Freedom for Humanity
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Art, politics, anti-semitism and anti-Corbynism

Published in Visual Arts

Nick Wright discusses, art, anti-semitism, and anti-Corbynism.

Labour is weathering a co-ordinated campaign which combines criticism of Corbyn's policies and persona with an intensified drive to brand any criticism of the murderous policies pursued by Israel's rulers with anti-semitism.

I was once branded an antisemite. It was the during the Thatcher/Major years and I was editing the newspaper of the trade union for executive civil servants. Our cartoonist, the brilliant, award winning Frank Boyle, drew a series of strips which called out the Tories for their dogma-driven privatisation policies. One depicted the Cabinet as bloodthirsty pirates of a distinctly unsavoury disposition — the chief among them a swarthy, hook-nosed, carbuncled cutlass-wielding figure in a striped vest, battered pirate hat.

A flood of letters arrived, a good proportion using strikingly similar phrases, rather obviously co-ordinated and some clearly unfamiliar with the actual cartoon and more generally concerned at the left-wing character of the union's policies. To my surprise I was accused of publishing anti-semitic images. In discussion with one or two of the more reasonable of my correspondents we were able to agree that the conflation of stereotypical Cornish pirates with the anti-semitic depiction of Jews was too far fetched to be taken as evidence of intent. But it was a useful illustration of how an image can possess an ideological power that transcends both literal meaning and the intent of its creator, the context of its creation and thus have an impact on an audience already sensitised by their own ideological position and their life experiences.

This was a useful experience in my next job working at the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight.

It is in the light of this experience and after several decades of anti racist and anti fascist activity that I approach the question of the now-destroyed East End mural that is the pivot on which the latest assault on Jeremy Corbyn turns.

Less I am accused of gratuitously circulated anti-semitic images I can claim that in four years at art school; two years specialist art teacher training and three years of post graduate research as an art historian that I encountered many medieval, Renaissance and modern art and design objects imbued with anti-semitic notions. These artefacts possessed a wide currency in the times in which they were created but nevertheless remain the object of critical scrutiny. We must bring the same approach to the examination of the mural depicted here. Called Freedom for Humanity it was painted by the Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, also known also as Mear One.

We can describe the formal features of the mural thus: Against an apocalyptic background that includes rather ambiguously crafted elements of industrial production and power generation sit six elderly business-suited men playing what appears to be Monopoly. The surface on which they are playing rests on the backs of crouching, naked, possibly androgynous figures and includes a pile of currency notes and tokens that signify industrial production, oil extraction, property ownership and, perhaps, in the case of a miniature Statue of Liberty, political values.

To the left foreground a man is carrying a poster placard that proclaims 'The New World Order is the enemy of humanity' while his left arm is raised to a clenched fist. To the right a melancholy mother holds her baby.

Rising above the central group is a pyramid and all-seeing eye, sometimes taken to signify Freemasonry and more universally recognised as an element in the design of US dollar bills.

It is conventional to catalogue the formal features of a work and the processes used. We can see that the artist works in a contemporary medium using commercially available saturated spray colours. We know from basic research and observation that the artist is proficient in this medium and a high degree of preparatory work and a measure of expert draughtsmanship and technical expertise is evident. This conclusion is supported by a film, available on social media, which shows the process underway.

So, having described the content how do we analyse its meaning?

We can of course, go with our immediate, subjective impressions. This clearly is what many people have done. Judging by the social media discussion some have even ventured an opinion without actually looking closely at the work. But to understand more fully we need to ask what is the painting about.

One way is to take its title. Freedom for humanity has a clear and transparent political meaning In a game of chance and skill six white men dispose of power and wealth while the oppressed and the propertyless support the structures which permit this disparity of means.

But this is not enough. Context is all important. As it is public art we already know something about the audience, we know it was made in 2012 and destroyed by the local authority. We know who made it. We know from the BBC report at the time that the artist said his artwork was not targeting Jews.

We need to locate the mural in relation to other work, including that of the artist himself, the local and global politics of its production and display and we need to understand how the public discourse around the work was originally constructed and how it has been reconstructed in the present moment.

This takes us to the contested meaning of the painting and the significance of the central group. The Times on 24 March this year reported that Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to apologise after initially defending his apparent support for “a mural depicting Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor.”

The day before The Guardian had said the that mural pictured several “apparently Jewish bankers” playing a game of Monopoly. The Guardian was on the same wavelength as the Daily Telegraph which reported that Jeremy Corbyn had questioned a London council’s decision to destroy an antisemitic mural “which depicted a group of Jewish bankers counting money on the backs of ethnic minorities.”

A more careful, or perhaps better informed Jewish Chronicle was better informed about the identities of the six. It said the 'controversial' artwork depicted a group of businessmen and bankers sitting around a Monopoly-style board and counting money. 

At the time, in 2012, there was relatively limited coverage of the mural's destruction. Reportedly, on Facebook, the backbench MP Jeremy Corbyn had suggested that the artist was in good company. “Rockefeller destroyed Diego Rivera mural because it includes a picture of Lenin” he said. A Labour spokesman at that point claimed Corbyn was standing up for free speech.

It is unclear whether Corbyn – who is fluent in Spanish and very well-informed about Latin American history, politics and culture — was mobilising his pre-existing cultural knowledge or if he knew something of the mural's content. However, the connection here artistic freedom and Rockefeller, who is one of the (non Jewish) figures depicted in the East End mural.

In 1933 the Mexican communist painter Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint frescos on the lobby of the Rockefeller building in New York. He titled them The Frontier of Ethical Evolution and The Frontier of Material Development, representing capitalism and socialism. When the patron, Nelson Rockefeller, pressed Rivera to remove images of Lenin and a Soviet May Day scene Rivera refused and the mural was painted over. Rivera recreated the artwork in Mexico as Man, Controller of the Universe.

NW Man at the Crossroads Rivera

There is little critical comparison between Rivera's work and the contemporary mural. Working in plaster and more translucent media Rivera deployed a rich and subtle colour palette, complex imagery, a vast cast of characters and drew upon a rich heritage of political understanding which articulated popular and revolutionary currents of thought.

The technical differences in production are clear enough. Both are public art, both have an avowedly political content, both are didactic. However in scope and sophistication the works could not be more dissimilar.

Given the highly politicised context of the present controversy this gives us a handle on the kind of criteria we must apply in evaluating Ockerman's work

Two immediate issues arise. Firstly, are the bankers and business men all or predominately Jewish? Secondly, in the light of the answer to this question is the depiction of the characters anti-semitic?

To quote Ockerman: “I came to paint a mural that depicted the elite banker cartel known as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, the ruling class elite few, the Wizards of Oz. They would be playing a board game of monopoly on the backs of the working class. The symbol of the Free Mason Pyramid rises behind this group and behind that is a polluted world of coal burning and nuclear reactors. I was creating this piece to inspire critical thought and spark conversation.”

We have to take him at his word. The problem is that the iconography draws on a very restricted set of references and these references are, in themselves, problematic. Set aside the passivity and subordination with which the oppressed are depicted. Look instead at the central figures who are depicted as distinctive types, painted with a clear reference, if distorted, to real historical protagonists.

Even if only two of these six bourgeois, Warburg and Rothschild, are Jewish we still need to make a judgement about the character and currency of their depiction. The draughtsmanship clearly exaggerates the distinctive features of all six men. The problem is that exaggerated depictions of Jews are created, disseminated and understood in a historically defined context that includes a powerful, even dominant, discourse that draws upon the long traditions of antisemitism embedded in the dominant ideology and expressed, over the centuries, in the dominant visual culture, including both traditional art forms, religion, politics, popular culture and mass media.

That these traditions are currently more diffused than hitherto and that today, for example, Islamaphobic narratives are more virulent and produce more dramatically dangerous consequences than does contemporary anti semitism is no justification for a lack of vigilance.

In truth, the subterranean narratives around notions of the Illuminati, Freemasonry and bourgeois conspiracies cannot, in much popular imagination, be disentangled from deeply suspect discourses in which alien, Semitic and covert elites are the controlling forces in our lives.

Such notions run exactly counter to the kind of materialist analysis that take the real and existing features of contemporary class society and seek to reveal their workings. State monopoly capitalism operates at vastly more profound levels and bourgeois hegemony is maintained by vastly greater systems of ideological domination than are illuminated by Ockerman's mural or accessible through his restricted political imagination.

Inevitably, this mural was going to understood in the context of existing traditions. If Jeremy Corbyn had not risen to his present stature this mural would have been long forgotten.

The truth is that neither its formal construction nor its artistry, neither its political language nor its iconography is articulated with sufficient levels of complexity and sophistication. It simply collapses, without sufficient theoretical or ideological underpinnings, into an inversion of its creator's avowed purpose.

This is bad art and worse politics.

When, five years later the long-forgotten facts around this painting's destruction are weaponised in a new coup against Labour's popular realignment, we can only marvel that the theoretical poverty of these latter-day art critics is matched by their political hypocrisy.

I am reluctant to criticise Jeremy Corbyn who is the most transparently honest and principled leader of the Labour Party in decades. It is true that his 2012 defence of artistic freedom might have been expressed with more circumspection and today a more robust defence might counter some of his more unprincipled opponents. But the unceasing assault on him is so obviously manufactured that I suspect its effect has a limit and that itself has more traction with a metropolitan and political elite than with broader masses of people.

It is possible to discover in the mountains of social media data instances of clear anti semitic intent. More common are maladroit formulations, poorly constructed arguments, ignorant and lazy conflations of terms that are logically distinct along with arguments that reflect various levels of conscious and unconscious bias. The diligent will find examples of trolling that have their origins in the crude public language in some sectors as well as provocations of even more dubious origin.

We can be sure that one agency or another is searching for any clumsy formulation or ill advised comment that can be weaponised against Labour. That no such diligence is directed at the Tory party or the media that serves bourgeois interest is clear enough indication that this is a project with a clear purpose.

The many hundreds of thousands of Labour folk know this. Many millions more sense the artifice entailed in this campaign. It is instructive that in working class Britain, which by and large is not deeply involved in this controversy, popular sentiment senses that Corbyn is the target. How else to account for the reports that crowds at boxing contests and football matches are breaking out in chants of Jeremy Corbyn's name.

Already the spurt in Labour (and Momentum) membership is taken by more intransigent zionist opinion a proof itself of a wide currency of anti semitism. Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn's Seder night feast with a group of irreverent young Jews in his constituency itself is weaponised. Associating with the wrong kind of Jews is also anti semitic it seems.

The association of Blairite MPs with the campaign being waged by the Board of Deputies (and the more obviously Conservative-linked Jewish Leadership Council) will do them no favours with Labour supporters who know from their own experience just how limited is the purchase of anti semitic ideas in the party and the broader labour movement. Interestingly, the non zionist Jewish Voice for Labour is experiencing a new wave of support.

We cannot disentangle the alarm that the Zionist establishment feels at the success of the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement from this current offensive. Corbyn is the target because he maintains his principled solidarity with the Palestinian cause and remains opposed to the imperial war plans that pivot on Israel's strategy towards it's neighbouring states.

The real danger is that in conflating, for narrowly sectarian political purpose, what is a fairly widely diffused currency of anti semitic ideas with the more poisonous political anti-semitism that exists as a conscious ideology this campaign runs a real danger of reinforcing the latter.

It is not enough to point out that the most reactionary trends in Zionism act on the basis that the existence of anti semitism is the principal validation of their political project. Anti-semitism needs to be confronted at every level — not as a privileged category of political action — but as part of a conscious movement to assert the universality of human values.

Calling out the crude conflation of Zionism with Jewish identity is the basic building block of any project to combat antisemitism. That this necessarily entails a principled criticism of its mirror image in the most virulently reactionary trends in present-day Zionism is a powerful demonstration of dialectical truth.

Why Christianity matters to socialism
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Why Christianity matters to socialism

Published in Religion

James Crossley argues for the importance of the radical Christian tradition as an important resource for the revolutionary transformation of the world. 

On becoming leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn envisaged living a society “where we don’t pass by on the other side of those people rejected by an unfair welfare system. Instead we reach out to end the scourge of homelessness and desperation that so many people face in our society.”

Every since that historic victory, Corbyn has repeatedly used the language of “not passing by on the other side.” It is an allusion to the Parable of the Good Samaritan from Luke’s Gospel and one popular among politicians. While David Cameron, Hilary Benn and others have used the parable to promote military intervention in North Africa and the Middle East (think the Good Samaritan violently beating the robbers), Corbyn, unusually for a contemporary politician, has used the parable to attack the scandal of increased homelessness, rough sleeping and the housing crisis.

JC Helping the homeless

These contradictory interpretations of a parable attributed to a figure like Jesus are not unusual: revolutionary and reactionary tendencies have always been part of Christianity, perhaps even present in the message of Jesus. The earliest traditions about Jesus have him predicting an imminent theocracy, not all of which would necessarily look progressive to us. It was likely to have been understood as a violent intervention in history, with new hierarchies established and subservient nations put in their place.

Christianity itself would later become integral to the Roman Empire. Some of this was due to changing religious affiliations in the Empire and Christianity adapting itself to Roman power. But it was not entirely alien to a theocratic message present from the beginning.

However, Jesus and his earliest followers’ hope for a new divine empire was tied in with stark attacks on the inequality and wealth, some of which were brought into sharper focus by the major building projects and land displacements in Galilee as Jesus was growing up. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus gives us some indication as to what this would have looked like in the case of one such building project, the town of Tiberias:

The new settlers were a promiscuous rabble, no small contingent being Galilean, with such as were drafted from territory subject to him [Herod Antipas] and brought forcibly to the new foundation. Some of these were magistrates. Herod accepted as participants even poor men who were brought in to join the others from any and all places of origin. It was in question whether some were even free beyond cavil. These latter he often and in large bodies liberated and benefited imposing the condition that they should not quit the city, by equipping houses at his own expense and adding new gifts of land. For he knew that this settlement was contrary to the law and tradition of the Jews because Tiberias was built on the site of tombs that had been obliterated, of which there were many there. And our law declares that such settlers are unclean for seven days. - Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.36-38

Jesus seems to have formed an alternative community to one where traditional households had been uprooted by aristocratic demand for greater surplus with a message revealing some awareness of the structural nature of poverty and wealth. The Acts of the Apostles suggests that these revolutionary impulses were kept alive in a community of shared goods that would later inspire Tony Benn in his defence of public ownership against the attacks from New Labour.

We should understand Jesus’ teachings in terms of Marx’s famous understanding of religion as “an expression of and protest against real wretchedness.” In a world where wealth was concentrated among a small aristocratic elite, Jesus was remembered as saying the rich would burn or be excluded from the coming kingdom while the poor would be blessed.

Parables like the Rich Man and Lazarus (where the rich man burns for being rich and the poor man Lazarus is rewarded because he was poor) and sayings such as “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” are in line with other expectations that the wealthy will eventually be overthrown and punished, at least if they did not give up their extreme wealth to those in need.

JC Anonymous Rich man and Lazarus ca. 1610

Pieter Cornelisz van Rijck, Kitchen Interior with the Parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus, 1610

This was to be, as the Acts of the Apostles note in a different context, turning the world upside down. But warning signs of this future were enacted in the present. People overcharging for sacrificial animals were the focus of Jesus’ ire as he was remembered for overturning the tables of the moneychangers and dove-sellers which would lead to his execution as a seditious threat.

The tension between reaction and revolution has continued throughout the history of Christianity. Clashes between elite power and the desire for radical democratic transformation or wealth redistribution simmered and occasionally boiled over in the history of English Christianity, leaving us with a long radical history, from the Peasants’ Revolt through the seventeenth-century radicals to the growth of the Labour movement and Keir Hardie’s desire to “stir up a divine discontent with wrong,” a saying referenced by Corbyn at the Labour Party conference in 2015. The language of this tradition was employed in the founding of the NHS and the successful Labour manifesto of 1945.

Thanks to countless dedicated socialists from the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp to revolutionaries travelling to Rojava, this was a tradition whose language would remain alive on the English left. The story of Jesus and the moneychangers was a prominent one in challenging “the one percent” at Occupy London Stock Exchange where St Paul’s Cathedral itself epitomised the tension: church leaders were uncomfortable with protesters while the grounds were simultaneously a readily available space for a sustained protest.

JC jesus and moneychangers

We now find ourselves in the position unusual for the Left: close to power. There have been encouraging discussions among Momentum and union activists about growing a working-class socialist culture “from below,” where social events, sports clubs, foodbanks, etc. become part of building a mass movement, see http://colouringinculture.org/cultural-democracy-home.

Historically, this socialism from below has had strong overlaps with Christian traditions. The impulses of Christianity which tackle poverty continue today, as in work of the Trussell Trust, whose role in foodbanks has made sure that Iain Duncan Smith does not forget Jesus’ words about poverty.

Yet, as I have discussed in a forthcoming book (Cults, Martyrs, and Good Samaritans: Religion in Contemporary English Political Discourse [Pluto, 2018]) there is evidence that much of the public does not like politicians explicitly invoking religion, Christianity and the Bible, particularly for grandiose claims about Christianity being the source of parliamentary democracy or free markets, as David Cameron claimed.

However, there does not appear to be widespread hatred of Christianity per se, not even beyond the pockets where church attendance remains relatively high. There is some indication that there is support for the Bible as a general moral code for helping others. This is something that should not be ignored by socialists. And Corbyn’s allusion to the Good Samaritan is precisely what is palatable for much of the British public: pithy, vague, but full of basic human decency.  

But there is also evidence that Christianity can be associated with national identity. One recent study found that nearly a quarter of people viewed being Christian in ethnic terms, i.e. a signifier of being English or British despite the sharp decrease in church attendance in recent decades and the accompanying rise in those identifying with non-belief.

This can, of course, be dangerous for the left and fertile ground for the right. Theresa May and Nigel Farage have both tried to capitalise on this ethnonationalist understanding of Christianity. For example, when asked in Parliament about the respecting between Christmas of “mainstream Britain” and “minority traditions” of Diwali, Vaisakhi and Eid, May responded, “We want minority communities to be able to recognise and stand up for their traditions, but we also want to be able to stand up for our traditions generally, and that includes Christmas.”

May, like Farage, was attempting to appeal partly to a certain kind of working-class voter in the light of the EU Referendum. Uncomfortable though it may be, these issues should not be ignored by the English left where the struggle over national identity has been a difficult one. Here we can turn to the radical English tradition which has informed the contemporary left, including Corbyn and his mentor Tony Benn.

In fact, Labour have recognised this potential in the fight against UKIP and the Tories. Sam Tarry, co-director of Corbyn’s re-election campaign, talked about the importance of an English Labour movement promoting “the Peasants’ Revolt, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, and the suffragettes and others” as a “socialist vision” which is also a “patriotic one, because nothing is more patriotic than building a society for the many; not the few.”

There is, of course, no doubt that religion can be a divisive issue on the left because of its well-known reactionary traditions. But Christianity (or any other religion) does not always have to be reactionary and socialist Christians won’t cease to be socialists because some of their co-travellers are not.

Left-wing Christianity has been central to English and British socialism and its legacy remains important to this day, whether in fighting poverty, keeping radicalism alive, providing ready-made community networks, or influencing the general language we use. None of this means, of course, that we all convert to Christianity or attend church on a Sunday morning. But if we want to transform this world, this radical tradition will prove to be an important resource.

religion

The Peterloo Massacre
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

More than ‘Rise like lions’: Shelley beyond The Mask of Anarchy

Published in Poetry

Mike Sanders writes about Shelley 'the Chartist poet' as a catalyst for working class creativity, how he envisioned a communist society, and how the privileged classes refused to hear the revolutionary meanings of his poems.

One of the unexpected features of the recent General Election campaign was the ‘co-opting’ of a long-dead Romantic poet as a speech-writer by Team Corbyn. Many of Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches ended with the recitation of the closing lines from Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many, they are few.

These lines written almost two hundred years ago in response to the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ have long been part of the Left’s cultural memory – anthologised, repeated and recycled for the best part of two centuries. I first encountered them as a teenage punk rocker in 1980 on the back cover of the Jam’s Sound Affects album and the discovery prompted me to buy a selection of Shelley’s poetry from a local second-hand bookshop. In that dog-eared volume, I discovered a poet who could give better shape and expression to some of my own rather more inchoate ideas about the society I lived in and my hopes for a better future.

Subsequently, I came to understand that previous generations of workers had also found in Shelley’s words, ‘resources for their own journey of hope’ (to adapt Raymond Williams’ wonderful phrase). Working-class appreciation and recognition of Shelley began relatively early. Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England observes; 

Shelley, the genius, the prophet, Shelley, and Byron, with his glowing sensuality and his bitter satire upon our existing society, find most of their readers in the proletariat; the bourgeoisie owns only castrated editions, family editions, expurgated in accordance with the hypocritical morality of today.

Shelley’s long poem Queen Mab was often described as “the Chartist’s Bible". Indeed, there is a sense in which Shelley is a Chartist poet insofar as many of his more overtly political poems, such as ‘Song to the Men of England’, were first published in 1839. 

The poetry column of the Northern Star, the leading Chartist newspaper, attests to Shelley’s importance as a catalyst for working-class creativity. In particular, Shelley’s ‘Song to the Men of England’ is reworked a number of times by various Chartist poets. I would like to suggest that this poem, which identifies the inverse relationship between production and consumption as moral obscenity as well as economic injustice, is even more important than ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. The poem begins with a series of questions intended to highlight the paradoxical way in which the economy distributes economic rewards:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?

Replace “lords”, “tyrants” and “drones” with “bankers” and “bosses” and you have a concise summary of our current economic woes. But Shelley does not rest there, he continues by observing that the workers also produce the means of their own political oppression:

Wherefore, Bees of England, forge
Many a weapon, chain, and scourge,
That these stingless drones may spoil
The forced produce of your toil?

Next, Shelley asks his readers if they enjoy the key features of a genuinely human life?

Have ye leisure, comfort, calm,
Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?
Or what is it ye buy so dear
With your pain and with your fear?

Thus far, the poem consists of a series of questions designed both to defamiliarise and thereby make visible the structural features of the economic order. These questions also invite the reader to think. However, in the second half of the poem statements predominate, as Shelley offers two very different views of the future. The first of which is the maintaining of the current economic and political order:

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

The second envisages a future in which there is a direct correlation between production and consumption.

Sow seed—but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth—let no imposter heap:
Weave robes—let not the idle wear:
Forge arms—in your defence to bear.

In the poem’s penultimate verse, Shelley makes clear that social change will require resistance and courage on the part of the oppressed. The “drones” will indeed shed, if not drink, blood to preserve their privileges if necessary:

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells—
In hall ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

In the final stanza, Shelley makes clear that the choice is one between life and death.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom
Trace your grave and build your tomb
And weave your winding-sheet—till fair
England be your Sepulchre.

The clarity with which Shelley both identifies the structures of exploitation and oppression, and identifies two very different visions of England’s future in this poem goes some way to explaining the different assessments of his work in the Nineteenth Century (and beyond). The privileged classes simply refused to hear this Shelley, preferring to construct him as a naïve dreamer – “A beautiful and ineffectual angel” to quote Matthew Arnold.

The Chartists and their successors heard a different Shelley. They heard a Shelley who was in no doubt as to either the necessity or the difficulty of securing political and economic change. The “Rise like lions” passage is inspiring, but if we read it in isolation there is a danger of seeing it as a promise of easy victory. For Shelley, the murdered victims at Peterloo were sufficient testament that there would be no easy victory. And the same is surely true for us today.

 

Grime helps launch a revolution in youth politics
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Grime helps launch a revolution in youth politics

Published in Music

Monique Charles examines the links between grime and progressive politics.

It became clear on June 9 that Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election was ill judged. This election has highlighted the disregard for the “many” that government should serve, and after an election in which the youth turnout was around 72% of those aged 18-24, the impact of the youth in Labour’s surge of popularity is obvious.

Of particular note is the role of a series of influential grime artists, who are not traditionally known for their politics yet came out in full force, working to galvanise the youth to vote and specifically supporting Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. In a 2003 radio interview, then MP Kim Howells laid into the grime scene, calling its artists “macho boasting idiots”. In the aftermath of the election, who are the macho boasting idiots now? Those in power should never underestimate the collective power of the masses. This is particularly true of the grimy kind.

 MC JC images

The relationship between grime and politics has been an interesting and evolving one. Grime is a genre of music that emerged at the turn of the 21st century in London’s inner boroughs. Early on, its sound was most closely likened to US hip hop and rap. But those in the know appreciate grime’s deep connections to its UK predecessors, which include music from the British underground scene such as garage and jungle, in addition to Jamaican dancehall, electronic/experimental music, and British punk. The grime “sound” developed as it grew, eventually being acknowledged as its own genre at the MOBOs in 2015 and iTunes in 2016. But grime has always been more than music. It is a culture, and this is key to its significance in this last general election.

Generation grime

Although now considered trendy in many strata of society, grime is a working-class scene. It originated from the very people and places government legislation has hit the hardest in its austerity measures over the last ten years: the bedroom tax; underfunded schools; tuition fee rises; zero-hour contracts; dwindling prospects of owning a home; and increased job insecurity. From this perspective, the relentless spread of gentrification and London’s role as a global financial capital can make David Cameron’s profession that “we are all in this together” simply farcical.

Grime originated as a predominantly black British musical form, yet appeals to young people irrespective of race or ethnicity. The common ground in its appeal was the focus on class based oppression and British cultural references. While racism remains pervasive and impacts young people in different ways, we live in a time of diverse multiculturalism, particularly in the inner city home of grime. There is a level of commonality in the British working class experience.

 MC grime and politics

 

This is all the more powerful given the collective nature of the grime scene. Success achieved by individuals in the scene is viewed as success for all. Individual achievement produces collective pride. This collectivity contributes to the solid sense of identity and culture that grime promotes. The collective experience of hardship and navigating it fosters community.

And middle class youth also see their futures in less certain terms. Grime, as with the appeal of other genres of music, is also a method of identity formation, which helps them to separate themselves from “older” generations, most notably parents.

Quite possibly for the first time, this election provided what I term “generation grime” (those predominantly under 30 who have grown up with it as a soundtrack to their lives) with an opportunity to engage with a political figure whose values align more closely with their lived experience, personal values and aspirations. Corbyn’s understanding of working-class issues, racial oppression and homelessness struck a chord. While the lyrical content in much grime may not be political, lived realities and hardships are a common theme to this work.

Prominent grime artists openly supported Labour and worked hard to encourage their supporters to vote: in response to their lived experience; the government’s disregard of their future; and the disconnection they felt to this government. Stormzy was one of Corbyn’s first grime supporters. In a 2016 interview, he said: “I dig what he says. I saw some sick picture of him from back in the day when he was campaigning about anti-apartheid and I thought: yeah, I like your energy.”

MC Jeremy corbyn 1496590874 crop 550x407
 
 
JME and JC

JME, Akala, and Rag'n'Bone man, all influential artists to generation grime and all of whom admitted to not voting before or having little interest or faith in the political system, also got behind Corbyn. Recent protests about government decisions which affected the future of generation grime led to minimal change and kettling, heightening apathy. This election offered a new approach. For scene members and fans not politically minded or disengaged from political processes, grime artist endorsement was the much needed push to look into Corbyn’s track record and manifesto. Young people suddenly felt they could do something to influence British society and their futures.

What now?

This election provided the opportunity for generation grime to really see the collective power in working together for the society they would like to create and the things they want to preserve. Although Labour did not win the election, a new energy has been injected into politics and political engagement among young people. It has given them the opportunity to realise their political power, and how to use it.

Significantly, this last election has also reignited the music-politics relationship of British punk in a new, 21st-century way. Grime artists made particular use of social media in order to galvanise generation grime into political action through the use of hashtags such as #Grime4Corbyn. And it doesn’t stop here. After the election, artists encouraged each other and scene members to engage with their local MPs. Grime artists tweeted about the success and the importance of staying involved.

This movement could be the start of something huge. The challenge is to maintain the momentum. While grime content is largely apolitical, this shift could open a space for more political lyrical content and imagery for both new and established artists. It may also lead to more systematic civic engagement, as artists can see first-hand the power of their influence on generation grime to push for social change.

For more than a decade, the government undervalued and strategically implemented policies to decimate the life chances of generation grime under the banner “we are all in this together”. We are not. Government must govern #ForTheManyNotTheFew, and now generation grime realise the potential of their political power they can push for it strategically.

Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Stop consuming and do it yourself

Published in Music

Via email interview, Robb Johnson introduces his new album and talks about politics, protest music, and plum pudding.

Q. Can you tell us something about your new album, whether it's a change of style, direction, material or theme?

‘My Best Regards’ consists of 16 tracks, 13 songs recorded with Jenny Carr on piano and organ, John Forrester on bass and double bass, Arvin Johnson on drums and percussion, with some guest contributions from Jim Cannell on cello, Linz Maesterosa on clarinet and saxophone, and Saskia's Tomkins on violin. Kirsty Martin’s singing adds some extra vocal magic, and there are two tracks which are different versions of songs on the album, recorded live with Brighton's Hullabaloo Quire, which Kirsty coordinates. Then there is one track that is an alternative version of the song ‘When the Tide Comes In’ again performed live, with Palestinian singer Reem Kelani.

 

I think it is more of a development than a change of style, and it's not really a change of material. For a while now, my songs have generally been understood to be a balance of the personal and the political. I am quite happy about that, and that seems to me to be a pretty good description of the songs on this album, though sometimes I think more mainstream reviewers only seem to hear The Political, at which they promptly throw their hands up in horror.

I have released albums that have been determinedly Political – ‘Some Recent Protest Songs’ and ‘Us and Them’ – partly because I had accumulated a lot of overtly political songs, but partly because there was a tendency for mainstream media hacks to spew out articles complaining that no-one writes that sort of song any more. This seemed to me a combination of arrogance, ignorance, and an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy.

Mainstream media hacks have been either sneering contemptuously at politics in music which they term dismissively ‘protest music’ (in a way they never quite do with theatre or film) or ignoring it altogether for so long. Then they felt able to wring their hands, as austerity ravaged communities and cities erupted in riots, and take songwriters to task for not writing about austerity and riots any more. Yet their idea of popular music doesn't seem to be interested in anything that isn't in the media-sanctioned pop mainstream.

But this isn't one of those albums, although I suppose it is structured so as to have a political theme framing it. I like to have albums that give a narrative, that have an emotional or intellectual beginning/middle/end coherence. So this one starts off with the rather bleak ‘September 1939’. Immediately after the last general election I felt that the summery sunny days that followed must have been a little what it was like after war was declared in 1939. The album ends, though, with the post-Corbyn election song ‘The Future Starts Here’.

Originally the album was to be shorter and much more obviously politicised, but we used some of the more personal songs as warm-up numbers in the studio, and enjoyed playing them so much that we kept them. I think they actually work well to balance some of the album's bleaker moments, and help make the album more of a narrative journey.

Q. The JC4PM tour reminded some of us oldies of the Red Wedge tours in the eighties in support of Labour. How did the tour go?

Well, I think it was pretty successful. Certainly the gigs I did were very enjoyable and there was a very effective mix of speeches, stand-ups and songs. There seems a lot more comedy involved in JC4PM, compared with the earnest guitar and song tendencies of what I remember about Red Wedge, but then I suppose that's post- modernist irony for you, comedy being the new rock'n'roll etc.

The other difference is that Red Wedge were working in support of a Labour Party in retreat, a Labour Party under Kinnock beginning the long and dismal process of making itself electable in the eyes of Rupert Murdoch, by making itself into something that was hardly worth electing at all, and losing all sense of principle, integrity, and contact with the very section of society it had traditionally represented.

JC4PM, on the other hand, is working with a Labour Party – leadership and membership anyway – that is on the advance, reclaiming its principles, integrity and commitment to represent its historical constituency.

Q. What are your thoughts about politics at the moment, generally and of course in particular the situation with Jeremy Corbyn, socialism and the Labour Party?

I have rejoined the Labour Party. It was the pusillanimous attitude towards the poll tax, and the collusion over the Gulf War that did for me. I have always voted Labour. I didn’t have illusions about voting Labour, but as a working person and a trade unionist – I worked as a teacher for 35 years and was a fairly active member of the NUT – having a Labour government seemed a better option than having a Tory one.
Indeed, that old inch of difference between Tory and Labour was really significant for early years’ education at the start of the century, where there were some really positive developments for children introduced, while Tony Blair was telling us about how Saddam had all these weapons of mass destruction only 15 minutes away.
So what Jeremy Corbyn represents is a significant shift in the accepted narrative that has dominated politics in the U.K., since the Tories set about deliberately trashing the postwar consensus 30+ years ago. Corbyn's selection has taken the gag off those voices that never accepted that greed was good, that there was no such thing as society, that the poor have to pay for the fuck-ups of the greedy rich.

I know Jeremy Corbyn from being on the same anti-war demos, and he is like you and me, only whereas my day job was teaching, playing guitar and secretly wishing I'd been in the Stooges or The Pink Fairies or whatever, Jeremy Corbyn's day job, and I suspect his version of being in the Stooges, is doing politics properly, with principle and integrity. Doing a version of politics to ensure society and social organisations exist to serve the needs of the people, not the other way round.

Obviously, the consequences of Blairism means we have a parliamentary party of careerist small businesspersons for whom that idea is both strange and threatening, because Corbyn's politics are essentially about inclusion and empowerment, and machine politicians like being machine politicians. They play the game, they prefer to serve the machine that rewards them for their compliance, rather than serve the voters who put them there.

Socialism is simply the tradition of trying to organise society to the benefit of all, so to me it seems simple common sense. Certainly, my experience has confirmed that to be the case. Working with under fives, you see people at their best, before the manifold poisons & disappointments of capitalism and its commodifications screw us up. I know that human beings are absolutely brilliant, every single one of us, and that humans are essentially kind and positive, happiest when they cooperate rather than compete. Happiest also in societies that value their individual members, and are organised along principles of inclusion, empowerment, equality, and fair play.
That is of course why 30 years of government interventions in education have only served to produce generations of unhappy, stupefied consumers. It is significant that it was the dismantling of that bastion of the concept of privilege, of the fatuous and inhuman concept of the deserving being separated from the undeserving – I mean the the grammar school system – that first really energised the Right in their challenge to the postwar consensus. And here it is again, being exhumed by Theresa Mayjor! A sure indication of how politically bankrupt the Tory party is.

Q. What's it like working in the music scene at the moment, as a worker? How has it changed, over your career? What do you think of other bands and musicians, and other music these days?

As with all workers, the introduction of new technology does tend to result in fewer jobs. Growing up in the 70s, I got to see lots of great bands at lots of great venues, and also lots of bandslike Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, who worked conscientiously round the pubs and who gave you a good night out.

By the 70s, the average band size was four people. But bands and musicians still exercised a certain creative control, and up to and including punk I think musicians rather than the music business determined the progress of popular music. This of course is not the case now. The business now determines the culture, the media polices its business decisions. From being the most exciting, innovative, democratic and radical cultural form of the last century, popular music has become a dull, processed puppet of the society of the spectacle.

You could say that there is surely a limit with what you can do with three chords, and that may well have been reached even before the Gallagher brothers made a career out of recycling old John Lennon riffs. This never used to bother folk music however, or indeed blues musicians, because these musicians were working within a tradition of form that facilitated personal expression. The experiences of the worker animated each song into something particular and expressive.

Now, there are bloated spectaculars of television, festivals and stadiums, no middle ground where the likes of Sutherland Brothers and Quiver can earn an honest crust, and pubs that will either play safe with covers bands or pay bugger-all for open mike nights. It is difficult in these circumstances for people to find their own voice, and to give their own lives particular expression.

Nonetheless, people keep on writing great songs and singing their hearts out about what it is like to be like them, to think like them, rather than Ed Sheeran. The media doesn't want you hear about them, because they remain outside the process of cultural recuperation. But they are there. They are people like Joe Solo and his mates, inventing We Shall Overcome, a grass roots weekend of nationwide self-organised gigs and community action as an annual alternative to getting kettled at a demo.
We need more of that, taking back our culture, organising a folk club or whatever you want to call it – Grace Petrie's just started a folk club in Leicester – more gigs like Nick puts on at the Yorkshire House in Lancaster. And less nostalgia!

Q. Can I have your thoughts on politics and music, such as what your favourite political songs are? And how you think music makes a difference, politically?

All music carries political meanings. In our agitprop trio The Ministry of Humour, singing down Thatcher, apartheid and capitalism in the 1980s, when people accused us of Being Political we used to say ‘everything's political.’

I tried translating The Marseillaise and it is awful, but I think the Internationale is beautiful, and the words don't really need updating. Songs may not of course kickstart strikes and seizures of post offices and telephone exchanges, or storm the Winter Palaces of the Ice Queen etc, but as we all know – and this is why the media don't want us listening to politically conscious songs – that magic combination of the perfectly apposite words with a perfectly apposite melody stays with us long after the speech or the editorial or the television interview. We can hum and sing them, and we realise we are not alone in our ideas and our aspirations, and they inspire us as we kickstart our own little part of the revolutionary process.

My favourite political song? ‘Te Recerdo Amanda’ by Victor Jara. My favourite song, which is also set within the landscape and language of working class life, but which carries its politics less consciously, is ‘Les Amants d’un Jour’ by Marguerite Monnot, sung by Edith Piaf.

 

Q. Culture Matters has recently started a series of articles looking at arts and culture policies, in the light of the austerity driven cutbacks which impact more on working people, and in the light of the research which is showing that working class people are finding it harder to access the arts, as consumers and as performers. And of course the gap between the funding of the arts in London/the South East and the rest of the country is pretty huge. Can we have your thoughts on arts and culture policy please?

Well – first step as above mentioned is to stop consuming and do it yourself. I saw a headline in a London newspaper on a London train which trumpeted – like it was a good thing – that arts funding in London wouldn't be cut! The headline should of course have been ‘Arts Funding to be Cut for Most of the UK’, just like we should recognise that for most of us, the Tory obsession with selection at 11 means a reintroduction of education at secondary moderns, rather than a reintroduction of grammar schools.

Yes, I would like to see funding directed at supporting art and culture initiatives rather than paying for military action in the Middle East, or Armageddon being parked at Faslane. But this financial support needs to be supported in turn by a social culture of empowerment. State education needs to be reconfigured to serve the needs of the child, not the state, which will mean a curriculum that values and encourages imagination and creativity. The media needs to be regulated to ensure cultural as well as journalistic balance, and press freedom should not be confused with the lowest common denominator.

Similarly, community art – like open mike nights or reality TV – should not be used as a cheapskate alternative to paying skilled workers at appropriate skilled worker rates. However, we would also need to reconfigure cultural workers as workers rather than as the extraordinarily differentiated celebrities that is the paradigm we are presented with at the moment. We need to recognise individual aptitude, but also recognise that this needs to be understood within a spectrum of performance, not within a hierarchy of ‘excellence’ that is usually related to the valuations of economics rather than valuations based upon intrinsic qualities of artistic expression.

Art & culture need to be returned more to the reality of their social function. Some of us are pretty gifted when it comes to plumbing, some of us are pretty gifted when it comes to singing, but when your plumbing goes wrong, Bono is no use whatsoever.

This spectrum of performance needs to be supported by a plurality of performance spaces and opportunities – culture should not be something that only takes place on television or as spectacular events set apart from the lives of those people whose existence is only defined by the word ‘audience’ and whose appreciation and experience of art and culture is determined by the economics of production and consumption.

Applying huge amounts of money to something does not necessarily ensure high levels of performance. A couple of seasons ago Brentford drew Chelsea in the Cup, and so there they were, all these fabulously-paid celebrity Chelsea footballers so celebrated in the media, hoofing about Griffin Park, and not actually performing that much better than Brentford’s cheery collection of 19 year-olds still living with their mums. It was a draw at the final whistle. Possibly the most creative aspect of the afternoon was the Brentford fans chanting “You’re just a bus stop in Fulham.”

The same problems of scale exist in the arts. Size of spectacle and budget are no guarantee of artistic achievement. Any investment in arts would be obviously welcome, but it will be largely ineffectual unless it is animated by an understanding of the importance of diminishing the distances between performer and audience, which necessarily involves a more realistic perspective on issues of inclusion and particular aptitudes and skills. We need a culture where everybody can join in, and though some people can join in a bit more than others, this is not a big differentiating deal. Even genius shits like the rest of us.

Another consequence of having spent so long working with children, is that this experience convinces me that each of us is gifted with our own skills of creativity and our own unique artist’s perspective. With our current models of culture as commodity, most of us find our access to & participation in art and culture limited and defined by capitalism’s profit-driven economics, and the mindset of privilege and hierarchy.

But we all have an aesthetic intelligence, we are all artists. Access to and participation in culture should be on the basis of personal choice and predilection, our engagement should be based on the forms of self expression that appeal to our individual consciousness, and our choices should be encouraged and supported by empowering education and inclusive social organisation, whether we feel happiest expressing ourselves through plumbing, plum crumble or plumbing the profoundest depths of the human condition with poetry, or painting, or postpunk acoustic guitar. Or maybe a combination of all three – plumbing, plum crumble and postpunk acoustic guitar.


Robb Johnson’s new album, My Best Regards, is available from http://www.ethicalwares.com and all good record shops.

 

 

Films for Corbyn
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Films for Corbyn

Published in Films

Andrew Warburton interviews one of the organisers of screenings of some socialist films at the islington Mill, Salford.

One proof of Jeremy Corbyn’s ability to inspire grassroots action among Labour members and in the community as a whole is the ever-expanding list of cultural projects and activities bearing the name ‘… for Corbyn’. First, we had ‘Poets for Corbyn’ (a collection of poems released by Pendant Publishing in August 2015). Then we had ‘Dance for Corbyn’, a mixture of speakers and DJ sets in London, and soon there will be ‘Rock for Corbyn’, a night of live music in Warrington. Next week sees the beginning of a Greater Manchester-based project called ‘Films for Corbyn’, involving the screening of socialist films in aid of various causes, including the pro-Corbyn activist group Momentum.

The first film, screened on 24th August at the Islington Mill in Salford, is the documentary, ‘The Hard Stop’, about the shooting of Mark Duggan, a young black man, by the Metropolitan Police. Speakers at the screening will include Claudia Webbe, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee; Carole Duggan, the mother of Mark Duggan; and the poet Mark Mace Smith.

I asked Simon, one of the project’s organisers, what inspired him and his Momentum colleagues to start a film series in support of the Labour leader. A testament to the dynamic nature of grassroots organising associated with the Corbyn-led renewal of the Labour Party, Simon’s responses also demonstrated the importance of combining socio-cultural activities with the more serious business of political organizing.

What was the inspiration for ‘Films for Corbyn’?

I suppose ‘Films for Corbyn’ came out of us on the committee of Manchester and Trafford Momentum thinking about socials we could do to keep people engaged in politics. I think it’s important that as well as doing all of the important organising meetings, we do events which allow people to socialise and have fun, so that we don’t lose the energy from all of the people who have become enthused with politics for the first time in a while (or ever!) thanks to Jeremy Corbyn. I worry that it’s quite easy for people to become bored or disillusioned with politics, especially in the Labour Party, whose structures are often bureaucratic and unwelcoming to new people.

Will the project raise money for a particular cause?

We were initially going to donate any funds raised to our local Momentum group, which has been building a grassroots pro-Corbyn movement without any funding. The committee has had to finance our activities out of their own pocket, and that has become increasingly difficult as we have had to book bigger spaces to cope with the numbers of people coming to our events, which has risen dramatically in recent months. We will also be donating to causes which are related to the films we are showing. So our first screening will also be redistributing donations to the Duggan family.

Where will the films be shown?

This is initially a Manchester project, so we will be concentrating on showing films around the Greater Manchester area, with our first screening being in Salford. We don’t have any plans as of yet to show films in other regions, but if there is interest elsewhere it would be exciting to expand this project to other parts of the country

What kind of films do you intend to show?

We intend to show films from a radical working class or socialist tradition, which explore issues affecting some of the most marginalised groups and people in society, which are issues Jeremy Corbyn has been campaigning on throughout his political life.

What is your larger vision for the series, i.e., is it an educational project or part of a bigger political campaign?

For us, educational projects and political campaigns go hand in hand, and we want ‘Films for Corbyn’ to be both of these things. Not only is it something which we hope will maintain and attract enthusiasm for supporting a left-wing Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, the films and discussions we will host will hopefully raise further awareness of issues in Britain which the Labour Party should be fighting. Promoting political education is something we have been doing in Manchester and Trafford Momentum and is something which we feel there needs to be more of.

What do you see as the great socialist filmmakers or classics of socialist film?

Personally, I’m a massive fan of the work of Cinema Action, which was a left-wing film collective whose members produced amazing (but overlooked) documentaries from the late ‘60s to the ‘80s. Particularly for me, the work of Marc Karlin and Steve Sprung, such as ‘The Year of the Beaver’ and ‘Between Times’ stand out. As someone who is more interested in documentaries, I also admire the series produced by Granada in its glory days, such as ‘World in Action’. And I, of course, love a bit of Adam Curtis.

The first film in the ‘Films for Corbyn’ series will be shown on 24th August at the Islington Mill, James Street, Salford. Tickets are £5 (£3 unwaged) and are available through Eventbrite at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/films-for-corbyn-opening-the-hard-stop-tickets-26874738065.

Don't Burn the Books
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Don't Burn the Books

Published in Round-up

A scorching hot list of summer political reading selected by Mark Perryman.

A year ago as Labour sought to recover from the May General Election defeat, halls were starting to fill up for Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign rallies. But even as the halls got bigger and the queues round the block longer, few would ever imagined that this would result in the Left for once being on the winning side. The overwhelming majority of Labour MPs never accepted the vote. They bided their time, and chose the moment for their coup in a way to cause maximum damage. Richard Seymour’s Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics is to date both the best, and the definitive, account of what Corbyn’s victory the first time round meant. One year on, it is the essential summer 2016 read.

But as Corbyn would be the first to admit, his victory will never amount to much unless he can refashion what Labour also means. A Better Politics by Danny Dorling is a neat combination of catchy ideas and practical policies towards a more equal society that benefits all. Of course the principal barrier to equality remains class. In her new book Respectable, Lynsey Hanley provides an explanation of modern class relations that effortlessly mixes the personal and the political. If this sounds easier written than done, then George Monbiot’s epic How Did We Get Into This Mess? serves to remind us of the scale of the economic and environmental crisis we are up against.

Labour’s existential crisis is rooted in competing models of party democracy, and how this should shape a party as a social movement for change. An exploration of what a left populist mass party might look like and the problems it will encounter is provided in Podemos: In the Name of the People, a highly original set of conversations between theorist Chantal Mouffe and Íñigo Errejón, political secretary of Podemos. And it's introduced by Owen Jones - what a line-up!

MP Podemos

One of the more positive aspects of Labour’s crisis should be pluralism, and a rejecion of simplistic binary oppositions such as Corbynista vs Blairite. To begin with, all engaged in the Labour debate should read the free-to-download book Labour’s Identity Crisis: England and the Politics of Patriotism, edited by Tristram Hunt. There is much here on an issue vital post-Brexit, yet scarcely acknowledged as important by most on both ‘sides’. One criticism though - why no contributors from the Left side, such as Billy Bragg, Gary Younge, or the young black Labour MP Kate Osamor?

Taking a tour round Britain to portray the state of the nation(s) is fairly familiar territory for writers on Britishness but Island Story by JD Taylor stands out, thanks to a the author’s sense purpose, tenacious imagination - and a bicycle. It also avoids the common tendency in attempts to produce a settled national narrative of  producing a bastardised version of English nationalism, combining the isolationist and the racist to produce a toxic mix. As a shortish polemic The Ministry of Nostalgia from Owen Hatherley is also more of a demolition than a deconstruction of the rewriting of our history that flows from this naionalism, and all the better for it.

Anglo-populism is mired in the issue of immigration as a mask for its racism. Angry White People by Hsiao-Hung Pai encounters the extremities of this - the far Right, whose politics of hate have a nasty habit of not being as far away as many of us would like. In the USA, the brutal institutionalised racism of its police force has sparked a mass movement which is reported with much insight by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s in her From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, another essential read if a similar popular anti-racism is going to emerge on this side of the Atlantic sometime soon. Of course #BlackLivesMatter didn’t emerge in a political vacuum, it connected movements that date back to the 1950s and 1960s. These connections are expertly made by one of the key Black political figures of both then and now, Angela Davis, whose new book Freedom is a Constant Struggle is an absolutely inspiring read.

MP black lives

Do the deepening fractures around race spell a new era of uprisings? Quite possibly, though their political trajectory and outcomes remain uncertain. Joshua Clover comes down firmly on the side of the optimistic reading in his new book Riot.Strike.Riot, while most wouldn’t be so sure. A handy companion volume would be Strike Art by Yates McKee which helpfully explains the protest culture created via the Occupy movement. However, doubt remains whether such moments, direct action or insurrection, can generate a positive impact beyond their own milieu or locality. Shooting Hipsters is a much-needed up-to-date account of, and practical guide to, how acts of dissent can break through into and beyond the mainstream media. And for the dark side? Mara Einstein’s Black Ops Advertising, which details the many ways in which corporate PR operations have sought to colonise social media.

MP shootinghipstersthumb

We can be inspired by history to carve out a better future from the present. A Full Life by Tom Keough and Paul Buhle uses a comic strip to illustrate the life, times and ideals of Irish rebel James Connolly. Alternatively, enjoy the extraordinary range of writing from the Spanish Civil War compiled by Pete Ayrton in No Pasaran! And Owen Hatherley’s carefully crafted The Chaplin Machine provides an insight into the aesthetic of revolution that was abroad at the time in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, on a scale never seen before or since.

It is also a period that is recorded with considerable skill by the twice-yearly journal Twentieth Century Communism - the latest edition providing the usual thematic range, including Trotsky’s bid to live in 1930s Britain, and an outline of the basis for a cosmopolitan anti-imperialism. Of course there are plenty who would seek to bury all of this. David Aaronovitch comes to the last rites with his brilliantly written if flawed Party Animals. An entirely different perspective is provided by the hugely impressive Jodi Dean and her latest book Crowds and Party, an impassioned account of modern protest movements as the enduring case for a mass party of social and political change. Sounds familiar, trite even? Not the way Jodi argues it, mixing an acute sense of history with a vision of the future.

MP Crowds and party cover

But enjoying the here and now of a super soaraway summer perhaps demands more than the promise of a better tomorrow. My starting point for a today to look forward to usually revolves around finding a recipe for a decent supper. Plenty of these can be found in The Good Life Eatery Cookbook with a mix of good-for-you, or more importantly in this instance good-for-me recipes, temptingly delicious-looking photography, and a philosophy behind it all that reminds me of that useful maxim ‘small is beautiful.’

Of course no summer should be complete without a visit to the beach. Highly recommended reading for the sun-lounger searching for a dash of a thriller for a mental getaway is Chris Brookmyre’s latest Black Widow which, as always with Brookmyre, is dark, twisted and entertaining. And for the children? Pushkin Press do the hard work for parents, tracking down the best in European kids’ books, translating, repackaging and producing such gems as Tow-Truck Pluck from the Netherlands. The perfect holiday read for families needing to be cheered up post-Brexit.

MP Chris Brookmyre

And my book of the quarter? Food is never far from most of our minds. Summertime picnics are for the fortunate, worrying about what we eat and the impact it has on our health. For others, the spread of food banks is testament to the failure of austerity politics. Few writers could appeal to both the modern obsession with food as well as to consciences concerned with those who don’t have enough of it to get by, never mind baking off. But Josh Sutton does with his pioneering account Food Worth Fighting For. This is social history that packs a punch, while written in a style and with a focus to transform readers into fighting foodies. Brilliant, and incredibly original.

 Food rev2

 

Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’, aka Philosophy Football. No links in this review to Amazon, if you can avoid purchasing from offshore tax dodgers please do.

Billy Bragg on tour 2015
Friday, 29 March 2024 06:30

Socialism of the Heart: an interview with Billy Bragg

Published in Music

 How did the last tour go, did you enjoy it? You had to put on extra dates, what were the audiences like? Do you think you're tapping into a new radical mood among young people, the same mood that got Corbyn elected?

The tour's just finished, it was great. I started with a couple of London shows at the Union Chapel, a non-conformist church in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency of Islington North. Built in 1877, it’s a wonderful gig to perform, but backstage isn’t really designed for rock and roll gigs. It’s a more of a Victorian warren. One of my crew asked if I’d seen the mural of Jeremy in one of the rooms? I went to investigate and found that, while it did depict a kindly looking fellow with a beard, this chap was carrying a lamb and his head was suspiciously backlit.

Following the London shows, I headed up to Scotland to do my first gigs there since the independence referendum. I was very encouraged to find that the energy of the Yes campaign had not dissipated, despite their defeat last September. I also found that Corbyn’s election means something different in Scotland. Progressively-minded people are happy that someone who opposes the neo-liberal consensus has been elected leader of the Labour Party, but they do wonder why it’s taken us so long to catch on to the idea that the Westminster system is broken.

It was an interesting time to be on the road up there. The Syria vote fired everyone up – even the doorman at my Glasgow hotel said it was outrageous that parliament had voted in favour of bombing. The Oldham by-election added some edge to things and the new left wing grouping, RISE, were holding their first conference on the coming weekend. As a result, the Scottish gigs were highly politicised.

We finished off with a gig at Butlins Skegness holiday camp. Sounds strange, I know, but it’s the best way to hold a festival in December and Butlins host music events most weekends through the winter. This one was the Great British Folk Festival and although I’m not really part of the tradition, the folk audience has always been very supportive. In a music business where most artists would rather not say anything politically controversial, the folk fans deserve respect as people who have helped keep the topical song alive.

I wasn’t too sure how my songs would go down at Butlins, but I gave them the same politicised set that I’d been doing in London and Scotland and it went down a storm. Every mention of Corbyn was cheered and when I finished with ‘There is Power in A Union’, they stood and sang along.

You're also one of the people that have kept the protest music tradition alive in this country, and helped make sure socialist values are kept alive and celebrated musically. Can you tell us something about your background, how you got into the protest music tradition, and why you've stuck with it when others have fallen away? Can musicians influence politics, do you think?

I got into politics through music. My earliest heroes were the singer-songwriters of the 1960s – Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne all wrote topical songs. My other love was American soul music. Listening to the likes of Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and the Impressions I heard the songs of struggle that were inspired by the civil rights movement.

Although people believed that music could change the world in the 60s, that has not been my experience. Ultimately, the responsibility for changing the world rests not with the artist but with the audience. To pretend otherwise is to fail to understand history. Having said that, I do believe that music has a role to play in inspiring the audience to take up that challenge.

Attending the Rock Against Racism Carnival in May 1978 was my first political activism. That event made me realise that I was not the only person who was troubled by the casual racism, sexism and homophobia I saw everyday at the office where I worked. However, it wasn’t the bands that gave me the courage of my convictions, it was being in that audience – 100,000 kids just like me. That day I realised that my generation were going to define themselves in opposition to discrimination of all kinds, just as the previous generation had been defined by their opposition to the Vietnam War.

The bands that played that day did a great service to me by creating an atmosphere in which my perceptions were challenged, which in turn led me to take a different view of things. That is the role that music can play in the struggle. I know, because it happened to me and so I try to challenge perceptions every time I do a gig.

Can you tell us more about the phenomenon that was Red Wedge, in the eighties, which you fronted? And the obvious next question, any chance of something similar happening in the next few years?

Taking its name from a poster by Russian constructivist El Lizzitsky, Red Wedge was an artist-led initiative that sought to encourage young people to support the Labour party at the 1987 election. When the miners' strike ended in defeat, those of us who had done gigs in support of the strikers and their families didn’t just want to go back to normal. Red Wedge was our way of continuing the struggle, taking the fight to the Tories at the next possible opportunity – the 1987 election.

We chose to work with (not for) the Labour Party because we felt they represented the best vehicle for getting rid of the Tories. The miners' strike had been a genuinely revolutionary moment, but it had failed. Now we had to take the next best option. We didn’t see the fight against the Tories as an either/or choice: our message to revolutionary colleagues was that we would come on to the street with them when it was time, if they would come into the ballot box with us.

The core artists involved were myself, the Style Council, Junior Giscombe, Jerry Dammers and the Communards. In the lead up to the election, we were joined by Madness, the Smiths, Prefab Sprout, the Kane Gang, The The, Gary Kemp, The Beat, Tom Robinson and many others. What defined us was our opposition to Margaret Thatcher, rather than an avid support for the Labour Party.

Could Red Wedge happen again? I think that’s a question for someone under 30.

How has the music industry changed over the years? Could someone with your background and your openly political approach still make it, do you think?

The music industry has changed massively in the 33 years since my first record. When I started out, there were three weekly music papers that sold big – NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, as well as many smaller publications. There were only two pop radio stations, BBC Radio One and it’s regional commercial equivalent – Capital in London. And there was a weekly pop show on national tv that broadcast all the latest music and styles into your living room – Top of the Pops. All of that has either disappeared or had its voice drowned out by digital competition.

More significantly for someone who wants to make political pop, music has lost its vanguard role as the primary identifying medium of youth culture. When I was 19 years old, the only avenue of expression open to me was pop music. If I wanted to broadcast my thoughts about the world, I had to learn to play an instrument, write songs and do gigs. Now any 19-year-old can express their views by blogging or making a film on their phone or using the ready-made platforms of the social media.

Although we didn’t realise it at the time, back in the latter years of the 20th century, music was our social medium – we used it to speak to one another and to our parent’s generation. Now if 19-year-olds want to know what their peers are thinking, they don’t buy an album or look at the charts or in the NME, they simply check their Instagram account.

I also wonder if I’d have been able to overcome the amount of scorn and abuse directed at anyone who expresses a progressive opinion on social media these days. If I’d had to endure the slings and arrows of Twitter and Facebook while forming my political opinions, would I have thought better of it and just stuck to writing love songs?

Your latest book of lyrics, A Lover Sings, is published by Faber and Faber, the august publishing house for top class poetry. That's quite an achievement in itself, isn't it? What do you think about the difference between poems and songs?

The main difference is that you generally experience poetry in solitude, reading quietly somewhere. Songs tend to be more of a communal experience. To hear a favourite song sung by the artists who wrote it and to sing along with them and hundreds, maybe thousands of others, has the effect of validating whatever emotions you’ve invested in the song. It’s a kind of solidarity. The left know the powerful unity that can come from singing together but it doesn’t have to be a political song to make you feel that you’re not alone. You can’t get that sense of communion on the internet, which is why I think gigs are becoming more popular, particularly festivals where you can feel part of something bigger.

What's your thinking about current political issues, the new Labour leadership, and the sudden and unexpected resurgence of the political left?

Unexpected is the word! I think Jeremy Corbyn himself may have been the most surprised by his elevation. It’s clearly not just about him. There is something bigger at work. My hunch is that he has become a lightning rod for a different way of doing politics. His sudden popularity is less to do with his own position and more to do with an urge on the left to be part of a genuinely transformative movement.

That’s the feeling that I got in Scotland last year, when doing gigs with supporters of the Yes campaign during the referendum. People were energised not by nationalism but by a sense that another world was possible. That’s why the turn out was unprecedented – people knew that their vote would really mean something. I think the same urge is behind Corbyn’s landslide. At a time when globalisation has allowed corporations to set the agenda, our democracy has become less about change and more about rewarding the status quo. Corbyn challenges that cosy arrangement.

Whether he can survive until the general election is anybody's guess, but, again, I take heart from what happened in Scotland: the Yessers lost the referendum, but they didn’t go home and give up. They maintained the connections they’d made and kept the momentum going. My hope is that, now we Corbynites have been engaged in the process of changing our politics for the better, we won’t simply melt away if the Great Helmsman is brought down by Blairite revanchists within the PLP. They can oust him, but they will still have us to deal with in the ensuing leadership contest.

Finally, Billy, what do you mean by your phrase 'socialism of the heart'?

It’s a term I came up with after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time when ideology was being swiftly abandoned and the language that we’d used to debate our politics no longer meant anything to the public we hoped to engage. I’ve always believed that if socialism is not, at heart, a form of organised compassion, then it is not really worthy of the name. So I began trying to find ways of expressing the compassionate politics that I felt had to form the bedrock of our attempts to forge a new ideology that connected with people’s everyday experiences and ‘socialism of the heart’ was the first term I came up with.

Billy Bragg has just finished an intensive year's tour round Britain. A Lover Sings, The Selected Lyrics of Billy Bragg, is published by Faber and Faber.

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