We shouldn't be shocked by Brand's "U-Turn". Flickr/jessie essex. Some rights reserved.Russell Brand’s last minute U-turn – first endorsing voting, then endorsing Labour – has been greeted with a mixture of shock and cynicism. In fact, if you look past the broader narrative that he weaves and all the revolutionary iconography that accompanies it, and see the actual political programme that Brand is putting forward, his endorsement of Labour is entirely consistent. What is more interesting is the misunderstanding that makes it look surprising, one which confuses edgy aesthetics with radical politics.
Since his 2013 Newsnight interview, Russell Brand has become a poster boy for the extra-parliamentary left. The merits of his exact role in promoting leftwing ideas and giving profile to grassroots campaigns – and the complicated implications of using celebrity politics – is a well-trodden topic. But Brand’s intervention into the mainstream is certainly not just self-promotion, and he has undoubtedly made a contribution to mainstreaming and developing an ‘anti-establishment common sense’, striking a chord with a range of already existing political movements.
In so far as we focus on tactics and tone, Brand is a genuine challenge to the political establishment. He talks openly about ‘revolution’, even if it is softened with an almost spiritual insistence that the revolution will be “peaceful, effortless and joyful”; he emphasises the power of ordinary people to ‘rise up’. Both Occupy and many of the smaller campaigns that Brand has befriended are centred on direct democracy and direct action, being prepared to defy the law and the establishment-approved boundaries of dissent. This willingness to break the mould of passive protest, and the implicit emphasis on the prefigurative politics that has remained a feature on the left since the anti-globalisation movement, is what has won Brand so many willing ears on the otherwise deeply cynical anarchist left.
