Russell Brand has always courted controversy. From his short-lived days as an MTV presenter a good 15 years ago and his infamous encounter with Andrew Sachs’ answering machine in 2008 to his run-ins with paparazzi, he has been a favourite of the tabloid press for decades and one of the celebrities that respected middle-aged authority figures first point to when they’re looking to explain exactly what’s wrong with the youth of today.

For the last few years though, as I’m sure almost everyone knows, his chosen playground has been politics. Or, as I suspect he might put it, given his disenchantment with the politics of politics, justice – revolution, even. Revolution is, after all, the title of his most recent book, which I must confess I’ve not read. I saw it for the first time on sale at Urban Outfitters, and assumed rather snobbishly and hypocritically that a book sat on a shelf next to a stapler shaped like a bunny in a shop which has faced criticism for selling clothes that trivialise depression, school shootings and the Holocaust, could not really on a number of levels be, as the blurb suggests, “the beginning of a conversation that will change the world”.

My initial cynical reaction to seeing a book entitled ‘Revolution’ in a major chain shop was prompted by the idea that any truly subversive ideas it presented would surely be contradicted by its capitalistic and materialistic surroundings. More so when these surroundings have been suggested to profit from the commodification of ableism, the gun industry and anti-Semitism. When I put it that way, my reaction seems fair enough. But this reaction of mine is, I think, one that is illustrative of and, crucially, influenced by one of the major criticisms levelled at Brand: that he is a hypocritical sell-out, claiming to preach social uprising while sat firmly and comfortably on the throne of $15 million that is estimated to be his net worth.

This, again, is fair enough. But the problem I have with this criticism is that too often it comes from people who are themselves in no position to throw stones: those with a fair amount of money, influence and power, who do not agree with what Brand says and seek to sway others to their points of view. Not to create a caricature villain of the establishment right-wing sort – sometimes I don’t have to, but that’s beside the point – the fact remains that the ideas Brand preaches often directly attack their privileges and priorities. So while many of them deride him for being naive and immature, for his contentious past and for the long words he uses, some discredit him for hypocrisy from a falsely objective standpoint, failing to take into account the glass houses they’re standing in.

And this is what I’m wary of: the claim that Russell Brand is attention-seeking, commercialised and hypocritical is influenced strongly by those who are most at danger of being destabilised by him. Not, necessarily, that I think he has that power, because the real danger of this claim is not to Russell Brand. It’s to those he represents – because whether we like it or not, he has somehow become one of the millennial generation’s foremost representatives. We are so often accused of naivety, of immaturity, of bad behaviour and of throwing around big words and big ideas we don’t fully understand – and, yes, of materialism and hypocrisy when we suggest that the world could, perhaps, be better than it is now. This, of course, is a moot point – in a consumerist world, we cannot be blamed for being consumerist as well.

So when we criticise Russell Brand, we have to think about where exactly these criticisms are coming from, and who is voicing them. It’s worth saying, here, that I personally don’t support him wholeheartedly. His articles, otherwise interesting and enjoyable, often feature throwaway sexist remarks which fundamentally throw a spanner in the works for his plans for revolution by alienating half the people he is intending to support. I don’t believe that abstaining from voting is a good idea. I think many activists have voiced his ideas before, including those who don’t have the privileges he has and so have not been heard.

I empathise with his call for societal change, but I think that too many people are in too fragile a position for that to go well for anyone apart from those who are already stable, making it no change at all. I also don’t really know what practical solutions he’s offering, though that might be unfair of me to say. Perhaps he elaborates in his book.
But I’m saying all of this from a very different viewpoint to the white, straight, middle-aged and middle-class men who tend to write disapproving articles about him in newspapers from the Mail to the Guardian. I know that broadly all of us share a sense of disenchantment with the world as it is now, along with most of the people in our generation. I also have sympathy for the classist backlash he’s faced, including, but by no means limited to, those who ridicule his vocabulary.

Do I think that Russell Brand is starting a conversation that will change the world? No, not even slightly. But I do know that if the revolution he seeks does come, although I do not think he will or should lead it and I hope he’s gracious enough to know that too, he and I and most of the people I care about will be on the same side. And hopefully, one day, we’ll all see that better world.