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.