Portrait of a Working Class Revolutionary

 

Revolution

by Russell Brand

Ballantine Books (2014)

Book Review

Russell Brand introduces his new book Revolution as an answer to a question Jeremy Paxman asked him in the interview that went viral on YouTube. Brand maintained that voting was a waste of time – that there needed to be a revolution. Paxman’s response was “And how, may I ask, is this revolution going to come about?”

This book never really answers Paxman’s question. In fact, it’s really more a memoir than a political treatise. Like his two earlier books (his 2009 My Book Wook and 2010 Booky Wook 2 ), Revolution mainly concerns Brand’s struggle with addiction. In this third book, however, he delineates a clear link between this struggle and his radicalization.

That being said, his new book is a funny, courageous, brutally honest account of the conscious personal changes that have kept him sober for the last eleven years.

Brand’s Personal Demons

Brand describes quite poignantly the demons that plague many working class people – the constant inner voices telling us we are worthless losers and will never amount to anything. This loser mentality, which starts in the working class home, is brutally reinforced in the public school system, through bullying and emotional abuse by teachers. It’s further compounded by TV advertising hammering on our worst insecurities and promising relief through the continuous purchase of products.

Brand experienced it as a constant anxiety in the pit of his stomach, which he could only relieve with drugs and alcohol, compulsive sex and eventually the adulation of an adoring audience. To overcome these addictions, he had to systematically reprogram himself to see how TV advertising was messing with his mind. A life centered around fulfilling our selfish needs is totally empty and sterile. None of us are the center of the universe. Both spiritually and scientifically (according to quantum physics), each of us in only a small part of a much larger whole.

For Brand a new-found belief in God and a recognition of the pivotal role a deeply corrupt capitalist system plays in all human misery were pivotal in this transformation.

Although I take strong exception to the way 12 step programs ram God down the throats of recovering addicts, I totally agree with Brand’s premise that activists must move out of their selfish individualism to have any hope of making successful revolution. True revolution must be aimed at the collective good. If people do it for their own selfish needs, they only end up replacing the old elite with a new one, as happened in the Soviet Union.

Stateless Participatory Democracy

What Brand favors is a political-economic system run on the lines of anarchist participatory democracy. He would have ordinary people running their own neighborhoods, communities, regions and workplaces through popular assemblies and consensus decision making. He gives the example of the popular assemblies that play a direct role in local governance in Porto Alegre Brazil.

The historical revolution he most admires is the Spanish Civil War, though this would seem to contradict his stance on strict nonviolence. Brand is inspired by the way workers pushed aside the capitalist stooges who were running the cities, factories and businesses and started running everything themselves. Unfortunately he seems to overlook the historical reality that these capitalists didn’t step aside voluntarily – that this was accomplished by force.

A Great Read

Despite being a little light on the pragmatics of mass organizing, I found Revolution a great read. Brand is incredibly witty, as well as a classic magpie who remembers everything he reads. His book attempt attempts to synthesize the views of a wide range of political thinkers and activists, though he clearly favors architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, anarchist and Occupy activist David Graeber and political commentator and anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky.

Also posted at Veterans Today

Ecosystems, Cybernetics and the Club of Rome

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace*

Adam Curtis

BBC (2011)

Part 2

Film Review

Part 2 in this series discusses how utopian ideas about computers led the scientific community to promote a totally erroneous model of natural ecosystems.

The term ecosystem was first defined by ecologist Arthur Tansley. He mistakenly believed that ecosystems work just like computers – that all of nature is linked through organized networks that self-regulate by means of feedback loops. As ecology became the predominant scientific discipline of the early seventies, he and his colleagues went so far as to portray these interconnected networks as electrical circuits. Meanwhile Silicon Valley computer engineers, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s radical individualism (earlier post), as well as this erroneous view of ecosystems, made a deliberate decision in 1968 to focus on personal computer technology rather than mainframe computers.

The work of Tansley and his colleagues would be totally discredited by new data that would emerge demonstrating were chaotic and unpredictable and tended towards wild fluctuations that never returned to an equilibrium point. Like many scientists, the early ecologists had oversimplified and distorted the data they collected to fit their model of nature as a self regulating system.

The Rise of Cybernetics

Meanwhile the scientific community’s fascination with computers would also give rise to the field of cybernetics, which looks at society as if human beings were a vast interconnected system of machines. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was a strong proponent of this systems-oriented view of both nature and society. A strong egalitarian, Bucky envisioned a society (which he referred to as Spaceship Earth) that did away with authoritarian hierarchies and allowed people to live together as equal members of a closed system that would self-regulate – as a spacecraft does.

In the early seventies, disillusioned by the failure of the anti-Vietnam War, a half million young Americans left the cities to start experimental non-hierarchical communes in the countryside. It would be the largest mass migration in US history. Their goal was to create egalitarian communities in which people sacrificed their individuality for the benefit of the system.

Most of these communes would fail. Curtis blames their failure, without any real evidence, on a rigid absence of structure that allowed stronger and more dominant personalities to dominate and bully weaker ones. He likens the failure of the commune movement to the failed Color Revolutions* of the 1990s – which left Eastern European countries even more corrupt and unequal.

He seems to be making the case that egalitarian societies are impossible, which I strongly question. In my view the Color Revolutions failed for the same reason as the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions: because they were instigated, organized and funded by the CIA, State Department (and George Soros in the case of Eastern Europe) for the purpose of installing new governments favorable to US corporate interests.**

Enter the Club of Rome***

Two additional outcomes of the new field of ecology would be the formation, in 1968, of the elite roundtable group the Club of Rome and the first international environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

In 1972 the Club of Rome commissioned a study based on the theory that all human and natural activity was merely a vast interconnected system of feedback loops. The MIT computer scientists they hired developed a complex computer model based on the best population, resource, industrial production, agricultural production and pollution data. Their modeling, which the Club of Rome published in their 1973 bestseller The End of Growth, predicted major economic and environmental collapse in the first decade of the 21st century. The book maintained that the only way to prevent environmental and economic collapse was for western societies to give up their fixation with continuous economic growth.

The European left became extremely concerned that growth restriction would lock the ruling elite (who ran the Club of Rome) into their existing positions of privilege and power. They launched major protests against The End of Growth. They argued the proper role of the environmental movement should be to end the greed of political elites. That being said, the computer modeling on which the book is based predicted the 2008 economic collapse.

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* Title of 1967 monograph distributed free by California cybernetics enthusiast Richard Brautigan. Available for $400 from Abe Books

**Serbia Otpor (Resistance) Revolution (2000), Georgia Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine Orange Revolution (2004) and Kirghizistan Cotton Revolution (2005) – see The CIA Role in the Arab Spring

***The early Club of Rome was financed by corporate oligarch David Rockefeller, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (see  and the Ford Foundation. The two latter entities are well known conduits for CIA funding (see CIA-funded Foundations)