The Disappearance of Protest Songs, and the Left's Loss of Its Roots

I have been thinking lately about how the left has become largely disconnected from it's ideological roots. The left arose in the context of union activism, of workers pushing for a fair distribution of the wealth of society, based on the work one does, rather than on the family into which one was born. This was represented by the great struggles of the 19th and 20th century for workers rights, such as the right to strike, the right to withhold labour, the right to keep scabs out of the workplace and job security.

The modern left seems to have largely abandoned this fight. Sure, leading lights in the NDP will occasionally show up at a major workers rights protest, such as the shut-down of GM Canada's headquarters by the CAW. This loss of interest in the plight of the working class has been parallelled by the loss of traditional protest songs, expressing both outrage and hope. Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize", "We Shall Overcome" (a socialist song before it was a civil rights anthem), "Solidarity Forever" and "Union Maid". These songs relate powerfully to the efforts of capital to stomp out any vestige of a movement for workers' rights.

Capital, and its cronies in government, at first sought to suppress the working class by sending in soldiers and police to kill strikers, like any number of coal miners' strikes in Cape Breton or West Virginia, or manufacturing workers strikes in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago or Pittsburgh. That didn't work. The workers were willing to risk the rifles and bayonets of the soldiers to defend their rights. Then, there was the phase of McCarthyism, and the attempt to smear all labour rights activists as Bolsheviks and anti-democrats. And sadly, this largely worked. North Americans became convinced that unions were synonymous with big-C Communism, and in the face of the hysteria worked up by capital about the Cold War, turned away from fighting for their rights. Unions never stood for any such thing, rather standing for democratic socialism and for horizontal, democratic, control of the economy to produce just outcomes for all.

The loss of the old protest songs is a sad reflection of the modern tendency in labour relations, and in the wider battle against global capital. This tendency toward giving up, and back-peddling on, the rights of workers continues up to this day. Under the leadership of quislings like Buzz Hargrove (who sold his soul to the Liberal Party, icons of capitalism, for a prospective seat in the Canadian Senate), unions have frittered away the rights of workers. For example, the CAW signed a collective agreement with Magna stipulating that the workers did not have a right to strike. That is heinous. If the workers have no right to strike, no right to withhold labour, there is no way to get concessions from management for better pay, benefits and job security.

Perhaps if we heard the old protest songs again, some of the moribund sections of the union movement might finally wake up. After all, as "Solidarity Forever" proclaims:

When the Union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.

Capitalists would have the people believe that pushing for labour rights will simply see more jobs flee to China. That's bullshit. Jobs are fleeing to China anyway, and if the workers aren't organized, there's nothing they can do about it. But if they do organize, workers can fight back. With the flight of good jobs to China, and the proliferation of crappy, un-unionized, McJobs, workers are returning to the situation of the working class in the late 1900s. As Marx wrote at the end of the Communist Manifesto, "the proletarians of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"

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