Revolution (28 page)

We have a couple of options for what to do with the assets that GM have—their factories, plants, or any resources they own. We could sell them off and use the money to compensate victims and former workers, or we could collectivize it and run it as a worker-owned co-operative.

The people that run the factories, design the cars, work in the canteens, do the admin, all that (I’m not an expert, who knows what they get up to), will own and run their company. Each region will be autonomous and fully self-supporting, except in matters that affect other areas of the organization or the planet or humanity as a whole.

They can democratically elect a board from the workforce, who will serve for a limited time period and are kicked off if they fuck about. They can call their new company whatever they vote for—I’d suggest, “We Don’t Kill Our Customers Motors”—and get on and responsibly make automobiles for American people. I wouldn’t worry too much about exporting them, as other countries have their own fucking cars that they can reclaim—like in Germany, for example, the people could take back Volkswagen in much the same way and call it “We Don’t Make Cars for Hitler Motors” or whatever.

These companies might consider observing a new charter, which they can collectively devise, to make cars responsibly. Might I suggest, for example, not deliberately making cars that break down in a few years so they can sell more of them. Built-in obsolescence, the deliberate and ubiquitous practice of manufacturing shoddy and expiring products, can be outlawed. It doesn’t serve us; it only serves them.

Other corporations that
Adbusters
suggests bumping off include Philip Morris, the fag company. One million people have died of smoking-related diseases, and as I keep saying, because it is such a clear demonstration of the priorities of big business, they knew for ages they were killing their customers but were as addicted to the money as we were to the nicotine.

They had no obligation to obey human codes. If I, me, ol’ Russ, knew that the milkshakes I was selling caused blindness, because
scientists kept telling me and because the people drinking my shakes were having trouble finding their way back to the store, yet carried on selling ’em, I’d expect consequences.

Especially if I aggressively went around getting anyone I could to drink my “cataract smoothies” through sexy adverts. Then, if when the jig was finally up, because the lie had become too obvious to ignore, I went to countries where the laws protecting people from my myxamatosis brew were more lax, like the Philippines, and started flogging it there, I’d expect at some point people to come together and say, “Alright, ol’ Russ, enough of this now; we’re going to have to shut down your milkshake business.”

If I indignantly responded that my milkshake business was a proud “national institution” and a “tradition” or “a way of life,” out would come the butterfly nets and I’d be in for a spell of basket-weaving.

Today in Britain, America, and other mostly white-people countries, fag firms have to write a message on the box to the effect of “Sorry we lied to you about our snout for generations; here’s a list of ways this stuff is going to make your life worse if you smoke these.”

So instead they are promoting cigarettes all over Africa and Asia, new markets where people are less informed on the subject and there are no warnings about cancer and the other known negative side effects of smoking.

We should probably kill Philip Morris. Difficult to know what to do with the factories, given it’s a product that kills people and the market is flooded with alternative brands. We could make it super reasonably priced, with our new, efficient, worker-owned model. We could also sell fags with weed in them—people seem to like that.

Or we could use the money raised from selling assets to compensate their victims (costly) and retrain their workers to do other, skilled jobs. This is an option; there are many options.

Why stop there? There’s loads of corporations all over the world, exploiting with impunity. We could knock ’em off like seal cubs—Exxon? Goldman Sachs? Boots? Yeah, Boots. If they don’t
pay tax, we’ll reclaim their assets and give them to the people that work there to run.

This idea that society will fall apart if there isn’t a snidey gang at the top of the financial pyramid needs to be challenged. We’re ready to challenge it.

T
HE ANSWER TO THE QUANDARY OF HOW TO REORGANIZE SOCIETY
isn’t new leaders within the same system; the answer isn’t leaders at all. The answer is, of course, simple: We can run our own lives and our own communities. We’re not idiots. We need to establish a few immutable, nonnegotiable principles, mostly to respect the planet and individual freedom, then look at who is benefitting from things being the way they are now and, using no violence when we approach them and no titles when we address them, politely insist they give us our planet back.

As you know, I’d prefer we just spontaneously begin cooperating on the basis that we are all manifestations of one sublime vibration, but that ain’t gonna butter no spuds on
Newsnight
or
Fox News
, so I will now reluctantly, and possibly badly, describe to you, in a little more detail, how we could own and control our means for production.

My mate Adam Curtis, the documentary maker who I’ve gone on about a bit because of his amazing films and weird, clever, sweet personality, told me this: “The problem with Marxism is that it placed economics at the heart of socialism.”

Now, even if you don’t understand that, simply nod and agree as if you were already thinking it.

What it means is, I reckon, that every subsequent political ideology, especially successful ones, like capitalism, have similarly placed economics at the center of their philosophy. The economy is just a
metaphorical device, it’s not real—that’s why it’s got the word “con” in the middle of it.

There are generally speaking—like General Motors do about their generally not, but sometimes a bit, murderous cars—two ways that the “means for production” can be owned.

Currently the most popular method is privately owned businesses with invisible, irreproachable bosses, often residing in tax havens, or nationalized industries, where incompetent and detached politicians run things.

Both these methods lead to an odd sense of alienation and disempowerment. No real pride in the work or the product, no real power to complain or change things. That works incredibly well for the people in charge but is a drag for the poor sods doing the graft.

Upon which unchallenged basis too are profits hurtled with thoughtless expedience into the pendular pockets, swinging like a velour scrotum, of the thumb-twiddling plutocrat who by happy accident owns the firm? The profits should be shared among the people who do the work.

An elected, rotating board can do the admin. I should note that I mean the board members rotate, not that the person in the role whirls dervishly in his chair.

Another tradition of the abstinence-based recovery groups that I much respect is: “Leaders are trusted servants; they do not govern.” Even in the policy-bare days of the Paxman interview, I alluded to an attitudinal shift towards civil service and governmental roles. It should be clear that these positions are about serving the people. We are not some binary crowd to be shepherded and shushed; we are not children who need to be reprimanded and praised. We are the people—the power is with us.

In this version of reality, we would have autonomy and freedom at work. If we had jobs at Carphone Warehouse in Lakeside, we’d chat among the twenty or so staff and elect two or three people to be over the admin. At the end of the year we’d vote to see what to do with the profits and whether we wanted to make infrastructural changes.

We might also like to consider that, given we are no longer siphoning
off all our profits to a vampiric board, we can give more money to ourselves and work less hours. The only people who tell you this is impossible are the people who benefit from things staying the way they are. Start to take notice of who the people are who are telling you that things are fine now; watch them, remember them, because change is coming. When people say, “The system works,” they mean, “The system works for me.” The slags.

This business model is up and running all over the world. Typically they are described as “co-ops.” My mate John Roger, who’s a bit of a hippie, lefty, druid, scruffbag type fella, did some research. Let’s go through it together:

“Autonomous, democratic control of the economy driven by equality, fairness, environmental, and ecological responsibility is not idealistic pie-in-the sky utopian daydreaming; it is a system currently in use by some of the most successful companies.”

It is important to keep reiterating and asserting that alternatives exist and flourish. The reason we grew up thinking socialism was a tarnished and hopeless ideology and only heard pejorative reports of the most extreme examples of it is because, if we aspired to it, Margaret Thatcher’s head may’ve ended up on a spike. This is the last thing she’d’ve wanted—typical.

That doesn’t sound too scary. I once participated in a capitalist experiment with the renowned street artist Shepard Fairey. We hired a unit in the Beverly Center in Los Angeles and ran a shop called “Buy Love Here.” The concept was to test the nature of consumerism by stocking items donated by famous folk like 50 Cent, Cameron Diaz, Mike Tyson, Jason Segel, Katy Perry, and a load of others, but not mark them out as such. There were loads of other donated items too, loads of shoes and T-shirts and jumble.

People were invited to take anything they wanted from the store
but they had to leave something in return. There was no imposition of equivalence, no price; people could take what they wanted and leave what they felt like.

That was how it was supposed to work. The problem was, I was involved. Even though, along with Shepard and my mates, I had come up with the idea, a gentle examination of consumerism in the very heart of the problem, I was incapable of behaving in the detached and objective manner that a social experiment such as this required. I was worse, in fact, than that lunatic Professor Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford prison experiment from the hardly neutral post of prison warden. I jokingly criticized him earlier in the book without acknowledging that I’ve committed a similar transgression.

Within seconds of the shop’s ostentatious opening—we had brown paper ripped down from the shopfront windows by models—I was carrying on like a fastidious little capitalist, sticking my nose into every transaction, barking at the “staff,” and secretly trying to put aside Cameron Diaz’s bikini. I was like Arkwright from
Open All Hours
—or J.R. from
Dallas
, if you’re American. It says much of our two nations that those two figures are comparable.

I was completely incapable of behaving in the Zen and nonjudgmental manner that the experiment demanded if it were to be valid. It brought out the very worst in me. I hated the fact that someone could bring in an old tennis ball they’d found in a dog park and swap it for my ex-wife’s frock. I completely forgot the point of the experiment: to see if people would behave fairly if given the option. I was incapable of letting it be.

I recall reducing one poor woman to tears as she tried to swap a hairbrush for Iron Mike Tyson’s toaster. It was a shambles. Loads of TV people turned up to see me in a tight yellow Shepard-designed T-shirt, frolicking with the models and bickering with the staff about flexitime.

I frog-marched some poor woman to a nearby jeweler’s to see if the diamond ring she was trying to swap for one of Shaquille
O’Neal’s big shoes was legit (How many of those things did he give out? They’re everywhere). This completely violated the idea of trust, which was meant to be at the heart of the concept.

The only thing the experiment proved is that I should never be allowed to run a shop. More broadly, it indicated that we need to safeguard against domineering individuals tyrannizing systems designed for the community.

Here are some further co-op guidelines that, if deployed, may have prevented the Buy Love Here disaster:

“Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility, and caring for others.”

Sounds a bit airy-fairy, but these ideas would’ve prevented me squirreling away the donated offcuts of well-meaning celebrities for some imagined reason.

This is all we need to know to run a co-op:

Voluntary? Do we get paid for working in these places or what?

Okay, so I suppose we could vote on whether or not to make money. See? I’ve gone into a capitalist frenzy and we’re only on point 2.

I see. We have to foster a different attitude to property. It’s hard when you’ve spent your whole life being defined by stuff, logos, and brands to step back from the ideology of consumption and remember that what we were trying to access through these acquisitions was a sense of fulfillment better delivered through belonging and community.