Revolution Russell Brand ★★★★★

Russell Brand's Revolution is by turns flip and earnest, prolix and self-obsessed

Martin Luther King was 34 when he delivered his ‘I have a dream’ speech in Washington.

Fidel Castro was 32 when he took power in Cuba. Engels was 27 when he co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, who was then aged 30.

Yet at the ripe old age of 39, Brand continues to be treated with the reverence usually accorded to a precocious 12-year-old.

Even the most sceptical of interviewers, from Paxman downwards, have tended to go all wobbly in his presence, their eyes widening in amazement that someone so very, very young can use such very, very big words, while nodding encouragement as he guides them through his plans for the world.

In his personal appearances, Brand tends to infantilise himself – fidgeting, changing the subject halfway through a sentence, constantly falling back on baby-talk.

But with the publication of his first political manifesto, boldly titled Revolution, there is now a chance to judge him by his words alone, without the distraction of his hyperactive physical presence.

The book is dedicated ‘To the divine, mischievous spark in you’.

There then follow three pages of Acknowledgements, with thanks extended to upwards of 50 people, including the popular philosopher Alain de Botton ‘for being such a cherry-lipped clever clogs’, the discredited journalist Johann Hari (‘you tireless, brilliant, adrenalised busybody’), and the political philosophers Noam Chomsky, whom he later refers to as both ‘ol’ Chompers’ and ‘Chompskeroony’ and Thomas Piketty, who is accorded a chapter with the title ‘Piketty, Licketty, Rollitty, Flicketty’.

‘I mean,’ Brand writes, ‘I’d like to take all the credit ideally but if this Revolution is going to have legs,

'I have to be a fair, upstanding, decent fella, not a gluttonous narcissist gobbling up other people’s credit like, I dunno, Wonga.’

So the tone is set – by turns flip and earnest, prolix and self-obsessed. Over the next 372 pages, he calls for, among other things: the end of the nation state (which ‘may have served its purpose and have to be dissolved; it’s not a big deal’); ‘the assertion of spirituality, of whatever form, to the heart of our social structures’; and the confiscation of the utilities and facilities of all large multi-national corporations after ‘a sustained, mass-supported attack’.

‘Russell Brand wants YOU to join the Revolution’ is the pithy way his publishers, Century, put it.

Oddly enough, Century is a part of Penguin Random House, itself a division of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann and Pearson PLC, the largest education company and book publisher in the world, and owners of the Financial Times.

The worst sort of chatterbox is the chatterbox who bores himself

His belief in small, democratic collectives clearly does not extend to the publishers of his own book; he never bothers to explain why not.

‘Having a Revolution will be easy. Maintaining the Revolution will be where we face challenges,’ says Brand.

In preparation for the coming Revolution, he has tried to read what he can, though, he confesses, ‘I can’t get my head around economics’.

However, this is, he insists, not his fault.

‘I’m not supposed to get my head around economics, none of us are, it’s designed to be obtuse. Look at those f***ing NASDAQ, FTSE, Dow Jones things...’

But if he himself has been unable to get his head around economics, he has at least been able to chum up with others who can, such as the Occupy Wall Street political philosopher Dave Graeber (‘I say his name like “Craig David”’) and, yes, Alastair Campbell (‘he’s a lovely bloke...I saw grace in him’).

Having spoken to them, and read what he can of Chomskeroony and Piketty Licketty, he puts the jokes aside and translates their thoughts into rambling splodges of Dave Spart GCSE prose, plastered with words like quotidian, matrix, hegemony and post-materialist.

At one point, he reveals that he has a contractual obligation with Random House to provide a manuscript of 100,000 words.

This may be the reason he makes simple thoughts sound complicated by inserting five words where one would do.

‘The significance of consciousness itself as a participant in what we perceive as reality is increasingly negating what we understood to be objectivity’ is a fairly typical sentence.

The book as a whole is a very long slog, and may be destined to take its place on the list of books that are bought but never finished. But can any Revolution begin with a yawn?

The worst sort of chatterbox is the chatterbox who bores himself. Brand only seems able to issue a hundred-or-so words of pseudo-revolutionary blather before beginning to bore himself, at which points he has to undercut it with a joke, or something that, chirpy, wordy and facetious, might just be mistaken for a joke.

On the vexed subject of fracking, he writes, ‘Out of nowhere one morning, probably a Thursday, or a Wednesday, one of the days, The Sun, apropos of nothing, announced with twitching enthusiasm that fracking is great.’

Which of the words in that 28-word sentence is necessary?

Certainly not the first 15. Rambling on and on about nothing may seem impressive in the O2 arena but in a book it is just a nuisance.

‘You know that bloke who tightrope-walks between skyscrapers? No? Google it yerself.’

In the Acknowledgements, he thanks numerous writers and editors: couldn’t one of them have found the time to Google Philippe Petit? Or were they all just desperate to fill that 100,000-word quota?

Often, his jokes are not just in bad taste, but thoughtlessly unpleasant. On the subject of climate change, he mentions the international Kyoto agreement on carbon emissions, arguing that it was too little, too late.

Fair enough; but then he adds ‘...like giving Fred West a detention’.

In a half-baked manifesto towards the end, he says ‘we know what has to change: corporate tyranny, ecological irresponsibility and economic inequality’.

He then looks ahead to a post-revolutionary world.

‘Do we know 100 per cent what this will look like?

'No, we don’t know if there will still be some inequality, some hierarchies, some conflict. We do know that there are alternatives and we can no longer remain pallid and listless in the cellar like Fritzl’s kids.’

Is he really comparing himself and the rest of us to Josef Fritzl’s daughter, who was raped and held captive for 24 years, along with the seven children to whom she gave birth? If he isn’t, is he just having a joke? And if so, what sort of joke?

He likes to think of himself as plain speaking, but he can be as shifty and evasive as the politicians he affects to despise.

He pays a call on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, ‘where he is forced to live for reasons I’ve never fully understood’. Well, most people understand them perfectly well: Assange was wanted in Sweden on suspicion of rape, and evaded extradition by taking refuge in the embassy.

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In the end, his proposed Revolution is fuelled by a) his suspicion of corporations such as the one by whom he is published; b) his already well-publicised refusal to vote, because it’s somehow more democratic than bothering to vote; c) his irritation with atheists like Richard Dawkins (who he refers to, inevitably, as Dickie Dawkins) because ‘we need faith now more than ever’; and d) his dislike of the class system (the Queen, we discover, is ‘just a person’).

In their place, he plans to get rid of all titles, reinvigorate our spirituality, and have us all eating organic food.

He will also reorganise society so that big corporations like General Motors are collectivised. As for foreign sales, ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about exporting them, as other countries have their own f***ing cars.’ And that’s that. Piketty Licketty he is not.

In interviews to promote Revolution, Russell Brand has said that he is prepared to die for his beliefs. Before that time comes, the rest of us may have died from boredom.