Revolution (35 page)

As he departed, Tom said he’d started a new business venture that day, and he’d been debating whether to stick to his initial plan to give a third of all profits away. “Sometimes there are things like this,” he said, “y’know: signs.” Off he cycled, and subsequent to
this minor act of public spiritedness as I marched down Kings Road, I felt like Jesus.

I know, it was nothing, but some gland or neurological zone saw fit to flood me with rewarding endorphins. I felt better. In that moment I was better. It was a connection between the three of us. My last consumer purchase, a pair of orange-rimmed Paul Smith sunglasses, didn’t give me as good a kick as that did. Maybe a life of devotion doesn’t need to be robes and chanting; maybe it’s just going through life with open eyes and an open mind, looking out for chances to help people and buzz on the altruistic zip it gives, like coins in Mario Land.

A
S WE APPROACH THE BOOK’S CONCLUSION, THE ANSWER TO THE
question “What would this Revolution look like?” begins to emerge.

It is defined and achieved by a sustained, mass-supported attack on the hegemony of corporations and the regulations that allow them to dominate us. It is the radical decentralization of power, whether private or state. It is the return of power to us, the people, at the level of community. It is the assertion of spirituality, of whatever form, to the heart of our social structures.

We do eat food, so we need a reassessment of global trade agreements to make them favorable to localized organic farming, not reckless profiteering.

Economics is at the heart of our nation-state philosophy. The nation state may have served its purpose and have to be dissolved, but that’s not a big deal: Ask the Bavarians or Persians or Mesopotamians.

A measure other than GNP must be used to judge a nation’s success, as in Bhutan, and we must revoke the corporate charters for corporations that have behaved criminally: e.g., Monsanto, General Motors, Philip Morris, Pfizer. The assets of “killed” corporations will be handed over to the people who work in them, to become worker-run co-operatives.

State power to dissolve wherever possible to empower autonomous democratic communities.

Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work—in government, on
Fox News
or MSNBC or in op-eds in
The Guardian
or in
The Spectator
or wherever—are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.

I’ll level with you: You know me, when I started this book I really thought I might be able to write my version of, I dunno,
Mein Kampf
(whatever happened to that guy?) or
Das Kapital
, that I’d contrive some brilliant manifesto where I would, on a wave of roaring adulation, be carried from celebrity to political office. Now I know that nobody should ever be in that position, that the structures that elevate, rarefy, or in any way concentrate power have to themselves be eradicated.

There is no heroic revolutionary figure in whom we can invest hope, except for ourselves as individuals together.

I really hate it when I think I’m on the precipice of saying something deep and empowering when it’s actually more or less a quote from
Rocky IV
(“If I can change and you can change, everybody can change”) or a lyric from an M People song (“search for the hero inside yourself”) but I’ve really got very little to add to these scattered and perennial pop cultural artifacts.

There’s no dearth of alternatives; there just aren’t many people in power who want things to change. Buckminster Fuller is the fella to return to on the practical stuff; he is only interested in the efficacy of systems and the truth of our situation. Capitalism isn’t irreducible and absolute, but the depletion of earth’s resources due to the free market is. Do we ditch capitalism or the planet? We can’t have both. Obviously we know capitalism has to go—everyone does, especially the elites that benefit from it most. They know that the majority of people would benefit from radical change and the implementation of the type of systems we have been discussing. This means they do two things: They disparage our viable alternatives to prevent us pursuing them actively and collectively, and, in the event that their propaganda and distractions don’t work, they are prepared for confrontation. They are prepared for activism, protest, and moaning. They aren’t prepared for Revolution.

The Cuban Revolution was a remarkable success in many respects:
It was recent, it was initiated by a small number of people, and it scared the shit out of America.

Che Guevara was unusually fond of making pronouncements seemingly designed to ensure his eventual CIA execution. Soon after the Revolution, he said, “Our revolution is endangering all American possessions in Latin America. We are telling these countries to make their own revolution.” Which is basically revolutionary for: “Come on, then, you mugs.”

After numerous victories in the mountains and jungles, including one incredible strategic victory where Castro negotiated a cease-fire when his troops were surrounded, then snuck ’em out, the rebels made their way to the major cities of Cuba, forming alliances as they went with other militias and kicking ass.

Batista, the corrupt U.S. puppet, bricked it and legged it at the first sign of agro, and Castro marched victoriously into Havana on January 8, 1959, just over two years after he’d arrived on a yacht called
Granma
with a bunch of shit sailors.

During one notable speech given by Castro, a white dove landed on his shoulder, anointing him divinely with a globally recognized totem of unity between man and a higher ideal.

The revolutionary movement did some pretty cool things, which you’ll never really hear about because most of them were a real kick in the balls to U.S. foreign policy (in fact, when you look at it, the U.S. military’s reputation for being invincible is a bit shaky: WWII, unpunctual; Vietnam, nil–nil draw; Gulf II, cock up; Cuba, decked in their own backyard). All private corporations were booted out of the country, and 75 percent of privately owned land was renationalized and given over to collectives—including, in a “practice what you preach” move of epic proportions, Castro handing his own family’s land over. The priorities of the new government were land reform—sharing land—and making sure everyone had food and literacy, making sure the population was educated.

Now, I’m a big fan of Castro and Guevara and all their beret-wearing, gun-toting, cigar-chuffing pals. They were sexy, cool, tough, and they won. They fuckin’ won a Revolution against America, which is to say, the big companies that America runs rackets for.

However, in the interests of balance, I am obliged to tell you they are not as pure and innocent as the dove that alighted on Fidel’s shoulder as he addressed the devoted Havana crowd. In way of mitigation I will say this: The Cuban people and their Revolution became a bit of a pawn in a game of international eyeballing between Russia and America and communism and capitalism; this skewed their ideals. It became necessary, under intense military and economic pressure, for Cuba to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, who had wandered way off track with their own Revolution, which started off as a lovely ritualistic murder of the royal family and empowerment of the serf class but went a bit mad and dictatorial.

So the Cubans did shut down all the churches, which is a bit of a drag, because we all need somebody to lean on. Again, this lot were dealing with a version of organized religion that had become crazily exploitative and corrupt, so I suppose Fidel and the gang thought, “Knock it on the head; less said, soonest mended.” This attitude of “nipping problems in the bud” led to a bit too much of the ol’ execution of “traitors” and “counterrevolutionaries.” This is notoriously the big problem of ideologues, the forcible imposition of the ideal: “My idea is fantastic, but it’s complicated and I haven’t got time to explain it to everyone, but if you knew what I know, you’d do what I’m telling you. However, we are in a bit of a rush, so anyone who gets in the way of the idea might get a little bit murdered in cold blood.”

This is what Dave Graeber is keen to avoid. “Can there be an intermittent regime that imposes the changes that give birth to utopia?” I ask him. “No,” he says. “Those operations always end up clinging to power and dispatching brutal justice.”

Then they start taking shortcuts, like: “Probably all Jews/gays/gypsies/Muslims/women/fat people are as bad as each other; to save time, let’s do them as a job lot.”

This is why Revolutions require a spiritual creed. It doesn’t matter who is doing violence or to what end. Violence is wrong. It’s not that violence by the people we disagree with is wrong but our violence in overthrowing them in order to assert our brilliant idea is “a means to an end.” All violence is wrong.

This leads to some challenging and absolute ideas: Capital punishment is wrong, torture is wrong, armed struggle is wrong, revenge is wrong. The only way to grasp this idea is by transcending the individual or material expression of violence and regarding violence in and of itself as taboo. Nonviolent Palestinians and nonviolent Israelis have to nonviolently unite to oppose violence.

So all my class-war rhetoric about lopping off the Queen’s bonce is counterproductive—counterrevolutionary, in fact. The rounding up and execution of executives at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs is counterrevolutionary.

Political rhetoric cannot ever solve these conflicts; it doesn’t have the language. Religion does. When Jesus, or whoever, says, “The lion will lay down with the lamb,” what this symbol infers is a time where the shared act of “lying down” is given preeminence over the distinct, temporary forms of “lion” or “lamb.”

When people get all worked up about which religion is superior, that is not religion; that is individualistic, materialistic, territorial ideology asserted through the language of religion. As Joseph Campbell says, “All religions are true, in that the metaphor is true,” and all religions have a bit in them where it says: “Don’t kill other people.”

All that fire-and-brimstone, blood-and-thunder, jihadi, Crusades stuff is expedient materialism.

The point of religion is to remind us that we are a temporary expression of a subtler and connected electromagnetic realm unknowable on our narrow bandwidth of consciousness. The defining principle is oneness, not division, not opposition. Regard geometry: circles, spheres, spirals. From the subatomic realm to Jupiter and beyond, not a single right angle or square to be found. We are fractally dissolving and reconfiguring into infinite oneness; harmonize it here, now, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

If one autonomous collective wants to live as the most extreme and fundamentalist version of Muslims conceivable, cool, they can. As long as it doesn’t contravene the autonomy and self-governance of any other collective or damage the planet we share.

If another autonomous collective wants to live as an orgiastic,
homoerotic, polygamous cult, cool. As long as it doesn’t contravene the autonomy or self-governance of any other collective or the planet and the members all voted for it. It’s no one’s business but theirs.

Same for the bankers’ collective. Or the Zapatista collective, or even the secular, mixed, ecologically responsible, electronically democratic collectives that I secretly hope will be most prominent.

The Cuban Revolution did a lot right—education for everyone, land sharing, emancipation of women, and equal rights for black Cubans—but they went a bit wayward with the homophobia and authoritarianism. I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for them—don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take the stuff we like, leave the stuff we don’t. It’s our collective future we’re building and the sanctity of those yet born, as long as we return to Buckminster’s theorem “To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Remember too: We are not trying to supplant a perfect system, we are not competing with justice, we are intervening in a gallingly unequal and corrupt system on the brink of Armageddon.

As Chomsky’s essay on enforced corporatization makes clear, the head of the serpent that must be severed is the United States as defined by the Monroe Doctrine and “Manifest Destiny.” You hear this phrase a lot, but unless you’re an American schoolchild or a potential immigrant undergoing rigorous exams, you’re unlikely to know what it means.

One of the myths that America built itself on—and perhaps any nation builds itself on—is the idea that it has sublime, even divine reason to exist. Otherwise, it looks like it’s just a hashed-together construct that serves the interest of elites. No one wants to belong to a nation that overtly and clinically states: “This land mass/concept having a pinnacle that is controlled by an elite is a convenient way of harvesting resources both material and human, so shut the fuck up and salute.” It’s not a very inspiring message. Better to tell people that God likes your land mass and mountain ranges and flag and the leaders are just interpreting his wishes.

In the opening scenes of
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
, Graham Chapman’s King Arthur addresses some serfs he encounters as his subordinates. The serf played by Michael Palin asserts that he doesn’t know that he’s a Briton, that no one has explained the concept of nation to him or his position in a hierarchy, and he believes himself to be a member of an anarcho-syndicalist democracy, much like the ones I’m advocating. The scene is well funny because it comedically demonstrates the absurdity of nation and feudalism, ideas that are so familiar to us that we don’t question their validity.

The only thing that makes Britain Britain is our consent; the only thing that makes money money is our consent.

My mate Gee told me—and I choose to believe him; I happen to be in a very research-dense part of the book and can’t be fucked to check this particular fact, especially as it works as a metaphor even if it ain’t true—that the Dutch used to dominate the global economy in colonial times, in part because of the value of tulips and they had the tulip market by the balls. Then one day, I like to think apropos of nothing, everyone went, “Fuck tulips, they’re bullshit,” and the whole caper fell apart.