Post Cold War Rock and Anty-capitalism

Post Cold War Rock and Anty-capitalism

Post Cold War Rock and Anty-capitalism

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Movement,” this outburst of activity was the early twenty-first century’s most significant social campaign,3 and presaged the contemporary Occupy Wall St. movement.

The “Anti-Globalization” moniker was always questioned by activists as unsuit- able “for a movement that revels precisely in its international character.”4 As David Graeber asserts, “Insofar as this is a movement against anything, it’s against neoliberalism … a kind of market fundamentalism … wielded largely through unelected treaty organizations like the IMF [International Monetary Fund], WTO or NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement].”5 Thus, activists later adopted such titles as the “Alter-Globalization Movement” and “Global Justice Movement.” Though neoliberals echo Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “There Is No Alterna- tive,” this movement reinvigorated debate about creating more socially, economi- cally, and ecologically just global processes.6

At one level, this movement was anti-capitalist in nature, not because all its mem- bers embraced explicitly anti-capitalist politics, but because it opposed core elements of the global capitalist system.7 However, significant sections of the movement were also self-consciously anti-capitalist, drawing on Marxist and anarchist traditions— Ronaldo Munck describing “an anarchism that takes on board much of the Marx- ist analysis of the nature of global capitalism and the anti-corporate movement’s emphasis on consumerism.”8 The movement’s explicitly anti-capitalist faction also advanced the most incisive critique of neoliberalism, and a meaningful program for social change.

T. V. Reed writes, “culture is always involved dialectically with the goings-on at the level of economics and politics, contesting for the meanings that can be made from … economic and political event-texts,”9 and, indeed, various musicians prefigured or later interpreted the movement’s anti-capitalist politics. This is par- ticularly true of rock music, always popular among youth counterculture because of its “undeniably antagonistic impulse.”10 This chapter explores the anti-capitalist movement’s politics through predominantly American and British post-Cold War rock music—the definition of ‘rock’ liberally spanning from folk rock to hip hop and electronica. Some thinkers periodize the post-Cold War era as ending with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis; thus, this study takes 1991–2008 as its scope.11 Rel- evant artists from post-Cold War music are discussed to explore key elements of anti-capitalist politics and demonstrate their expression. This examination begins with the protest movement’s evolution, then surveys its perspectives on environ- mentalism, marginalized social groups, exploitation of the developing world (the Global South), war and domestic securitization, and, finally, anti-capitalist sys- temic critique. The term “Anti-Globalization” is used when describing the diverse protest movement, and “anti-capitalist” when discussing the anti-systemic faction on which this study focuses.

Friedman, J. C. (Ed.). (2013). The routledge history of social protest in popular music. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from michstate-ebooks on 2020-05-18 12:57:44.

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DAVID ALEXANDER ROBINSON

The Music

Robin Ballinger argues music is important politically because, “through its com- plex system of signification … [it shapes] awareness, individual subjectivity, and social formations … [it] is a powerful site of struggle in the organization of mean- ing and lived experience.”12 Music encourages individuals’ activity by helping them feel part of a coherent group, and reinforcing “movement values, ideas, and tactics … provid[ing] information in compact, often highly memorable and emotionally charged ways, both to educate new recruits and to refocus veterans.”13 Political songs also work as propaganda for “potential recruits, opponents, and undecided bystanders.”14 This study examines anti-capitalist lyrics on the basis that, regard- less of whether musicians identify completely with anti-capitalist politics, anti-capi- talist activists are buoyed by political memes reflecting their core beliefs.

Cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg differentiates between “oppositional rock … [that] presents itself as a direct challenge or threat to the dominant culture … [and alternative rock, which] mounts only an implicit attack.”15 This study surveys oppositional rock explicitly expressing politics congruent with anti-capitalist beliefs. While many songs voice a general social ennui, or vague rage against authority, coun- tercultural revolt has been so highly commercialized that “rebellion” and “revolu- tion” are “catchphrases of the new standard marketing strategy.”16 Indeed, neo- liberalism itself is a rebellion by capital against government impositions. So, artists transmitting unambiguous anti-capitalist memes are identified here, to demonstrate core elements of that radical social critique. The extreme concentration of music industry ownership with a handful of corporations forces musicians to accept “the advertising, marketing, styling, and engineering techniques of increasingly uniform and narrow profit-driven criteria.”17 However, this study addresses radical messages that have entered popular circulation—corporations still cannot (completely) control “the meanings, practices, and pleasures of listening, dancing, and partying at the site of consumption.”18 As Vladimir Lenin remarked, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

The Movement

The Anti-Globalization Movement originated in the late 1980s as neoliberal advo- cates pushed to create regional free trade blocs in North America and Europe, limit- ing government regulation of national economies. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher “successfully pioneered free-market policies … [and by] the end of the decade the world scene had become highly favourable to the generalization of these innovations.”19 The Canada–US Free Trade Agreement provoked Canadian oppo- sition from 1988, and from the early 1990s European protest grew against the Maas- tricht Treaty’s fiscal austerity and social cutbacks—the massive 1995 French general strike being the most dramatic example of this. Radiohead’s lyrics later embodied

Friedman, J. C. (Ed.). (2013). The routledge history of social protest in popular music. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from michstate-ebooks on 2020-05-18 12:57:44.

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POST-COLD WAR ROCK AND ANTI-CAPITALISM

these popular doubts in the song “Electioneering.”20 Civil society campaigns con- tinued to grow in Canada, the US, and Mexico, with NAFTA’s signing in 1992, though they would not prevent the treaty’s ratification—Rage Against the Machine (RATM) warning of its impact in “Wind Below” from 1996.21

Parallel to these campaigns, a guerrilla uprising in Chiapas, southern Mexico, coincided with NAFTA’s implementation on 1 January 1994. Led by the enigmatic Subcomandante Marcos, the “Zapatista Army of National Liberation” denounced NAFTA’s neoliberal agenda on behalf of Chiapas’ poor indigenous people.22 Geoff Eley writes that the rise of the Zapatistas was the “founding event of recharged anti- capitalist political formation.”23 Various RATM songs later celebrated the Zap- atistas.24 The WTO’s creation in 1995, and Multilateral Agreement on Investment negotiations to reduce international investment barriers, spurred campaigns against the WTO, World Bank and IMF. Activists, recognizing that neoliberal policies rein- forced global corporate privilege and threatened established human rights, labor and environmental standards, successfully coordinated through new internet and email technology.25 (Bands such as Anti-Flag and System of a Down (SOAD) would go on to rail against the IMF and globalization with particular fervor).26 Amidst this activ- ity, the Zapatistas helped shape the anti-capitalist movement from 1996 by inviting to Mexico “over 3,000 activists and intellectuals from 42 countries on 5 continents … to enhance the global struggle against neoliberalism.”27 Networks originating from those meetings, “which took place knee-deep in the jungle mud of rainy-season Chiapas,”28 eventually organized the 1999 WTO protests. Successful protests at the Birmingham G8 Meeting in May 1998 and the Global Carnival Against Capitalism in June 1999, attracting tens of thousands of participants, established the context for the Seattle events.29

The Seattle protest coalition was extremely diverse, including anti-corporate groups; environmental organizations; farm, sustainable agriculture, and anti-GMO groups; labor unions; development/world hunger groups; animal rights groups; religious organizations; and government representatives from developing nations.30 They were united by growing awareness that the international financial institu- tions threatened their causes, and they demanded the institutions balance “eco- nomic growth with considerations of the social and environmental consequences of trade and investment promotion.”31 Most activists were young, well-educated and involved in informal networks, while those in important logistical roles were pre- dominantly older representatives of NGOs or labor unions.32 Propagandhi reflected those young people’s perspective that, despite their relatively comfortable, middle class backgrounds, they had a moral obligation to speak up for the poor and pow- erless.33 SOAD describes them as “peaceful loving youth against the brutality/Of plastic existence.”34

Activists’ commitment to non-hierarchical, consensus-based, decision-making produced the organizational model of “affinity groups” sending delegates to larger

Friedman, J. C. (Ed.). (2013). The routledge history of social protest in popular music. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from michstate-ebooks on 2020-05-18 12:57:44.

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“spokes councils” to discuss wider strategies. They had no over-arching leaders and operated through participatory democracy, allowing coordination without decision- enforcement mechanisms.35 The WTO protest involved political marches and speeches, and the pre-coordinated blockading of roads and conference venues using knowledge of the downtown layout and cell-phone communication.36 Meanwhile, the anarchist “Black Bloc” donned black clothes and masks, smashing windows of symbolic capitalist targets such as McDonald’s, Nike, and Gap.37

Overnight, the “Battle of Seattle” launched the Anti-Globalization Movement as a well-known political force, and numerous bands later invoked the imagery of that protest and others in calls for social resistance. Anti-Flag railed against the suppression of free speech,38 while Ani DiFranco, Tom Morello, and SOAD sang about protesters being shot by police.39 Asian Dub Foundation (ADF)’s song “Basta” (“Enough,” in Spanish) praises later G8 protests40 and elsewhere they portentously link free markets with slavery.41

Over the next two years, dozens of such protests targeted national and international institutions representing neoliberal orthodoxy. Alongside global May Day demonstrations, and protests against the US Republican and Democratic National Conventions, prominent anti-globalization protests occurred in Washington, D.C.; Chiang Mai, Thailand; Melbourne, Australia; Prague, Czech Republic; Seoul, South Korea; Nice, France; Davos, Switzerland; Quebec City, Canada; Gothenburg, Sweden; and in Genoa, Italy, for the 2001 G8 Summit which drew 250,000 protestors.42 From January 2001, the Anti-Globalization Movement also forged a more coherent counter-organization, with 12,000 activists attending the first World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, Brazil—Naomi Klein writing, “If Seattle was … the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then … Porto Alegre [was] the coming-out party for … serious thinking about alternatives.”43

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States dramatically undercut the movement, dampening enthusiasm for large-scale protest and empowering governments to respond more aggressively and criminalize dissent. However, in subsequent years, less-frequent protests returned to encouraging sizes across Europe and North America, and were joined by larger demonstrations against war in Iraq and Afghanistan.44 Almost half a million participants protested “Against a Europe of Capital and War” outside the Barcelona EU summit in March 2002.45 World and Regional Social Forums have since attracted more than 50,000 delegates a year,46 building what the second World Social Forum announced would be an “alliance from our struggles and resistance against a system based on sexism, racism and violence, which privileges the interests of capital and patriarchy over the needs and aspirations of people.”47 Despite the changing context, anti-capitalists maintained that, as SOAD and Faithless sing, greed, war, and turning away from those in need continue to determine individual and collective behavior.48

Friedman, J. C. (Ed.). (2013). The routledge history of social protest in popular music. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from michstate-ebooks on 2020-05-18 12:57:44.

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POST-COLD WAR ROCK AND ANTI-CAPITALISM

Environmentalism

Environmentalist beliefs are by no means the preserve of the anti-capitalist movement. Many today are stirred by Tracy Chapman’s lament that we are witnessing a world being raped by corporations.49 Nevertheless, environmentalism is a core anti-capi- talist value, and one that motivated action against international institutions in the 1990s. Buttel and Gould argue that, from 1990, decisions by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the WTO shocked environmentalists, beginning with a ruling against a US Marine Mammal Protection Act clause prohibiting import of tuna caught using methods resulting in numerous dolphin deaths.50 Early WTO rulings prevented the US imposing higher environmental standards on imported gasoline than domestic production, and later a US law “banning shrimp imports from countries whose shrimp harvesters kill sea turtles” was struck down.51 Europeans feared the WTO would force them to accept genetically-modified goods, which later occurred in 2006. These rulings disturbed mainstream environmental groups previously unopposed to free trade, demonstrating how liberalization could overturn hard-fought-for environmental legislation. This drew them into the coalition against the WTO meeting in Seattle.52

Anti-capitalists also recognized that free trade regimes endangered citizens of developing countries by “eliminating already inadequate environmental laws … turning the environment into a product to be bought and sold.”53 Morrissey and Immortal Technique have warned of the consequences of unbridled, unregulated, capitalism, with references to pollution and toxic dumping, while others, like Propagandhi, interject vegetarianism and animal rights into their broader ecological critique.54 Generally, the interconnectedness of environmental and social struggles is recognized, whether in the corporate strategy of playing workers against environmentalists to degrade both labor and environmental protections,55 or the wider understanding that the anti-capitalist movement thus views the capitalist compulsion to profit as the key driver of environmental destruction and commodification of the biological world.56 As Propagandhi say, “You can tell by the smiles on the CEOs that the environmental restraints are about to go.”57

The Marginalized

Anti-capitalist activists are generally extremely aware of social marginalization due to race, class, sexuality or gender, their intersectionality, and how these forms of oppression are overdetermined by capitalism. Robert Ross writes that the movement has “identity consciousness in which inherited characteristics—race, ethnicity, gender … are taken to be political building blocks.”58 Margaret Thatcher denied structural discrimination with her slogan “There is no such thing as society. There are [only] individual men and women, and there are families.”59 Neoliberals assert that a “level-playing field” exists within nations, and individuals bear full

Friedman, J. C. (Ed.). (2013). The routledge history of social protest in popular music. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from michstate-ebooks on 2020-05-18 12:57:44.

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