Letters: Jimmy Hill (2016)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jimmy Hill

Dear Editors

The obituary on Jimmy Hill (February Socialist Standard) failed to mention his role as consultant and mediator of a ‘rebel tour’ to apartheid South Africa to play football in 1982. There was also omission of his defence of football manager Ron Atkinson’s use of the word ‘nigger’ in an off-air  2004 television transmission for football.

I am also very surprised that we devoted so much space to the death of David Bowie.

Joel Thompson

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David Bowie

Dear Editors

I was surprised as a socialist to read the rather effusive article on David Bowie in the February Socialist Standard, (‘David Bowie: Ground-Breaking Artist’) when many readers would, I believe, regard him as the hyped-up product of that epitome of brash capitalism; the pop music industry.

Rather than being a genius as the article tends to imply, I would venture to suggest that a more realistic reading of the situation would be that his greatest talent was in recognising his limited ability and boosting his career by wearing outrageous clothes, adopting weird personas and making controversial statements to appeal both to the young and those who see profundity where none exists.

An example of the latter was his claim to be gay/bi-sexual at a time when later admitted that this claim was a lie and not unconnected with the promotion of Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous character he was then adopting for his stage shows.

It's difficult, therefore, not to reach the conclusion that, rather than being concerned with the plight of the LBGT community, his greater concern, as with other similar statements and stunts, was for self-publicity, his image and greater record sales.

Richard Layton

Reply: 

This might be what some are saying down at the pub but it’s surely simplistic and unfair to assume that all pop artists are mere talentless self-publicists. Bowie at least wrote his own music which the writer, a musician himself, judged had merit. In view of the large number who liked him he must have said something that echoed how they felt under capitalism?  – Editors

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Myriam Namazie

Dear Editors

The article 'From No Platform to Safe Spaces' (February) concluded that suppressing free expression at universities 'must be opposed and exposed just as much as the Leninist ‘no-platformers’'. It is probably worth then pointing out to readers that the militant atheist and ex-Muslim Maryam Namazie works for the Central Committee of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI) as editor of its journal. While critical of the Soviet Union the WPI nevertheless operates as a vanguard with a cadre and 'rank-and-file' reprinting works by Lenin.

Their figurehead Mansoor Hekmat wrote 'If it is a question of a real assessment of Lenin, of the truth of his views and his practice from the viewpoint of Marxism, of his contribution to the revolutionary thought and practice of the working class, and so on, of course I am a Leninist. In my view Lenin was a genuine Marxist with an essentially correct understanding of this outlook, and a worthy leader of the socialist movement of the world working class.' (http://wpiran.org/english/?p=299)

On 'safe spaces' policies, definitions might vary. While it might be undesirable for applying too broadly, a space free from prejudice, discrimination or harassment voluntarily agreed to by freely assembling workers might be achieved (even inadvertently) by the Socialist Party practice of meeting with chairpersons and having editors publish the Socialist Standard.

Jon D. White

Reply: 

We are not aware that, even though it regards itself as a Leninist vanguard, the Worker-Communist Party of Iran advocates ‘no platform’. Not all Leninists do, to their credit. If it does then Namazie would be a hypocrite, but even if she were she should be free to express that view. Even no-platformers should be allowed a platform. That’s the point. – Editors

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Paul Mattick

Dear Editors

Stefan's review of Gary Roth's book on Paul Mattick (February Socialist Standard) is interesting and thought-provoking. There is, however, one otherwise minor point I think it would be useful to bring out. The World Socialist Party of the U.S. did not 'originate' from the Socialist Party of Michigan, as stated in the review.

The Workers' Socialist Party was the direct result of collaboration between disaffected Detroit members of the SP of A and SPGB 'slackers' Adolph Kohn and Moses Baritz, on the run from the British wartime authorities. These members, drawing on Kohn's input, resigned as a body from the SP of A, which would not allow the breakaways to use its registered trademark as the Socialist Party of the United States. So they dodged the issue by adding the qualifier 'Workers' to the name.

The emergence of the Proletarian Party, on the other hand, was the outcome of mounting conflicts within the SP of A's Michigan affiliate: between the faction grouped around John Keracher, who promoted a radical policy of no reforms of capitalism, and members who had no trouble selling the national office on Keracher's heretical radicalism. The national organization finally 'expelled' the Michigan troublemakers by excluding them from its reorganized state affiliate.

The new Proletarian Party, under Keracher's leadership, held views that were generally regarded by the WSP as nearly identical to its own  – except for the PP's passionate endorsement of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is true there was a longstanding relationship between the Proletarian Party and the Workers' Socialist Party/Socialist Education Society. But it was a debating interest centered mainly around the latter's infatuation with 'the Russian bug,' as WSP members referred to it. The PP often derisively referred to the WSP as 'revolutionary tea drinkers.'

It is in any event somewhat misleading to describe both organizations unqualifiedly as having a common origin in the Socialist Party of Michigan.

Ron Elbert, 

Boston, USA

David Bowie: Ground-breaking Artist (2016)

From the February 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

January saw the death from cancer, aged 69, of David Bowie. No popular music artist of the past fifty years has had as wide and profound an influence. There was a spontaneous outpouring of grief across the world amongst the millions of fans he had accumulated in six successive decades. The same comments were repeated on social media and in the press over and over again: that he had provided not just the soundtrack to their lives, but had inspired and stimulated them artistically and culturally. I became an avid listener of his as a child in the early 1970s and this was a key influence in my becoming a musician myself.

As a teenager growing up in the London suburbs, Bowie was both extremely imaginative and intensely hard working at honing his craft, and he remained so, releasing his latest album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday just two days before he died. He is known for the recurring theme of space travel gone wrong, and the loneliness and alienation so powerfully symbolised by that. He once said of his childhood that he ‘felt often, ever since I was a teenager, so adrift and so not part of everyone else . . .  so many secrets about my family in the cupboard . . .  they made me feel on the outside of everything' (interview in 2002 TV documentary, David Bowie: Sound And Vision). It was entirely appropriate that he composed the music for the television adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha Of Suburbia in 1993. He understood more than most the psychology of the city and its outer reaches, and always reached out to fellow ‘outsiders’ of every kind.

His fierce determination in financial matters derived in part from having had all the receipts from his early years of success siphoned off surreptitiously by then manager Tony Defries, resulting in near bankruptcy despite having sold millions of albums and show tickets. As a former victim of such sharks he took the unique step of never again having a manager, instead himself employing a tiny number of people to deal with his personal, business and publicity needs. They were simply paid fees by him rather than his being paid out by them; he retained all of his own rights. He once sold a future rights issue to his songs, via ‘Bowie Bonds’, for a fixed period with the rights reverting to him after that, which proved an extremely astute financial move. A couple of years ago his home town of Brixton had honoured him by using his face on the ten pound note of their local currency, the Brixton Pound (a voucher system circulating between local traders).

'Crazed'

In a mid-1970s magazine interview he once advocated ‘fascism’ for England, and in 1976 was set up by the press and accused of making a ‘Nazi salute’ at Victoria station when greeted by fans on his return from living in Germany. The video of that moment shows him waving and this was freeze-framed to look like a salute. The following year, in 1977, he told Melody Maker that his flirtation with fascism had been a result of his being ‘out of my mind, totally, completely crazed’ at the time. In later years he campaigned vigorously for humanitarian causes and remained a committed Buddhist with a life-long opposition to the subjugation of Tibet by China. He also opposed the British occupation of Northern Ireland. Regarding racism, he was interviewed by MTV in 1983 and took the opportunity to take them to task repeatedly for limiting the number of black artists they featured.

'Subversive'

In a preposterous little piece in the Times (13 January) two days after Bowie died, Daniel Finkelstein tried to recast Bowie’s prolific promotion of artistic individuality as something for which we should thank capitalism – a view which Bowie would have found ridiculous. Finkelstein claimed that Bowie ‘was subversive because capitalism is subversive’, whereas in fact the opposite is the case. Capitalism homogenises and destroys individuality, as the human army of labour is moulded into conformity to match the needs of this system and increase profit.

He broke down barriers of every kind, and advanced the possibilities for choosing what to be. This evolution of personal freedoms is not something we can attribute to one influential person. It was clearly part of a much bigger and longer-term global trend. However, he had the brilliant social sensitivity and insight to tap into these moments and accelerate them.

Bowie rose to fame in the early 1970s at a time when ‘free love’ had been proclaimed as desirable between men and women, whilst gay relationships were still frowned on, even having been illegal in the UK until the late 1960s. He wore feminine clothes and make-up and challenged conventional sexual roles and behaviour. Large numbers of gay people even now still say that his announcement in 1972 that he was gay (and, later, that he was bisexual) helped them to feel less isolated and more confident in their identity.

Foresight

He had an intense intelligence and was extremely well-read with a broad encyclopaedic knowledge, which was yet another point distinguishing him from other pop or rock stars. In a 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman he once again showed great foresight in predicting, with what turned out to be uncanny accuracy, how the internet would rapidly come to dominate human communication (and what the effect would be on the music industry):

‘I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society both good and bad is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.’

He also said that he had chosen to work in music in his youth as in those days it still had ‘a kind of call to arms feeling to it, that this is the thing that will change things’ whereas pop music later became a mere career opportunity and that ‘the internet now carries the flag for the subversive and possibly rebelliousness, the chaotic and nihilistic . . .  forget about the Microsoft element, they do not have a monopoly.’ The audience becomes at least as important as those playing to them, with

‘the demystification of the relationship between performer and audience . . .  the point of having somebody who led the forces has disappeared, because the vocabulary of rock is too well known, it’s not devoid of meaning but it’s certainly only a conveyor of information not a conveyor of rebellion. The internet has taken on that.’

This was in 1999, when the evolution of the internet was very much less developed than it is now. Bowie was the first artist to have a dedicated website, or to make his material available online, or to offer his own web server facility (‘bowienet’). In that same interview, Paxman suggested that ‘some of the claims being made for the internet are hugely exaggerated’ but Bowie stuck to his guns and joked about the ‘far-fetched predictions’ made at the time of the arrival of the telephone, that it would ‘one day be found in every home’.

Survival instinct

He also quoted Duchamp on how the piece of work is not finished until the audience come to it, and add their own interpretation; that what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. ‘That grey space in the middle is what the twenty-first century will be about.’ Asked about why he felt the need to continue earning money, he replied ‘Being working class I feel that there’s never enough to leave my family. There’s a kind of survival instinct.’ He was not one to write overtly political songs, but his awareness of the corrupting power of money is evident, for example in his song Red Money:

‘Oh, can you feel it in the way
That a man is not a man?
Can you see it in the sky
That the landscape is too high?
Like a nervous disease
And it's been there all along.
Project cancelled,
Tumbling central,
Red money.’

Superpower imperialism also came into his sights tangentially in songs like This Is Not America. In Sons Of The Silent Age he captured the stupefying idiocy of popular culture:

‘Sons of the silent age
Pace their rooms like a cell’s dimensions
Rise for a year or two
Then make war
Search through their one inch thoughts
Then decide it couldn’t be done’

But above all he had a genius for conveying, through his work, the experience of alienation. It is significant that he spoke in interviews about his reasons for having ‘chosen’ music as his medium, for he was primarily a universal artist who was also happy to work in visual art (he was a good painter and sculptor), who acted in many films and plays, who produced, directed and designed.

He never allowed himself to become part of that cosy establishment generally joined by the luminaries of the arts, including pop stars of a certain age. He refused honours from the queen of both a knighthood and a CBE. His legacy will be one of challenging, imaginative, boundary-smashing creativity throughout artistic endeavour.

Clifford Slapper

Mixed Media: Bowie's Piano Man (2015)

Book Review from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bowie's Piano Man: The Life of Mike Garson by Clifford Slapper is a musical biography of the avant-garde jazz pianist who has worked with David Bowie over the last forty years.

Garson came of age musically in the 1960s when people would 'listen to Bartok, John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix all in the same day', and he had his big break in 1965 in Greenwich Village when Elvin Jones, renowned drummer with John Coltrane called on Garson to replace a pianist.  Slapper describes the influences of jazz pianists Cecil Taylor, Erroll Garner, Herbie Hancock, and Bill Evans on the young Garson. Jim Merod concluded that Garson is 'within the circle of genuinely masterful jazz pianists including Bill Evans, Art Tatum and Thelonius Monk.'

Slapper details Garson's work with Bowie beginning with the 1973 album Aladdin Sane, which he expressively describes as 'the arrival of Aladdin Sane was the 1970s equivalent of joining the first passenger jet into space.' The album lyrics describe New York City's urban decay, decadence, drug addiction, violence and death just prior to some catastrophe. Garson's piano parts on Aladdin Sane are exquisitely beautiful cascading notes. Nicholas Pegg wrote that 'Garson's breathtaking jazz/blues inflections forcibly steer away from pure rock'n'roll, creating a vigorous hybrid somewhere between the Stones and Kurt Weill.' The song Time is Brechtian Cabaret, and it is interesting to compare with the cabaret music of Jacques Brel and Weimar Marxists Brecht-Weill. Garson used the old stride piano style from the 1920s which 'sounds like those old-fashioned rinky-tink bar-room pianos.' There are a number of links between Brecht-Weill and Bowie-Garson; Brecht-Weill's Alabama Song was recorded by Bowie in 1978, Bowie had the title role in the 1982 BBC TV dramatisation of Brecht's Baal, and at his father's funeral at his request Garson played Weill's September Song and Brecht-Weill's Mack the Knife.

Garson's sweeping piano runs were a key feature on the songs We are the Dead, 1984, and Big Brother on Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs which was based on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty Four. The lyrics describe a dystopian post-apocalypse nightmare, and highlight Bowie's political anxieties about leadership, submission to authority and conformist beliefs. Bowie later said it was an 'apocalyptic kind of view of our city life... it just coincided with the first economic disasters in New York.' Allan Tannenbaum's New York in the 70s describes how 'economic stagnation coupled with inflation created a sense of malaise', in 1975 New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, then AIDS devastated the gay and artistic community (see Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust.)

Garson was a Scientologist in the 1970s but Slapper does not elaborate on Bowie's 1997 Q magazine interview where he says Scientology had caused 'one or two problems', although Garson does say he 'went through a period of being overbearing in his attempts to persuade others to take an interest in his spiritual beliefs.' David Buckley wrote that Garson's ' proselytising efforts had converted both Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey', and D'Agostino in Glam Musik quotes Bowie: 'He tried it on with me a bit until we had a fight about it. He was so po-faced. Very serious guy. We used to call him Garson the Parson.' William S Burroughs believed that Scientology might help where psychoanalysis had failed, and that auditing techniques could do more in ten hours than psychoanalysis could do in ten years but he was 'disgusted by the authoritarian organisation and the stupidly fascistic utterances of L Ron Hubbard. The aim of Scientology, complete freedom from past conditioning, was perverted to become a new form of conditioning. He had hoped to find a method of personal emancipation and had found another Control System. It was like a State, with its own courts and own police' (Literary Outlaw, Ted Morgan)

Garson 'has a lot of faith in humanity and the goodness of human nature', and the need to spread the idea of connecting to something bigger and deeper through an exploration of artistic creation. Garson says 'everybody is innately connected to God, and is God', and 'We are indeed all deeply interconnected' which evokes Jung's 'collective unconscious.' Garson, and Slapper to some extent, appear to have sympathy for the Jungian concept of 'synchronicity.'

Garson's spirituality can find echoes in Erich Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man: 'For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, as well as for Marx, man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. In this productive process, man realizes his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.'

Garson sees creative artists 'projecting what the future society is supposed to be', and the positive social significance of art and creativity which we see in William Morris's Art, Labour and Socialism.  Slapper writes 'there is plenty of evidence showing how the human brain is capable of great cooperation and collective creativity. Every performance by every orchestra bears testimony to this.'

Bowie's Piano Man is a welcome addition to my bookshelf and sits between the bookends of The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, and Strange Fascination – David Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley.

Steve Clayton

Bowie's Piano Man can be ordered at the following link. 

Pathfinders: Watch This Space . . . (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Space flight dominated last month’s science reporting, with the embarrassment of an exploding Antares rocket and a crashed Virgin Galactic plane being rapidly pushed off the front page by the media hoo-ha over the Philae probe, which bounced around on a comet, sent back half a dozen pictures, drilled a hole then expired.

The Philae landing was undoubtedly quite a feat, like pinging a peanut across a continent and having it land in an eggcup. A tweet immediately went viral inviting cynics everywhere to complete the phrase ‘they can land on a comet but they can’t… (e.g. stop war, solve world hunger etc) but such cynics are missing the big picture. Drilling into a comet could tell us whether our water came from outer space, and even more importantly, whether life could have come from outer space, and even more importantly than that, whether humans can feasibly strip-mine speeding space rocks so that fat future profits can also come from outer space.

Now UK news services are abuzz with a new crowd-sourced bid to send a British probe to, er, the moon and drill a hole in that too (BBC Online, 19 November). The enthusiasm seems quite out of proportion to the aim, but it’s a chance to put one over on the Chinese and besides, space travel is a good deal more sexy than fixing Earth’s problems. Indeed it tends to bring out the silly or downright suicidal in some people, as witness last year’s Mars One project. Not a space probe but a Dutch company, Mars One sought volunteers for a one-way manned trip to Mars, the costs being recouped through TV coverage and sponsorship deals. Not one person in their right mind would go for this, you would think, especially as you had to pay a €30 deposit. Over 200,000 people signed up. Socialists might be desperate to escape the capitalist prison, but we’re not that desperate. The only red planet we want to live on is this one.

… Oddity

A cover version of David Bowie’s famous song Space Oddity, done by a Canadian astronaut in a very odd accent aboard the International Space Station, has been reposted to YouTube after having been taken down due to licensing restrictions (BBC Online, 4 November). Bowie himself had no objection to the cover, describing it as ‘poignant’. What stood in its way were the rules of terrestrial capitalism. As the singer, Chris Hadfield, explained: ‘The Space Station was built by 15 countries, and depending on where I floated while singing and playing, whose copyright laws applied? Which Space Agency owned the recording? Whose jurisdiction was I in?’

If aliens ever visit and like any of our pop music, let them beware. It’s a minefield down here.

Toys R Us(eless)

Continuing the space theme, the Telegraph was recently keen to report the apparently astounding fact that ‘There is more computer power in some of this year's top Christmas toys than the first moon mission’ (5 November). Big deal. There’s more computer power in your washing machine too, and your phone, and if you’re a true early adopter, your glasses.

At the risk of resorting to Christmas grumpy mode, what is all this computer power doing? Making crappy dolls to emulate babylike simpering tones while talking to your iPad, and plastic dayglo smart watches that store 900 photographs an inch wide. How cool, how awesome! What a load of utter rubbish, all designed to last two weeks and all designed to cost a fortune, paid out by overworked parents who can’t afford it but are trying to make up for ignoring the kids all the rest of the year.

What would children really want for Christmas, if they had the knowledge and imagination to ask for it, and any expectation whatsoever of getting it?

They might want their two front teeth, like the old song. More likely, they might want parents who aren’t permanently stressed out with bills, debts, overwork and each other. They might want siblings who can be friends instead of rivals. They might want to live in a house that it’s affordable to heat properly in winter, in an area where they won’t get beaten up by local gangs if they go to the shop. They might want a say about whether they have to go to school, about where they go, and what they do when they get there. They might want to feel safe, and secure, and understood, and cared about. They might want to feel that they have a future worth looking forward to, that strangers are just friends they haven’t met yet, that they are not too fat or too thin or too stupid but just right, that alive is a good thing to be.

But this year, if they’re lucky, they’ll just get capitalism rammed in their stocking, just like every other year. Ho ho ho.

The only way is ethics?

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges recently produced a report arguing that doctors have an ethical duty to prevent waste in the NHS (BBC Online, 6 November). It’s not hard to understand the argument. Billions are wasted every year that could pay nurses more or buy extra equipment. Doctors of course being no strangers to ethical codes but frequently being utter strangers to budgets, the AMRC naturally thought a spot of moral arm-twisting was in order.

The idea of waste being ‘unethical’ is a fairly novel one, considering how profligate nature itself is. But it’s not the first thing to be morally stigmatised by a civil society anxious to change our behaviour – two recent examples being smoking and drink/driving.

Since socialists are anxious to change the behaviour of civil society, perhaps we ought to use ethical arguments more. The trouble is, the whole subject makes us slightly nervous, because of the problem of moral relativism.

What’s ethical to you isn’t necessarily ethical to him or her. And while ethics can be based on empirical reasoning, as with the doctors, it doesn’t have to be. It could be based on mystical dreams, or God’s word, or a Hollywood film script. Building a case primarily out of ethics is like building a shed primarily out of blancmange.

Some scientists think that moral relativism is a myth and that we are hard-wired to be moral, pointing to the activities of mirror neurons in the brain’s motor cortex, which fire off in sympathy at certain observed behaviours in others and trigger similar responses in us. The strongest of these effects is seen in yawning, however, an activity not normally related to questions of morality unless you’re intensely bored with the subject.

Still, there’s not much doubt that people are only motivated to act when they perceive that something is ethically ‘wrong’, not just scientifically ‘incorrect’.  The Proto-Indo-European root steig (prick or pointed) gives us stick, stigma and instigate. What other behaviours can we expect to see stigmatised in the future, with a view to changing behaviour? Using fossil fuels, probably. Eating fat or meat or sugar or being a couch potato, possibly. One key social norm which we would be in a hurry to see stigmatised is the ‘right’ of a small group of people to exist as a parasitical social elite at the expense of everyone else and the environment. It’s about time people realised that’s not just incorrect, it’s damn well wrong.

PJS