A few short notes on a failing revolution.

What our governments are doing is wrong. But what our protestors, our supposed freedom fighters are doing is stupid. 

New products are sold to millions through advertising; and new ideas are sold to millions through advertising. The advanced capitalist system we live is not the same system that Marx wrote about in Capital. Socialists must begin to divert their brainpower to working out how their ideals exist within a context of this new world. The European working classes are not physically repressed; they will not rise up in glorious revolution against their oppressors. The working classes (if that term can even be used any more) are placated by this system; they are made content at the expense of ideology or belief. These people accept things that look nice and resist things that look ugly.  Our freedom fighters look ugly. They are resisted; not by police officers in body armour, but the minds of their countrymen. This fight is not against oppressors but against depressors.

You can only alter advanced capitalist systems where most people are happy through one of two ways:

a.     Civil War

b.     Advertising

Resistance, and unarmed protest cannot work in any meaningful way. The associations of such actions to the eyes of the multitude are inherently negative; irrespective of cause or intention. Systems must be gradually and intelligently manipulated or obliterated. This is the history of our nation; this is the binary state of existence in the modern age.

The danger with the first option, that of civil war, is of simple psychology; those capable of overcoming governments and nations, of destroying systems, have been proven repeatedly through out history to be both incapable of ruling in times of peace and incapable of giving up power. The force of will it takes to kill your way through your country, to separate families, kill men women and children seem to always leave scars that make it impossible to stop killing. This journey towards freedom seems only to end in tyranny.

The danger with the second option is no one has really tried to do it. That’s not to say that no one has ever thought to use advertising to sell political ideology; it is of course the benchmark tactic in any election. Normally however it used to sell benign differences to an apathetic public than skip to the back page of the newspaper or turn the channel over when newsnight comes on the tele. What if the carcophony of talented creatives and thinkers were to put their attentions to using new media to sell the idea of free education and of a return to habeus corpus to the public and politicians with a glossy smile and vast wit? What’s there to loose? Its got to be better than wasting your time “sitting in” and being either ignored or hated by the multitude of ineffectual half wits?