Life and Times: Bob Dylan in Swansea (2025)

The Life and Times column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time. His music is top of my list, as it is of many people’s. I’ve seen him perform live a number of times – in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham. So why wasn’t I jumping for joy when my local newspaper carried the story that the 84-year old legend was soon to do three concerts (not one but three) in my own little home town – and at a venue a walking distance from where I live? In fact, not only was I not jumping for joy, I didn’t even want to go. Why not? Well, because, as I see it, Dylan has been going downhill musically for a long time – since the late 1990s in fact. The bits and pieces of some of the recent live performances by him I’ve seen on the web have seemed especially dire. So why would I risk spoiling the fond memories I had of him at his best? Don’t get me wrong. He’s still one hell of a wordsmith and, though there was much questioning of his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, I was less surprised than many. But my perception was that the current package couldn’t be anything but a disappointment – even if the many confirmed ‘bobcats’ attending wouldn’t see it like that.

I relayed news of the concerts to my son, a great Dylan enthusiast too. His quick reply was ‘We’re going and I’ll pay’. So I relented, and on an evening in early November we left the house and walked the relatively short distance along the sea front to see the first concert of the Swansea Arena leg of Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour.

What was it like? To be frank, better than I expected. ‘Mixed’ might be the right word – and in more senses than one. Firstly, because he mixed songs from his most recent album (ie ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’) with a selection from previous albums. Secondly because most of the songs he performed from that latest album could, in my view, only be described as dirge-like (and to make it worse some of them seeming to go on forever), while his earlier numbers were well performed on the whole, even if with almost unrecognisable arrangements compared to the original versions. But then Dylan has always been known for going against the grain, despite the fact that, in the content of his songs, any explicitly anti-establishment or ‘protest’ matter is way back in the past. And it must be said that his voice is still strong and that he was, as always in his concerts, backed by a group of exceptionally good musicians. The other thing is that the sell-out audience of 3,000 – to me a surprisingly diverse gathering in terms of age (teenagers to aged hippies) and gender (very much a 50-50 split) – absolutely loved it. ‘What an amazing evening’, one of them who’d come all the way from West Yorkshire posted on a Facebook page the following day. And a good many others had clearly come from afar. Before the start, on our row alone, we chatted with fans from Wrexham, Plymouth, Bristol and Milford Haven. Then at 8 o’clock sharp Dylan and his band walked on, the music started and, after performing for a full two hours, with no breaks or banter between songs, they stood up and walked off. The crowd stood up too and clapped and cheered and shouted for more. But they didn’t get it and the lights came on.

The show over, the question I had to ask myself was whether this, at bottom, was just another example of the way the entertainment industry sells us thrills (often meaningless) to patch over the uniformity and stress of the wage and salary system most of us are compelled to spend our lives in? Was it part of that alienation from mutually cooperative activity which is inherently an obsession with celebrities (people we do not know personally and we may have little in common with) and which is the direct opposite of a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with others?

There’s no doubt that Dylan is some kind of hero to many of those who go to his concerts. And it must be said that he has something unique to offer that makes people listen to him and want to go. Many of his lyrics present ideas and images which, while often anything but immediately decipherable and sometimes downright puzzling, do at least give food for thought and reflection. But it’s the worship of the man rather than of his work that, like celebrity worship in general, I see as questionable and as a symptom of the underlying follow-your-leader mentality that capitalism instils and educates people for. You can like (or love) the music and the lyrics, yes. But to put the individual who produces it on some kind of rarified pedestal seems to me part of that ‘superior being’ idea, which is seen at its worst in the kind of cult worship to be found around ‘charismatic’ figures, whether in entertainment, in sport or in politics.

What’s for certain, however, is that in the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – one without leaders or led, governments or governed and based on common ownership of resources and democratic organisation and decision making – each individual will have the time and space to cultivate their own talents freely and, while no doubt admiring the talents and achievements of others, will be unlikely to see them as heroes. Rather in fact each person will have the confidence to be their own hero.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Cheating the reaper (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s a dark and ghoulish story for your Christmas-time delight. Back in September, just before the wall-to-wall media orgy of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met up for a big military parade in Beijing, accompanied by their chums Lukashenko of Belarus, Pezeshkian of Iran and Min Aung Hlaing of the Myanmar junta. This self-congratulatory Comic-Con of the Marvel Supervillain Universe was chiefly notable for a ‘hot mic’ moment in which Putin and Xi were overheard talking about the prospects of human longevity. According to reports, the conversation went like this:

Putin (aged 72 at the time): ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing… Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

Xi (also aged 72): ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Ha ha, they wish. One of the few consolations of being an elderly worker in capitalism is that no matter how rich these capitalist bastards are, they can’t cheat death any more than you can. This little soundbite reveals that they are keenly aware of that fact too. It’s just not fair, is it? You go to all the trouble of demolishing democracy, crushing your opponents, cowing your population, and making yourself dictator for life, only to have death pull the rug from under you just like it does for the little people.

It’s not just the autocrats, of course. Donald Trump, while not believing in exercise or healthy food, nevertheless appointed ‘longevity enthusiasts’ including RF Kennedy to key health posts. Rich Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos also harbour Methuselah aspirations, reasoning that if there’s any way to extend life, their money will find it . There are individuals like Bryan Johnson who are so obsessed with longevity that they will put themselves through the most punishing and joyless regimes in order to wring life out to the very last drop. Instead they are likely proof of the old joke that renouncing all pleasures doesn’t make you live longer, it just seems like it .

Though it’s still considered ‘fringe of the fringe’, there is a history of research into longevity, from plasma therapy to fusing old and young mice together, and even injecting pureed monkey testicle into the human scrotum. Instead of seeing death as the great leveller, why not treat it as a preventable disease like any other, for which treatments can be found? The Greenland shark can live for 500 years or more, and only starts dating at 150. There must be sound biological reasons for that, aside from living in a perpetual icebox.

The World Health Organization in 2018 included old age as a disease in its 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, until vigorous protest made them remove it again. For critics, pathologising a universal process involves serious ethical concerns, stigmatising old people as ‘having something wrong with them’ .

And there is the big picture. Death is the reason we exist. If animals didn’t die, there would have been no evolution and therefore no us. If humans became immortal, society might ossify, and you’d have to abolish children. But never mind big pictures and bleeding hearts, think of the profits. ‘They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable… They seemed strangely uncurious [sic] about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’.

In any case, no one wants to make workers immortal, only the super-rich. Putin, famous for his ludicrous bare-chested-on-a-horse publicity photos, is fixated with being a ‘healthy strongman’, and goes everywhere with ‘an army of doctors’. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and has put billions into anti-ageing research, stem-cell cloning and organ transplant technology. It’s also scurrilously reported that he bathes in deer blood, a traditional Siberian shamanic ‘remedy’. In all this he is no doubt encouraged by his inner circle of hangers-on, who warmly appreciate that keeping him alive is their ticket to staying in power.

What’s the reality behind the hopeful hype? Professor of vaccine immunology John Tregoning points out that you can’t keep swapping out failing organs indefinitely because a) general anaesthetics are a calculated risk that increases with age and each operation, and b) there’s a high risk of MRSA infections, including sepsis, with every transplant op. Putin would be playing Russian Roulette, over and over. Cloned organs are not a thing, so you’d need a lifetime of immuno-suppressants, with an ever-present threat of fatal infections. There is not an endless supply of suitable organs, in fact there’s a world shortage. There is some state-of-the-art work using genetically modified pig organs, but if you survive six months after a transplant, that is considered an ‘amazing feat’.

Meanwhile, Tregoning adds, the rest of your body would still be ageing. The largest organ is your skin, and how would you replace that? ‘Even if you could replace all of the internal organs, you’d need to replace your muscles, your bone, your skin, everything is aging at fairly constant rates…. Just putting a new heart in is like taking a 1980s Ford Cortina and putting a brand new Porsche engine in and expecting it to run fine’.

On top of all that, brain connectivity declines over time too, and there’s no known way to reset that. There is some horizon research into a class of drugs called senolytics, which eat dead cells and scar tissue and may be a way to reboot the human body from the inside out, but for now they only work with fruit flies and nematode worms, and have toxic side effects.

Happily, today’s ruthless autocrats stand no chance of cheating the reaper. But new ones will replace them as long as capitalism survives. The world’s workers need to wield the political scythe where it would do most good.

Paddy Shannon