Music Review: Agitprop Bop (1978)

From the June 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Robinson Band reviewed in concert and on record.

With lyrics asserting hat "When Left is Right and Right is wrong/You'd better decide which side you're on", Tom Robinson is being hailed as "our first red rock star." Time Out, however, described the Tom Robinson Band's music as "songs for swinging social workers" thus neatly acknowledging an affinity between the Socialist Workers' Party's elitism and TRB;s condescending tone as in Ain't Gonna Take It: "I'm a middle-class kiddie but I know where I stand / I've got brothers in Brixton . . . "

Essentially TRB put over the agitprop of minority pressure group politics, sharing the same false assumptions that they need only "stand up and fight for their rights" against the "puritanical backlash" portrayed in  Power in the Darkness. Despite this, they do make clear that the problems of various minorities should not be seen in isolation but that "we are all in it together."

It's too easy to knock TRB's songs as merely patronising platitudes when after all, what constitutes socialist music? Even if it were desirable, few would want to listen to a Marxist liturgy let alone a rock version of "sing along with ma(r)x". Music, to be successful as propaganda, must be emotive with lyrics of protestation.

TRB's music is successful because it fulfills both these conditions. The result is powerful and infectious though at times somewhat frightening for, as the Gay News review warned, "some of the lyrics are dangerously simplistic evoking a Pavlovian response in their listeners." This is illustrated by the unfortunate clenched fist gesture audiences copy from the band's insignia and use during the more aggressive numbers, which in other circumstances might be classified as a nazi salute. The emotive power of the music is shown by the oft-remarked enthusiastic response by straight audiences to—what has become the gay anthem—Glad To Be Gay.

But emotive responses aren't sufficient in themselves to make socialists, however well intentioned. Rational insight into the nature of capitalism must accompany the gut reaction. For in focusing attention on the oppression of minority groups (gays, blacks, women, etc.) by authoritarianism, police harassment, machismo and violence, these come to be seen as the cause and thus the target of protest rather than realising these to the inevitable effect of capitalism. Urging us to stop "Fighting each other/Instead of the Front" perpetuates the erroneous notion that eliminating the NF will eradicate racist ideas. The inverse is true; removing racist ideas by showing how the  inherent problems of capitalism, create them, will permanently eliminate the NF.

The necessity of simple lyrics in musical verse offers the possibility of only brief insights into the nature of oppression though the reactionary views of "Benyon and Whitehouse getting us stitched/'cos abortion and the gay scene are only for the rich" in Ain't Gonna Take It illustrates well the class nature of oppression and hypocrisy.

But it is in attacking the cherished assumptions of capitalist society that TRB succeeds best. Like, for instance, the satire on the adolescent youth in Grey Cortina, aspiring to emulate the aggressive "Cortina owner, no-one meaner" which is scathingly ironical in lampooning the mindless image of the macho driver. "Chewing gum at traffic light/Stop at red but leave on amber/Grey Cortina outta sight". Yet the paradox is that while debunking machismo in this number, elsewhere (e.g. Up Against The Wall) the necessary use of powerful music to express anger gives the impression of aggression found in "conventional" rock bands.

TRB's success in moving from the obscure pub performing circuit to EMI contracted recording stars has caused political pundits to debate the possibility of TRB having to compromise their political stance through commercial pressure. Yet with the recent release of their first album* containing their most 'political' songs it would seem that EMI have shrewdly realised their market potential among at least the 'left', if not the general public, (e.g. EMI advertise "Rock Against Racism" on the record sleeve and the giveaway gimmick is a TRB clenched fist stencil with the "caution", "This stencil is not meant for spraying on public property!") Tom Robinson himself, in an interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show (ITV 13 May) quite candidly admitted that his ambition was to be a rock star and that "music is his first concern". And with those political impresarios the SWP exploiting the slogan type lyrics for their own propaganda 'Carnivals' (see accompanying article) it would seem that any 'commercial' pressure to influence TRB is likely to come from the listening expectations of their supporters.

In an interview in New Musical Express Tom Robinson reckoned he had no "illusions about the political left any more than the right: just a shrewd idea which of the two sides gonna stomp on us first". Unfortunately his "shrewd idea" is merely an "illusion", for 'left' and 'right' are only different sides of one record, variations on the same theme—capitalism.

Paul Moody

* "Power in the Darkness" by Tom Robinson Band (EMI Records)

Rock against reformism? (1978)

From the June 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do Paul Foot (editor of Socialist Worker) and Vera Lynn have in common? Answer: they both entertain people with illusions. During the last war, while workers were being slaughtered in defence of their masters' property, Vera Lynn was employed to sing to the troops to keep up  their morale; tell them what a worthy cause they were dying for, how life would be so much better when it's all over — "There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover . . . " It was an exercise in cynical hypocrisy which made Vera Lynn rich and famous and those who attended the concerts all the readier to sacrifice themselves. So what's this got to do with Paul Foot?

If you were in Victoria Park, Hackney, on the afternoon of Sunday 30 April you'd have seen a gathering of fifty to sixty thousand people. At a first glance it looked like a rock concert. There was a stage before which sat thousands of rock enthusiasts listening to the music of Steel Pulse, The Clash and The Tom Robinson Band. But from another angle the scene looked like yet another futile political demonstration, complete with SWP banners demanding the right to work, Lefties selling every shade of newspaper from Worker's Voice to Worker's Arse and the usual contingent of Young Liberals who weren't quite sure why they were there. The organisers of the event were the Anti-Nazi League (for which read Rock Against Racism for which read SWP for which read Paul Foot and friends). The object was to win support for the Socialist Workers' Party's policy of physically preventing the National Front from operating. Emotional propaganda mixed with powerful music is a sure way to build up a politically opportunist movement. The SWP are not original in discovering this. Consider the following remarks:

The great mass of people consists neither of professors nor of diplomats. The scantiness of abstract knowledge possessed by the mass confines its perceptive faculties to the realm of feeling. Within these limits, its attitude is either positive or negative. It can perceive only a forceful stimulus in one of these two directions, and can never appreciate a middle ground lying between them. This emotionalism of the mass, however, is responsible for its extraordinary stability. Faith is more difficult to shake than knowledge, love undergoes fewer changes than respect, hate is more powerful than aversion, and the impetus to the most powerful revolutions upon this earth has lain at all times less in scientific cognition dominating the masses than in the fanaticism inspiring then and sometimes in the hysteria driving them forward. He who wishes to win the broad mass must know the key which opens the door to its heart.

The writer was Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf, p. 371). The Socialist Party of Great Britain does not oppose racist, fascist and nationalist ideas in isolation, as if capitalism will be humanised without them. Our case is that wages system can not be made to run in the interest of the working class. This message can only be impressed upon fellow workers by reasonable argument. Anti-social behaviour will not cease by getting people to wear 'Stop the Nazi' badges. 

There is no  doubt that music can be used to spread ideas and even to increase class consciousness, but this will only happen when those who organise the concerts and perform the music are themselves aware of what Socialism means. In the meantime, we understand that Paul Foot is auditioning for Hughie Green's old job on 'Opportunity Knocks'—opportunism and bad music rolled into one; whay more could he want.

Steve Coleman

Billy Bragg: Not Looking for a New England (2012)

From the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I never advocated the abolition of capitalism” (Billy Bragg, Radio 4, 21 April)

1984 was the year of the Miners' Strike and Billy Bragg. He identified himself with the Miners’ struggle against the Thatcher Tory government. In fact, Bragg says that Thatcher made him who he was. His album Brewing Up with Billy Bragg contained a song called The World Turned Upside Down about the Diggers and Levellers of the English Revolution of 1649 who advocated the“common treasury” of the earth, the title of the song referencing Marxist historian Christopher Hill's book.  All proceeds from Bragg's EP, Between the Wars, were donated to the Striking Miners’ Fund.

In April, the Reverend Richard Coles invited his old Red Wedge comrade, the ‘Bard of Barking’, Billy Bragg, onto his Saturday Live Radio 4 show, introducing him as “the British Left's most consistent voice”.  Bragg's consistency has been as a reformist, gradualist, and non-revolutionary voice. The Guardian (1 January last year) declared that Bragg had “an unshakeable commitment to democratic socialism”. Is the term ‘socialist’ an accurate description for this Dorsetshire denizen?

Bragg was brought up in Barking in East London, experiencing “the reality of working class experience not the theoretical” and attending Barking Abbey Comprehensive School.  He was energised by the Punk Rock explosion of the late 1970s, stating he was politicised by seeing The Clash at the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park in Hackney in 1978. The Clash were notorious for radical chic Leftist gesture politics such as wearing Red Brigade/Baader Meinhof T-shirts, and eulogising the Leftist Nicaraguan Sandinista government.

Bragg would have been better politicised if he had seen the Gang of Four confronting British Movement skinheads at Thames Poly in Woolwich in 1979. The Gang of Four were a Marxist post-punk band originating at Leeds University who were influenced by the Frankfurt School, and wrote about love, sex and leisure as fetishised commodities in capitalism, and alienated labour. In 1982, their single, I Love a Man in a Uniform, dissected war and capitalism. This song came too late for Billy Bragg because in 1981 he had joined the British Army. He had not worked out an analysis of capitalism and war and the fact that the working class do the killing and dying in capitalist wars.

After the end of the Miners’ Strike in 1985, Bragg's next campaign was Red Wedge which was a pop music collective dedicated to electing the Labour Party and getting Neil Kinnock into Downing Street.  Bragg told Coles that Red Wedge was “hardly revolutionary, it was Neil Kinnock”. Kinnock was already expelling from the Labour Party Trotskyists such as Militant and beginning the modernisation process that would eventually result in New Labour.  In 1987 Thatcher was elected for the third time.

After the 1987 election, the next stop for Billy Bragg was joining the newly formed pressure group, Charter 88, which had been set up by Liberal/SDP intellectuals. Charter 88 would eventually merge with the New Politics Network (which had evolved from Democratic Left which was, in turn, the 1991 successor to the defunctCommunist Party of Great Britain) and form the pressure group Unlock Democracy.

Barking Abbey Comprehensive School also produced Malcolm Eden and Tim Gane who formed the indie pop band, McCarthy, in 1985 who were explicitly a Marxist group that sang about socialism (Red Sleeping Beauty), the socialist commonwealth (CelestialCity), while their 1987 album, I am a Wallet, was all about capitalism and commodity fetishism in Thatcher's Britain

When McCarthy split in 1990 Tim Gane teamed up with French singer, Laetitia Sadier, to form Stereolab. Sadier told Melody Maker in 1991: “I want to change the world” and Stereolab's lyrics had a Marxist content. One song called Ping Pong in 1994 was a Marxian economic analysis of capitalism's crises. A 1992 song, Surreal Chemist, identifies the Marxist perspective of Stereolab:

“Even more than philosophers/Aiming at no less than the total transformation of man and his world/ True life embodying pleasure principle's noblest triumph/Over the cowering mendacity of bourgeois christian civilisation”.

In 2005, Bragg supported Oona King MP (New Labour, pro-Iraq war) in her election campaign in Bethnal Green and Bow in East London against the maverick Leftist, George Galloway. She was defeated.  New Labour had so abandoned the working class in East London that the far-right BNP gained seats on Barking Council.

The rise of the BNP in his native East London prompted Bragg to write his 2006 book, The Progressive Patriot, where he champions English nationalism and multiculturalism and even draws inspiration from Rudyard Kipling. (He of the British Empire and ‘the White Man's Burden’ whose propaganda egged on the slaughter of millions of the working class in the trenches of the First World War.) Bragg has no class analysis of society and writes he is “developing a narrative which explains how we all came to be here together in this place” (my emphasis) and states we now live in a “present classless society”. He does not see that the capitalist ruling class seek to convince the working class that ‘we’ is ‘the Nation’ and the Nation state is run by the capitalist class in their interests. He does not see ‘multiculturalism’ from a socialist angle, which views it a divisive because it forces the working class to identify with other groups against their class interests.

Since 2001, Bragg has stated that he is a tactical Lib-Dem voter but feels betrayed by the Lib-Dems being in the Coalition government with the Tories: “They had some positive things in their manifesto, and they seem to have abandoned the lot of 'em”.

Bragg told Reverend Coles in April that “there are no utopias, I was never that kind of revolutionary. As if I've ever called for the abolition of capitalism”. He agreed with Coles that his was “a modest programme of change, chipping away at that which is tractable”. Last year he told the Guardian:  “We're living in a post-ideological period” and that “the long shadow of Karl Marx” was over, and of the new protests he did not “care if it's called socialism”.

Steve Clayton

Further Reading:

Socialist Standard review of Billy Bragg's The Progressive Patriot

Further Listening:

Billy Bragg - The World Turned Upside Down

Gang of Four - I Love A Man In Uniform
McCarthy - Red Sleeping Beauty
Stereolab - Ping Pong