It’s been a couple of months since I posted here, which is indicative of something or other. I’ll settle my debts with this vacuity in the next few days. However, as a nod to May Day, find below a link to a fascinating post by one of my favourite American commentators, WD James.

It deserves, it needs to be read in full.

Musical Interlude: American Commonist Music

WD begins:

It is not my contention that genuine American folk music is Communist in any sort of technical sense. It is my contention that the development of ‘folk’ as a genre was pretty explicitly a Communist project.

He continues:

For most of my life it has been pretty normal to associate folk music with the ‘left.’ We could just write off folk music as a Communist plot. That would be mostly wrong, but it would also miss an important development.

In the 19th century (when the first attempts to recognize and capture, by writing it down, the music of the folk took off) and early twentieth centuries, interest in folk music was considered reactionary or nationalist- sort of Blood and Soil stuff, at least some places.

So, when these lefties got interested in it the political winds were not with them. In fact, orthodox Marxist theory was very much opposed. Even though folk music was associated, well, with the folk, it was held to represent a perspective into traditional, pre-modern, and pre-industrial conditions and customs. From a classic Marxist position then it would be associated with what Marx and Engels termed ‘reactionary socialism’ or ‘utopian socialism,’ definitely not the shiny up-to-date ‘scientific socialism’ they formulated. Marxism was about the future, not the past.

He comments:

That’s another thing about those generations of American Commonists- they loved America! There was none of the national self-hatred that characterized much of the later left. Further, they actually respected ordinary people’s folk traditions, including the religious aspect of those.

Not to mention, folk was just fun. Remember mixing fun into one’s politics?

He concludes:

There was a time when everything cool was on the ‘left.’ Not because the left was that cool, but because it was open. Radicalism, localism, everything critical, Jungian psychology, folk music, spirituality, etc…. The current left is open to zero that is interesting. The right is only open to a quarter of what is interesting. So, they’re rightfully winning. Wake up folks. Whoever gets with ‘cool’ first wins the culture war. Go ahead; get cool.

There’s a challenge!