Every major political party is stepping into the new year with trenchant denunciations of each other and solicitations of your vote for them. Every party, that is, apart from Britain’s latest revolutionary movement.

In his book Revolution, Russell Brand takes a break from being an overpaid comedian to metamorphose into the Che Guevara of our times.

His rallying cry is: “Just don’t vote,” and he proudly proclaims that he has never done so, having devoted himself to Class A drug addiction for most of his early adult life.

Now, my grandad had firm views on the subject of voting. He had few illusions about those standing for office, but voting was non-negotiable in our house.

As he regularly reminded us, he wasn’t having the sacrifices of people who gave up their lives or liberty to secure a universal right to vote tossed aside by “a generation who couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed or off the sofa.” Grandad wasn’t a man for subtleties.

Actually, that isn’t true. I can recall being taken to polling stations with him as a child, where he pretended he couldn’t read. I had to read out the candidates’ names in a clear voice, while he would proclaim in equally clear tones: “Oh, no. That one’s a crook. No-one in their right mind would vote for him.” Or, “Him, no! He couldn’t decide whether to cross a road let alone build a school.”

We always got told off, and asked to vote quietly. When I asked why we did this, knowing that he could read anyway, my grandad just said he liked to feel he was “doing his bit” for the election.

I tried to remember this when looking over the spoilt ballot papers in elections during my years as an MP. It seemed to me that there was actually something dignified about those who wrote messages of abuse on their ballot paper. At least they had made the effort, putting anger into engagement rather than disengagement.

It made me feel that such votes should be counted and reported as first steps in a process that would make voting compulsory, allow social movements to put “write-in” candidates on the ballot paper and make it as easy for the public to throw an MP out as to put them in. But this isn’t where we are now.

Brand isn’t the first public figure to confuse oppositionalism with radicalism and he won’t be the last. But we ought to look carefully at where this has taken social movements in today’s confused political world.

The Arab Spring and Ukraine’s “bloodless” revolution both began by harnessing the mood that Brand embraces — disenchantment with a system sucks, with parties that dance to the tune of corporate and individual greed and with MPs who are philanderers, crooks, careerists or all three.

The trouble is that opposition without an alternative only produces tyrannies under different names.

Across the Middle East, Africa, eastern Europe and beyond, the lessons are the same — in the absence of radically different (propositionalist) programmes, you just lurch between equally repressive alternatives.

Rosa Luxemburg warned long ago that the future would be a choice between socialism and barbarism. This seems to be the direction that the world is travelling in.

However, this doesn’t describe the current state of British politics. But there isn’t much “big picture” politics landing on people’s doormats. The Tories claim you can’t trust Labour with spending. Labour claims you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS. And the the Lib Dems’ claim you can’t trust them to tell the difference.

The Greens make a stab at the bigger challenges we face, but you wouldn’t know it. Most of the press prefers to be down at the pub with Ukip. And this is the dangerous ground that Brand plays into.

However much his analysis is flawed, self-indulgent and inaccurate, Brand does begin with the inescapable obscenity of the world we live in.

When 85 people, collectively, own over $3 trillion (£2trn) — more than the combined wealth of the 3.5 billion poorest people on the planet — something seriously sucks.

The chasm that is today’s rich/poor divide represents a concentration of self-poisoning wealth and power best depicted in images of the Capitol in Suzanne Collins’s book The Hunger Games.

It gets no better when you look at wealth divides in our own capital.

CEOs in Britain’s FTSE 100 companies each pick up an average salary of £4.72m a year. In the first two working days of the year they all earned over £27,200 — more than the average worker earns in a year.

Should we kick the tyranny of such divides into touch? Absolutely. Will not voting achieve this? Absolutely not.

For this we need a more coherent understanding of the ways in which tyrannies are replaced by democracies and how the Earth’s resources can be shared more equitably and sustainably. For this we need to draw inspiration both from the past and from ourselves.

This is the challenge — the leap from oppositionalism to propositionalism — that has to be thrown at mainstream political parties, far more than at Brand.

No British government will be able to “manage” today’s economic model towards a sustainable future. At both a global and national level, what we have no longer works. It is economics for idiots — over-feeding some and under-nourishing most, stealing from today at the cost of tomorrow, putting profit before planet and obsessing over the making of money rather than things.

Critics are absolutely right to say that the world’s 30-year ideological leap into neoliberal economics has become little more than a pirates’ charter. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) “free trade” agreements have legitimised a massive shift of power from citizens to corporations. The public, and whole nations, have been given duties where once they had rights. For corporations, the opposite is true.

Food, water, minerals, work and wealth are being hoovered out of the lands, and lives, of the poor at an unparalleled rate. All the public get left with is the aftermath of abandoned sterile lands, the clean-up costs and an assertion that austerity measures are the unavoidable answer to a mess someone else created. None of this is true.

If we are to break a whole raft of WTO rules — as we must do — then we also need a new theology of hope to mobilise around. For me, as a young man, it was as easy to find this in the teachings of Tony Benn and from leaders of the liberation theology movement — particularly those who turned anti-war campaigns into pro-peace and justice movements.

In the early 1970s one of its leading voices, Paulo Friere — author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed — held a stopover meeting in Britain on his way back to Latin America, following work he had been doing for the World Council of Churches in Mozambique and Angola.

Asked what he had been up to, Friere explained that he had been teaching soldiers to read rather than shoot. Literacy was key, both to understanding their oppression and in building alternatives to it.

Friere’s second message was that “liberation” has nothing to do with deposing the oppressor if you just end up becoming him. Merely pushing against a negative does not take you into a positive. You have to offer a better plan.

I can’t blame Brand for not listening to this message. He was barely old enough to play truant at the time. But reading and reflecting on it should not be beyond his reach, and it shouldn’t be beyond ours. Both for ourselves and for the planet, we have to open up a new political dialogue that discusses how we replace, not repair, what we have now.

Paradoxically, this is where comedians may have a pivotal role. If you want to deconstruct something that no longer works, humour is a fantastic starting point. Those who do it best tear holes in political reputations — and wipe millions off corporate stock values — without ever descending into personal abuse.

Michael Moore’s movies have travelled the globe, debunking the US war machine, the influence of the gun lobby and the corporate hoovering of jobs from the US economy. In Britain, the programmes of Spitting Image, Rory Bremner and Mark Thomas used humour to systematically kick lumps out of political hypocrisy and corporate corruption.

In Italy comedian Bepe Grillo’s “Cinque Stelle” (five star) movement — which now has seats in the Italian Parliament — is specifically committed to breaking the corruption of Italian politics.

All this is a world away from Brand’s revolutionary disengagement. At the very least, he should have looked more affectionately at the day when Pigasus the Immortal almost flew.

It was Chicago, 1968. Anti-war protesters and the police had been locked in five days of street conflict over the Vietnam war. Yippies — members of a revolutionary youth

party — were fed up with two parties each committed to the war and decided to run a protest presidential candidate ahead of the Democratic national convention. Their chosen candidate was Pigasus — a pig.

On August 23 the Yippees attempted to launch Pigasus’s manifesto and candidature. Barely minutes into it the police intervened, arresting the leading activists — including Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman — and Pigasus himself. Pigasus disappeared. The others were charged, under livestock regulations, with bringing a pig into Chicago.

At their trial, the defence counsel argued that, in the shape of Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, both the Republicans and Democrats were already doing the same thing.

It was a remarkable piece of political theatre which became worldwide news. Behind it lay the desire to bring home to the US public how profoundly divided the country had become, and how pitiful its level of governance. The lesson was that if you are going to ridicule the system, at least look humorous rather than just bumptious.

Entertaining as this was, it is still a second-best option. Neither Nelson Mandela nor Mahatma Gandhi were short of one-liners, but neither stooped to abuse nor advocated disengagement from electoral politics. What made them different was their possession of a different vision of a better society. This was what people rallied around.

The mess we are in today is far too serious to leave to those who would just swap cynicism and abuse. Pigs will not fly, but fresh, visionary ideas can. This is what’s missing — and this is what politicians of all parties must be forced to go looking for.

Alan Simpson is former Labour MP for Nottingham South.