PAMELA ANDERSON : REVOLUTIONARY

Former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson says that the future will either be revolutionary or reactionary and that she wants to help build the revolutionary future.

ALTHOUGH SHE MIGHT have been an internationally recognised pin-up model back in the 1980s, former Baywatch actor Pamela Anderson's political activism has received scant recognition and even when it has been acknowledged, it has largely not been taken seriously. For the corporate media Pamela Anderson will always be girl with the turbulent private life, the girl who modelled for Playboy magazine and the girl who ran, in slow motion, down a Californian beach in a red swimsuit - and was watched by over one billion people in some 148 countries.

Her animal rights work, particularly with Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in the 1990s, caught the media's attention often because Pamela Anderson was involved. Her celebrity often got in the way of the issue she was trying to highlight.

Unknown to most, Anderson's politics have been moving steadily to the left. Unlike the notorious Bono, she hasn't sought to cultivate the friendship and support of the rich and powerful. Her conversations reveal a woman who has been doing a lot of reading and thinking. In various interviews she has referred to, among others,  Bertolt Brecht, Jeremy Corbyn and Karl Marx.

This month she came out in support of the gilets juanes (yellow vests) and, along the way, revealed a far more comprehensive and nuanced explanation for the protests than has been provided by much of the mainstream media and its battalion of columnists and pundits.

Anderson tweeted: “I despise violence … but what is the violence of all these people and burned luxurious cars, compared to the structural violence of the French – and global – elites?”

She went on to say that the protests "came from the rising tensions between the metropolitan elite and rural poor, between the politics represented by Macron and the 99% who are fed up with inequality, not only in France, all over the world,”

Her tweets provoked widespread reaction, not all of it favourable, and Anderson has carried on the conversation on her blog - which is well worth a read.

Her posts reveal a woman, now 51 years old, who has become something of a socialist. She certainly shares little in common with the delusions of a failed liberalism. To those who accused her of supporting violence, she writes:

'When some protesters destroy cars and burn shops, they symbolically attack private property that is the basis of capitalism. When they attack police officers, they symbolically reject and challenge repressive state forces - forces that primarily protect capital.

Moralising about burned cars and banks’ broken windows is misplaced. This must be seen in the context of the current status quo. A status quo in which the power of the powerful and the powerlessness of the powerless is maintained. A status quo of societies where only a few profit and the many lose.

Yellow Vests are calling for a new social justice order, for the right to live in dignity based on fair wages and a fair tax system. The only solution is to create such a system. A system that will stand for respect of community life: for redistribution of the wealth to the benefit of the people and the nation. Because the people have been excluded from the distribution of wealth thus far and have been left destitute.'

Anderson is explicit in her view that capitalism lies at the root of our problems and that mainstream politicians are doing little but vainly trying to  treat the symptoms:

'People in so many places do not feel represented by their politicians. They know that it doesn't really matter who they actually vote for because nothing much will change in their lives. Because the real power does not sit in the ballot box. It sits elsewhere. The power is in the global hands of big business and financial capital. '

On the question of climate change she rejects the proposition, favoured by our own Green Party, that there can ever be an environmentally friendly capitalism. In a recent interview with Jacobin she said.'

'I do not think the poor should pay for climate change. Yet it is the poor who are paying the biggest price. Some say that the protesters in France protested so they could continue polluting the planet. But I do not think this is true. They protest because the rich keep destroying the planet. And the poor are paying.'

Her argument for real change will annoy conservatives and liberals alike, who share a common loyalty to a failed political and economic status quo:

"We must stand against neoliberalism and its global and regional institutions. We must offer an alternative democratic and socially-just society, one devoid of social democratic compromises (especially those with big business)...We must stop believing that the current system is set in the stone with an inability to change. We must stop believing that what we have is the best possible system out there.'

Over a century ago Rosa Luxemburg famously said that the future would either be 'socialism or barbarism'. Anderson echoes Luxemburg: "The future will be either revolutionary or reactionary.. I want to build the revolutionary future."