No Life Without Song

May Day 2013:

THINKING ABOUT MAY DAY, the day we celebrate the hopes, the dreams, the tragedies and the triumphs of organised labour the world over, I asked myself:

“What’s the easiest way to convey the sentiments of those who struggled in the past for the rights and dignity of working people, to those who struggle today, in 2013, to protect those rights and secure them for future generations of workers?”

The answer I came up with was a simple one: through their songs.

Protest songs were the YouTube clips of their day: cheap to produce, easy to access, and if they were any good they could be passed on to tens of thousands of people in an astonishingly short period of time.

So I hauled out my copy of “Kiwi Youth Sings” – a songbook put together in 1951 by the Student Labour Federation and the Progressive Youth League. The songbook’s editors, Conrad Bollinger and Neil Grange, were in no doubt concerning the importance of political song.

“Locked in the dungeons of the Gestapo the Czech resistance fighter Julius Fuchik could not be stopped from singing”, they told their youthful readers. ‘”There is no life without song,'” said Fuchik, “as there is no life without the sun.”

The first song in “Kiwi Youth Sings” is, very appropriately, “The Internationale”. Just listen to the anger and red-hot determination of its opening lines:

Arise ye prisoners of starvation!

Arise ye wretched of the earth!

For justice thunders condemnation,

A better world is now in birth.

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us!

Arise ye slaves no more in thrall!

The earth shall stand on new foundations,

We have been nought – we shall be all!

Stirring stuff!

But not all the songs rely on the rhythms and language of the Bible.

“It’s My Union”, an Australian ditty, is much more colloquial:

They can call me agitator

They can even call me traitor

They can tell me that my brain is off the track

But I’m smart enough to see

What the union’s done for me

So, I’m rolling up my sleeves and fighting back.

From England came the poignant “People’s Anthem” – the most popular song of that first great mobilisation of working-class people, the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 40s.

Rather than ask God to save the Queen, the song’s author, Ebenezer Elliot, implores the Almighty to save the people.

Shall crime bring crime forever,

Strength aiding still the strong?

Is it thy will, O Father,

That Man should toil for wrong?

No! say thy mountains, No! thy skies:

Man’s clouded sun shall brightly rise,

And songs be heard instead of sighs.

God save the People!

And, of course, we could not walk among England’s poor without acknowledging William Blake’s mysterious incantation of a poem “Jerusalem”:

And did the countenance divine

Shine forth upon these clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark satanic mills?

Nor could we leave them without at least quoting the chorus of what Bollinger and Grange called “the great hymn of the British Labour Movement”:

Then raise the scarlet standard high!

Within its shade we’ll live or die!

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer

We’ll keep the red flag flying here!

Years later, I’m reliably informed, Conrad Bollinger penned a wicked parody of “The People’s Flag”:

O Labour’s flag is deep magenta

It flies on high – just right of centre!

Interestingly, on the night of 5 July 1945, when it became clear that the British Labour Party had won the General Election, the vast crowd of working-class Londoners which had gathered outside Transport House to welcome in the Red Dawn didn’t celebrate their victory by singing “The People’s Flag”. The song they sang that night, to usher in Britain’s new welfare state was much older – Blake’s “Jerusalem”.

I shall not cease from mental fight

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Til we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

But nowhere, in the English-speaking world has the battle for workers’ rights been harder – or bloodier – than in the United States.

Small wonder, then, that it is from the USA that we have inherited what is, perhaps, the greatest union anthem of all – “Solidarity Forever!”.

An enormous confidence rings out in the song’s verses: an absolute conviction that workers’ power can not only defeat the bosses, but also transform the world:

They have hoarded untold millions

That they never toiled to earn

But without our brain and muscle

Not a single wheel can turn

We can break their haughty power

Win our freedom when we learn

That the union makes us strong

In our hands we hold a power

Greater than their hoarded gold

Greater than the strength of armies

Multiplied a thousand-fold

We can bring to birth a new world

From the ashes of the old

When the union makes us strong.

The author of “Solidarity Forever!”, Ralph Chaplin, was writing in the optimistic early years of the 20th Century – when it seemed that the long-awaited “Commonwealth of Toil” could not be long-delayed.

But the First World War, and coming of the Great Depression drove iron into the soul of the American Labour Movement.

Listen to the bare language and stark choices laid down by Florence Reece, who battled alongside her husband for miner’s rights in the Kentucky coal-fields during the 1930s. She wrote down these words on the back of a calendar after a gang of strike-breakers crashed into her home and attacked her family.

They say in Harlan County

There are no neutrals there

You’ll either be a union man

Or a thug for J.H. Blair

Which side are you on?

Which side are you on?

And that’s a sentiment, Comrades, that never changes. To every human-being, be they old or young, black or white, man or woman, rich or poor, a moment always comes when the choice that changes lives must be made, and answer given.

Which side are you on?