We need a revolution

Jeremy Paxman, host of the popular British current affairs program Newsnight, couldn’t understand Russell Brand’s hatred of mainstream parliamentary politics. Brand, a comic who has become a voice for masses of disenchanted people, had just disclosed that he doesn’t bother voting. “If you can’t be arsed to vote, why should we be asked to listen to your political point of view?”, asked Paxman.

“It’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy”, responded Brand. “I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where you have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system.”

The 2013 interview has now been watched almost 11 million times on YouTube alone. Respectable media outlets across the globe, in response, have published an uninterrupted stream of scoffing at his “lack of education” and “unrefined manner”.

Considering he’s just a comedian with a YouTube channel (the Trews), it might seem strange that the establishment feels so compelled to try to demolish his political credentials. But Brand is striking a chord with millions of people who want a better society.

‘Even the calculator has gone berserk at this injustice’

Seven years on from the global financial crisis, the decline in living standards across much of the Western world continues: one in four people in Spain and Greece are unemployed, welfare is being dismantled across Europe, and almost 50 million US citizens are on food stamps (including full time workers).

Yet sales of expensive goods, such as Louis Vuitton and Moët, have doubled since 2008, according to Capital Finance International. The rich won’t invest in anything except their own luxury. Banking executives and CEOs have benefitted from a crisis of their own making. Bailouts and tax breaks to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars remain in abundant supply.

“It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie”, Brand wrote in an article for the Guardian last year. “There was no abracadabra for ordinary people, they just got abraca-fucked.”

Brand’s major political focus is the increasingly unequal and undemocratic nature of capitalism.

Oxfam has estimated that the 85 richest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion. It predicts that the top 1 percent will have more than the bottom 99 percent combined by 2016. “I just used the calculator on my phone to subtract 85 from 3.5 billion and the answer had a letter in it. Even the calculator has gone berserk at this injustice”, he wrote.

Capitalism is a global system, and its problems can be seen everywhere. Even in Australia – “the envy of the world” – the situation for many has deteriorated during an unprecedented economic boom. A report from the Australian Council of Social Service found that 2.5 million people live in poverty, including 600,000 children and more than half of those on welfare. Forbes puts the 10 richest Australians’ total wealth at $50bn.

This extreme unfairness reaches its zenith in the forgotten underbelly of capitalism: sweatshops, starvation and 36 million slaves. Yes – according to the Global Slavery Index 2014, published by the Walk Free Foundation, an Australia-based anti-slavery NGO, there are 36 million slaves in the world in the 21st century.

It is as 19th century German revolutionary Karl Marx described: capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. Despite incredible increases in labour productivity, it has achieved a more unequal and more violent society than any other in human history. Coming out of the Middle Ages, you’d have thought this would be an easy participation award: “Congratulations, you did not make society more unequal than feudalism.” Alas, the system has failed.

‘We live in an aquarium of hypocrisy’

Tax evasion is a topic that Brand talks about a lot because it sheds light on all the rubbish about “lifters and leaners”, about a scarcity of resources and about the rich and powerful “contributing to society”.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in a 2014 investigation known as the “Luxembourg Leaks”, revealed the vast extent of corporate tax evasion and fraud. The exposé revealed that hundreds of companies had moved financial assets and corporate operations to Luxembourg, where they were charged around one quarter of 1 percent tax. The country’s deal with online retail giant Amazon was so generous that European Commission investigators called it “illegal state aid”.

Luxembourg is just the tip of the iceberg. The Tax Justice Network, a group of unions, church and charity organisations, put the global value of financial assets stowed in offshore tax havens at US$21 trillion. To put this in perspective, Oxfam estimates that the annual cost of ending global poverty would be $US60 billion.

Yet we’re told that there’s only so much to go around.

Research by the Tax Justice Network and United Voice, an Australian union representing service and hospitality workers, last year found that 28 of Australia’s 200 largest companies pay no tax at all. The heads of these corporations want the government to crack down on “welfare cheats”. “We live”, as Brand says, “in an aquarium of hypocrisy”.

‘Wherever there is profit, there is also deficit’

This theft via loopholes and shuffling money across borders is nothing compared to the generalised theft that is at the heart of capitalist society.

The bosses, the ruling class, own the productive assets of society – the mines, the office towers, the factories, the telecommunications infrastructure, the farmland. Workers can survive only by selling our services to a boss. We are “free” in the limited sense that we are not directly owned like slaves. Nevertheless, we must sell ourselves to someone. Invariably the terms of the contract will be set by the buyer. At work we receive less in the form of wages than the value of the work we perform. This is what Marxists call “exploitation” – and the difference between the value a worker creates and what s/he is paid is the source of profit.

Brand says, “Wherever there is profit, there is also deficit.” And he is right. Every cent of corporate profit is taken from the labour of workers.

This is the basis of class conflict: to get profits up, wages must go down; to improve wages, profits must be reduced. Marxists are always for higher wages, because profit is just the part of the value the worker created that some boss now has control over.

More than that, bosses compete with one another for the largest share of profit. So workers are under constant pressure to work longer and harder for less pay; the drive for greater exploitation never stops. That’s the reason why we see a “bejewelled fun bus of privilege” as Brand calls it – those 85 people with the wealth of half the population, could drive away in a double decker.

‘Constricting conversation to a very narrow window’

For many people, the situation is obviously intolerable. Why then is it so hard to hear a voice like Brand’s?

Marx made the point that “the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class”. This makes sense: the bosses have a lot more money to get their opinions across. Free speech is in reality very expensive. Those who own the mines, the factories, the farmland, the satellites, the banks and the offices, also own the media, and they influence which ideas are taught in schools and universities.

They want “common sense” to be that things are the way they are because, well, it’s just how things should be.

Capitalism is not perfect, we are told, but every other way of organising society is worse. If feudalism was justified as being in accordance with “divine will”, then capitalism reflects “human nature”: a greedy, competitive war of all against all. The news is filled with examples highlighting the worst aspects of humanity. Those who fight for something better, such as trade unions, are demonised. So too are those who can be scapegoats – Muslims, refugees and welfare recipients in particular today are used to turn working people against each other while the exploiting class laughs all the way to the bank.

This general role of the media is shown by the parades of critics who have felt the need not so much to critique as to hang, draw and quarter Brand’s call for a revolution – for radical social change from below to address the gross inequality.

Permeating all the polemics is thinly veiled elitism. For example, John Crace from the Guardian called Brand “a bloke from Essex who happened to take a load of smack a while ago and has talked about little else since”. Craig Brown in the Daily Mail compared listening to Brand to hearing from “Tinky Winky … for his thoughts on global warming”.

Demolishing Brand’s high hopes for humanity is “the elite’s new blood sport”, to quote Neil Clark from Reuters, one of Brand’s very few defenders in the capitalist press. There are also suggestions that he’s a hypocrite for now having money or that he’s just doing it all to advance his career.

Brand takes on his critics with characteristic insight: “When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter. Now I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite. I’m beginning to think they just don’t want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.”

‘A bureaucratic means for furthering the advantages of economic elites’

Brand is routinely criticised for not voting. But he’s not against democracy. On the contrary, he insists: “We deserve more from our democratic system than the few derisory tit-bits tossed from the carousel of the mighty, when they hop a few inches left or right.”

The parliamentary parties in the UK, Australia and everywhere else are a pathetic restriction of choice. But we’re constantly told that if we want to make change, we’ve got to go through the “proper channels”. Wait a few more years and we can elect a saviour from on high.

But every election, no matter who we vote for, the political program always seems to be one of neoliberal economic orthodoxy – more market, more individuals thrown to the dogs, more favours for the rich and the continual growth in inequality. After we’ve ticked the box, the rest is up to the professionals in parliament.

But even if politicians don’t themselves come from a wealthy background, they’ve got the billionaires breathing down their necks. Who calls the shots in the thousand days between one election and the next? And what about the rest of the state outside of the parliamentary wing, which is completely unelected: the police, the courts, the army, the bureaucracy?

Brand calls parliamentary elections a “a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to choose what colour tie the liar who leads us wears”. Marx said something similar: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

From the Marxist point of view, genuine democracy under capitalism is impossible, and parliament is just the talk-shop of the capitalist state: decisions and new laws might be discussed, you might even have a couple of trouble makers in there, but those with real economic power ultimately decide which laws, and which governments, are acceptable.

‘People can run their own workplaces. People can run their own communities’

So what is the democratic alternative to the ballot box? It’s the living, breathing struggle that goes on every day around the world, sometimes open, sometimes hidden, against the exploitation that is at the heart of capitalism.

“I think direct action on the streets is probably the best way to get things changed in every area”, Brand told Channel 4’s Jon Snow in February.

“Do you want a revolution?”, Snow asked.

“You know I do.”

Brand is vague on what a new society would look like. But partly that’s because he insists that a new world will be created not by the pronouncements of celebrities such as himself. On the contrary, it will be created through the mass of people acting for themselves.

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, one of history’s most important rebels, called revolution “the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny”. When you watch a strike, where workers form picket lines to stop business as usual in order to improve their lives, you see the very early embryo of what a new world could look like: a world where those who make the wealth decide how it’s distributed, in a collective, cooperative, democratic way.

And when you see revolts, uprisings and revolutions, you get an even better idea of the incompatibility of capitalism with human need, and the power we have to move beyond it. It can happen out of the blue, and plant the idea of fighting back in the fertile soil of workers’ minds elsewhere.

It’s not only that we need a revolution; it’s also that ordinary people will always find the tenacity and initiative to fight back. Revolution, Brand says, is “totally going to happen”. There’s no doubt about that. Revolution and rebellion are features of the capitalist world. The real question then, is not whether a revolution could happen – it’s about which side you are on when it does.