Sex, drugs and revolution

If I can't dance like an idiot, it's not my revolution

I don’t own the copyright for this photo, but I am in it, so I’m borrowing it.

This article is a republished and re-edited version of one that was pulled after complaints from young people working at prominent consultancy firms…which kind of proved the point I was making.

When I used to work for Greenpeace in New Zealand, I suggested they open a pub. I wasn’t kidding. 

I knew they weren’t going to do it, but my reasoning was simple. 

Back when I was a student in Brighton in the UK I was a member of a place called the Cowley Club. It calls itself an “anarchist DIY social centre.” It’s a members-run co-operative that is a café and bookshop during the day and a members’ bar in the evenings. It also houses a radical library and has space for political and social groups to meet, plan and have events. 

That may sound like a place for getting pilloried over your mung bean korma for using the wrong pronouns. But if you’re a young person into a certain kind of politics you can go to the Club and get cheap food and booze. You can meet like minded people and have a really good time. 

In the wearying, earnest, consensus-infested world of today’s health-conscious activism the vital importance of this has been overlooked. Which means that most of what actually motivates mass movements has also been overlooked. 

My limited contribution to activism could have been primed by my Mum sitting me down in front of the news and telling me the world isn’t fair. I would love to claim that it stemmed entirely from a burning desire to be on the right side of history. But it was actually largely inspired by spending my teenage years dancing at drug fueled raves where activists also hung out. And I only actually took any action after meeting a 19 year old student activist wielding a cleavage I wanted to live in.  

I’m not the only one. And I’m not just being nostalgic for my own lost youth. A glance back through recent history shows this happening on a mass scale from epoch to epoch. Take the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s. The political upheavals of that time were intimately intertwined with an explosion of counter cultural merriment, as was the nature of the progress made. 

A generation of young people turned up at protests, actions, lectures and workshops. It was where they hung out with the grooviest guys and the sexiest chicks to the best soundtrack. It was where they could break social norms. They could get access to boundary-shattering alternate states of consciousness and generally have a blast.

It’s convenient for society’s cultural bulldozers to grind this aspect of political progress into the dust of conventional life. Either that or they ignore it altogether. But defying the stereotype of the drugged up ne’er do well, go back through the records and you find happy people having a good time and getting a lot of useful shit done. 

Today environmental organisations mostly try to recreate the politics without the party. Is it a coincidence, then, that the kind of sober, sensible earnestness we have forced on our teenagers has coincided with a period of relatively ineffective activism and unmolested destruction? I know, people are shitting themselves because people from Extinction Rebellion sit in the road for a bit or glue themselves to things, but it’s hardly the Red Army Faction is it? 

I think some of this can be traced back to a particular moment in history. It’s the moment we got rid of student grants around the early ‘90s. During the same period benefits dipped to carefully match the poverty line in societies becoming ever more expensive to live in. When we think about industrial society as a cancer, this is the moment it spread to the extremities of the body politic. This is where corporate capture came for the kids. 

There were some downsides to grants and the dole, sure. I spent my uni years being required at lectures and seminars from 8-13 hours a week. I did a degree in English with History at a very peripheral university, and was already relatively good at the subjects. So I spent a lot of afternoons drunk. I played Mario Kart at two in the morning at something like the level of a Phd. I dossed down with my girlfriend for weeks on end at a completely different university at the other end of the country. During that period we probably ended up with one too many wanna-be poets like me and not quite enough engineers, since she was one and had to actually turn up to her studies. 

But a sign of a healthy society is it’s ability to allow some people to not play the same game everyone else is. To live and think outside the box. To protest. To be allowed some youthful, living impulses. To be spared some time to just be, without a To Do list longer than the big bumper illustrated edition of War and Peace. 

A few years back here in New Zealand I ended up in a car full of students on the way to the Oxfam Trailwalker event. All of them were doing a subject like sport or art and business. I was appalled. It was like nobody had the bottle to get into ludicrous amounts of debt for something they actually loved and believed in any more. They felt forced to hedge their bets. Half their degree was dedicated to training them for some slightly bullshit job in the oil polluted heart of the corporate machine.  

And of course they worked like stink. Largely gone are the drinking games and lawn sofas. It’s all career plans on Gantt charts and interning for the United Nations. It’s disgusting.

When I was young, environmentalism involved quite a bit of circus skills and petty theft. Today, sustainability is a popular career choice. And I’m not sure that is an entirely good thing.  

I’m no longer surrounded by bedraggled hippies in home-made cardigans shouting at each other over wobbly stacks of robustly phrased pamphlets. I’m more likely to be with terrifyingly efficient people with several degrees and a MacBook Pro, showing me their waste busting Instagram channels.

These people have never woken up in an unfamiliar squat after a day at a riot and a night dusting themselves with sparkling dancing powders, and it shows. To crusty old gits like me their way of life seems almost as hopelessly entangled in the status quo as the lives of those of us with mortgages and children.

They’re lovely. They’re dedicated to the cause as they see it now. They’re probably far more effective human beings than I or many of my generation will ever be. But that’s my point. Maybe “effective” isn’t quite what we need. To me being busy and effective looks a whole lot like what got us into this mess in the first place. 

These are our brightest and best. They’re the people with nothing to lose if they shake our structures to their foundations. To paraphrase the late, great Rick Mayall, they’re supposed to be our wild eyed anarchists, on the last freedom moped out of Nowhere City, where the only place to put your underpants is on your head. But instead of dancing on burnt out police vans their jostling for jobs at corporations and consultancies. Instead of listening to Rage Against the Machine and Public Enemy they’re flipping through TikTok. They’re selling out faster than tickets to watch Piers Morgan have his head cut off.

There are parties going on, most of which I’m quite rightly not invited to. For all I know there may be altered consciousness going on too. There is some protest. But the real magic happens when they all come together.

If you’re young or alternative enough to think I am wrong I will ask you this: please, please prove me wrong. Disrupt this old white dude’s comfortable suburban existence, I beg you.

I’m not saying that I am going to take my younger colleagues out and dose their cappuccinos with hallucinogens. But I think there’s a signal here for what to look for if real change is about to emerge. A sign of the onset of genuine disruption will almost certainly be the return of starkly alternative lifestyles, hair cuts that scare parents and all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you can eat. Chances are I’ll probably miss most of it, again.

But of course, promoting all that won’t get government grants, corporate largess or donations from middle class people who fear their kids might actually rebel against their complicity.