Rather than being a well-schooled lefty having grown up around party conferences, meetings, socialist organisation and ideas etc (I’m thinking of perhaps Owen Jones, all credit to him) Russell Brand represents more clearly the kind of political journey that many “young” people (bit of a shorthand as Brand is himself 41 and his fans are as likely to be in their thirties as their twenties) have been on.
It’s the “Brand Generation” so to speak whose early adulthood was shaped by the financial crisis and the ongoing ‘War on terror’. They’ve become the most politicised. Brand has most support for his ideas in this loose social grouping, what has probably most accurately been described as Generation Rent. Brand’s engagement with housing issues is telling. His audience understand where he is coming from on this although his media attackers don’t. Brand has become a perhaps unlikely tribune of the oppressed. The right people get this point. Tribunes of the oppressed don’t need to be oppressed themselves, but I digress.
Brand has been on an obvious political journey. You can see this just by looking at his book titles. The first was called My Booky-Wook. The second, predicably, My Booky-Wook 2. The third book was called Revolution. Clearly something has happened to Brand between the publication of the second and third books.
We may not have all published books, but many of us have been on a similar political journey. My first political activity was the big anti war demos, against Afghanistan, and the really big one against Iraq. I got involved in organised politics by accident. I lived with a socialist at the same time the whole neoliberal system ran off a cliff. A perfect storm of interpersonal relationships, experience of what was going on politically in the outside world and reading stuff about socialism made me into a revolutionary. It’s the lefts job to maximise the chances that such transformations happen.
That in itself is a good reason to take Brand seriously and relate to him and his ‘audience’. I don’t know about you but I’m not so much interested in Brand the entertainer as Brand the political analyst and activist. The same goes I suspect for most his fans. A Guardian interviewer notes that all whilst interviewing Brand in private, fans kept coming up to him to talk to him exclusively about his Trews ‘vlog’ (a truly inspired political intervention in my view and one the left should start to replicate sharpish). Brand’s millions of twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of Youtube subscribers are signing up to hardcore politics presented in an accessible and lively way. It’s that simple.
Dan Poulton 