Lots of folks are desperately wondering how we build the resistance. If such efforts have any chance of success, history shows that it had better be a resistance that sings together.
Preface
Trump has been in power now for a week (second time around), imposing tariffs, deporting people, encouraging annexation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, trying to change longstanding citizenship rights, and all kinds of other horrors, which are sure to continue and get worse.
Naturally, people all over the US and all over the world are freaking out. Just as naturally, what in the US seem like the far fewer numbers of people who were freaking out just as much about Biden's facilitation of Israel's genocide over the past 16 months are continuing to freak out, for all the same reasons, under Trump.
Suddenly, for the first time since 2016, we're hearing a lot about the "the resistance," and the lack of it, and a lot of talk about the prospects for building a serious opposition to all of this madness here.
Obviously the title of this piece gives you some indication of where I'm going here. Whatever resistance is going to happen, if it's going to happen, if it's going to get off the ground and become something, it'll have to be musical. History is full of lessons on that front, the verdict is clear, and we ignore it at our collective peril.
It'll also need to be radically inclusive, it'll need to have clear vision for what kind of society it wants to bring into being -- not just what it's against -- and it'll need to be a vision that clearly rejects both of the failed corporate imperial parties that so many Americans have in so many ways been trying to say they generally reject altogether for a long time (though without a viable alternative party to vote for, it's harder to illustrate this assertion).
I was asked by a friend who organizes for a German labor union to write something for their union's journal. As I look at the piece I wrote -- which is more or less in a finished state, or could be -- it occurs to me to share it with my broader audience, in English, because I think what I'm trying to say is so relevant outside of Germany as well.
And the examples I share in the piece are especially relevant when we're thinking about building a resistance movement to the Trump regime. All of the examples I chose to illustrate my point about the importance of culture and music in movement-building are just as relevant as examples of how the most effective, most popular social movements have not just been the most musical ones, but they have also been ones possessed of a vision for the world they sought to build, ones that were radically inclusive, and, very importantly, movements that existed independently of which party was in power.
OK, on to the essay.
The Power of Culture in Movement-Building
When I was asked to write something for a journal coming out of the German labor movement, I knew what my contribution would be about.
Before I start trying to make my case, a little introduction will help it all make a bit more sense.
I'm a musician, originally from New York, of the sort that the US media would have called a “protest singer” back in the 1960's.
It's a musical orientation that long predates the 1960's, and of course exists globally, far beyond the borders of the US. But “protest singer” is a more or less familiar description now, with whatever deficiencies it may have as a term, so I'll use it.
As a protest singer, I've sung at a lot of protests since the 1980's, in around 25 countries. Some of the best of them, in every way a protest rally can be measured, have been in Germany.
During the same period of the past few decades, singing at protests in other countries, the trend in so many of them towards a much less musical orientation is very obvious, and very disconcerting, since it's also so clearly a move in the wrong direction.
The question I'll strive to answer over course of the next few thousand words is why would I say this? What's so powerful about protest music, or music in general, at protests, or more broadly in the context of the labor movement?
What I've learned from experience is just because something seems abundantly obvious to everyone at one moment doesn't mean this will be the case in the next moment.
At German protests I've sung at over the past few decades, whether they were happening within the auspices of the labor movement, the global justice movement, the environmental movement, or the anti-nuke movement, what they all had in common was more than 80% of everything that happened on the stages was music.
In all of the countries that I tend to call the Anglosphere (Great Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the program at every protest is always completely dominated by speakers. Another difference that's also easy to observe is the protests in Germany tend to be much bigger and better-organized, in addition to much, much more musical.
Before I was on the scene as a protest singer, it was different. There were much bigger social movements in places like the US, and they were also vastly more musical, so much more plugged in to many different forms of actually popular culture, nothing like the sad little gatherings of talking heads that protests in the Anglosphere are usually like today.
Obviously, the world is a complex place, and it would probably be impossible to eliminate other factors and measure how much the success or failure of German or US labor unions has to do with their embrace or lack of embrace of music and culture.
We can make some generalizations, though, perhaps.
All of the most successful labor movements and other social movements around the world, throughout history, have been deeply musical ones. And if we can say that – and we can – then we might want to explore possible reasons why this is the case, and make sure to keep embracing culture, if we already are doing that – or to think about how we can start embracing culture, if we're not already doing that, or could be doing it better.
I'll spend most of this piece exploring some of the movements that have deeply embraced culture, how they did that, and how this might have been helpful in building different movements.
But first, maybe it's useful to talk a little about the role of culture in other areas of society that we're all familiar with.
Imagine for a moment a commercial on TV with no music in it, advertising a product with no jingle for us to associate the product with. If you're at all like me, it's hard to even conceptualize this. We are so used to things being advertised using songs and jingles, it's hard to even imagine a commercial without such elements.
Those responsible for selling the products know about the power of music and culture, of course. If you know a gainfully-employed working musician, actor, or filmmaker in the US, they are probably making commercials. Because whether a corporation is pushing cars, shampoo, or life insurance, they're all going to use mediums like film and music to market whatever they may be selling.
In the US, where there isn't the kind of support for the arts that can be found in EU countries, one area where arts spending doesn't lag is within the military.
Most federal government support for the arts in the US comes in the form of military spending, for military bands, USO tours, and other forms of support for the arts. The US military, like its counterparts around the world, understands the importance of music and culture for recruitment and to maintain troop morale. This has probably been the case since the very beginning of organized warfare.
The role of music and culture in everything from branding products to maintaining troop morale is ubiquitous around the world, now and historically. The same can be said of the role of music and culture in the labor movement around the world, and in social movements generally.
It's fairly easy to observe that the least grassroots, least sustained organizing efforts tend also to be the least musical ones, and the most top-down in terms of how they are managed. It's also easy to observe that the biggest, most participatory, most sustained social movements are always deeply musical ones.
It's vital that we're conscious of this, and that we think about how music and culture can work to simultaneously build and enrich the labor movement.
To that end, I'll explore a few different examples from US twentieth-century history for us to consider.
The Industrial Workers of the World
If we were to focus on the numbers of workers unionized or the numbers of strikes that were victorious, in the US we might be particularly impressed by decades like the 1930's.
This focus would be a very limiting one, however. As challenging as it may be at any time to organize workplaces and build a labor movement, for most of the 1930's in the US, the federal government led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sympathetic to organized labor. Before FDR there was decidedly less sympathy for unions in the White House.
The first two decades of the twentieth century had a cataclysmic conclusion in so many ways, with World War 1, a global pandemic, followed in the US by a massive nationwide crackdown on the radical labor movement.
But in the years prior to and following what they were calling “the war to end all wars,” the organization – or social movement, depending on how you look at it -- that the powers-that-be were most concerned about was the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW. The IWW led the Winnipeg and Seattle General Strikes, and was the primary target of the nationwide Palmer Raids, that saw most of the union's leadership in the US arrested, and many members deported.
The IWW was a pioneering union in many ways at the time, welcoming immigrants, women, and people of color who had all been regularly excluded from the ranks of other unions.
But one of the ways I would argue the IWW was most pioneering, and one of the reasons for its out-sized impact on history, and for the mythological level of popularity it had as a union during its heyday – with millions more people who considered themselves part of this union movement, even if they were never card-carrying members of it – was its use of art, music, and culture.
Members of the IWW were (and are) nicknamed “Wobblies.” The Wobblies put out a songbook – “songs to fan the flames of discontent” – which came with every member's Red Card of union membership. Songs, street theater, comic strips, and other forms of art were primary tools for the IWW, for education, for recruitment, and for fostering solidarity and community.
IWW songs were generally written to the tune of a song most people would have known, such as one of the chart-topping songs of the day, or to the tune of a religious hymn everyone would have heard.
The religious songs were especially useful for a number of reasons.
In the same working class neighborhoods where the IWW was actively organizing, the Salvation Army was also actively trying to save souls for Jesus while feeding the hungry. This meant there was a ready-made band playing music right there in the middle of town – so it made good sense to have songs at the ready that were to the tune of whatever the band might be playing.
It also made good sense because it brought into focus the differing visions, that Joe Hill captured in “Preacher and the Slave” – the Christian message people were often getting being one of waiting until you die before you get a chance to live the good life, whereas the Wobblies were saying if we organize we can have Heaven on Earth.
Over a century after this syndicalist era of American labor, the IWW member most remembered today was a poet, musician, and cartoonist, the Swedish-born Joe Hill, who was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1915.
As Joe Hill said:
"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science."
The CPUSA in the 1930's
The 1930's in the US began a period of several decades of a vibrant and large labor movement.
With the 1930's, it's easy to see that the labor movement was having great success – you can measure it in the numbers of workers and workplaces organized during this time. You could correctly surmise that the major reforms involved with FDR's New Deal programs were as major as they were because of pressure from below. It is still very much the case today that some of the best of this country's crumbling infrastructure dates back to this period of large-scale public works programs.
But there's so much more to be said about this period, and why the labor movement was as big, as militant, as inclusive, and as successful as it was in the 1930's.
There's so much more to be said, in fact, that it's easy to lose track of a lot of important details, when faced with the big historical trends we think of when looking at the development or suppression of the labor movement in different countries during that extremely eventful decade.
Optimism about the future was widespread among a very significant cross-section of the American population in the 1930's – particularly that element of the population that was inspired by the example they believed was being set in the development of the Soviet Union, where everyone seemed to be very busy building a modern society, which contrasted greatly with the bread lines across much of the Depression-era western world. There was also great optimism to be found in the widespread solidarity within the ranks of the newly-impoverished millions during the Great Depression, with the public kitchens, and the successful anti-eviction campaigns of the unions of the unemployed.
I would argue that all of this optimism and widespread solidarity also had deep roots in the role of culture, and the successful use of culture as a tool for popular education and movement-building by networks of people represented under the banner of names like the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Communist Party, USA, which was in important ways a sort of backbone for the CIO.
Almost a century later, if people know anything about the labor movement in the US in the 1930's, and the Communist Party of the time in particular, they know the names of musicians like Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie.
The Communist Party, or just “The Party,” as it was generally known to millions of people at the time, wholeheartedly embraced the kind of street theater that the IWW employed so effectively.
They also embraced folk music, and actively promoted artists like Woody Guthrie. Woody had a column in the People's World newspaper. Party members started up Sing Out! magazine as well, which for many decades would continue to have an appeal within the folk music crowd generally, while maintaining a decidedly leftward bent politically.
The rise of folk music in particular was embraced by social movement leaders who thought this more clearly local, popular form of music might communicate better to local people than what in other left circles they called “Workers' Music,” which the folk music crowd saw as too erudite.
Another phenomenon that was part of life for so many people associated with the Communist Party and the broader labor movement of the 1930's and beyond were working class resorts, summer camps, places in the countryside where children, or families, or other combinations of people would come together and engage in many different activities involving popular education and fun, including lots of music.
I would note here that this idea of using summer camps as a means of building community and doing popular education among the youth within the context of a political movement isn't unique to the left, and wasn't invented by communists in the 1930's. Politically educating the youth at a summer camp has also been popular with all kinds of religious groups and all kinds of political tendencies, covering the entire spectrum. As with so many things, music can be used for good or ill.
The Civil Rights Movement
Looking back at things like the eventual desegregation of the southern United States in the 1960's, a full century after the American Civil War, it might seem like something that was inevitable, bound to happen as it did. History, once it's happened, generally has that kind of feel to it. But who knows what would have happened with the Civil Rights movement if it had not been such a musical movement.
Music was at the heart of the movement. The IWW had been called “the singing union,” and the Civil Rights movement earned the same reputation as a singing movement. People sang together in churches, they sang together on the buses in the Freedom Rides, and they sang together as they marched towards the lines of riot police and barking dogs.
Ask anyone who was involved with the Civil Rights movement about their memories, and they'll talk about the music. Many people have said if it weren't for the fact that they were all singing together, they would have turned and ran.
It is undoubtedly the case that the music of the Civil Rights movement overwhelmingly came straight out of the Black church in the US. But it's also worth noting that many of the songs sung at Civil Rights movement sit-ins were the same songs sung at union pickets by Wobblies half a century earlier.
And many of the same people and organizations that were responsible for promoting the use of culture within the movement in the 1930's were also deeply involved with the Civil Rights movement -- perhaps most infamously Pete Seeger, responsible for the “shall” in “we shall overcome,” and the Highlander Center in Tennessee.
And still today, when people remember the Civil Rights movement, after Martin Luther King, the recollections are likely to be musical, and the figures most fondly remembered are often the musicians who sang the songs that had such profound impact -- Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald.
The 1960's/1970's Antiwar Movement
Generally overlooked when it's not being broadly vilified is the influence of music and culture within the context of the movement against the US war in Vietnam, which was a hugely popular movement across the US and around the world.
Looking back on this history, many people are apt to dismiss it all, observing that the war dragged on for many years while the antiwar movement did, too, and the antiwar movement didn't put an end to US imperialism going forward.
On the other hand, the antiwar movement was so popular among the US troops that soldiers all over Vietnam started regularly refusing to leave their bases, and when they got home to the US, so many of them joined the antiwar movement. The antiwar movement also arguably had such an impact on US society that it caused what was known for decades as “Vietnam Syndrome,” a “syndrome” that means the US was disinclined to invade other countries, with its own troops, for over a decade going forward.
The experience of the Vietnam War is impossible to disentangle from the experience of the antiwar movement, just as the antiwar movement is impossible to disentangle from so much of the popular music of the day. But some combination of these things effectively demilitarized the hearts and minds of American society for some time to come.
For those who were seeking to use music as a vehicle for social change during this time, there was a strategy involved with this.
The regular, large, free festivals being held, at first in places like San Francisco and soon far beyond California, were often painted by the media as spectacles of hedonism and depravity. For many of those involved with organizing them, they were a vehicle for the transformation of society, a vehicle through which we might win the hearts and minds of America, and demilitarize them.
The belief in the power of the music of the time was so widespread that across North America, when anyone tried to organize a festival where tickets were being sold, a certain set of society would be outraged, because they had internalized this idea that the music came out of the movement, and it was a vehicle for the movement that must be free in order to work best.
From the vantage point of labor, and working musicians, it's very easy to poke holes in this idea that everything should be free. But this was the orientation of a big part of the antiwar movement of the time, and I would argue that it was one of the most successful efforts on the part of a social movement to influence a society ever undertaken.
Once again, when we remember this movement today, half a century later, and look at some of the music that was most influential within it, some of the artists continue to be some of the most listened-to of the modern era, such as Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix, and other artists that still have the kind of cult following they had fifty years ago, like Phil Ochs or Jefferson Airplane.
The Global Justice Movement
Fear of the power of art on the part of authoritarian regimes goes way back. Art can be banned outright, and artists can be jailed and executed. These things have happened often in the past, and continue to take place.
More commonly in the west is the active promotion of harmless art, and suppressing the more incendiary forms of it more by not promoting it, rather than by actions like the targeted assassinations of poets.
What we can observe unmistakably in one city after another during the course of the global justice movement in the late 1990's/early 2000's in the US was the systematic targeting of art and culture everywhere.
One of the great challenges with protests is messaging, and creating effective messages that can capture the interest of the general public around you, and the media-viewing public out there in the world as well. If people might just get a few seconds to figure out what is going on here, how might you best represent it? How might you even win hearts and minds to the cause, in those few seconds?
Many of us found that there's no better visual than a giant puppet, or a bunch of them, to capture the imaginations of protesters and passersby alike, along with the media.
Coming out of cultural traditions born out of the 1960's such as Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, groups like David Solnit's Art & Revolution could be found in advance of the big protests outside the meetings of the G8 or WTO or IMF/World Bank summits, working with many other people to build giant puppets and other props for very effective street theater.
In the case of the giant puppets and the global justice movement, the observation that may be most relevant to make is not about how effective the messaging was, but how tenaciously it was opposed by the authorities.
More often than not, in one city after another, local police would find some reason they needed to raid the warehouses where all the puppet-building was taking place, and confiscate the puppets.
Learning from the Secret Police
In 1971, people involved with the antiwar movement in the area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania held a meeting and formed what they called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The group proceeded to successfully burglarize FBI offices and steal a thousand secret documents.
What the world learned from these documents and others that would be forthcoming as a result of Congressional and other investigations was that the national secret police force of the United States, the confusingly-named “Federal Bureau of Investigations,” had been engaged in a constant campaign, from the beginning of the Bureau to the present, involving infiltrating certain groups, spreading disinformation within them, occasionally committing assassinations of group leaders, and otherwise engaging in the systematic suppression of certain elements of society.
The groups especially targeted for “neutralization” began with the IWW. The main focus of the FBI in the beginning was the destruction of the IWW. The union was against participation in World War 1, which they called a “bosses' war.” Therefore they were labeled “German agents,” the leadership was arrested, many members were deported, and union halls across the US were burned down. All of this was done at the initiative of the FBI.
As time went on, the next major target of the FBI in the 1930's would be the Communist Party. Later it was Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights movement generally, and what FBI leadership described as the New Left, by which they meant anyone that opposed the US's war in Vietnam or supported civil rights for Black or Brown people.
What the FBI has been focused on over the past century – the movements they've been particularly intent on undermining and destroying – have especially included all the ones I've mentioned with the exception of the last one, which came later than the 1971 exposure of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program they nicknamed “Cointelpro.”
There are many threads connecting the groups throughout history that the FBI has been most concerned with. They've all been associated with the left, in one form or another. They've also all been groups that were known to have connected deeply on a cultural level with a big part of society – or were at least threatening to do so.
Music Matters
Just as we can look at the twentieth century in the US and see that the most influential social movements were also the most musical ones, as well as the ones more targeted for neutralization by the FBI, we can look at the 21st century social movements and observe certain trends.
Without knowing what the secret police might be doing in more recent years the way we know, at least to some extent, what sorts of nefarious activities they were engaged in for so much of the twentieth century, one trend that's been impossible not to be impacted by has been the increasing disappearance of live music from almost all social movements in the US.
Traveling extensively throughout a couple dozen countries over the past 25 years especially it has become a more and more pronounced phenomenon to witness.
At least from 2000-2016 in Germany I could list many protest rallies I sang at that were huge, and mostly music. But these were not concerts – the folks at the rallies would in many cases be the same ones committing civil disobedience a couple hours later.
By contrast during this period in the US, and more so since 2016, the rallies that might have been half music in 2000 are now almost completely, or completely, bereft of any live music. Not only that, but they are often lacking any speakers who know how to engage emotionally with an audience by telling a relevant story, rather than just shouting slogans.
History can teach us many different sorts of things -- perhaps as many different sorts of things as we care to focus on. But I would suggest that one clear take-away from the examples I've shared is music and culture matters for people generally, and for social movements in particular. Social movements that have understood this have sometimes done especially well.
By the same token, those seeking to undermine social movements have also figured out how important culture is, and that's why US history features episodes like the execution of Joe Hill, the loss of Paul Robeson's passport, Pete Seeger testifying for the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the systematic raiding of the puppet warehouses, and the active suppression of the careers of a multitude of leftwing artists during the course of Cointelpro.
A protest rally is, of course, only a small part of the activities of a real social movement, but an important, and revealing, part. We can only imagine exactly how it came to be that the American left got so completely detached from music and the arts, how we got to this stage where protests for vitally important causes have anemic attendance and no live music on the stages, but here we are.
What is also unmistakable to observe is that this collapse in artistic expression within American social movements has not happened to nearly the same degree outside of the US. When one goes further from the Anglosphere, labor unions and social movements of various kinds all seem to be more connected to culture, and tuned in to the important role it has in maintaining and building organizations and social movements, along with neighborhoods, cities, societies. These tendencies need to be reinforced at every opportunity. And they need to be revived in the US.
The power of culture to inspire resistance, to help build social movements, and to sustain them for future generations is an essential one to remember, because we humans are fundamentally musical creatures.
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