Dragon Teeth

     WHEN THE PRISON DOORS ARE OPENED/THE REAL DRAGON WILL FLY OUT -- Ho Chi Minh

     a column by JOHN SINCLAIR, Chairman, RPP

       "BRINGIN IT ALL BACK HOME"

        ROCK & ROLL IMPERIALISM

                           part 3

     I think I left off last week talking about the internal and external colonies of imperialism and what this all has to do with rock and roll music, and I'll try to get this dry analytical shit out of the way as soon as I can so we can move on to the present and the future problems we all face in this weirdo world.  Dennis Frawley is playing "Woodstock" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash & they are in my ear right now, and that ties in too, but let me try to take it in order so it'll make a little sense at least, ok?

     Rock and roll music jumped out into the wilds of early post-industrial Amerika in the middle of the 1950's-- ah, I remember it well, because I was one of the first-generation rock and roll people who were sitting around in the seventh grade waiting for something like that to happen.  Like I was trying to say last time, rock and roll like everything else--like all of us, to start with--is a product of history, the result of the development of specific socio-economic contradictions, and like all cultural forms it reflects and gives concrete expression to those economic contradictions.  That is to say, it isn't just "something that happened," you know what I mean?  The conditions which produced rock and roll music have also produced a lot of other new forms which are as precise to their origin as the music is, and just as reflective of those conditions.  Everything is everything, is one way of putting it, and it all ties together.

     What are those conditions?  Well, as I was saying last time, capitalism had developed into imperialism, gobbling up whole peoples all over the world and turning the whole "underdeveloped" pre-industrial) world into a collection of colonies or "oppressed communities" as Huey P. Newton puts it.  This happened not because a bunch of rich Euro-Americans were inherently "evil" or simply greedy, but because the working people in Euro-Amerika were rising up and demanding a larger share of the returns of their labor, and the only way the big "owners" could keep up their profit level was by reaching out to other areas of the planet and ripping off more natural wealth and human labor.

     This enabled the capitalists to buy off the working people at home while maintaining their accustomed level of profit, or "return" from their capital investments. See, capitalism works like this:  you get a little accumulated wealth (which is called "capital") and then you use that to get more--and more.  You might get the first stake by working for it, but usually by force of weapons combined with a superior technology.  Once you get that stake, though, you're "in business" and you can use it to get more money without doing any more work at all--you "let the money work for you," you know what I mean?  Then you can "buy" land and other natural resources (which is usually done at the point of a gun), and you can buy other people's labor so they do the work of producing and developing the resources for you, right?  They might not like it, but since you "own" everything and have all the guns they have to work for you or one of your pals or else they can starve.

     The people who acquire the capital compete with each for a while, but before long the ones with the most capital start manipulating things so the little capitalists go out of business and their enterprises are bought up by the big guys.  Pretty soon the big "owners" have got everything cornered among themselves, and instead of "free enterprise" (where a lot of chomps compete with each other for the available profits) you've got monopoly capitalism.  Then the workers start agitating and have to be bought off at home like I said before, so the owners move out beyond their national borders and start the same process all over again on an international scale, creating "colonies" wherever their virus spreads.  Instead of enslaving just the working class in the mother country, they now oppress whole peoples and keep them under the gun while the rip-off goes down.  And imperialism is what that's called.

     Among the colonized peoples, however, the life-force gradually rises and grows to the point where the "natives" will no longer submit passively to their oppressors, and they start to rise up against the imperialist dogs demanding their freedom from external control and manipulation just as the mother-country workers once did.  The only problem is that there is no more virgin territory for the imperialists to rip-off the natives can't be bought off with anything less than their own freedom.  They want self-determination, and they won' t settle for anything less.  So the imperialists bring in their big guns--their armies, tanks, bombers, napalm, defoliants, poisons, the whole arsenal of imperialism--to crush the natives' rebellion.  But that doesn't work either, because (as Huey said, once again) "the spirit of the people is stronger than the Man's technology."

     OK. This is what happens in the colonies of imperialism around the globe--one by one the colonized peoples rise up to liberate themselves and win self-determination, and imperialism becomes weaker and weaker as the sources of its riches are yanked back away from them.  Meanwhile, at home in Babylon, the oppressed peoples who have been shut out of the game by the Euro-Amerikan "owners" and the mother-country working class (that is to say, the "white" workers who once forced the capitalists to cut them into the pie a little bit) began to learn of the colonial rebellions taking place and catch the spirit of liberation their own selves.  Through the new technology of imperialism, especially electronic technology (which was developed to serve the communications needs of imperialism as it spread itself around the planet), the oppressed peoples in Babylon begin to develop a new sense of peoplehood, and for one thing their culture--which is a culture of resistance to begin with--is carried across the land to all the separated people who are kept in enclaves where the "owners" require their services, working to bring the people closer together and to give them a new, powerful national identity.  This in turn moves them to fight more openly for their liberation, to keep on pushin' for freedom and self-determination even in the face of the increasing repression from the mother-country domestic army, that is to say, the police.

     I left out one thing - as imperialism festers and spreads around the world, oozing out from Euro-Amerika like a big sore, it not only transforms the rest of the world but it also creates massive changes in the mother country itself.  The racism which is an integral component of both capitalism and imperialism makes the non-Euro peoples in Babylon into domestic colonies, where whole peoples are oppressed on the basis of their race and/or culture which is non-Euro-Amerikan (non-"white", you dig?) and "alien" to Euro-Amerikan values.  That is to say, non-Euro peoples (black, brown, red, yellow, and now rainbow people) are exploited and oppressed not only as workers (if they can get work) but also just because they are not Euro-Amerikans.  The class consciousness of the mother country worker shifts from "working class consciousness" (an awareness that all working people share a common interest in gaining some control over their lives) to national or cultural class consciousness ("us white people got to stick together"), and the mother country workers jealously guard their privileges against the demands of the non-Euro peoples (both at home and elsewhere throughout the world) for better living conditions.

     The major cause of this change is economic:  since the new post-industrial technology takes more and more jobs away from humans the "labor market" gets increasingly smaller and those workers who do have jobs are scared that they'll lose them, so they try to close their ranks against the peoples who are trying to enter the labor force for the first time.  These new workers happen to be non-Euros for the most part, people who can be visibly identified as black, brown, and red people, or people with long hair and weird clothes, you know?  The desperation of the workers to keep their jobs keeps them from seeing that their real interests are not represented by the Euro-Amerikan owners who exploited and oppressed them for so long, but by the new people who want only self-determination and freedom for all peoples including themselves, of course.  So the mother-country workers are used as dupes by the big imperialist creeps in the struggle to keep the world from moving on into the future, where there will be no private ownership of the means of production but collective control by all the peoples of earth over everything that affects their lives.

     Am I making any sense yet?  Let me try to boil it down into something easier to deal with:  imperialism and its technology has transformed the world into a vast plantation ruled by a tiny Euro-Amarikan "ownership" class. Pre-industrial peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America (with the exception of the socialist nations which have already liberated themselves) have been enslaved and made colonies of imperialism.  Within Euro-Amerika itself imperialism has transformed its national minorities into domestic colonies, and peoples which would have been welcomed into the labor force during the growing stage of capitalism have now frozen out because capitalism is on the decline and has no more room to grow.  Electronic and cybernetic (computer) technology now make it possible for all humanity to move out of the industrial age, where people were enslaved to machines and jobs and scarcity production (scarcity is where there isn't enough for everybody), into the post-industrial age, where people control the technology and use it to produce enough for everybody's needs.  The age of imperialism is coming to an end, and the only thing that keeps it from dying out right now is the desperation of the imperialist "ownership" class to hold on to what it's got by any means necessary. The death culture is doomed to death, but it refuses to give it up and tries to maintain itself by means of its weapons and its control over the peoples information--that is to say, its culture, which it disseminates (spreads around) through its schools, newspapers, radio and television facilities, and its rapidly slipping grasp on the means of production through which the peoples livelihood is controlled.

     Can you dig it?  I know I still haven't got to the specific problem of rock and roll imperialism, but we' re getting there step by step, and until this other shit is laid out we won't be able to understand what it's all about.  My point is that rock and roll imperialism is just part of the overall problem of world imperialism--it doesn't exist in a vacuum, and it can't be explained without taking the whole situation into account.  It all ties in, and unless we can see how our situation as rainbow people in Babylon is interconnected with the situation of all oppressed peoples we won't be able to do anything about it.  Maggie's Farm covers the whole earth now, we ain't the only ones who won't work on it no more, and we've gotta see where we fit in to the whole picture.  So I'll try again next week and see how far I can get, ok?

     Dig, I've gotta say one more thing before I quit:  I just heard three jams off the MC5' s new album and they were really dangerous!  It sounds like they got their music back--now if they would only bring their asses back over here with the rest of us and hook all that power up with the people again, we might really be able to do something!  Long Live Rock and Roll!  Rainbow Power to the People of the Future!  Let it Grow!