ABSTRACT
The British actor and comedian Russell Brand has recently turned into a celebrity propagating anti-capitalist values and preaching against exploitation and economic inequality. With tens of millions of views on his YouTube videos and equally high numbers of followers in his Facebook and Twitter accounts, in the span of around three years, roughly from 2012 to 2015, Brand grew to a spokesperson and symbolic representative of the anti-austerity movement by British mainstream media, a movement culminating in the massive rallies and student dissent of 2010 and 2011 as well as in numerous protests against the first Tory government. In November 2013, Brand gave an interview to the journalist Jeremy Paxman for the BBC show Newsnight where he advocated, among other things, a ‘revolution’ and a ‘massive redistribution of wealth’ (2014). The clip became viral (currently more than 11 million views on YouTube) with Brand gaining widespread popularity and raising debate in left-wing and anarchist circles and the press. In 2014, he urged for a non-violent insurrection against the current political system in his eloquently titled book Revolution, citing Gandhi, Jesus Christ, and Che Guevara as his sources of inspiration. The same year, he founded a daily online show on his YouTube channel called The Trews (from the words ‘true news’), taking a militant position on a variety of everyday social issues. From these platforms, as well as from his participation in anti-austerity demonstrations and anti-gentrification protests, Brand launched critiques against corporations, the political establishment, and the media industry, encouraging and making public, as the Marxist commentator Mark Fisher puts it, ‘a call to arms’ across the British society (2013).
