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Revolutionary Zeal

Revolutionary Zeal

For a book written by a comedian most famous for being Katy Perry’s husband, Russell Brand’s treatise on Revolution has been surprisingly controversial.

A stand-up comedian, Big Brother presenter, author of ‘booky-wooks’ and Hollywood actor, he's recently been carving a niche as a social activist. He’s campaigned for the decriminalisation of drug use and for abstinence based recovery (even addressing a parliamentary select committee) and lent a hand to the residents of the New Era estate in East London, who were threatened with rent rises and evictions after the estate was sold to US investment firm Westbrooke Partners. The book sees Brand turn away from celebrity-land, and chart the intersection between his dissapointment with himself and disaffection with the political system.

Why so controversial? Brand said in a Newsnight interview that he has never voted and never will, but who cares what a comedian-actor-celebrity addict has to say about politics? Quite a lot of people, as it turns out, not least because he has a ‘bandwith’ that no conventional politician or commentator can match. What does he do with all this influence? The point is more what he does not do, refusing to deliver what he regards as the bromides of ‘the establishment’ – ‘just say no’ or exercise your vote. However popular he may be amongst the general public, the commentariat have been pretty universal in their dismissal.

Polly Toynbee, Nick Cohen and John Lydon are among those who have criticised him particularly trenchantly. It’s not hard to understand why. His complaints about ‘the capitalist system’ are too vague to worry the right. They poke fun, but sleep soundly in their beds knowing that Brand’s revolution will never come. Those who agree with much of his analysis – borrowed from Thomas Piketty, David Graeber and others – are frustrated by his loose spiritual idealism, which puts what they see as ‘real’ political change at risk. With a close general election four months away, and a fierce debate about the size and shape of the state emerging from the political fog, is this really the time to be discouraging people from voting? Labour’s problem has often been that their natural supporters are less likely to vote that their wealthier, better educated, older, middle class counterparts. People who might sympathise which much of Brand’s agenda also know change is more likely to come when someone else’s hand rest on the levers of power. 

Sensible people can see both sides. It wouldn’t have done the residents of the New Era estate much good to wait for a Labour win in the 2015 election, and under pressure from the campaigners and their growing number of supporters (including elected politicians), Westbrooke Partners re-sold the estate to a housing association at the end of 2014. Yet the machine of national party politics and electioneering too often fails to address voters' immediate and visceral concerns. That’s a deep and serious flaw, and one of the factors in the public's disillusionment with politics. So Brand is right to look to more meaningful and immediate forms of political action even if, in the end, he’s wrong to trade it off against mundane forms of citizenship.  Like lots of people he puts 2 and 2 together and makes 5 – national party politics looks incapable of delivering meaningful change for these people at this point, therefore politics is never capable of delivering change for anyone.

It’s odd, though, that the noise around this book has been about the most effective political method. This is only a small part of the book. Mostly, it’s a story of a man in the process of repenting from nihilistic hedonism. The gospel according to Brand is that he has achieved redemption from being a feckless, promiscuous, money- and fame-obsessed heroin addict. He’s changed, so we can all change. And so can the world. And that’s about it.

For Brand, the revolution is first spiritual, then political. He’s angry at Goldman Sachs and General Motors, but he’s angrier with Dickie Dawkins and his “atheistic tyranny”. A whole chapter is given over to the Lord’s Prayer, and an extended section to his experience of an Eritrean church in Kensall Green, where he accepts (under some pressure) Jesus Christ, but with some caveats. “Christ as the end of paganism, the beginning of individualism, of idolatry… Christ as the reminder that we must all constantly die and be born again… Christ as the symbol that we can achieve no more, until we transcend, until we ascend into the new conscious realms and manifest the divine…”

Chesterton once quipped that when man ceases to believe in God, he will not believe in nothing but he will believe in anything – but what does someone believe in when he ceases to believe in nothing? Brand believes in God – he tells us again and again – but his God is literally anything. He is technically, I suppose, a panentheist, and much enamoured of Transcendental Meditation, which appears so much it gets its own acronym (TM). There are moments which are, to put it gently, on the wrong side of the line between freethinking and barmy (his regurgitation of a debunked experiment ‘proving’ that TM could reduce violent crime rates). These threaten to tip what is a meaningful and sometimes really moving reflection about the public meaning of personal redemption into an exercise in celebrity omphaloskepsis. But then staring at your own navel has been an important part of meditative practices, including in the Christian tradition.

There’s now a small cottage industry devoted to sending up Brands writing style. It is, let's say, excessively loquacious. But the book is also funny, self-deprecating, honest, often lyrical – a relief from some of the bile that characterises more ‘grown-up’ political discourse. There are moments where he gets things badly wrong (omitting the Terror from his jaunty retelling of the French Revolution). There are others when it’s very hard not to be frustrated by Brand’s extraordinary capacity to drift interminably from his point. Like or loathe it, though, it’s a book suited to a distracted generation that believes that politics should not just be empowering, but also entertaining.

There is no shortage of Russell Brand ‘haters’, but I’m not one of them. His argument has many gaps and many flaws but there’s something about him that continues to intrigue and attract – a sense of justice, a desire to tell and hear the truth, and the insight to see that social change is more than a matter of pulling legislative levers - a changed society requires changed people. Yes, he might have a big flat, a big wallet and a big gob but he’s also got a big heart. Regardless of what he says about elections, he’s trying to give some voiceless people a voice.

I’ll vote for that.

Paul Bickley

Revolution is published by Century. A version of this review will appear in Third Way.

Image by Erik McGregor from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.

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