TALKING ’BOUT A REVOLUTION
I thought by this age I’d be a lot more relaxed about politics, happy to say, ‘I did my bit’, but whenever I have an audience in front of me, I find I’m compelled to really speak out. I feel as angry now as I did in my twenties.
If I look around the world, especially to the US, I’m in shock at the levels of racism still very much in evidence. I would never have predicted the rise of the alt-right, neo-fascists or the KKK, feeling so emboldened, so self-righteous, that they’d be taking to the streets and talking about their rights! And in the UK, I never imagined the EDL (English Defence League) or Britain First emerging, given that we’d seen off the NF ages ago. I knew we weren’t ever going to live in a perfect world, but by the 1990s I thought we’d come too far to ever go back.
I think it’s easy for people like me, who grew up in Birmingham, or for people who spend a lot of time in major cities, to think everyone is cool, but it’s really not like that in the majority of the UK. I believe it’s because politics is driven by fear – it keeps going on about the ‘other’. And it’s in areas where there are no black people that you seem to get the most fear, with people panicking, saying, ‘What if they all start coming here?’
Capitalism needs wars but it also needs a fear industry. It always has to have a new enemy. I was doing an interview a couple of years ago, where the interviewer played a recording of me speaking in the 1980s. Back then I said: ‘We always need an enemy; right now it’s the Russians but I can imagine in a couple of decades it being something like . . . Islam.’
When I think about the political landscape in the not-too-distant future, I believe capitalism will eat itself. The idea of any economy having perpetual growth is ludicrous. It’s like it relies on two big things, and they always talk about them, no matter what else is happening in the world. These are car sales and how the supermarkets are doing. Is Sainsbury’s making a profit? Is Tesco making a profit? And it’s like some big disaster if car sales dip by half a per cent, or Tesco’s margin drops a couple of million pounds. Then you hear: ‘Oh no, the economy’s broke and we’re doomed!’ To deal with that they have recessions and bail out the banks to pump up the bubble; then the bubble floats for a few years before it bursts again. This cycle of boom and bust is unsustainable. One day there’ll be a bust we cannot recover from. Then the most important currency won’t be made of silver, gold or paper – it’ll be made up of the relationships and trust with have with each other.
That’s no excuse to be lazy or to give up, though. We’ve still got to play our part to improve things. People are going hungry, we need to take care of our old folk, we need to provide kids with the best education they can get, but we can’t sit back and rely on capitalism to take care of it. We’ve still got to struggle, because it’s like all the rights and gains made to better people’s lives in the UK over the past sixty years are being chipped away.
I’m convinced the widening social gap started with Thatcher. People always quote her saying, ‘There’s no such thing as society’, but the one thing I recall her saying, which I thought was shocking, was that if a man is taking the bus at the age of thirty he’s a failure. That set the tone. Constant achievement became king, as if taking the bus meant a person was some kind of tramp. And this message fed into the ‘loadsamoney’ culture that’s still with us.
Before the 1980s, I never saw the kind of greed you have now, where people want to accumulate as much wealth as possible, not caring about others and stepping on them. I was listening to a Commons debate soon before this book went to press. Theresa May was hiding behind some statistics, and Jeremy Corbyn said to her: ‘Have you not seen the people sleeping in train stations? Have you not seen the soup kitchens?’ And no, they haven’t. The people who are really rich – or who facilitate obscene wealth – do not see, and cannot see.
One of my well-known poems is ‘Money Rant’. Although financial systems are complex, at a basic level there’s something very simplistic when you strip it down. In effect money is an IOU. It began in China, with people exchanging things. One day someone said, ‘I’ll give you a note.’ Then the ruling system took it over and said, ‘OK guys, we’ll do that.’
The Oxford Book of Money, published in 1995, used ‘Money Rant’ because they said my poem explained the culture of money really well and made that explanation accessible. Money only works because we believe in it. If I’m going to do a deal with you, and I give you money, you will accept it because you know that the person you go on to give it to will also accept it. If I go to a chimpanzee and he has grapes and I have a banana, we could swap. If I went to the chimpanzee and he has grapes and I only have a £5 note, he’s not going to be interested. He doesn’t know the narrative – the one that says: ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of . . .’ All the humans know the narrative.
When it comes to labelling me, I would say the closest description of what I am is an anarchist. People always mock you if you say that because they think it’s about going crazy, and I could respond by giving the examples of the Free Territory of Ukraine in 1918–1921, Catalonia between 1936 and 1939, and the many Asian and African communities that survive without help from a central government. But I don’t have to; look at what happened after the fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 – the immediate aftermath of that completely avoidable tragedy was an example of anarchy in action. At a time when people urgently and desperately needed their government and their local council, they weren’t there for them. So the people organised themselves. People who had counselling skills volunteered; others worked out where the donations would go; some set up food centres. All that assistance was done without government help.
If we are going to have government, then can we at least have responsible government? If someone asked me what I would do with the structure we have right now, I’d say renationalise the railways and keep the NHS out of private hands. But I come from the Marcus Garvey school of political thought – doing whatever is necessary to achieve something. Some aspects of life actually work well with a capitalist approach. Personally I’m quite competitive; if I’m playing dominoes or tennis, I want to win!
If you really want to mess up the economy, get everybody to grow their own food or do favours for other people. Can you imagine how much it would upset the ruling systems if people started growing their own food? One of the things they really don’t like is people saying, ‘Let’s be self-sufficient.’ But back in Jamaica, that’s how many people lived right up until recently. In fact, the simpler, more self-sufficient way of life is still thriving in parts of the Caribbean.
One time, in about 1987, in Jamaica, I gave my grandmother the equivalent of £60 in cash. And she said it was the most money she’d ever held in her hand in her life. I said to her, ‘But you’ve got a house, you’ve got a farm. You must have needed money for that.’ Her reply opened my mind to a different kind of economy.
‘No, we didn’t need money,’ she said. ‘Mr Baker over there, I gave him some yam, so he laid the foundations . . . to get the brickwork done I went to Mr Lawrence over there, and gave him some dasheen and sweet potato and did some childcare.’ To get to her land, she had to walk through other people’s plots, so it made real sense when she said the most important currency for her was the relationship she had with her neighbours.
When I asked if her garden was organic, she said, ‘I plant something here, then I plant something next to it that tells the flies to go away.’ Companion farming, it’s called. But she didn’t call it that; it was just natural. That’s why it’s so evil that you now have companies like Monsanto wanting to copyright rice or take seeds out of a natural crop so a person can’t grow it without having to buy the copyright version.
And look at the arms trade – something that is evil by definition. As this book goes to print, Saudi Arabia is waging a despicable war in Yemen and the UK government is doing nothing about it. It just keeps selling them more arms. This is an instance when we should be saying no but, because of shareholders, and how important economically the arms trade is, we don’t.
It’s amazing when you see a country that’s recently had a coup. You walk into a palace and think, This was recently a government. How were they overcome? Just a couple of props pulled out made it collapse. Say there’s ten props; you only need to take out a couple. In China their revolution was initially started by a few people talking in a room. We now know that what Mao in China, and Castro in Cuba, did was revolutionary even compared to other revolutions. Others might have appealed to students and intellectuals, but Mao and Castro, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, went to the poor people; they went to the fields and said, ‘See this land you’re working on, you can take it over. Come with us.’ By the time they got to the cities, they were massive.
These days, a lot of political discussion has shifted from being about class and inequality to being about personal identity. I used to have a simple formula: if you were upper or middle class, then you would inherit a house and/or money when your parents died, and if you were working class, you’d inherit debt. People were always worrying about how they’d pay for a relative’s funeral. But that’s all changed. If I had children they’d inherit my house, but I still wouldn’t see myself as middle class. People are confused about class identity now because those kinds of social markers aren’t so cut and dried. The labour force is fragmented and the concept of solidarity has been eroded by the culture of the individual.
I was speaking to this old-style socialist recently, and I realised how out of touch he sounded, talking about the rank and file, as if people still worked in factories and were going to down tools and march out on strike. Most of them are stuck behind desks and not even in a union. Exploitation is everywhere. All the factories I knew when I was growing up in Birmingham are now privately owned office spaces and workshops or loft apartments.
If you want to have a peaceful revolution, everybody needs to undergo a big mindshift and say: ‘We’re not paying for this. We’re not doing this.’ But these days it’s like everyone wants to go shopping. I look at advertising now and think, What the hell?! Do people really believe this nonsense? Capitalism is extremely seductive. It’s why I like to buy clothes that are out of fashion or see films once all the fuss has died down. I want to avoid the hype.
In China and other parts of the developing world, as capitalism takes hold, more people are getting an obsession with skinniness. Places where anorexia was unheard of thirty years ago are now subject to the same dogmas as the West. You see the obsession on social media with thinness via the craze for things like the thigh gap, or the rib cage; young people essentially oppressing themselves and each other for the fact they’re not skinny enough. It starts out with advertising, but anxiety about body image spreads like wildfire via social media platforms and is so corrosive to the young psyche.
As dominant as the cult of the individual seems to be, there are also numerous rewards for mediocrity. I was watching a breakfast TV show recently featuring a vlogger who had published a bestseller by writing about domestic stuff. All she was writing about was being at home with the kids. It didn’t sound like she had much of a sense of the world or what was going on politically; she was just writing about the day the washing machine broke down.
I thought back to my mum in the 1960s, washing all her clothes by hand; nappies made of terry cloth being boiled clean on a stove and seven kids to look after. These days people are being indulged with fame for mastering their kitchen utensils or baking a cake. All I know is that the world has changed a hell of lot since the days of Angela Davis.