Most of you have probably seen this making the rounds along with the rather sensationalist description as him having "started a revolution", so I thought I'd get a discussion started here.
http://gawker.com/russell-brand-may-...ght-1451318185
My thoughts are first that the last supposed "revolution" (namely the occupy movement, which Brand mentions in the interview) petered out after achieving precisely nothing, aside from Brand's valid point that putting the 1% and 99% into popular parlance does at least draw attention to income disparity.
Second, I have a great degree of skepticism how Brand's new world order would actually work. Profit is bad? Massive corporate taxes? Some measure of redistribution of wealth I can maybe get behind, but haven't we seen that the profit motive is what makes humans do anything at all? If we remove the profit motive don't we need coercion to make people do anything?
For example, if there's no incentive (of profit) to produce food, industrial agriculture will grind to halt. How are we going to feed the world's people? Out of the kindness of our hearts? How are we going to heat our homes? Any political revolution that doesn't address the fact that 7 billion people need their basic needs met (and I realize that a good portion of those people's needs are not being met at present) is a non-starter for people like me. It's going to make things a hell of a lot worse before they get better.
But I'd like to hear from people who want to start throwing bricks into factories, since I'm pretty jaded and cynical about people in general.