Orwell Would Have Backed Brand’s Call for Revolutionby Tim Holmes
First published: 07 November, 2013
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... revolutionRussell Brand appeared on Newsnight recently—you may have heard about it. Demanding revolution, denouncing voting and tearing into the British establishment, the comedian generated a surge of public support—and soon enough a backlash, as the media did their best to vilify him. Nick Cohen, as I’ve noted, calls Brand a Nazi; Tom Chivers a nutcase; Robin Lustig an idiot. The Irish Times’ Donald Clarke deems Brand “irritating”, “floundering” and “largely idiotic”; dismisses his “almost childlike ideas” as “waffle”; and complains that he “dismisse[s] democracy” as an “elitist fad.” But more serious critiques have also appeared, defending voting without illusions; expressing deep discomfort with Brand’s casual sexism; and exploring the broader issues this raises for progressives.
Here, I take issue with two pieces in particular:
the latest commentary by Media Lens; and comedian Robert Webb’s “
open letter” to Brand in the New Statesman. Both criticise Brand, but from radically different perspectives. In so doing, both invoke well-known left-wing figures, and misrepresent what those figures say.
Media Lens begin by exposing the campaign of ad hominem attacks against Brand—noting, for instance, the Independent’s backhanded compliments and irrelevant digs about “champagne socialism”—but soon take aim at the man himself. Their critique is pure gift-horse dentistry. They accuse Brand of “a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the corporate media”—falsely. That Brand fails to denounce the BBC they deem “crucial,” as if he is obliged to cover everything in one sitting. This takes purist demands to absurd extremes.
They end up clutching at straws: Brand’s a corporate media employee; Chomsky calls media attention a sign you’re “doing something wrong”; ergo Brand’s interview won’t spur revolution. But Chomsky has himself appeared on Newsnight – so is he “doing something wrong” too? Of course not: Media Lens have simply mangled his arguments. Nowhere does Chomsky deny that Newsnight features token radicals, or that doing so might catalyse radical change. Mistakenly applying a (deracinated) general model to a specific case, positing effects where the propaganda model posits none, Media Lens reach nonsensical conclusions.
Webb offers nonsense of a different variety. He upbraids Brand for “wilfully talking through your arse about something very important”; recommends he “read some fucking Orwell”; and claims Brand's call for revolution has inspired him to rejoin Labour—because in office, “on the whole, they helped.”
In criticising Brand's opposition to voting, Webb has a point: Brand has probably done real damage. But he doesn’t stop there. Brand is “actively telling a lot of people that engagement with our democracy is a bad idea”—note how “engagement” and “voting” become practical synonyms—for “election day is when we really are the masters.” David Cameron works for us, not vice versa (even if three out of every four of us didn’t vote for him, and many of the rest did so only grudgingly). To curb corporate power, parliaments need “more legitimacy. That’s more votes, not fewer.” Revolution, on the other hand, “ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder”: Brand is “an intelligent fellow citizen ready to toss away the hard-won liberties of his brothers and sisters because he’s bored.” Enter Saint George.
Alas, the real George Orwell lends scant support to this argument. Orwell himself “tossed away the hard-won liberties of his brothers and sisters” by grassing them up to British Intelligence on a hunch. And about Britain’s “democracy” he did not mince words: though he believed in a unifying national consciousness that connected classes, he also wrote:
George Orwell wrote:“Do I mean by all this that England is a genuine democracy? No, not even a reader of the Daily Telegraph could quite swallow that.”
“The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class.”
“It is all too obvious that our talk of ‘defending democracy’ is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education it deserves.”
“England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth.”
After the war, he added, English aristocrats hope to go “back to ‘democracy’, i.e. capitalism, back to dole queues and Rolls-Royce cars…” He saw Labour as weak and hamstrung:
George Orwell wrote:“Once in power, the same dilemma would always have faced [Labour]: carry out your promises, and risk revolt, or continue with the same policy as the Conservatives, and stop talking about Socialism. The Labour leaders never found a solution …”
And he was crystal clear what to do about it:
George Orwell wrote:“The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New blood, new men, new ideas—in the true sense of the word, a revolution.”
“It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class… we have got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole.”
“By revolution we become more ourselves, not less. There is no question of stopping short, striking a compromise, salvaging ‘democracy’, standing still. Nothing ever stands still.”
Orwell, in short, would have scoffed at Webb’s claim that “more votes” means more “legitimacy”. This is like claiming you can become manager of a record label by buying more CDs. Those concerned, as Webb professes to be, with making the public their own “masters” must seek not only to broaden democracy, but to deepen it—through electoral reform, rights of recall, referenda, direct decision-making powers—while addressing the myriad forces that obstruct it.
This means scrapping the Lords and the Monarchy; extricating big money from politics; overhauling the rich man’s racket known as the justice system; curbing time poverty, material inequality and class divides in education; fashioning a media system that represents the public rather than multi-millionaires; and so on. None of this can happen without massive pressure from below: without it, the establishment’s interlocking, mutually supportive institutions will block any changes we try to make. These institutions function as a kind of immune system: we see it at work when the Tories’ financial backers help block electoral reform; or when the press scuppers even rudimentary checks and balances on its power.
When Brand calls for revolution, Webb responds by rejoining Labour. But this begs the question—what stopped him until now? Indeed if Labour “helped overall,” why did he ever leave? The most obvious answer—Iraq—far outweighs any good Labour did in office, proving Webb wrong at a stroke. And there are other contenders: Afghanistan (which Blair persuaded Bush to “do” first—thanks again, Tony), growing inequality, persistent poverty, social immobility, financial meltdown, the war on asylum seekers, the betrayal of developing countries, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, the arms trade, torture, Heathrow expansion, Trident replacement, NHS privatisation, shredded civil liberties, new coal…
These outrages will end only when we are no longer prepared to tolerate them: when we are pissed off enough, organised enough, and create a social upheaval powerful enough to shake the British establishment to its foundations.
That, as Orwell knew, is what “revolution” means.http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... revolution 
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