolent world, you cannot use violence to achieve it. He also said, “In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance. Gandhi dealt with the colonization of nations by nations; we deal now with the colonization of consciousness by corporations.
I spoke to David Graeber, the anthropologist, economist, writer, and Occupy Wall Street movement member. Typically I would write “Occupy Wall Street movement leader,” but they eschew such titles in the movement. David is an anarchist. I don’t know much about anarchism, I only know about anarchy from graffiti, the Sex Pistols, and as a kind of slur or reprimand from my mum: “Is that what you want? It’d be anarchy!”
Well, according to David Graeber, there’s more to anarchy than not tidying your bedroom, spitting, and having a Mohican. In fact, it isn’t defiantly disorderly at all; it is society that has no centralized power. David came round my house in East London during a torrential downpour to talk to me about Revolution.
It was properly raining. I stopped what I was doing to look out of the front door at the rain. One of those sudden outbursts of nature that serve as a deft reminder that even mighty structures like cities are temporary and nonsensical, it smashed its way down from the sky, all joyful and triumphant like “ye faithful.” David turned up whilst I was marveling at it and half planning an ark, with his jacket pulled up over his head like when you play Batman.
It was ridiculous—he was soaking. I had to get a towel and offer him clothes that he wouldn’t take. I knew immediately that I’d like him; he just had one of those faces. I could see what he’d been like as a boy, probably always fenced off in the electronic penitentiary of a too-fast mind.
His eyes are narrow, like a Japanese person or someone from the future in a film. He spoke, pertinently given the weather, like Rain Man, or like his voice was trying to become a synthesized burr, like Stephen Hawking’s robot voice.
There was a salad on the table, still packaged, from a Thai takeaway. “Can I have this?” said David, already unpacking it, like it was an energy coin in a computer game. Then he sat there eating, all wet and content, with a towel round his head like E.T. on his way back to his spaceship. “How’s this bloke gonna dream up a new economic system?” I wondered.
David is most well known for his idea of debt cancellation. Personal-debt cancelation used to be a common policy in ancient civilizations; every seven years all debt was canceled. The Bible refers to “debt jubilees,” where everyone’s debt would be reset to zero. I think it’s especially nice that it was called a “jubilee,” creating an even more euphoric sense of carnival.
In Islam too, usury, credit at extortionate rates—like Wonga or whatever offer—is forbidden. So this bizarre-sounding notion has strong historic precedent. It is a mark of how far into materialism we have descended that it seems unfeasible in our world.
David explained from beneath my towel that debt repayment has a powerful moral charge in our culture, that people feel ashamed about debt and guilty about nonpayment. Seventy-five percent of Americans are in debt, 40 percent owing more than fifty thousand dollars, whilst an estimated 9 million British people are in “serious debt.”
What David Graeber, the anarchist, is suggesting is that all personal debt, debt for normal people, is canceled.
Think about it.
That means you. All your debt canceled.
When David said it I felt excited, like it was naughty, like it shouldn’t be allowed. This is the feeling I still get when I start a car. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I think, plunging down on the accelerator. The reality is, I shouldn’t be: I’m a terrible driver. My conditioning kicked in when Dave Graeber (I say his name like “Craig David”) said that debt cancellation is a contemporary possibility. I nearly told him to shush and looked over my shoulder for a park keeper. Immediately, just by contemplating it, you feel like you’re bunking off school. “We can’t cancel debt—we’ll get the cane.”
I thought about the ramifications. Well, obviously, the majority of people would be thrilled: Tuesday night you go to bed with a credit-card bill, mortgage, and a bloody headache; Wednesday you wake up with a spring in your step and a pound note in your pocket. What a touch. Obviously this is not such good news for credit-card companies and banks: Overnight their entire operation has irrevocably altered.
Most of these companies are international too, so what would the impact be on global finances? I imagine a mainstream economist—and let me tell you off the bat, I’ve no fucking intention of asking one—would say this action would instigate financial meltdown.
What Graeber says in response to this is that $700 billion was written off and trillions were lent to banks as the result of the 2008 financial crash. That sounds like a lot, but I can’t get my head around economics. I’m not supposed to get my head around economics, none of us are; it’s designed to be obtuse.
Look at those fucking NASDAQ, FTSE, Dow Jones things: Sometimes I accidentally press a button on my phone and the screen is filled with the numerical babblings of these unknowable entities, and it’s more baffling and mysterious than the Amharic cries that filled the Kensal Green church. They speak in numerical tongues as they worship their invisible God.
That instinctive feeling I had when I was a kid—I bet you had it too—when the financial report came on at the end of the News was, “This is bollocks!” That wasn’t the result of innocence or ignorance; we were right. Since then there has been an attempt to inculcate and obfuscate and dress it up in conferences, rolling onscreen graphics, and supercilious posturing, but we were right, it
is bollocks.
How can we conceptualize a trillion dollars? Merrill Lynch, J. P. Morgan, and Lehman Brothers were all lent in excess of a trillion dollars to get them through that crisis; that doesn’t seem fair. Plus they all have names like Coronation Street baddies. “Merrill Lynch and the Lehman Brothers have burnt down the Rovers,” someone might say. “It was probably an insurance job.”
At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing; it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.
It has gone wrong and is tyrannizing us. We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine: If my vacuum cleaner went nuts and forced me to live in economic slavery, I wouldn’t roll my eyes say, “Oh well,” and humbly do its bidding. I’d turn it off and fuck it out the window.
When the reckless and greedy trading, lending, and gambling of the financial industry led to the economic breakdown that if not resolved would’ve provoked social upheaval, possibly Revolution, the governments of affected nations got together (in a smoky dim-lit room?) and decided to press reset on the economy. Aside from a few people carrying plants out of their offices in cardboard boxes, I don’t remember there being many consequences at all. Just some people with plants looking confused by a revolving door.
Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.
So we are not discussing whether or not debt cancellation is a possibility; we know it is, we’ve seen it, they’ve done it. All we are discussing is who it is possible for. Them or us.
I’ve just typed myself into a revolutionary fervor again. Every so often the fury at injustice rises up in me and makes me want to smash something or burn something, but nothing in my immediate environment belongs to me so I have to refrain.
Unless of course we consider that the concept of property is preposterous, like a Native American chief, Great Elk or one of them, who when us lot (By “us” I suppose I mean white Europeans. You might not be one; I hope you’re not, actually. Sorry for unconsciously addressing this book to imperialists) turned up in their country with contracts, were confounded.
“How can you ‘own’ a river? The river is our brother.”
“Yeah, alright, mate. Sign this, will ya? Here’re some blankets for yer trouble.”
We are so acclimatized to our metaphors that we no longer see them as imaginary or symbolic. We forget that most things that define us are conceptual. Most things that we consider real are the material manifestation of an idea. The laptop upon which I type, once an idea in some boffin’s noggin, the words that I type, a consensual code of Saxon and Latin, my merrily dancing fingers the result of an unrealized uterine form, tracking some invisible plan toward realization.
Four o’clock on Wednesday: just a concept, an agreement, not actual, not real like an apple or a heartbeat. Karate: just a system of breath and movement.
My support of West Ham United FC is a totemic symbol. Since I started supporting them, when I was born, a hereditary legacy, like my eyebrows or my addiction, they had different players, different owners, a different kit. Soon they will move to a different stadium; they play now in a different league, in a different way, under a different manager.
What, then, is the West Ham that I support? It is the West Ham that my dad supports, that everyone at my school supported, that everyone at Upton Park supports? Those men terrified me on my early visits—and still, if I’m honest, unnerve me a bit now, with their tribal roars and curses, with their tears and vows, with their beers and rows. The chanting, the defiance, each of them, each of us—“us,” there’s the word—knowing that the game as we know it is dying, that the fraction of the club that belongs to us is being ever eroded.
The concept of belonging—commodified like all else. Their belief versus our belief. The songs so rote: one evocative and plain, “West Ham Till I Die”; “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”; “West Ham’s Claret and Blue Army.” Anthems of place and unity.
Folk codes of pride and togetherness, pride in both senses, honor, and togetherness. Ring-fenced emotion permitted only at three o’clock for ninety minutes in the sanctuary of the stadium. Can we march that pride out of the gates and into the streets? Can we harness it? Direct it? Use it for something less stymied by white lines and whistles, that could pour from the terraces and into the oak-and-leather chambers, the steel-and-glass towers?
Money and the economy are just symbols, ideas, tools. If they don’t serve us, if they don’t serve the planet, then they have to change. They are not serving us or the planet, so why are they not changing? Where is the resistance coming from? It must be benefiting somebody. It is probably the occupants of the bejeweled bus; they seem to be behind all this mayhem.
Of course, if we suggest alternatives that inconvenience them, they’ll say it’s impossible, implausible, sixth-form, naïve, Nazi; they’ll say anything to prevent the realization that change is necessary and inevitable.
David said that, secretly, even those that benefit most from capitalism know its demise is imminent. What they are preparing for now is what follows it. Something fairer, or the militaristic maintenance of a comparable tyranny? I think given the evidence of history it’s obvious they’ll favor the latter.
Is there evidence that those in authority are preparing to confront mass uprising?
David as an anarchist is opposed to centralized power in any form. He believes that people should be entrusted and empowered, that given the opportunity, released from the chains of authority and the spell of a corrupting media, we will form fair and functioning systems; they may not be perfect, but, remember, we’re not competing with perfection, we’re competing with corruption, inequality, and destruction.
I asked him if we could formulate a centralized revolutionary movement to coordinate transition. He said this, the anarchist:
“Well, my own approach is to avoid constituting any sort of new authority, because in a revolutionary situation, there’s crisis and conflict and therefore always an excuse for the provisional authorities, however well meaning, to amass more and more power.”
Which is a fair point. That Arab Spring we were all so excited about on Twitter turned out to be fuck-all. As usual. I suppose we could try to ensure that a military junta isn’t placed in power at any point. Those guys with uniforms and medals and sunglasses are normally wrong’uns.
I asked him what he envisaged, then, whilst simultaneously stuffing my beret and mirrored shades down the side of the sofa.
“My dream is to create a thousand autonomous institutions that can gradually take over the business of organizing everyday life, pretty much ignoring the authorities, until gradually the whole apparatus of state comes to seem silly, unnecessary, a bunch of buffoons useful for entertainment perhaps, but no one we have to take seriously. Obviously that only works if they don’t have the means to shoot you. The tricky thing is that means that, much as you hate the cops, or the army, you’re only going to win if at some point those guys decide they’re just not going to follow orders to shoot you.”
I like the idea of creating autonomous organizations to perform necessary social functions that are not motivated by profit. This along with the principles of equality, nonviolence, and ecological responsibility are necessary pillars of Revolution.
I disagree with David’s antipathy towards the police and military. This could be for a couple of reasons. Maybe David, as an anarchist, is always in protests, like Occupy Wall Street or marches or whatever, and gets himself into confrontations with authority.
I’ve done a bit of that myself, not in his league, but I was always getting nicked when I was a junkie, so I’ve had my fair share of skirmishes with the law. However, I am fortunate in that I have a very positive feeling toward
s the police and army. The police that have arrested me have usually been all right, and they’ve always had a point. I happen to think all drugs should be legal, and when I was a drug user I paid no heed to prohibition, but I understand the position of the officers arresting me.
Mostly these arrests, futile though they were, were conducted in a relatively bonhomous and professional manner. Once a copper who pinched me in Soho, before searching my marijuana-laden bag, announced whilst rolling up the arms of his shirt with a magician’s flourish, “Nothing up this sleeve, nothing up this sleeve.”
I recall too that the chats in the back of the van weren’t too bad as they dispatched me to the nick. It’d be less antagonistic perhaps if the police didn’t wear police uniforms. It’s a crime when someone else does, impersonating a police officer; maybe the police oughtn’t impersonate police officers either.
The uniform: a dehumanizing device. When I’ve encountered the police in domesticity, stripped of the thin blue line—my mate Rene Zagger’s older brother was a copper, and I was struck by his normality. Once I house-sitted with a mate, a copper’s flat in south London, and he had hash in his front room. And these days when I chat to the Met I see that they’re not really any different from me. Normal people from around the estuary, supporting Spurs, or the Hammers, or Chelsea. An armed response vehicle pulled over in east London and the policeman driving it, younger than me, said he’d seen me on telly and that he agreed with me; politicians are “full of shit,” he said.
Cases where public disorder has been the offense have been less amicable. When arrested stealing porn in an all-night garage, or clambering nude across TV outside broadcast vehicles in the midst of a riot, or even when picked up retrospectively, on set, for affray and destruction of public property, there has been a more tangibly adversarial dynamic.
Revolution Page 9
