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Watching the recent public demonstrations protesting, at times violently, the Coalition government’s budgetary cuts, I was forced to revisit a long-held personal dilemma   I’ve described myself as ‘a writer’ from the age of nineteen, writing, at first, a series of features in and around the disparate areas of contemporary art – while at the same time arguing with very little subtlety in favour of my grand vision for the world, and how it should work While my writing today may well have outgrown its incipient characteristics of undergraduate anger and a quite spectacularly misplaced sense of superiority, I’ve not lost those early impulses to write Indeed, I’d say my desire to write – the compulsion to put pen to paper, as it were – has remained largely unaltered in what’s now a decade-long career Similarly, my motivations – explicitly political as they doubtless were from the start, against capitalist social relations and diametrically opposed to the current order of things – have stayed with me I’ve not so much as purchased a copy of Socialist Worker, however – despite the obvious opportunities to do so, especially while attending a redbrick university in the North More to the point, though, I’ve never joined any kind of physical march, riot or protest – against anything This I’ve always found difficult to explain, and is therefore my principal reason for this essay: to justify why I write rather than riot; to demonstrate briefly where this is mirrored by others; and to argue how this paradox must be upheld * When George Orwell wrote his seminal essay ‘Why I Write’, from which I take both title and inspiration – at least, in part – he made plain the motivations for a very particular type of artist: the writer Orwell, only a handful of years after his own participation in the Spanish Civil War, then provided four motives for writing: sheer egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; historical impulse; and political purpose I myself would eschew, though not entirely dismiss, points two and three As a writer, it’s egoism and political purpose that defines both