This is an ambitious and unusual book that aims to comment on the politics of punk rock legend Joe Strummer (1952–2002), vocalist/guitarist of The Clash. Gregor Gall criticises the use of lyrics by past authors to form assessments about Strummer's political inclinations, preferring instead an incredibly detailed study of Strummer's media interviews. Past authors, such as me (see James Reference James2009, Reference James2010a, Reference James2010b, Reference James2014), who described Strummer as a ‘Third World Communist’ or ‘Marxist’, are criticised here in fairly strong terms. However, one can still argue the contrary perspective: many artists put major time and effort into lyrics, whereas magazine interviews may be used for publicity or shock quotes. Gall's thesis that someone's ‘real’ politics can be better inferred from interview quotes than lyrics is far from proved here. In fact, the reader is overwhelmed at times by the contradictory nature of various interview quotes, even from the same year or era, and many are juvenile and have not aged well at all.
The first half of the book reflects Gall's interest in working out which labels should and should not be assigned to Strummer. The author seems to be of the perspective that Marxism ended with (or before!) Lenin, both in theory and in practice, thus ignoring writers such as Althusser, Mao and the Western and Cultural Marxist traditions. The book comes across as ahistorical in the sense that these later authors, as well as the Frankfurt School and Foucault, escape mention in the book when they are highly relevant in terms of understanding the historical trajectory of Leftist ideas and their dialectical interplay with events. The Clash wrote at a peak time for the influence of Maoism and the Frankfurt School. Furthermore, Foucault's most influential writings were first published in English during The Clash's lifespan, 1976–86. Therefore, they were the theoretical backdrop for his era, just as much as Reagan, the Notting Hill Carnival riot, Thatcher and the Sandinista were the political backdrop.
Mao wrote that contradiction is in the essence of all things, and Gall would have done well to have made this, or similar, quotes the centrepiece for his book. By describing Strummer as Marxist, I was not calling him a ‘dedicated Marxist’ or an ‘orthodox Marxist’. I understand Strummer as being a man defined by his contradictions, while ‘Marxist’ refers to his ideas being often Marxist-infused or Marxist-influenced.
However, if pressed, and from the perspective of today, and incorporating insights from Cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, Althusser and Mao, I would call a ‘Marxist’ someone who believes in the idea that surplus-value is unpaid labour time, which is extracted from the proletariat by the capitalist business owner, through the capitalist production process, and wants to see the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a workers’ state. In definitional debates, Gall and I may disagree and I may allow the definition to widen to incorporate the insights and practice of Lenin and Mao, in particular.
This is not the place to endlessly debate lyrics and quotes, but I think we can go further than calling Strummer anticapitalist. In song lyrics, it is unrealistic to expect a full exposition of Marx's theory of surplus-value, but the ‘belief’ may still be there if we look at the full picture of what the person did or said. Being written in an era when the Soviet Union still existed and Really Existing Communism still existed in Eastern Europe and China (and this historical context was vital for the meaning and impact of The Clash), Strummer clearly holds on to at least romanticised ideas about communist revolution and the fighting of the fascists.
I will mention two areas where Gall takes me to task, quite unreasonably. I quote the song ‘Bankrobber’ where it centres on a man ‘spending his life serving one machine’ which is ‘ten times worse than prison’. I describe the man as alienated, in the Marxist sense, drawing on Marx's (1932/Reference Marx and Simon1994) theory of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts. In terms of the lines from ‘Bankrobber’, Gall, disingenuously, claims that this could be a protest against advanced industrial society rather than capitalism (as I claimed). Since, in England at least, these things emerged historically at the same time and through the same historical processes, they appeared together. Hence, I doubt that Gall has proved me wrong.
The Sandinista clearly thought of themselves as Third World Communists and they fit in with the historical trajectory of those nation states and ideas that used that label, which included China and Vietnam. If Gall does not want to call them ‘Marxist’, I presume that this is because they were not a revolution initiated by the industrial urban proletariat, which was the classic Marxist scenario. However, neither was the Chinese revolution and neither was the Russian revolution. Both relied on the alliance between the industrial working-class and the peasantry. Lenin, too, had the theory of the vanguard. In effect, Gall seems to want to take us back to a pre-Leninist position that would deny the validity of even the Russian revolution.
The problem with the book is the earnest and endless search for ‘the truth’ in terms of Strummer's political beliefs via a literal reading of countless texts. There is no poststructuralist awareness here, no concept that Strummer's understandings were fragmentary and contradictory. He was Marxist and not Marxist, at varying times and to varying degrees, and depending on which definitions one chooses. Gall doesn't consider that the definitions are themselves contested and change over time. And Strummer's views reflected the changing events of history (he was in confusion after the collapse of the Soviet Union), and hence also constrained him in terms of what he could conceivably think. These problems make the book duller than its title would suggest, although the second half is better.
In closing, it seems that here we have a work that is pre-Foucault, pre-postmodernism, pre-1968, pre-the Frankfurt School even, and which aims to locate (Marxist) truth by defining it rigidly, protecting and enforcing it upon those who use the definitions in a different way or more loosely. There is no awareness at all that many regard truth as being socially produced. Punk was a movement of individualism and identity politics, at least to some extent, so it presaged today's world. With this book and this author, there appears to be no understanding at all that the categorisation process, and the categories themselves, can be oppressive, and that is problematic.
