Brat socialism

Call me a brat but I think we should accept nothing less than a system that delivers these three basic freedoms

Postcard from exhibition by Gambinya Thelma Burke in Melbourne, July 2008.

Yes it did take me a year to riff off the whole Charli XCX ‘Brat Summer’ trend. That’s how plugged into social media I am. My brain can get addicted to absolutely anything except a) gambling and b) social media.

Anyway, over the year, the ‘Brat’ idea has percolated and blended with something that I have long known: that my solidarity with others and insistence that we can do better than capitalism comes from being a brat.

I’m someone that has always had an instinctive solidarity across all kinds of divides. I’ve always been able to identify with people that our ruling class tells us are untouchables, whether that be a migrant (which I literally am), a prisoner, a drug addict, a homeless person. I’ve never assumed that there’s anything other than a tiny thread separating me from any of those positions.

This probably has something to do with my brown immigrant and Jewish family background. My brother and I were literally raised to the mantra of ‘don’t ever think that it won’t happen to you’. Trust me, I don’t.

Having said this, I have also been raised with certain privileges: a British passport, food on the table, a roof over my head and a ‘good education’. Until Brexit I was free to live across the EU and to get visa waivers for up to three months in many other countries. I haven’t had to do the most low-paid and dangerous work. And I’ve mostly had my basic health needs met.

Whenever these basic freedoms get violated, I react with utter incredulity and outrage — because I expect to be able to live a moderately decent life. We have been bludgeoned into thinking that this demand, to have a livable life, is the height of spoiled entitlement. Well then bring it on, call me a brat. But because of my solidarity, I extend this expectation and outrage to everyone in the world. I’m a brat on behalf of everybody. And this is where my political vision comes from.

I’m a brat about many things but here I’ll briefly discuss three: work, borders and health.

Work

I have a friend whose husband has a full time, reasonably well-paying desk job about which he is 100% indifferent. Outside of that, he is an active father to two young kids and sometimes gets to see his friends and play football. I’ve never heard him complain about his lot. He sees his work as a minor inconvenience that he has to do for money, and he gets his meaning and happiness from the other parts of his life.

I wish I could be so zen about work, but for me, having to do pointless drudgery to stay alive is a source of bitter resentment. Call me a brat but I simply do not have the energy, the very life-force, to spend my best hours of the day doing stressful, soul-sucking tasks for no reason other than ultimately to make some rich dude even richer.

And we’re talking about the ‘good’ jobs here. We’re not even talking about the poultry farmers who have to wear diapers because they’re not allowed toilet breaks, or any other number of hazardous, degrading jobs that don’t even pay enough to live on.

The ultimate outrage is that these are often the jobs that actually contribute to society — like food production and care and domestic work — and that we should be valuing the most. Meanwhile, some of the most amply remunerated jobs are not just pointless but actively destructive — just think of the arms industry, fossil fuels, big tech and vast swathes of the finance sector.

Those who regularly read my work know that I’m constantly moaning about work and frequently use the anthropologist David Graeber’s concept of ‘bullshit jobs’. It’s basic brat common sense that all work that doesn’t actually contribute to everyone’s wellbeing should be ditched immediately and that the economy should be organised around doing things that actually make our lives better.

Borders

There’s nothing more dissonant than going on your cute little family holiday via the Channel Tunnel and entering the hellish dystopia of the border crossing at Calais. All that steel and razor wire just to keep out little ole me? Well, maybe not me but the parallel me who happened to be born in a country where they don’t have the ‘good’ passports.

Just as work under capitalism is a hard pass for me, I find it unacceptable that some faceless monolith has the right to tell me where I can and cannot go. How dare some agent of state violence keep me apart from my family or prevent me — either at a tap on a keyboard or at the tip of a machine gun — from making a home with my beloveds?

The criminal activity of ICE in the US is rightly making headlines, but it’s not just rogue border agencies but borders themselves that are tools of unspeakable violence. Brat common sense tells us that it’s time to bin them, not just for white South Africans but for everybody.

Health

I have a chronic inflammatory illness that I was diagnosed with in 2017. They don’t know exactly what causes it but ‘environmental’ factors play a significant role. What are these ‘environmental’ factors, exactly? Microplastics, air pollution, forever chemicals in our water and food. I now deny my daughter strawberries because of the hazardously high levels of PFAS pesticides.

Basically, I have been poisoned by capitalism. Newham, the working class, immigrant borough of London where I grew up, has some of the worst air pollution in the whole of the UK.

But, again, I’m one of the ‘lucky’ ones here. I’m not, to give just one example, the mama of one of the many babies in the Niger Delta — babies just like mine — born with serious birth defects and ultimately having their tiny light extinguished, linked by Amnesty to Shell’s toxic oil leaks and spills.

There are so many ways in which health comes under brat socialism but let’s start with this basic brat maxim: we should all live in freedom from having our health and our glittering home planet Earth ravaged for the sake of our rulers’ profits and power.

Brat revolution

We are told that it’s much too much to expect that we can actually live decent lives on a flourishing planet. We’re told that we have to compete over scraps. Well, if being a brat means accepting nothing less than a good life for everyone in the world, then viva la brat revolution.