📖The Intellectual Left Are Fucking Bollocks On “What to Do”
Guardian columnist Owen Jones and ex-city trader, Gary Stevenson's latest video, Why We're In This Mess is great on the no-brainers. For example, in a stagnant economy, if the rich pass a tipping point of wealth, they eat up the poor. Well, nothing particularly new there - just what Marx was saying. I played Monopoly every Sunday for years when I was a kid and, if you are reasonably clever, you soon work out that as soon as you tip into owning a certain number of properties the other players are exponentially done for.
All well and good. But then, in the last five minutes, they move to “We have to give hope” and well - what's the plan? Owen is “supporting” independents and Gary wants people to listen to him more: What I call the macro delusion and the information delusion. What they are saying is so dumb it makes me want to throw myself over a cliff. All they are doing is creating even more despair and thus passivity.
Gary, quite understandably, can't get his head around why, given he has earned shit loads of money, the government and academics won't listen to him. At the same time, both of them don't want to listen to people who know how to build political power and get taxes on the rich.
That's where I come in. My team have created the three biggest climate/social movements in the UK - XR, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil. We developed a detailed integrated mobilisation model and replicated it in 10 Western countries - creating the biggest campaigns in 5 of them in two years. If you are a social scientist - i.e. you’re familiar with complexity - you know that is pretty amazing. Just as you know Gary is cool for getting his predictions right several times in a row. Why? Because he has a different theory of how the world works - and so he can make lots of money.
So guess what - why have I been successful in building political power from literally £250 in the bank and 3 people in a room? Because I have a totally different theory of how the world works to all the NGOs that have 10s of millions and do fuck all.
Is anyone in the system interested in speaking with me? No. I have been almost completely ignored.
By “the system” I am talking about Owen and Gary, and all the rest of the intellectual Left who continue to be completely clueless on how to build political power. They haven't even got to page 2 on the basics. (All of which I've outlined in my podcast, Designing The Revolution)
Don't get me wrong, no doubt about it, they are nice and moral people but, as Gary says, we are facing fascism. And that is going to really fucking hurt. I mean physically. People will get beaten up, get shot, get no help at the hospital, and die an early miserable death. That's what's going to happen to you reading this.
Add that onto the climate crisis, and this time round it’s going to go on forever and then everyone is going to die - hundreds of miles of rotting corpses. What do you think extinction is going to look like? It’s not a video game.
In other words, ignoring how best to change things is no fucking joke. Nothing could be more serious - why do you think I’m swearing? So please stop being stupid. Look at the evidence, check out who makes things tick, bring them into the room, and take a load of notes.
Owen and Gary - stop bollocking around on “What needs to happen”. Have me on your YouTube shows and I will go through the deal in 40 minutes and then have a concrete pathway to action. It's not complicated. Just do it.
Find out more at my monthly Zoom talks.
I've got two focuses:
- Revolution - Building social formations to create revolution and guide moments of social disruption.
- A Balanced Society - Building the new civilisation based on a new balance of deliberative democracy, compassion, and limited consumption.
Sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. Alternatively, you can now join a new collaborative project I'm helping with called Humanity which is aiming to build the new world ahead based on deliberative democracy.
