In his quest for a global revolution, political activist Russell Brand is eyeing crypto currency and crowd funding as a way of negating and avoiding the capitalist system. Such combination can set the stage for a new era, believes RT’s Max Keiser.
Russel Brand has long been promoting organized civil disobedience to bring about a political revolution and fair distribution of wealth unfeasible under capitalism. With his calls sometimes bordering on anarchy, Brand has emerged as a leftist political figure seeking social justice and decentralization of state control over the individual.
“I think what is important is to organize and to disobey. To be really, really disobedient. Revolution is required. It is not a revolution of radical ideas, but simply the implementation of the ideas that they say we already have,” Brand was telling his supporters as he campaigned for resistance.
Now Brand has taken one of these revolutionary ideas, the cryptocurrency, and teamed up with StartJoin crowdfunding platform to help people break away from conventional monetary and financial systems.
“Essentially what we need is alternative systems and models, and alternative currency is an integral part of that,” Brand told Max Kaiser, the co-guru behind the financial side of the StartCOIN project and the host of RT’s Kaiser Report.
“I’m very interested in setting up social enterprises, such as our cafe that we’ve started, replicating that model more and more,” Brand explained. “Small businesses, practical, functional things where people can come together in an entrepreneurial spirit, creatively, and work together – hopefully ultimately using an alternative currency and completely negating and avoiding the system.”
“The more I deal with bureaucracy, the more I deal with consumerism, the more I think that there is really very little it can offer us,” he added.
Brand’s latest project is aimed at promoting digital literacy, to further boost online activism. By raising £150,000 for at least 1,000 laptops he is planning to give away for free, Brand wants to make the voices of even the most marginalized individuals in the community heard.
And now let's get the digital literacy project funded! http://t.co/KrHUVcsXvF#digitalliteracy#hackney#youthworkshttps://t.co/Db4JyyeuP5
— StartJOIN (@StartJOIN) April 15, 2015
StartJOIN platform calls itself a “new style of crowd funding technology” that utilizes social media and crowd technology to create a launch pad for projects to flourish. The platform rewards active community members with crypto-coins that can be on backing other projects, exchanged or cashed out.
“This is quantitative easing for the people, you can spend it on the projects that you are endorsing and behind,” Max Keiser stated, adding that one could of course cash these coins out as well. “This is a currency that could be a currency of the revolution.”
The emergence of decentralized crypto currencies such as Bitcoin now challenging central banks has redefined the “economics and money”of the 21 century, said Keiser.
“Bitcoin, StarCOIN and StartJOIN, combined with Russel Brand’s political revolution can now set the stage for a new era,” Kaiser proudly proclaimed.
In one of his previous projects, Brand asked backers to help make StartCOIN a “true currency of the people, for the people” and after the goal was reached – distributed hundreds of self-branded scratch cards with thousands of free StartCOINs.
#Startcoin Scratch-cards. Thank you @StartJOIN We Love Startcoin....... pic.twitter.com/buT884vEjT
— Europe Crypto Group (@alexcrypto) April 2, 2015
“Part of the beauty of StarCoin is that we have approximately $2-3 million to give away in the next 2-3 months,” Kaiser says.
“We’re giving millions of dollars away to people using scratch cards and using it online to fund these projects that are funding the basis of a political revolution that is Russel Brand’s revolution. So this is a new economy, a new currency.”