Revolution (11 page)

This second suggestion is a bit easier for us to read and reiterates the difficulties we face when capitalism and its mechanics are inserted into the most fundamental and necessary aspects of our lives. Like food. Helena explained to me that most countries import and export a worryingly similar quantity of the same commodity.

America, for example, exports the same amount of beef as it imports each year. If you must have beef, and I would suggest we’re eating too much of it, at least eat the beef that’s near you rather than sending that off to Japan or whatever while simultaneously getting some far-flung beef chopped up and whizzed over on a jumbo jet like Freddie Mercury prolonging a holiday romance.

Especially as we face several ecological crises that are being exacerbated by this unnecessary bovine jet-setting. One, global warming and, two, depletion of fossil fuels. Everyone knows that, so why is a profligate and dangerous planetwide trade system being perpetuated? Because we are living under a fundamentalist dogma, the only relevant question is: “How do we make the most money?” The answer to that is: “By abiding superfluous trade tariffs.”

If that structure exists, it can be subverted or replaced. The administrative structure that serves capitalism can be used to serve a new, sustainable nutritional system. A recent UN survey concluded that the world’s agricultural needs could be met by localized organic farming. Of course, the organizations that benefit from
things being the way they are don’t admit that. They’ll tell you that industrialized, genetically modified, patented farming is the only way to feed the world, half of which is starving anyway—another example of the floundering deceitful maintenance of the current order.

Remember when you were a kid and you thought that your diet had to consist of meat, eggs, cheese, bread, and milk? The food groups? All that? The people that established that nutritional template were the people that sold—wait for it—meat, eggs, cheese, bread, and milk. They discovered which commodities were easiest to produce and transport on an industrial scale and then told us that those commodities were the commodities that we should be consuming. In a way, this Revolution will be a doddle because it isn’t so much about creating new systems; it’s more about disregarding obsolete ones.

The food industry in its present form is obsolete. A food industry is necessary, but we have to remove from the system all components that are superfluous. Flying beef around the world, like a dead, carved-up rent boy, because it serves the agenda of big business to the detriment of the planet and its people doesn’t require the contemplation of a sociological or economic genius, we just have to stop doing it.

The way to do that is by disempowering the organizations that benefit from things staying the way they are. If that can be done by democratic process, fine. If not, that’s fine too. The only option that isn’t fine is things remaining as they are.

Helena told me that there are apples that are grown in Britain, flown to South Africa to be cleaned and waxed, and then flown back here to be sold and eaten. That would be indulgent for the fruit at Kim and Kanye’s wedding. It’s happening to the apple in your lunchbox. The suggestion of Revolution is not mad. That is mad. Imagine if we had locally supported, collectively organized agriculture, where our apples were grown in, I dunno, Kent, and if you lived in Kent you could buy and eat those apples. In Kent.

Then someone turned up and said, “I’ve got a better idea—let me take over your orchard and all orchards like it, fly their produce
around the globe to be spruced up, and then we’ll give ’em back to you; sound like a plan?” We’d tell ’em to fuck off, wouldn’t we? Well, it has happened and we didn’t, because nobody explained it to us.

The reason they don’t explain this to us is because they know that if we find out the extraordinary lengths that they’re going to to fuck us over, we will overthrow the current system and replace it with something fair. That’s why all this important stuff is made to seem inaccessible, boring, and abstract. That is why our participation in politics has been sanded down into an impotent nub. Stick your “X” into this box and congratulate yourself on being free.

It pisses me off. It makes me want to get together a gang of Toxteth’s finest, of Broadwater Farm’s most deadly, Belfast’s most up for it, raid Molotov’s drinks cabinet, and light up the Westminster sky.

I understand why people loot shops. I understand why people in Thurrock, where I’m from, vote for knee-jerk berks like Ukip. How the tendency to condemn the vulnerable outsiders flares up. Why should people be claiming benefits? Why should people be coming over here for work, welfare, health care?

Whilst behind this concentration of innocents, marched out like a veil, lined up to be jeered at, in the shadow they cast the real criminals conduct their masquerade. The sneering puppeteers yank the strings and blind us.

Immigrants did not cause the financial crisis. Benefit cheats did not get multimillion-dollar bonuses. Disability claimants did not knowingly fracture the planet’s stability.

The final point on Helena’s list has broad ramifications and requires a huge change in the way institutions behave but oddly it’s already in line with the way most of us think.

Right, there’s quite a lot to think about in there. Prioritizing life over profit is a good example of how the way our world is governed has moved out of alignment with our nature. That means our system has become aberrant. Edward Slingerland, the professor of Asian Studies that explained the concept of Wu-Wei, told me the story of an artisan in the Zhuangzi.

This fella apparently carved bell stands—for bells, obviously—that were vital in ancient ceremonial rituals. These bell stands were evidently top-drawer; everyone was crazy about them.

At this point in the story, I had to make a bit of a psychological leap back to ancient China, because, where I’m from, people don’t get that excited about bell stands. I was struggling to imagine a bell stand of any description, let alone one that would really get me jazzed up. I mean, it’s not even the bell, which would for me be the obvious star of the story—that’s the thing that gets rung—but there you go. I am not a professor, so I just kept my mouth shut.

Everyone was so enchanted by this bloke’s bell stands that someone eventually asked him how he made them—the equivalent of a local news item where the man who makes David Beckham’s boots is patronized about his needlework skills.

Initially the craftsman is vague about his methods—coy, you might say—but after a probing he yields. “I meditate,” he says, “until I forget my intentions and attachments, until I forget the credit I will get for making a good bell stand, the adulation, the money. Eventually I forget even myself. Then I go down to the forest in this focused, open state and I look at trees until I see a tree that already has the bell-stand in it. All I have to do then is remove the excess wood until all that remains is the bell-stand.”

It was around this point in Edward’s recital that I realized the tale was allegorical, that he wasn’t inexplicably giving me a highly specific and probably redundant lesson on ancient Oriental carpentry but in fact describing how to materialize concepts from a higher realm.

First transcend the lower, basic requirements of the animal self, the hungers, desires—I suppose that’s why most religions have “fasting” as a ritual, to see what lies on the other side of hunger, on
the other side of these basic drives. Then look, without prejudice, at the nature of the challenge—in his case trees, in our case the machinery of global capitalism—wait until the solution reveals itself, then remove what is surfeit. In his case twigs, bark, leaves; in ours anything that isn’t in the service of justly catering for our common requirements.

This story also reminds us of the need for this process to be peacefully undertaken.

Sometimes when we’re incensed by the rancid tide of injustice, the impulse is to attack. We must avoid this. We have learned that violence as a means is always unsuccessful.

G
ANDHI, AN EXTREMELY EFFICIENT REVOLUTIONARY, IS PERHAPS
most admired for his excellent deployment of “nonviolent protest.” The ingenuity of nonviolence is not immediately obvious to us, the inheritors of a world built upon martial means, but the principle is almost like mathematics. Authorities are trained to deal with a particular kind of conflict, violent conflict, so by using violent means you are entering the territory that they are best qualified to control. Also, by becoming violent you are tuning in to the frequency that you are trying to overcome, the frequency of violation, violence FM.

“Be the change you wish to see in the world,” said Gandhi. If you want a nonviolent world, you cannot use violence to achieve it. He also said, “In the end the British will walk out because 100,000 British cannot control 350 million Indians if those Indians refuse to cooperate.” A small minority cannot control an uncooperative majority, so they must be distracted, divided, tyrannized, or anesthetized into compliance. Gandhi dealt with the colonization of nations by nations; we deal now with the colonization of consciousness by corporations.

I spoke to David Graeber, the anthropologist, economist, writer, and Occupy Wall Street movement member. Typically I would write “Occupy Wall Street movement
leader
,” but they eschew such titles in the movement. David is an anarchist. I don’t know much about anarchism, I only know about anarchy from graffiti, the Sex
Pistols, and as a kind of slur or reprimand from my mum: “Is that what you want? It’d be anarchy!”

Well, according to David Graeber, there’s more to anarchy than not tidying your bedroom, spitting, and having a Mohican. In fact, it isn’t defiantly disorderly at all; it is society that has no centralized power. David came round my house in East London during a torrential downpour to talk to me about Revolution.

It was properly raining. I stopped what I was doing to look out of the front door at the rain. One of those sudden outbursts of nature that serve as a deft reminder that even mighty structures like cities are temporary and nonsensical, it smashed its way down from the sky, all joyful and triumphant like “ye faithful.” David turned up whilst I was marveling at it and half planning an ark, with his jacket pulled up over his head like when you play Batman.

It was ridiculous—he was soaking. I had to get a towel and offer him clothes that he wouldn’t take. I knew immediately that I’d like him; he just had one of those faces. I could see what he’d been like as a boy, probably always fenced off in the electronic penitentiary of a too-fast mind.

His eyes are narrow, like a Japanese person or someone from the future in a film. He spoke, pertinently given the weather, like Rain Man, or like his voice was trying to become a synthesized burr, like Stephen Hawking’s robot voice.

There was a salad on the table, still packaged, from a Thai takeaway. “Can I have this?” said David, already unpacking it, like it was an energy coin in a computer game. Then he sat there eating, all wet and content, with a towel round his head like E.T. on his way back to his spaceship. “How’s this bloke gonna dream up a new economic system?” I wondered.

David is most well known for his idea of debt cancellation. Personal-debt cancelation used to be a common policy in ancient civilizations; every seven years all debt was canceled. The Bible refers to “debt jubilees,” where everyone’s debt would be reset to zero. I think it’s especially nice that it was called a “jubilee,” creating an even more euphoric sense of carnival.

In Islam too, usury, credit at extortionate rates—like Wonga or whatever offer—is forbidden. So this bizarre-sounding notion has strong historic precedent. It is a mark of how far into materialism we have descended that it seems unfeasible in our world.

David explained from beneath my towel that debt repayment has a powerful moral charge in our culture, that people feel ashamed about debt and guilty about nonpayment. Seventy-five percent of Americans are in debt, 40 percent owing more than fifty thousand dollars, whilst an estimated 9 million British people are in “serious debt.”

What David Graeber, the anarchist, is suggesting is that all personal debt, debt for normal people, is canceled.

Think about it.

That means you. All your debt canceled.

When David said it I felt excited, like it was naughty, like it shouldn’t be allowed. This is the feeling I still get when I start a car. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” I think, plunging down on the accelerator. The reality is, I shouldn’t be: I’m a terrible driver. My conditioning kicked in when Dave Graeber (I say his name like “Craig David”) said that debt cancellation is a contemporary possibility. I nearly told him to shush and looked over my shoulder for a park keeper. Immediately, just by contemplating it, you feel like you’re bunking off school. “We can’t cancel debt—we’ll get the cane.”