31
Be the Change
OF 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 Englan
d 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.
32
Help Me, Help You
HERE 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.
1. Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon our unity.
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.
These shady, secret trade deals that Chomsky told us about are like white phosphorous-tipped arrows in the heart of this principle: “Fuck the world, fuck community, show me the money.”
So when we’re holding a group meeting on how our community should be managed, no individual would have the right to do anything that fucks on a micro level with the group or on a macro level with the planet.
On a lighter note, I was once in the back of a limo with Tom Cruise—oh, yeah, I’ve lived, baby—and he was talking to me about acting and he told me how he approached the character of Jerry Maguire, who said the famous “show me the money” line. His kids were opposite us, and we were trapped in a luxurious carriage of beige leather. He said the comedy of Jerry came from his frustrated enthusiasm, a man who believed powerfully in what he was doing but was constantly thwarted. “Help me, help you,” said Tom all passionately, repeating another one of Jerry’s famous lines. In this moment I thought, “Wow, I’m in a car with Tom Cruise and he’s doing bits from his films—how cool.” I looked round the car to see if I could get a reciprocal bit of eye contact from someone—y’know, like, “Hey, guys! This is mad, he’s doing that thing!”—but everyone else in the car was either Tom Cruise or Tom Cruise’s kids, so they weren’t as impressed by it; in fact they didn’t notice it. So I changed my “wow” face to a normal nodding, smiling face and thought, “I’ll just have to put this in a book one day if I’m going to get any juice out of it. I hope when I do, it doesn’t seem like an extraneous name drop.”
2. For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
I love this idea: No individual has authority; the group has authority; the group conscience is expressed through voting. If I turn up and say, “I’d like a big statue of me erected in the town square, and as leader of the group, I’m going ahead with it,” everyone else can say, “Well, that’s a nice idea, Russell. You’ve been a good leader, arguing our case at the regional meetings and nationwide meetings. Let’s see if a statue is a winner: All those in favor, press the green button; all those against, press red.” If for some crazy reason there are more red votes than greens, I don’t get my fuckin’ statue, and that’s that. This principle reminds Rumsfeld or Ed Balls or whichever risible dope in a suit is trying to wangle a conservatory or new pair of shoes out of their role in public office that we, not they, are in charge, and you only get to act on the will of the people, so if the people don’t want a war in Iraq, no war in Iraq. The bosses, the people, through the group conscience, have spoken.
3. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.
This requires a bit of translation. What it means is, it don’t matter what gender, sexual persuasion, color, religion, or class you are; if you want to join the group, you can. I suppose on a global level there will be groups that want to define themselves through specificity and exclusion; the English Defence League or th
e Nation of Islam might want their own set-up. I suppose we’d have to tolerate that. I mean, we can’t phone up the Nation and say, Bill O’Reilly wants to join up; you’ve got to let him. That might be antagonistic.
4. Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or our organization as a whole.
This tradition deftly deals with the above problem: Have a racially, religiously, or sexually defined and exclusive group if you want, but you can’t mess with our necessary overall objective of ecological responsibility and economic equality.
5. Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
Our primary purpose is the preservation of our environment and the creation of a harmonious and inclusive democracy. We can likely only achieve this through small, self-determined communities that are run voluntarily and democratically.
6. A group ought never endorse, finance, or lend our name to any related facility or outside enterprise, lest problems of money, property, and prestige divert us from our primary purpose.
This prevents people trying to profit from communities designed with spirituality in mind. We’re all flawed and greedy and egotistical, so we have regulations in place that acknowledge that and guide us back to the better part of our individual and communal nature: our altruism, our empathy, our creativity.
7. Every group ought to be fully self-supporting, declining outside contributions.
This is designed to prevent top-down authority asserting itself. The group is independent and democratically run. This tradition—even the word “tradition,” is nicer and less incendiary than the word “rule”—prevents swaggering capitalists and glamorous nitwits acquiring authority through financial means.
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