Geldof hits the political nail on the head

Has Bob Geldof joined Russell Brand in seeing the political light? For more than 30 years, Geldof has thrown himself into numerous humanitarian projects, starting with his famous Band Aid single in 1984 and the subsequent Live Aid concert to draw attention to famine in Africa. Poverty, hunger and inequality haven’t gone away despite the best efforts of Geldof and countless others.

Given an honorary knighthood in 1986, Irish-born rock star Geldof has been feted and courted by leading politicians and the CEOs of the major corporations. He achieved the status of a one-man NGO, gaining entry into major summits. Geldof is a member of numerous charitable commissions and a very rich man from his days with the Boomtown Rats.

Often dismissive of those who criticised his work on the inside track for lending the global establishment credibility, Geldof now seems to acknowledge that the political system itself is holding back solutions to pressing problems. In doing so, he has joined comedian Russell Brand’s recent call for a political revolution.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Geldof agrees with Brand’s point of view and warns that the current system of democracy "may not be viable for much longer". He praised Brand for his "articulacy and expressing the anger of the moment". Brand caused a storm during an interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight. His call for a revolution has had nearly 10 million views on YouTube. Leading up to his interview, in an essay in the New Statesman, Brand called for the “overthrow of the current political system”.

In his interview, Geldof denounced the banks as a form of “outright international global gangsterism”, giving themselves money through fraud. He said:

"That's what it was. Mispricing of products, fraud. Mis-selling of products, fraud. Fixing the interbank lending rate. Fraud. It was fraud on an unprecedented scale! They sucked billions out of the world economy, destroying individuals, companies and countries.

"Russell [Brand] is completely right. That model cannot sustain us as we saw, it bankrupted Greece, almost Italy, almost France and almost Ireland. It just can't work. When you have these supposed masters of the universe averaging more than 248 times the average worker's pay, you have a serious problem of inequality. Inequality stops a society functioning and so it has to stop.

"I do think the version of democracy that we have been living with just may not be viable for very much longer. We will have something where we have proper freedom and elected representation. "We all co-operate in the knowing lie, which is that everybody promises more and that the economy will inevitably grow. what does that mean? It means more, more of what? That's not viable in an unsustainable and finite world.

"Nor can you in a four-year electoral cycle put into place programmes that would help to ameliorate the effects of that. If the economy is affected in that way by definition politics are so that the politics that we've grown up with in a different economy cannot work in a new one, there has to be a newer type of politics. You will see a change in the type of politics. It'll still be our government, it needs to be otherwise you'll have problems and it still needs to be a more coherent economy."

Geldof and Brand express what millions more sense, not just in Britain but around the world, but are denied the chance to articulate. Our limited capitalist democracy cannot deliver on its commitments to its citizens while it openly favours business and financial interests.

Geldof may not have gone quite as far as Brand, but he knows the old game is up and his forthright remarks about the failure of the present system are important. Developing new forms of real democracy based on a charter of social, human and political rights is the priority for 2014. So support the Agreement of the People and other projects aiming to break out of our current political cul-de-sac.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

For the times they are a-changin'

We all know that wide swathes of the global media are dominated by celebrity nonsense which breeds a deep cynicism towards the entertainment industry. But when celebrities like Morrissey, Russell Brand and now Antonio Banderas suddenly speak out against the status quo, something else is happening.

A few days ago, singer Morrissey publicly thanked Russell Brand for standing up for rebellion in a 2,000-word tirade which the former Smith’s front man posted on the fan website True-to-you.net.

He supported Brand’s call to abstain from voting in rebellion against the 'broken political system”. The "most powerful vote you can give”, Morrissey said, “is No Vote".

He mourned the lack of real debate in the UK: “At what point did the dis-United Kingdom become a cabbagehead nation? Where is the rich intellect of debate? Where is our Maya Angelou, our James Baldwin, our Allen Ginsberg, our Anthony Burgess, our political and social reformers?

“At what point did the shatterbrained scatterbrains take over – with all leading British politicians suddenly looking like extras from Brideshead Revisited,” he asked.

Brand’s famous Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman has had nearly 10 million views on YouTube. In the face of a lot of pooh-poohing and an attack by fellow comedian Robert Webb – who said that Brand had caused him to re-join the Labour Party (how sad is that?)  – Brand has stuck to his guns. He insisted recently:

"I'm happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking we're heading in the right direction. The people that govern us don't want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part."

Perhaps most dramatic of all, from within the very heart of the beast, the times they are a’ changing. More and more Hollywood stars are joining the fray to encourage young people to question the system and seek alternatives to it.

The unearthing of a 1997 video of Matt Damon reading a 1970 speech by late US activist-historian Howard Zinn is adding to the momentum on the internet. It makes clear that Brand’s condemnation of the impoverished nature of our democracies expressed feelings which extend far beyond British borders.

There is an immediacy in Damon’s voice as he calls for civil resistance, including “the right to abolish the current form of government”. Damon’s call – via Zinn – is for people to stop obeying laws that protect the rich and imprison the poor, whilst allowing the true criminals to go free. The international tenor of the speech is striking in its call for a “declaration of interdependence” amongst the people of the world.

Veteran actor Donald Sutherland says he wants his film The Hunger Games: Catching Fire to inspire “a youth-led uprising against injustice that will overturn the US as we know it and usher in a kinder, better way”.

Now actor and director Antonio Banderas has called for an end to corporate power. He has told Spanish CNN interviewer, Ana Pastor that we are living in a “post-democratic era”.  Praising former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez he lamented the corporate corruption of Barack Obama’s presidency.

In response to Pastor’s questions about the financial crisis Banderas blamed “the markets, the lobbies, the big corporations” and suggested they didn’t have to take responsibility when countries and governments had problems. “We’re not being governed by the people we voted for.”

When Pastor asked “How do you put a stop to that?”, Banderas responded: “You break it like Chávez did in his day, you get all these big corporations and you nationalise them. There was no other way out.”

Banderas, Morrisey, Brand and Sutherland are straws in the wind of a seismic change that is pretty much global in its scope. The old politics is dying on its feet – not before time – and these artists in their own way express the yearning for an alternative. We should use the opening they have helped create.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

 

The old politics is dying on its feet - for very good reasons

Why the political establishment has reacted so sourly to Russell Brand’s call for people not to vote and to think about revolution instead, should surprise no one. The comedian touched a raw nerve because the old politics is dying on its feet.   

The repercussions are enormous. When a system of government endorsed by the vast majority for nearly 150 years loses the support of key sections in society, the political class has a right to be worried and angry with people like Brand who point this out.

His fiery exchange with Jeremy Paxman on BBC2’s Newsnight has had getting on for 10 million views on YouTube. Many of those are undoubtedly by a generation switched off from mainstream politics already. Brand was kicking at an open door.

A new survey confirms the worst fears of Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband. Some 46% of under-30s say they will not consider voting for any parties, including smaller organisations like the Greens or non-mainstream groups like Ukip. For this generation it’s “none of the above”.

The response wasn’t much better for the electorate as a whole, with four out of ten people saying they were “alienated” from Britain's political parties and say they will not consider voting for any of them at an election.

This research for the Committee on Standards in Public Life tallies with the latest monthly ComRes poll for The Independent, which shows that only with the 45-54 age group do you get a majority who say they are certain to vote at the 2015 election. Two-thirds of the 18-24 age group say they are absolutely certain about not voting next time round. Andrew Hawkins of ComRes, said: "The evidence all points to people being turned off by the traditional party system.”   

The Committee on Standards in Public Life, an advisory body to the government, was set up in 1994 in response to sleaze at Westminster. It has seen disconnection with politics grow ever since. Commenting on its latest poll, the committee says 40% "hold sceptical or deeply sceptical perceptions of standards and do not trust those in public life" and that “an entrenched political disenchantment…appears to have acquired a growing foothold in the British public".

None of the surveys in recent years say that people are indifferent to what goes in society. It’s just that for many, they simply have no effective say or influence, whoever they vote for. And they’re right in that key respect.

Politics at one level can be understood as a mean to achieving organised control  over a complex system of ruling a community or society – aka the state. Accelerating disengagement from this kind of politics coincides with how the relationship between state and citizen has changed.

The transition from a welfare state – which provided affordable housing, free education, support when unemployed or disabled, comprehensive health care, pensions, energy and public transport – to a ruthless market state is the story of our times. Some call it a corporatocracy – rule through and on behalf of the corporations.

A market state does what it says on the packet – make key services and provision subject to market and commercial considerations first. Politics, in this context, is reduced to managerialism, to adjusting markets, to reducing state provision even further. The parties have coalesced around this purpose, and in the process have dissolved existing politics. How is anyone supposed to relate to this?

The standards committee is deeply concerned and wants further research into whether the poll findings harbour “the potential for rejection of the system of representative democracy and for democratic norms”. With respect, the two don’t go together.

We want a democracy that serves the majority, not a system that actually undermines “democratic norms”. The present system of representation has outlived its usefulness and is now a plaything of powerful economic and financial forces.

Moving democracy on, extending it to areas like the workplace, replacing shareholder control with community democracy around a system of people’s assemblies is a model to consider. We should support the initiative launched by John McDonnell, one of a handful of Labour MPs who champion democracy, for a People’s Parliament to discuss where we go from here.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Russell Brand's fire crosses the Atlantic

As Russell Brand’s simultaneously visceral, emotional and intellectual case for revolutionary change goes viral, respected Pulitzer prize-winning US journalist Chris Hedges, arriving at the same conclusion, goes even further than the comedian.

Exactly one year ago, Hedges, who wrote for the New York Times for 15 years until 2005, described the US presidential election as “a battle between the corporate state and us”. His conclusions and actions then echoed the eruption of Occupy:

“If we do not immediately engage in this battle we are finished, as climate scientists have made clear. I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance.”

And in registering a protest vote for the Green Party, he said he was stepping outside the system. Twelve months later, Hedges’ ideas have moved on apace. Amongst other things, he’s been studying the work of Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and anarchists, including Alexander Berkman.

Hedges now sees things much more clearly. While Brand was laying into Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, Hedges noted: “Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realise that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realise that these elites must be overthrown.”

And this week, in Our Invisible Revolution, Hedges looks deeper at the revolutionary process itself. He believes that the ideas used to justify the “private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters” are losing their power over people. He adds:

“The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognise that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.”

Hedges believes that once enough people “get it” – that free market capitalism does not serve their interests – then the process of change quickens and, as Berkman wrote, “evolution becomes revolution”.

There is a nervous air among America’s ruling elites, Hedges believes, because more and more people have rejected the ideas of the status quo. “This is why voices of dissent—as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement — are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.”

Like most people, however, Hedges comes to the realisation of the need for revolution unwillingly, reluctantly. He would prefer “the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy”, a system that allows its citizens to non-violently dismiss those in authority, “a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power”.

But, as after acknowledging that we don’t live under such a system, Hedges admits that “revolt is the only option left”.

To avoid spontaneous movements like Occupy being ruthlessly crushed by the state, Hedges is clear that we need a direction, a strategy and alternative ideas for how society could look in the future.

“An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself.”

So the key to a successful revolt, for Hedges, is a clear vision of a new society and a strategy for how it can be achieved. To which we should add, democratic forms of networked political organisations that can help us focus on the main prize.

Russell Brand and Chris Hedges are playing a tremendous role in bringing the case for system change out into the open. They have helped kick-start a social revolutionary process which millions will join.

Gerry Gold

Backlash against Brand shows he got it right

Be worried. Be very worried. The “revolution” word got top billing on the BBC’s Newsnight. And, God forbid, the word “profit” was called “filthy” by a comedian, actor, radio host and author who has over seven million followers on Twitter. No wonder the media – right across the spectrum  – is working overtime to give Russell Brand a thumping. In his article for the New Statesman, Brand flings down a barbed and well-crafted and often hilarious gauntlet– as he did in his confrontation with Jeremy Paxman last week. He challenges the notion that our present Tweedledee and Tweedledum parliamentary system is the only form that democracy can possibly take. He makes a strong claim that there is a revolutionary alternative. From the Spectator’s James Bloodworth to the Daily Mail’s Janet Street-Porter Brand to the Independent’s Joan Smith, Brand is being tarred and feathered.  Accusations range from that of “being a narcissist”, “spurning a right that people died for” (Spectator) to indulging "adolescent waffle about 'revolution'". 
 

It has also enraged Tom Watson, Labour’s former deputy chair, who for example, wrote in the Daily Mirror: “That vote which Mr Brand thinks is worthless is all the little guys have got left. In 2015, millions of us can send the bankers and hedge fund bosses that fund the greedy Tories packing.”

 How? By voting for Ed – let’s have responsible capitalism – Miliband? Surely, you are not serious Mr Watson.
        
Defenders of the status quo all around are outraged that Brand dared to say what millions think: the parliamentary system is neither representative nor truly democratic. His attack on the political system and call for a revolutionary change touched a raw nerve because he points to the fact that the democratic emperor really has only a few tatters for clothes. “I have never voted,” Brandt writes. “Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.” Yes, his and Jonathan Ross’s prank calls to actor Andrew Sachs back in 2008 were unpleasant. But that was some five years ago and Brand has come a long way since, politically speaking. In 2009 he co-signed a letter from the Hoping Foundation to the Independent calling for an end to the Israeli attack on Gaza and attended the anti-G20 protests in London. Brandt remains a vocal supporter of the Occupy movement. In June this year he took part in a video backing US whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Last month he was ejected from the GQ awards for hilariously but seriously accusing sponsors Hugo Boss of being “Nazi tailors”, thus biting the very hand that fed him. Brand’s chief crime is that he is calls for a revolutionary alternative. Not only that, but a socialist and inclusive one which is not dour and dogmatic but which links Britain’s legacy from Pagan times, to the English revolution, the Tolpuddle martyrs and the immediacy of the ecological crisis. Jibes that Brand’s call to arms are just “banalities about revolution”, that  “wild emotions are all very well” and “where’s your programme?” are just that – cheap and nasty jibes by defenders of the status quo. They emanate to use Brand’s eloquent words, from “people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists”.
 The Observer’s Nick Cohen makes the most insidious and hurtful accusation by comparing Brand to Mussolini, claiming that chiefly the far right would benefit from a revolution. But he lets also the cat out of the bag. “Now, as in the 1920s and 1930s,” he notes, “many inhabitants of most European countries agree with Brand's slogans that all politicians are crooks and democracy is a sham. Today's crisis has left Europe in a pre-revolutionary situation.” The furore that Brand’s remarks have caused shows the established commentariat in their true colours, dismissing the idea of a revolutionary change while clinging on to their own privileges and positions. They are the ones living in the past while Brand looks to the future. We’re with him all the way. Corinna LotzA World to Win secretary