Revolution Right Now: The Ends are the Means

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There’s been a lot of talk about revolution here at SQUABBLER – lots of wild ideas about total systemic overhaul – and you might be wondering: what the hell can I do? Maybe Thatcher was right, you might be thinking, maybe there really is no alternative.

But there is. The revolution isn’t a distant idea. It is already happening.

War All the Time

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The important thing to understand is that revolution is not utopianism. It is not about imagining some perfect society and then striving towards that. Revolution is a constant process of change, of adaptation. The old anarchist motto says it all: “live as though you were already free.” The means are the ends. Revolution is a daily activity.

It begins by knowing your enemy. Who is it that is preventing you from living the life you want to live? Is it a cruel landlord? A petty manager? Or is it the government which has failed to provide its citizens affordable housing and the economic system that drives us into jobs we’d rather not have simply to make money? Is it mediated images of white supremacist hetero-normative patriarchy through Hollywood films and television or is it the performative resistance to this and a false alliance to progressive ideals by companies who profit off of systems of inequality? Is it the cops? Is it the supermarkets? Is it the entire state which exists only through the assertion of force, the theft of land and the sustaining rewards of racism?

It is all of these.

Revolution is not simply fought in the streets. It is not necessarily destructive, though destruction may help. As Mikhail Bakunin says, “the destructive act is also a creative passion.” This may have worked in an industrial society, against a state apparatus of discipline and punish. But today, in our interconnected surveillance society, beneath the eyes of money-powered Control, revolution is best fought with your wallet.

I’m not talking about “shopping locally,” or “buying organic.” These are middle-class responses. Most people can’t afford to do this. I’m talking about food-security education: learning how to grow your own food, access community gardens, how to take over otherwise disused green spaces in your neighborhood and begin to understand how to manage your own food supply.

More importantly, I’m talking of how not to buy. If we have learned the many names of our enemy and seen how they all answer to the supreme name of Capitalism, then we must agree that the replication of capital through buying and selling is an action in service to the adversary.

Simply put, the most revolutionary act you can do is to stop spending money on absolutely anything you don’t need to. Steal music, go to a library, shoplift if you feel like it and accept the risk. These are truly revolutionary acts that present a direct challenge to the concepts of exchange and property that underpin capitalism.

Challenge yourself.

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Mainstream media reinforces the status quo which legitimizes capitalist hegemony. Mainstream narratives either are encoded with bigoted thought or perform our resistance for us by paying lip service to anti-capitalist ideas whilst tightening the grip of very regime they decry. Films, television, and popular music are all equally guilty of this. Better to seek out the bizarre, the formally experimental, the challenging. Especially difficult works produced by people marginalized by the current system. Read from small presses, discover music on Bandcamp or Soundcloud. Better yet, make something yourself.

Creation is Resistance.

Stasis is the enemy. Comfort is complacency. Capitalism would have us stalled in every motion that is not directly related to production and consumption. That’s a nice hobby, says Aunt Thea, but what do you do? Creation is not necessarily production. L’art pour l’art is a direct challenge to the capitalist notions of entertainment and economic service that artists have long been shackled to. Make something and give it away. Write a book to pull the pillars down. Make a beat, write a song. Never sit still and always be exactly who you want to be. This is revolution.

The political is personal. We are holding ourselves back and others less fortunate than us every time we participate in the economy. The market is responsible for global warming, the market is responsible for wide-spread inequality. The market means you are not free. Revolution exists wherever capitalism is resisted. Capitalism exists wherever capital is self-replicated.

Ask yourself: do I want a better world or a better phone?

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Have We Forgotten How to Dream of the Future?

With the extraordinary availability of television programming, running hours and hours of content, with millions of songs at your fingertips, streamed and forgotten on a whim, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our cultural climate was teeming with originality. It isn’t.

One World. One Mind.

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Perhaps it began with the neo-liberalism of the early nineties, the political force that sought to unify the entire earth beneath a single umbrella of trade and corporate control. A homogenization of culture was necessary if we were all to sing with one voice in Coca Cola’s utopia (Fruitopia?). Technology became affordable, global communication became easier than ever. Perhaps some of us felt free.

This was the solidification of the Deleuzian “society of control” that we now find ourselves in. Where freedom takes on the appearance of a free flow of information and a seemingly border-less world. But the price of this freedom is the data harvested by every tech company and every airline which in turn is readily shared with governments for purposes of social control. We stopped dreaming of the future because, so we were told by our leaders, the future was already here.

The End of History

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Another remake. Another Carpenter-esque synth-laden retro futurist soundtrack. 32-bit graphics, butterfly clips, yet another remake. Same story, different spandex. It was once thought that the 2000s would see flying cars and automation replacing drudgery creating a society of leisure. Instead we got seven different Spider Man films.

The new millennium began with revival: garage revival, post-punk revival. Artists like Amy Winehouse, the Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey have built careers on being living musical remakes, monuments to the past. Corporate entertainment continues to feed the pap of childhood to us well into our adult life so that we remain forever infantilized, forever dependent. All potential forever neutralized.

If you are looking backwards, you will never move forward. What are “Ready Player One”, “Stranger Things”, “Blade Runner 2049” and the undying popularity of “Star Wars” but a kind of MAGA sublimated into aesthetic. A desire to return to an inaccessible past, using the language of genres that have historically pointed forward.

No Future for You

Mark Fisher, the great theorist of all lost futures, firmly demonstrated the link between late capitalism and corporate nostalgia (what Simon Reynolds calls “retromania”) when he wrote that:

 “neo-liberal capitalism has…systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new…as public service broadcasting became “marketized,” there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful.” (Ghosts of My Life, p. 15)

As corporations gradually colonize every aspect of our lives, as control becomes de-spatialized and we carry the office, the school, the prison around with us, there becomes less and less room for the new. We are sold the past and so the past is what we come to expect. We are taught to fear the strange, the unsettling and take comfort in the bosom of familiarity.

Utopian Dreams

It is up to us to demand the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncomfortable. We deserve a future, not the eternal prison of the past. If we’re ever to emerge from the suffocation of control, if we’re ever to breathe a breath that hasn’t come at a price, we need to remember how strange the future can seem and forget its false familiarity.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline