Millennials might not have a viable entry into the housing market, stable job prospects or much hope of living in a world unaffected by the worst of climate change, but there is one thing that we’re more than sorted for, thank you very much, and that’s advice doled out by boomers.

Publications as once vital as the Sydney Morning Herald have spent the last few years slowly going to shit, transforming into soapboxes accessible only to those with a major in world politics, a crippling mid-life crisis and a tweed jacket with dinky leather patches sewed onto the elbows, and younger Australians can’t move but for bumping into headlines screaming about how they’ve ruined one obscure industry after the other. Boomers have a stranglehold on media outlets in this country – and they’re using them to lecture us.

Razer has the ability to cut through the cocktail party fart-sniffing that has somehow become the standard for comedy.

To that end, there are some who might be understandably wary of a book like Helen Razer’s recently released Total Propaganda, a 230-something page long diatribe designed to teach the philosophy of Marx to “the angry and the young”. After all, in the hands of a lesser author, the work could have easily been boring at best and actively insulting at worst; one more opportunity for millennials to get their ears chewed off by slobbering geriatrics ever ready, in Razer’s own words, to “write their shit about how young people aren’t buying homes because they’re too busy stuffing themselves with brunch and Tinder cock.”

But there is a lot separating Razer from the stale farts and muckrackers stinking up our overcrowded media industry. For a start, she’s funny – and not funny in the way that we tend to use that word while talking about radio personalities and celebrity authors in this country (i.e. to mean “about as funny as a multi-car pile-up”), but genuinely, actually funny.

Eminent Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek is described as a “mutant brat”.

Like some unholy combination of Jonathan Swift and Lenny Bruce, Razer has the ability to cut through the deluge of literary allusions and cocktail party fart-sniffing that has somehow become the standard for comedy around these parts, and there are moments in Total Propaganda that are laugh out loud hysterical, amongst them a bold, two paragraph long rant in which Razer turns her powers of deconstruction onto Gwyneth Paltrow and her vaginal steam cleans.

So no, Propaganda is no bone-dry lecture, nor boring dinner table chinwag; it’s a shitstorm of cuss words, vicious insults and multiple synonyms for the word “fuck.” Eminent Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek is described as a “mutant brat”; 45th president of the United States Donald Trump as a “broken toilet”; and even Marx, a thinker for whom Razer has considerable respect, is a “bugger” and a mind fucker.

Nor is Total Propaganda a distilled semester at a second-rate university, or one of those agonising textbooks you were forced to pore over in high school that tried to make maths cool or science “radical!” Razer doesn’t tell as much as she shows, and her book is peppered with references to contemporary politics that never feel strained or hamfisted.

Even Trump, despite getting one verbal lashing after another, is not really the villain of Total Propaganda.

We are, after all, living in distinctly shitty times; trapped on one side by a frothing, rabid bunch of radicalised neo-Nazis high on energy drinks and their nightly furry porn binges and on the other by a bunch of pantsuit clad centrists with all the political acumen and morality one would find at a car salesman convention.

Razer knows this all too well. Although she saves considerable ire for “morbid symptom” and all-around tool Trump, her (admittedly not limitless) faith rests in socialists like Bernie Sanders and the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn rather than Clinton, who, although “not the devil”, is one more capitalist shill in a world full of capitalistic shills, and even the now beloved Barack Obama, who Razer points out deported more “illegal” aliens than any other president in US history.

Like Sanders and Corbyn, Razer has faith that the world will be saved by the young, and the alienated, and the pissed-off.

And even Trump, despite getting one verbal lashing after another, is not really the villain of Total Propaganda. That is entirely the point of Razer’s precise takedowns, and her use of swathes of statistical data that indicate capitalism makes us unhappy, unfulfilled and even psychologically traumatised: there is no one single author of the horror novel we find ourselves shuffling through every single day. There is no Big Brother; there is no man behind the curtain. Capitalism is something that we do to ourselves; something that we actively choose, each and every single day.

Which is depressing as fuck, right? But Total Propaganda is no suicide note for the western world, or terminal cancer diagnosis. Like Sanders and Corbyn, Razer has faith – not that the world will be saved by petroleum price-fattened boomers, but by the young, and the alienated, and the pissed-off. It is those who have been broken by an inhumane system that Total Propaganda is really for, and that is what makes it a valuable read for apolitical adolescents and battle-hardened media junkies alike: it’s not a lecture as much as it is a love letter, albeit one stuffed with references to genocide and class war.

Ever since Trump’s election, arts critics the world over have become obsessed with the phrase “a book/film/album for our times” – as though political outrage and a desire for change have only just come back into fashion. Total Propaganda is not a book for our times. At its swollen, blood-gorged heart Total Propaganda is a book for all times – a hoarsened, desperate battle cry for change.

Total Propaganda is out now. For more info, head here.

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