"When the mode of the music changes, the wall of the city shake..."

 

 

Unreeling before me now is an ancient video I recorded back in the early '90s (info and credits label long since unpeeled and gone) of a BBC 2 TV programme about Woody Guthrie. I'm typing this as an extraordinarily pretty John Mellencamp fronts an acoustic pick-up band singing Woody Guthrie's sardonic classic, Do-Re-Mi. This just after that fiercest of Scottish radicals Dick Gaughan delivered his blistering version of Leon Rosselson's The World Turned Upside Down. The matchless power of song to orchestrate and celebrate belief and commitment!

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I'm one battered, cockeyed socialist whose convictions were ratified, consolidated and underpinned rather than dispelled during those dark Thatcherite days of the mid-'80s. The notion that an understanding of  the central dynamic of socialism must derive entirely from a narrow and simplistic characterisation of class and culture in isolation from its deep and broadly spread roots has always stifled the true nature and implications of the ideology.

However, ideology notwithstanding, one thing is certain: if there predominates a class that controls the wealth that the majority produces and if social order is determined by this reality then there exist fundamental inequities and injustices within society. And socialism is the belief system that best accommodates the conviction that it is humanity's drive to cooperate rather than to compete that accounts for the survival, indeed, the flourishing of the species.

My Dad told me one Sunday lunchtime at our middle class dining room table that by the time I was his age I would have made all the compromises that adult pragmatism had forced upon him and that I would see the world through lenses of a very different colour.

Well, he was nearly right: I've made my compromises and I've spent more of my working life inside the tent pissing out rather than on the outside, a radical dissenter, pissing in. But however many issues I've ducked as kids have come into the world needing a house to live in and clothes to wear, the infection of socialism has informed my every perspective. Whether working with Gypsies and Travellers or joining with others in keeping afloat approaches to education and schooling that offer real ideological and practical alternatives, it's been cooperation over competition, community over institution that have inspired me. 

So as we wobble precariously into this second decade of a century that appears to have eschewed ideology of any kind, my convictions, against the supposed counter-intuition of crabbed age, have gained substance. And as the chronic progression of capitalism's stomach cramps becomes more evident by the day, the overwhelming power of an idea whose time really has come seems to me undeniable.

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The closest that the broad left has ever got to a defining hymn or anthem  is not that old battle chant, The Red Flag, but rather the song that celebrates the breaching of all frontiers, The Internationale. Here's Billy Bragg at Pete Seeger's 90th birthday, singing the verse that Seeger had him compose. The matchless power of song to orchestrate and celebrate belief and commitment!