Revolution (12 page)

I thought about the ramifications. Well, obviously, the majority of people would be thrilled: Tuesday night you go to bed with a credit-card bill, mortgage, and a bloody headache; Wednesday you wake up with a spring in your step and a pound note in your pocket. What a touch. Obviously this is not such good news for credit-card companies and banks: Overnight their entire operation has irrevocably altered.

Most of these companies are international too, so what would the impact be on global finances? I imagine a mainstream economist—and let me tell you off the bat, I’ve no fucking intention of asking one—would say this action would instigate financial meltdown.

What Graeber says in response to this is that $700 billion was
written off and trillions were lent to banks as the result of the 2008 financial crash. That sounds like a lot, but I can’t get my head around economics. I’m not supposed to get my head around economics, none of us are; it’s designed to be obtuse.

Look at those fucking NASDAQ, FTSE, Dow Jones things: Sometimes I accidentally press a button on my phone and the screen is filled with the numerical babblings of these unknowable entities, and it’s more baffling and mysterious than the Amharic cries that filled the Kensal Green church. They speak in numerical tongues as they worship their invisible God.

That instinctive feeling I had when I was a kid—I bet you had it too—when the financial report came on at the end of the News was, “This is bollocks!” That wasn’t the result of innocence or ignorance; we were right. Since then there has been an attempt to inculcate and obfuscate and dress it up in conferences, rolling onscreen graphics, and supercilious posturing, but we were right, it is bollocks.

How can we conceptualize a trillion dollars? Merrill Lynch, J. P. Morgan, and Lehman Brothers were all lent in excess of a trillion dollars to get them through that crisis; that doesn’t seem fair. Plus they all have names like Coronation Street baddies. “Merrill Lynch and the Lehman Brothers have burnt down the Rovers,” someone might say. “It was probably an insurance job.”

At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing; it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.

It has gone wrong and is tyrannizing us. We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine: If my vacuum cleaner went nuts and forced me to live in economic slavery, I wouldn’t roll my eyes say, “Oh well,” and humbly do its bidding. I’d turn it off and fuck it out the window.

When the reckless and greedy trading, lending, and gambling of the financial industry led to the economic breakdown that if not resolved would’ve provoked social upheaval, possibly Revolution, the governments of affected nations got together (in a smoky dim-lit room?) and decided to press reset on the economy. Aside
from a few people carrying plants out of their offices in cardboard boxes, I don’t remember there being many consequences at all. Just some people with plants looking confused by a revolving door.

Oh, and 13.1 million American people had their homes foreclosed. Because their debt, it turns out, was real; it was only the debt within the financial sector that was imaginary. It was only the people who generated the crisis who got three magical wishes from an economic genie. There was no abracadabra for ordinary people; they just got abraca-fucked.

So we are not discussing whether or not debt cancellation is a possibility; we know it is, we’ve seen it, they’ve done it. All we are discussing is who it is possible for. Them or us.

I’ve just typed myself into a revolutionary fervor again. Every so often the fury at injustice rises up in me and makes me want to smash something or burn something, but nothing in my immediate environment belongs to me so I have to refrain.

Unless of course we consider that the concept of property is preposterous, like a Native American chief, Great Elk or one of them, who when us lot (By “us” I suppose I mean white Europeans. You might not be one; I hope you’re not, actually. Sorry for unconsciously addressing this book to imperialists) turned up in their country with contracts, were confounded.

“How can you ‘own’ a river? The river is our brother.”

“Yeah, alright, mate. Sign this, will ya? Here’re some blankets for yer trouble.”

We are so acclimatized to our metaphors that we no longer see them as imaginary or symbolic. We forget that most things that define us are conceptual. Most things that we consider real are the material manifestation of an idea. The laptop upon which I type, once an idea in some boffin’s noggin, the words that I type, a consensual code of Saxon and Latin, my merrily dancing fingers the result of an unrealized uterine form, tracking some invisible plan toward realization.

Four o’clock on Wednesday: just a concept, an agreement, not
actual, not real like an apple or a heartbeat. Karate: just a system of breath and movement.

My support of West Ham United FC is a totemic symbol. Since I started supporting them, when I was born, a hereditary legacy, like my eyebrows or my addiction, they had different players, different owners, a different kit. Soon they will move to a different stadium; they play now in a different league, in a different way, under a different manager.

What, then, is the West Ham that I support? It is the West Ham that my dad supports, that everyone at my school supported, that everyone at Upton Park supports? Those men terrified me on my early visits—and still, if I’m honest, unnerve me a bit now, with their tribal roars and curses, with their tears and vows, with their beers and rows. The chanting, the defiance, each of them, each of us—“us,” there’s the word—knowing that the game as we know it is dying, that the fraction of the club that belongs to us is being ever eroded.

The concept of belonging—commodified like all else. Their belief versus our belief. The songs so rote: one evocative and plain, “West Ham Till I Die”; “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”; “West Ham’s Claret and Blue Army.” Anthems of place and unity.

Folk codes of pride and togetherness, pride in both senses, honor, and togetherness. Ring-fenced emotion permitted only at three o’clock for ninety minutes in the sanctuary of the stadium. Can we march that pride out of the gates and into the streets? Can we harness it? Direct it? Use it for something less stymied by white lines and whistles, that could pour from the terraces and into the oak-and-leather chambers, the steel-and-glass towers?

Money and the economy are just symbols, ideas, tools. If they don’t serve us, if they don’t serve the planet, then they have to change. They are not serving us or the planet, so why are they not changing? Where is the resistance coming from? It must be benefiting somebody. It is probably the occupants of the bejeweled bus; they seem to be behind all this mayhem.

Of course, if we suggest alternatives that inconvenience them,
they’ll say it’s impossible, implausible, sixth-form, naïve, Nazi; they’ll say anything to prevent the realization that change is necessary and inevitable.

David said that, secretly, even those that benefit most from capitalism know its demise is imminent. What they are preparing for now is what follows it. Something fairer, or the militaristic maintenance of a comparable tyranny? I think given the evidence of history it’s obvious they’ll favor the latter.

Is there evidence that those in authority are preparing to confront mass uprising?

David as an anarchist is opposed to centralized power in any form. He believes that people should be entrusted and empowered, that given the opportunity, released from the chains of authority and the spell of a corrupting media, we will form fair and functioning systems; they may not be perfect, but, remember, we’re not competing with perfection, we’re competing with corruption, inequality, and destruction.

I asked him if we could formulate a centralized revolutionary movement to coordinate transition. He said this, the anarchist:

“Well, my own approach is to avoid constituting any sort of new authority, because in a revolutionary situation, there’s crisis and conflict and therefore always an excuse for the provisional authorities, however well meaning, to amass more and more power.”

Which is a fair point. That Arab Spring we were all so excited about on Twitter turned out to be fuck-all. As usual. I suppose we could try to ensure that a military junta isn’t placed in power at any point. Those guys with uniforms and medals and sunglasses are normally wrong’uns.

I asked him what he envisaged, then, whilst simultaneously stuffing my beret and mirrored shades down the side of the sofa.

“My dream is to create a thousand autonomous institutions that can gradually take over the business of organizing everyday life, pretty much ignoring the authorities, until gradually the whole apparatus of state comes to seem silly, unnecessary, a bunch of buffoons useful for entertainment perhaps, but no one we have to take seriously. Obviously that only works if they don’t have the means
to shoot you. The tricky thing is that means that, much as you hate the cops, or the army, you’re only going to win if at some point those guys decide they’re just not going to follow orders to shoot you.”

I like the idea of creating autonomous organizations to perform necessary social functions that are not motivated by profit. This along with the principles of equality, nonviolence, and ecological responsibility are necessary pillars of Revolution.

I disagree with David’s antipathy towards the police and military. This could be for a couple of reasons. Maybe David, as an anarchist, is always in protests, like Occupy Wall Street or marches or whatever, and gets himself into confrontations with authority.

I’ve done a bit of that myself, not in his league, but I was always getting nicked when I was a junkie, so I’ve had my fair share of skirmishes with the law. However, I am fortunate in that I have a very positive feeling towards the police and army. The police that have arrested me have usually been all right, and they’ve always had a point. I happen to think all drugs should be legal, and when I was a drug user I paid no heed to prohibition, but I understand the position of the officers arresting me.

Mostly these arrests, futile though they were, were conducted in a relatively bonhomous and professional manner. Once a copper who pinched me in Soho, before searching my marijuana-laden bag, announced whilst rolling up the arms of his shirt with a magician’s flourish, “Nothing up this sleeve, nothing up this sleeve.”

I recall too that the chats in the back of the van weren’t too bad as they dispatched me to the nick. It’d be less antagonistic perhaps if the police didn’t wear police uniforms. It’s a crime when someone else does, impersonating a police officer; maybe the police oughtn’t impersonate police officers either.

The uniform: a dehumanizing device. When I’ve encountered the police in domesticity, stripped of the thin blue line—my mate Rene Zagger’s older brother was a copper, and I was struck by his normality. Once I house-sitted with a mate, a copper’s flat in south London, and he had hash in his front room. And these days when I chat to the Met I see that they’re not really any different from me.
Normal people from around the estuary, supporting Spurs, or the Hammers, or Chelsea. An armed response vehicle pulled over in east London and the policeman driving it, younger than me, said he’d seen me on telly and that he agreed with me; politicians are “full of shit,” he said.

Cases where public disorder has been the offense have been less amicable. When arrested stealing porn in an all-night garage, or clambering nude across TV outside broadcast vehicles in the midst of a riot, or even when picked up retrospectively, on set, for affray and destruction of public property, there has been a more tangibly adversarial dynamic.

It is at an institutional level, when acting as the henchman of the establishment that the police become frightening. As individuals, as humans we find harmony. Ferguson, Orgreave, Hillsborough, and the many unexplained deaths in custody are all manifestations of the dehumanization that occurs when an institution that ought to serve the public glitches and becomes a tool for state oppression. The transference of $4.2 billion of U.S. military equipment to local police authorities across America is an indication of what the state regards the role of the police to be. Even Boris is buying up German water cannons to sluice down febrile Londoners. It’s as if they know a change is coming.

T
HE LAST TIME
I
WAS ARRESTED WAS IN
N
EW
O
RLEANS AND
wasn’t that long ago. I was clean. It is worse getting arrested in recovery and it is worse getting arrested in America. This arrest came during my beard-and-pajamas postmarital era.

I was making a film called
Paradise
(don’t worry, no one has) with Diablo Cody, the writer of
Juno
. It was her directorial debut. She is a talented, y’know, Oscar-winning writer and a lovely person. I suppose I just wasn’t up for making a film. The indicators were clear, with hindsight. For example, I was refusing to cut my hair for the part. Or my beard. Hair is prissy but understandable; beard is inter-dimensional unreasonableness.

Diablo and I fashioned my beard together in my trailer, together, as cautiously as you’d sculpt a peace treaty between two nations that prefer war to peace. The reality was that my identity outside of filmmaking had become more important to me. I was doing hours of yoga and meditation each day, I was going through a divorce, and the result was a kind of hirsute intransigence.

I looked like the cliché of a terrorist and I behaved like one. Except the beard wasn’t the symbol, it was the cause. I feel some guilt about my lack of enthusiasm for acting, like it’s a bit ungrateful. Like I’ve let my teenage self down. Mind you, he let himself down a fair bit, the dirty little pervert. The dreams of my adolescent self were entangled with silvery screens and limousines, and I still feel that I need to offer up superficial sacrifices to his misguided altar. The fact is, though, I find filmmaking a boring process and its ends
dubious. This could, of course, be due to the quality of the stuff I’ve done so far, as opposed to an essential rejection of an art form.