What It Means to Be a Rebel in the 21st Century

As the Covid crisis deepens, we can witness a status quo fighting for its life. Behind the hyperreal shows of daily death updates, gloomy economic forecasts, and personal “lockdown stories”, some painful yet all-too familiar questions emerge. Why are governments so focused on keeping low-interest-rate credit and subsidies flowing to businesses? How about those who fall between the cracks? Why do property owners receive a “mortgage holiday” but renters in precarious situations nothing? When will there be a Universal Basic Income, which is widely seen as the best answer to ensuring a degree of protection for the most vulnerable in our increasingly disrupted world?

This feels like the beating heart of neoliberalism exposed. The vast and determined purchasing schemes of central banks, otherwise known as “Quantitative Easing”, maintain stability by systematically injecting liquidity into financial markets to make sure the stock market and other markets remain afloat. In the banking sector, for example, under the current stressed conditions, the private market scarcely exists, as state subsidies underpin the lending mechanisms of financial institutions.

This vast grey area of under the table private-public “co-dependency” shows the one key marketing point of neoliberalism – that the natural wisdom of free markets is an efficient wealth-producing mechanism – is a sham. Not that we didn’t already learn that lesson in the last financial crash. States will rush to the defence of big capital under the banner of stability, what Grace Blakely describes as “corporate welfare”. That response might be more palatable if they did the same for ordinary people. But more often than not they don’t. Many jurisdictions they have done the opposite, as a decade of harsh welfare reforms under austerity can testify. And we’ve become so used to this new reality that we scarcely question the strangeness of politicians and ideologues venerating market wisdom while blatantly propping up the markets, including businesses that might otherwise have failed. When questioned, the response is a shrug and a repetition of the word stability.

But stability for whom? Why must the system survive at all costs? Why must we sleepwalk through environmental catastrophe and spiralling inequalities, as if nothing is really the matter except a slightly deflated GDP? Does the stability and strength of one have to come at the weakness and exploitation of another? Can’t there be a middle ground between maintaining stability, introducing harder regulatory measures to accelerate a transition to a just green economy, and reducing inequalities?

Yet it is the same old story. This is what it means to live in the 21st Century: to feel like a sleepwalker, a terminally ill patient who has been forbidden to wake up. It is, of course, useful for a certain caste of capital-owning, baby boomer neoliberals to enforce the status quo at every turn. They have already sealed off their own private gardens in the anxious maze. By being born at the right time, they were able to catch the post-war boom, buy properties and build solid stakes, just in time to close the door behind them and laud the benefits of the state-subsidised “free” markets. Millennials, frequently stereotyped as superficial, “avocado-eating” hipsters, have been weirdly marginalised in this dynamic as if late-stage capitalism means the resurrection of Moloch, the child-eating Semite god that Alan Ginsburg howled against:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

***

The charades of democracy provide some degree of ostensible validation to the internecine warfare characterised by the defence of capital at the expense of everything else. When there is an illusion of meaningful debate, there is a sense that one’s own voice might have been considered, that capitalism will pull through eventually and a magic tide will lift all boats. Democracy is a useful hyperreal show, a pretence that communication is forthcoming. However, in the context of party politics, which is skewed in the favour of neoliberal policy-making, what does free speech and expression actually achieve? The voice of the have-nots, the majority of those born too late to benefit from the post-war boom, is of minimal interest to central authorities, whose primary concern is the defence of capital. Free speech has taught people to speak more freely, and politicians to seal their ears shut.

Rebellion starts in the stomach. A sinking feeling of the world not right, of things arranged for the benefits of others, of humiliation and exclusion. Its purest expression is rage. And then the rebellion rises to the heart, causing grief, and finally the mouth, inciting expression. Stuck beneath the weight of so much hypocrisy, you want to cry and shout. You want to fight the injustice.

Some believe in the cathartic, restorative properties of violence. Karl Marx is famous for advocating the baptisms of fire and blood in the guise of communism. The former slave, Frederic Douglas, also vouches for the necessity of violence to achieve any meaningful political change:

Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

I appreciate these views. However, after reading the writing of Carl Jung, I have also become more aware of the dangers of formulating a “heroes and traitors, good and evil, us and them” approach. There are plenty of historical antecedents to corroborate this concern. In 1918, the destruction of the old Russian ruling class gave birth to another. A diehard revolutionary can morph into an authoritarian patriarch when the tables turn in his favour. To use the Jungian vocabulary, the ideals of the Puer Aeternus archetype – the child-like visionary and rebel -  can slowly mature over time into the rigid, reactionary Senex archetype, who is concerned primarily with the maintenance of authority. Thus Galileo was put under house arrest for questioning the world view of Christianity, itself born from the ideas of a crucified rebel.

The “us and them” approach often feels less about delivering justice than a more primeval sense of projecting the shadow onto perceived oppressors, of dividing countries into black and white, heroes and traitors, good and evil, ignoring the more delicate human nuances behind the scapegoating and the broad-brushed polemics. When in the wrong hands, morality itself can be a source of injustice, used to serve private, unconscious agendas of hate.

Not that I don’t believe in rebellion as a means to achieve progress. As Frederic Douglas rightly says, change doesn’t happen without action. I am also an admirer of the work of Extinction Rebellion, an organisation that excels at immediate protest, even if it sometimes lacks a clear vision of an alternative system to which humanity must transition. My main concern is that the “us and them” approach can play into the hands of the system. By raging against the shadow, you put the shadow on the defensive, and can even strengthen the shadow. It also enables neoliberals to undermine progressive movements by picking holes in their “us and them” narratives and deride them as unrealistic and childish.

***

In this digital age, where identity is wrapped up in the 24/7 online spectacle, there are other reasons to be cautious of displays of rebellion. In her popular book “Trick Mirror”, Jia Tolentino explores the idea of rebellion as a commoditised expression of self-identity, as hashtags, such as the famous METOO hashtag, foster a sense of shared injury, and enable social media activists not only to fight an unjust patriarchy but also boost their own online presence and win followers. Revolution, in this sense, has the risk of turning into a hyperreal game of self-promotion, with much said and little done.

The fragmented terrain of micro-protests, each one focused on a particular nuance of injustice in the capitalist system, bears witness to the capacity of capitalism to alienate even those who ostensibly work for the resistance. Instead of focusing their energies in a coordinated fashion, “activists” pick their own slice of the discourse market, their hyper-specialised –ism, their angle of approach, apply for PhD funding, and perpetuate the illusion that a lot of noise on different topics is symptomatic of progress. Thus the postmodern often prefers to do what Tolentino describes as substituting “doing with showing”, a tendency that has accelerated with the rise of the internet.

It is worth remembering that fragmentation is neither inevitable nor even a long-standing phenomenon. One supposes that Martin Luther King, a figurehead for civil rights activism, would be surprised by the single-issue nature of the METOO or Black Lives Matter movements. For King, the struggle against racial injustice was simply one part of a larger struggle against the mechanisms of capitalism. In his famous 1967 Riverside Church speech, King said:

​When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Throughout his life he attacked American capitalism and promoted policies that align with democratic socialism, such as better wealth distribution, a guaranteed annual income, constitutional amendments to secure social and economic equality, and greatly expanded public housing. “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter,” King is widely quoted as asking, ​“if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?”

His comments seem particularly poignant in these days of online “activism”, in which public displays of anger, trolling and “cancel culture” can be used as a means for self-promotion. There is also the dystopian tendency of large companies with shady practices to “image wash” by hijacking the diversity or race equality agenda to conceal their own abusive tendencies. I used to work at a large company where un-unionised employees were routinely harassed, overworked and underpaid. There was a real sense of helplessness among most of the “grunt” workers. The board of governors never seriously addressed these issues, but used any kind of formal public statement to trumpet their “diversity and gender equality programs”, patting themselves on the back for doing such a great job.

Moving forward to Joe Biden’s recent acceptance speech, one is haunted by the way Biden’s self-congratulation on diversity issues lacks even a single mention of the spiralling inequalities that helped set the scene for Trumpism in the first place:

I am proud of the coalition we put together, the broadest and most diverse in history. Democrats, Republicans and independents. Progressives, moderates and conservatives. Young and old. Urban, suburban and rural. Gay, straight, transgender. White. Latino. Asian. Native American. And especially for those moments when this campaign was at its lowest – the African American community stood up again for me. They always have my back, and I’ll have yours. I said from the outset I wanted a campaign that represented America, and I think we did that.

Postmodern fragmentation allows the powerful to pick and choose a la carte from the smorgasbord of protest movements to find the ones that enhance their own image without actually having to transition away from the current form of capitalism.

Let us return to Martin Luther King: “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter, if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” To this comment I would add: “what does it matter if the finger that pushes the drone strike button is black, white, brown, gay or transgender? There will still be suffering.”

***

To this list of rebellion woes, I would like to add another facet of late-stage capitalism that may also contribute to alienation: academia.

Radical academia exists in almost every industrial university complex in the Western world. Bright-eyed 18 year-old adolescents are routinely spoon-fed Foucault and Derrida upon entering the academies. Such thinkers have equal disdain for contemporary society and the common man, who cannot, one imagines, digest the jargon loaded texts of the deconstructionists. These initiation rites inculcate the early sense that revolution is an elite activity, something that takes place behind university walls, a club to which you need a PhD to join and be fully accepted.

Those who do join the good fight may become public speakers (e.g. a Noam Chomsky or a Slavoj Žižek), with a desire to popularise revolutionary ideals and actively engage with politics. Or they may end up suffering from what I call “institutional introversion”, a spiritual and intellectual condition characterised by would-be revolutionaries investing their chief reserves of energies into talking among themselves, each one picking and choosing a corner of the discourse market to chew over. I am often impressed by not only the zeal of academics, but also their constant busy-ness, the immense pressure placed on them to produce papers and build careers within the confines of university walls. It doesn’t matter whether the papers are on Karl Marx or Freidrich Hayek, they still have to produce for a living.

Late stage capitalism is skilfully poised to counter resistance by absorbing and re-appropriating revolutionary energy through the matrix of academia: less a question of divide and rule, than fragment and consign to irrelevance. It is no coincidence that the rise of neoliberalism has come hand in hand with the rise of radical academia. That doesn’t mean that radical academia doesn’t have the solutions to the problems of today; paradoxically - they do - it just means the format in which those solutions are presented is often one of disconnection and alienation, of “institutional introversion”. Without a single, codified, holistic ideology, such as the democratic socialism that Martin Luther King envisioned, there is little that rebels can do except collectively bang their heads against the wall.

That said, some excellent, more general reading books have emerged in recent years. Such books provide, in relatively easy terms, an anatomy of the structural problems that have given rise to the extinction crisis, the housing crisis, the inequality crisis, the climate crisis, etc. The next step is to combine the insights of these books and create a new ideology that lays out a clear blueprint for a better world with concrete policy recommendations.

***

To return to Carl Jung and the shadow...

Many of us instinctively empathise with the plight of the weak and vulnerable. Empathy is a powerful tool that nature has given humanity for the benefit of everyone, since, in the interdependent webs of life, collective destiny and individual destiny are inextricably intertwined.

The problem arises when our unconscious is saturated with crude and oversimplified representations of revolution narratives, what could be appropriately labelled as the “Disney-fication” of revolution. When Christianity, with its eternal crusade against the shadow-devil, merges with consumer capitalism, the result is an absurd, saccharine spectacle in which righteous revolutionaries triumph over an evil empire, a spectacle that is devoid of nuance and roots its reality in vague gestures towards the “bad guys” of Nazi Germany. Hence Star Wars, the stormtroopers, and the association of revolutionary activity with naïve and pure Luke Skywalkers, together with a host of cuddly teddy-bear-type creatures.

However, revolution, which depends on imperfect politics, is messy and complicated; good and evil is rarely clear-cut. Yes, on one hand, the current form of capitalism, which has ushered in the “sixth mass extinction” phase, is clearly capable of immense “evil”. Yet stereotyping everyone who works in a car factory or oil company as evil is clearly an exaggeration. We are all born in the lap of capitalism, and so we are all, to some degree, the children of capitalism – both lackey stormtrooper and Luke Skywalker, a complex blend of identities. The reduction of revolution to cuddly good versus disfigured evil diverts attention from the complexities of the present, inviting us to wallow in infantile fantasies rather than address reality effectively. It seals the ears, prevents listening to the other, instigating an unhelpful “shadow” projection on all the objects of perceived evil.

It is no coincidence that Disney has recently purchased the Star Wars Franchise. In fact, the real surprise is that this didn’t happen a long time ago.

***

I would like to conclude this essay on the challenges faced by 21st century revolutionaries by thinking of the ways in which we, as children of capitalism, can re-orientate our consumerism-saturated consciousness.

Philip Levine once said that poetry can restore “meaning to language” vandalised by consumer capitalism. Think of all those relentless advertisements, those quick fix uses of language, such as Big Mac, or deep clean, to associate words with products. Think of those relentless calls to “succeed” and “be the best”, those sound bite stories of success that gloss the hyper real shows, making us, ever more inclined to consider “the ideological assurances of wealth and fame as the highest human good”, as millennial essayist Alex Mazey puts it.

By forcing us to slow down and reflect on deeper meanings, poetry provides an antidote to the “modern man on the rush gotta get rich or die trying” culture. Since poets are universally poor, the heroism of poetry lies solely in the artful use of words, the restoration of spiritual value to a conscious mind distracted by the hyper-real shows of late-capitalism. 

Here is a piece of poetic prose I recently wrote on the subject of rebellion:

What if the core crushed by so much exposure signals something real – how then do we replace the overstimulated highways that cough their final rites, their passages of confusion? Do threads ravelled by centuries in the making open doors? Do crooked paths, the more absurdist shades of grief, create vision?

I have contained nothing and everything inside this swollen dream;

I am determined to strip the ideological assurances of wealth and fame as the highest human good and discover what, if anything, lies beneath them.

I want to discover truth.

Is it a rebellion to think? Should thinking relegate itself to blood, sinking into the arteries, the acidic nervous system, the stifled spaces; there, where a secret, desperate voice is lost among the hyperreal shows.