Seegerism -- And the War Against It

I was listening to the brilliant new podcast, A Weekend with Pete Seeger, and I realized I am a Seegerist.

Before anyone accuses me of inventing a new "ism," I didn't.  I just did a search online and discovered many other people have coined the term before me.  Which is good -- I'd prefer to be able to blame someone else for first putting "Seeger" and "ism" together, in case any of the Seeger family members aren't happy with it.  But it was undoubtedly an inevitability that the term would come in to use.

The more I keep doing this -- this being carrying on the Seegerist tradition as a full-time gig for most of my adult life -- the more I realize how much the world needs more of this sort of thing.  The more I travel to different parts of the world that are in different places when it comes to the role of art and music in their social movements and in their societies at large, the more I see how vital a role culture plays in sustaining any social movement, and how destructive to and isolating for any social movement the absence of music and art tends to be.

There is a fabulous new podcast series that a Danish journalist I've now known for about a quarter of a century, Claus Vittus, was involved with producing, called A Weekend With Pete Seeger.  Over the course of five episodes, it follows Pete, and sometimes his wife Toshi as well, around Beacon, New York, over one weekend in 1999.  Listening to the podcast is what largely got me thinking that "Seegerism" deserves to be a word.

What is it that I'm calling Seegerism?  I can hear some people wondering.  Define that!  OK, here are my Basic Principles of Seegerism.

1. One of the best ways to communicate, to educate, and to bring people together is through music, and other related things like art and theater.
2. Any authentic social movement is full of art and music, by definition.
3. The social movements that stand a chance of growing are the ones that, among other things, embrace the vital role of art and music in the movement.
4. Musicians and other artists can put themselves to good use by finding a way to be part of a social movement in an artistic capacity.
5. Cultivating a movement where people sing together and play music together is especially good, in addition to having ringers on the stage.
6. It's generally best to err on the side of inclusion, rather than exclusion, even when it comes to people we have a lot of differences with.
7. One of the best ways to develop mutual understanding is to share music, art, food, and community together.
8. When in doubt, have a festival.  At least one for every season.

I could add more.  These are off the top of my head, but that's the gist of it. 

As any contemporary of Pete Seeger would likely point out, he didn't invent any of these ideas.  The Industrial Workers of the World had embraced all of these ideas in a massive way, before Pete was born.  Soon after, when Pete was still very young, the Communist Party wholeheartedly embraced these notions, as it grew tremendously throughout the 1930's.  The Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's also naturally embraced music and culture, as this was already central in the culture of the churches the movement was based out of.

The antiwar movement of the latter 1960's and early 1970's embraced culture so thoroughly and in such a very Seegerist way that it actually affected the martial spirit of the entire society, and posed a real threat to the future of US imperialism as the world had known it up to that point.

In more recent years, the 2006 immigrant rights movement that involved some of the biggest demonstrations in the history of the US, though now largely forgotten, was extremely musical, and also successful in having the proposed legislation dropped.  The movement to shut down the School of the Americas may not have succeeded in shutting down the school, but as this very musical movement grew in size from one year to the next it did succeed in exposing and isolating this torture school, with the movement playing a pivotal role in some Latin American countries cutting ties with the institution.

What becomes more and more clear to me over the years, and decades, is how right Pete always was.  The movements that grow are inclusive and musical.  The ones that shrink and die quickly aren't.

What also becomes more and more clear is that I'm not the only one who realizes this truth.  The impact of the antiwar movement of the 1960's and 1970's in destabilizing American society and the American empire was huge, and the powers-that-be have responded accordingly.  Throughout my entire childhood and throughout my entire adult life, the generation that came before me, the boomers that made up the bulk of the movement of that period, have been vilified, along with everything they stood for -- or everything they are said to have stood for.

We have been fed a steady drumbeat about the ineffectiveness and unrealistic nature of those hippies, those pacifists, those drug-addled musicians and their free love festivals, those self-absorbed rock stars seeking further fortune and fame.

The reaction against inclusivity, common goals, and an embrace of culture has brought us to the point we're at now on the American left.  Now, instead of a belief in inclusion we are more often competing to demonstrate who is more oppressed.  Instead of seeking common goals we are declaring some to be more radical than others and denouncing those who disagree with our assessment.  Instead of embracing culture in general, and the breadth of it as well, we are often collectively deciding that there's no room for any more white people on the protest stages, whether they're speaking or singing, which is intended to somehow be compensatory for centuries of racism, I guess.

Of the many protests I've attended in the US in recent years, they're almost always bereft of live music, and anyone giving speeches is engaged in the act not of communicating about important issues and mobilizing us to engage with them, but in shouting at us and reminding us of our shortcomings.  

It would make good sense if the FBI were running these protests and doing the political education that has led politically-engaged people to believe that shouting is an effective means of communication, or that music and culture are frivolous and unnecessary things to think about, or that primarily white organizers keeping white people off of your stages will somehow forward the goals of your movement -- whatever movement it may be in a majority-white country like the US.  If the FBI were responsible for creating this mentality, for socially engineering this reality, it would all make good sense, since what has been created is a mentality that is designed to sabotage any social movement that might start to get off the ground.

Regardless of the role of undercover operatives in sidelining efforts at effective organizing and movement-building and promoting this kind of shouty, guilt-trippy nonsense, what is obviously desperately needed is a collective realization that we're going down the wrong path with all of this stuff, and we need to look around at how things are with the rest of the world's social movements -- and our own as well, historically -- and embrace those things that actually work so well, though we have somehow convinced ourselves they don't.

When I talk with young folks about their impressions of past social movements, what I hear is the same kind of stuff I've been hearing forever from the corporate media about these movements, but repackaged to sound radical.  They say, in other words, the same kind of nonsense I said when I was young, because I had also swallowed the same corporate nonsense, like most of us naturally do, given that's what's available 24/7.

They say those movements didn't overthrow capitalism or put an end to US imperialism, they didn't win, they lost, and so they were basically useless.

While on the face of it you could say this is an accurate statement, the tacit assumption that because these movements failed to overthrow capitalism or imperialism, we have nothing to learn from them, is utter madness.

The radical labor movement of the early twentieth century that so deeply embraced music and culture didn't overthrow capitalism, but they paved the way for the movements that would come soon after, employing so many of the same tactics, which would make great strides for the American working class.

The Civil Rights movement didn't end racism in the USA, but it did end segregation of the schools and buses, and allow Black people in many states to vote and run for office, where they had been prevented from doing so previously.

The antiwar movement during the Vietnam War did not end US imperialism, but it did succeed in killing the martial spirit among any of the soldiers who might otherwise have thought joining in the slaughter to be a good and patriotic idea.  It did cause the US military to rethink their plans for decades afterwards, arguably up to the present time.

All of these movements accomplished what they did at the same time as they faced immense repression -- police brutality, trumped-up charges and sometimes long sentences or execution at the end of the trial, if there was one, and covert operations of all kinds.

Regardless, these accomplishments aren't enough, of course.  But the victories of these social movements were very impressive, and point to the effectiveness of the tactics that went into building and sustaining these movements.  

At the same time, if you try to find any social movements that have not been deeply connected to communities through music and culture -- if you try to find social movements that have not embraced Seegerist principles of organizing, which have flourished and accomplished anything significant, you will not.

To sum:  I know the situation calls for action, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and sabotage everything.  Instead, communicate, make art, sing, be radically inclusive, and be part of building the kind of movement we need so much.

What Spotify, Facebook, and the International Monetary Fund Have in Common

I don't know how it took me so long to notice this, but Spotify and Facebook, among other gigantic tech corporations, are using the IMF's playbook as their business model.

As a life-long anti-capitalist with a background in the global justice movement, I don't know how it took me so long to notice this, but the modus operandi that gigantic corporations like Spotify and Facebook employ in their efforts to monopolize eyes, ears, and industries is essentially the same as that of the IMF, with its history of keeping poor countries in a perpetual state of "development" through debt peonage.

I hope most of you are wondering what the hell I'm talking about here, because I'm going to explain.  I also hope some of you are having a light bulb moment like I just did, because the comparisons between the IMF and these corporations is obvious as soon as you engage in the intellectual exercise of making them, if you know enough about the operations of all of these predatory entities.

I'm a professional musician, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Spotify, engaging with the platform in various ways, and being impacted by it tremendously.

It's far from a straightforward relationship between me and Spotify.  As with, say, borrowing a billion dollars, it's not just an exploitative relationship between lender and borrower, it's a two-way street.  There are great potential benefits to being able to borrow a billion dollars, depending on the terms of the loan and what you might be planning on doing with the money.

If you're a poor country in need of a billion-dollar loan, for a lot of countries there has historically been just one option to borrow from.  The IMF's loans came with lots of strings attached, that would mean the borrower country risked becoming dependent on more loans, and would be structurally unable to repay them, because of the strings that were attached to the loans in the first place, such as the requirement that the country privatized ownership of industries or natural resources that could have made the country rich, if they had not been sold at pennies on the dollar, under duress.

But even if you weren't a corrupt dictator looking to increase the size of your Swiss bank account, if you were running a poor country, you might also take the loan, after the economists explain to you how much better your country will be doing once it has a nice new highway or a new hydroelectric dam.  The loans and what you can do with the money can look really good.  And if the money is coming from the only game in town, you tend to play by their rules.

With giant, global corporations like Facebook and Spotify, they're not aiming to get national governments hooked in to their services, so much as the ears and eyes of everybody living on the planet.  The strategies are aimed at individuals, our desires and our needs, and getting us sufficiently hooked into their matrix that they essentially become monopolies that we can't afford to live without relating to on their terms.  Especially, in the case of Spotify, if you're a professional musician -- or perhaps someone who used to dream of being one.

Everyone who is old enough probably remembers when Facebook first hit the scene, and when they started using it.  If you're someone involved with promoting your music or trying to spread the word about anything, you probably remember how useful the platform was in the earlier years of its existence.  You'd post something, and if you had a lot of followers, a lot of people would see your post, and do things like buy the album you were posting about, or come to the show you were promoting.

It was so good, so useful, so rewarding that you may have stopped maintaining an email list, just as you stopped maintaining a mailing address list long before.  You may have stopped communicating with anyone by email altogether, and stopped going to websites that weren't Facebook pages.  You may have maintained accounts with other platforms that started out as similar ones, like Friendster or MySpace, but when everyone migrated to Facebook, you did, too.  And then they became the monopoly that they are today.

At which point, the rug was yanked from under our collective feet, but it was too late to do anything about it.  The trick is, most people didn't necessarily notice.  Most people use Facebook to keep tabs on what their friends are posting about, and share posts themselves.  They may notice that some posts get more engagement than others, but their livelihood isn't dependent on it.

For the minority of us for whom this is life or death stuff, we noticed when Facebook pulled the rug out, right away.  Suddenly it didn't matter whether you had a big following, no one was going to see your posts unless they had nothing to do with promoting a gig or an album, but were about a vacation or a wedding or a baby.  If you wanted people to see your posts about the tours or albums, you now would have to pay -- "boost," they call it.  They started that as soon as they became a monopoly, and it's been their MO ever since.

Spotify has had its own trajectory, but the end goal of becoming a monopoly that makes and changes the rules as they see fit is the same.

At the beginning their pitch to musicians was hey, people are pirating all of your music anyway, but with legal streaming platforms like ours, you'll at least get paid something for it, even if it's not much.

This pitch was problematic to begin with, because it operated on the assumption that all recording artists, from the pop star to the shoe-string garage band, were having the same experience with music piracy, which was most definitely not the case.  From my personal experience, and I think it stands true for many others, I was still selling plenty of CDs right up until 2013, when Spotify started their Free Tier.

Once Spotify became the dominant player in the music streaming business, they had enough clout to make a deal with the Big Three record labels, to sign them and their artists up for the Free Tier, by giving plays of Big Three artists a bigger percentage of the streaming revenue.

By the time Spotify started their Free Tier and devastated the independent music industry globally overnight, it was already too late to fight back by encouraging people to use different platforms or whatever.  Spotify set the standard, and soon everyone else was forced to follow suit, to one degree or another.

Now, today, living in this world so dominated by one Stockholm-based music streaming platform for the past eleven years or so, even here in the ruins of the indy music biz, the influence of Spotify continues to be all-encompassing.

It may be that there is very little money to be made from recording albums and putting them out into the world under the supremely unequal arrangements Spotify has pioneered, as far as selling music goes -- but what about having listeners at all?

Everywhere I go on tour these days, when I ask young people how it was that they first heard my music, if they can pin it down, the most common answer is "Spotify."  When I drill deeper I usually learn that what this means is actually it was Spotify's song recommendation algorithm that directly led them to me.  They may have been listening to Phil Ochs, Billy Bragg, or the Mountain Goats, but whoever it was, Spotify saw fit to stick one of my songs in next, they liked it, and soon became more intentional listeners of my music.

Spotify tells me that my new album, just out on streaming today, has been listened to over 1,500 times in the first 24 hours.  Spotify tells me that of my 17,000 listeners on the platform last month, 5,000 of them were first-time listeners. 

That's very significant.  Now what if they were to take all of that away?  Maybe next month I'll have 12,000 listeners, and those 5,000 new listeners Spotify sent my way will be sent elsewhere.

In fact, my fellow musicians especially, if there are any left alive reading this, that seems to be exactly the sort of thing Spotify has in store for us.

Now that their venture capital, monopolistic practices, and absolutely brilliant music recommendation algorithms have put them into the position of being by far the most dominant music streaming platform in the world, they've introduced their Campaign Kit.  And all of the campaigns in Spotify's new Campaign Kit are designed for artists or corporations who want to forego earnings, or pay money, in order to have their music get more attention on the platform.

Now that Spotify is in control, they can afford to allow their algorithm to start sucking a little, in order to make more money from those willing or able to pay more to get played more, in order to develop their audience that way.

If Spotify's new Campaign Kit or things like it becomes widely adopted, and there are enough artists or corporate representatives thereof who are willing to forego streaming revenues or pay to get played on the platform like these promotional tools are designed to facilitate, the great recommendation algorithm will inevitably get worse and worse.  But as long as Spotify can keep their platform popular enough to maintain their monopoly while squeezing as much money as possible from the artists that are the basis for the platform's existence, then they'll make their investors happy -- at the expense of the rest of humanity, recording artists in particular.

If you're looking for hope at the end of this transnational corporate monopoly tunnel, you might want to join United Musicians and Allied Workers like I recently did.  The hope that does exist all lies within the realm of solidarity, organizing, and collective action.