Uncle Pete is dead (fuck your nuance)

[ritaxis]

Days ago I was writing my own Pete Seeger eulogy. It would have been sentimental and I honestly don't know how interesting it would have been, since it would have contained a few of the bare facts of his life plus the things that I remember most vividly about him and also my feelings about him. I wasn't making much progress between sniffling and getting frustrated that what I had to say was not more interesting.

Well. I think a lot about how Pete Seeger used to say there were only really five tunes in the world and all the differences were just wonderful variations. He didn't mean "oh everything is all of a sameness and it's boring:" he meant "it's accessible and you can own it and make it yourself." He made a bunch of movies about that: how to make a steel drum, how to play a banjo. He popularized the banjo as a mainstream folk instrument on purpose because it's relatively easy to make a beautiful sound on it, it's flexible, and you can make it fit into a lot of different kinds of music. A good "people's instrument." Yes, andf even a good banjo is less expensive than a lot of other instruments -- more so in those days. So there's that.

And there's Pete Seeger and the HUAC meetings. Where he did not take the Fifth and did not sell out his friends and did not repudiate the Party (though I'm pretty sure by that time he was already turning away to do other things: if not, it happened not long after). Where he said "You do not have the right to ask me these things, and you do not have the right to call me a traitor and an anti-American because of the work I do." That's a thing.

And there's Pete Seeger's songs. Simple and sweet and kind and brave and singable. And --

Well, I was coming to this, while I was struggling to write about the fellow and his times and the things he did, when I saw in Making Light's sidebar that Patrick Nielsen Hayden had linked to "Steven Brust, canny and nuanced, on Pete Seeger."

I like Steven Brust. And "canny and nuanced" are nice words. But mostly I was curious: where's to be nuanced about Pete Seeger? I know there was a period when folkies would tend to be all hipster on Pete because his music wasn't authentic and gritty enough. But they were a little sheepish about it even back then because he'd pretty much always done the right thing, or one of the right things that was available at the time, and because even at his corniest Pete was fun to listen to and sing along with. So maybe he was going to do that? But isn't it a bit late to bother with all that?

It turns out it's just stupid. Sorry to say, but Steven Brust said something stupid in the name of being canny and nuanced, and in the process he demonstrated that he doesn't really get what the counterculture of the thirties, forties, and fifties was actually doing. And where I think he was intending to sound wise and all that he actually sounds condescending and knee-jerk anti-communist, the second of which is kind of an ironic and surprising and dumb thing to happen, considering everything. I mean, Steven Brust has kind of a nice record on that kind of thing, as far as I know from reading his stuff.

You should read the whole eulogy for yourself because it's mostly okay and every word that Steven Brust writes should be read even when it's not up to standard.

Here's the paragraph that I object to: "He was a Stalinist, and it showed more and more as time went on. You could see it in the way he did songs that carefully explained everything and drew their morals out plain as if the audience couldn’t be trusted to understand; you could see it in the way that, especially after his involvement with the Civil Rights movement, he would gladly hop onto any cause the pseudo-left embraced, the more middle-class the better."

as if the audience couldn't be trusted to understand

No. This shows a complete lack of understanding about what that kind of music is for. Pete Seeger explicitly said, over and over, in many contexts, that he actually thought his audience knew damn well what was going on, and understood the issues just fine. He wasn't up there educating anybody when he sang. He was giving people songs to march to and to sing along to and to use as work songs, that expressed things they already knew and felt. The power of a Pete Seeger type of song is not that it tells you something new. It's that it gives you a singable tune with a memorable refrain that says what you've already got on your mind.

I can hardly remember what the fuck words like "pseudo-left" mean anymore. I figure it's whatever movement the speaker thinks doesn't have the cred, or the analysis, or the right alignment. But I know it has a more precise meaning and it probably includes both the kind of "if you scratch the surface, you find a conservative" liberal types and also socialists who aren't far left enough and also probably Stalinists (about which more later: there's a disclosure due, which I'll get to). Or some subset or combination of subsets of these. Somebody, probably a Trotskyist, will come along and tell me I'm wrong and why. That will be okay, because as snarky as I've been in this paragraph, I would actually prefer to have a correct understanding of the term.

Here's a link to a bit of a bio for Pete Seeger: not really adequate. Highlights of his later involvements: working against the war in Vietnam; benefits for unions; support for cleaning up the Hudson River -- I guess these are what Steven Brust means by "the more middle-class the better." And pseudo-left. Because?

I'm stalling on getting to the Stalinist part. I want to talk about something else first. But I guess I have run out of other things to say. So here's the disclosure: my parents belonged to the Communist Party of the USA, and left it only gradually because they decided, in my mother's words "it wasn't going to change with all those men in charge of it." And I joined a Stalinist-flavored left-wing communist party called the Communist Labor Party for several years in my twenties. And I don't repudiate it, even though I do criticize some of the things we did, including the weird thing we did about Stalin where we tried to cherry-pick stuff like The National Colonial Question while distancing ourselves from everything else he did. Why don't I repudiate the CLP? Because most of us in the CLP, like most of the people who joined the CP or any of the other parties around, joined in order to engage in coordinated efforts towards making things better on a broad range of issues, and honestly we did that. At least in my area, we organized support for labor struggles, resistance to war and intervention, we walked the picket lines and packed the boxes of books for libraries and painted the signs and went to the farmworker barracks at four in the morning with reading material. We did a lot of good work and we were generally honest. I could, point-by-point, discuss all the ways that we were wrong, but frankly I am not that interested in it. I'm only bringing it up nopw because if somebody doesn't like what I'm saying today, they should not also think I'm hiding that I have this particular history. Of course it affects what I'm interested in and what I think and feel about it.

Pete Seeger's history is different. He was a public person and everything he did had wider ripples. For me, quietly not talking about my former CLP membership means the issue doesn't come up and I don't get punished for it. For Pete Seeger, it meant that people would call him a Stalinist for forty years or more afterwards. He didn't repudiate his Communist Party history as he moved away from it because it would have been cowardly to do that at the time. He would have had a much simpler life throughout the fifties and early sixties if he had made a public show of distancing himself. When he finally did write a song about how bad Stalin was, it was when it no longer could bring him any real benefit.

So anyhow. I'm not being canny and nuanced here. Not canny, because I'm utterly partisan about Pete Seeger and also probably pseudo-left, if I understand the term at all correctly (oh wait I already admitted I probably don't, but I'm probably pseudo-left anyway). And not nuanced, because I don't recognize that because a person has Stalinist connections in their history their actions and their work must necessarily be tainted and lesser. Oh right, and not nuanced, because I think sometimes a song should just goddamned say what it feels.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Jeez. I assumed everybody knew that Steve grew up the son of Trotskyist labor organizers. Of course he has a particular outlook on the CPUSA. We all have our prejudices. Or turns of mind. Or outlooks that our upbringing and experience leave us with.

I don't have any direct personal history with any of the branches of American communism, although I know lots of people who do. I certainly know that there are lots of times-and-places when fire-engine-red communists, including, yes, self-identified Stalinists, were the only people with the courage to stand up against lynching, or for migrant workers, or against any number of practices that even the wishy-washy now concede were horrible.

Also, one of the oldest existing photographs of me depicts me at about three years old, a precocious early reader, wearing toy plastic glasses and peering at the lyric sheet enclosed inside Seeger's AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL BALLADS. Solid iron from McKeesport down. I also liked SONGS TO GROW ON. I got no bone to pick with Pete Seeger's membership in the CPUSA.

What I thought was interesting about Steve's look at Pete Seeger was the double vision. On the one hand there's Steve the Trot-by-birth, with a critical attitude about what he sees as certain aspects of Seeger's presentation. And in the very next paragraph, there's the side of Steve that says "But that doesn't matter, because..." and goes on to make really good observations about Seeger's musicianship. This tension between the demands of ideology and art, and Steve's usual willingness to struggle to be honest about it, is one of the things I've always found interesting about Steve, whether it's manifesting in a novel, in a blog post, or in conversation.

That said, if I start thinking that people are going to get quite so furious about the offhand terms I use to link something I find interesting, I may simply subside into silence. "Fuck your nuance"? Really?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

No, I didn't know specifically: I had his politics by osmosis or guess, and didn't want to say "of course he would say that, he's a Trot," because it's not the point.

Anyway, this post, even though your words gave me clarity about why his eulogy pissed me off, isn't about you. Maybe your nuance, in this case, but not you. And it's not really about anybody, when you get down to it, but Pete Seeger and me.

Like you say, we all have our prejudices, turns of mind, and outlooks that our upbringing and experience leave us with. And for me, the obligatory deprecation "of course he was a Stalinist, and --" or "of course he was a Stalinist, but--" is a thing that I have had to turn the cheek to my whole life and just once in a while it sort of boils over. Like now, when I'm kind of rattled already: too many deaths, too many anniversaries.

Going to say it again: I'm not railing at you, and probably not really Steven Brust, either: I'm railing at a thing.

And seriously, you're not going to shut up because someone like me gets ranty about a thing. Even if you feel like it for five minutes. We've both experienced far worse on the internet: I bet you can think of ten things in the last month that are worse than Lucy's grief getting tainted by anger.

edited for typo: there are probably more of them, but I don't see them.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

And seriously, you're not going to shut up because someone like me gets ranty about a thing. Even if you feel like it for five minutes. We've both experienced far worse on the internet: I bet you can think of ten things in the last month that are worse than Lucy's grief getting tainted by anger.

(slow applause)

Also for the original post.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

...the kind of "if you scratch the surface, you find a conservative" liberal types...

I think that may be the kind of liberal I am.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Well, that was the kind of liberal who would say the things that would inspire this. (http://youtu.be/ta_iKeH4tsg) Or this. (http://youtu.be/u52Oz-54VYw)

(Yes, they're both Phil Ochs. As an old person, I make new memories less well than I dredge up old ones, so the many fine pieces expressing similar analyses that have come up in the last few decades do not jump to the forefront of my mind, alas)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I never joined any Communist parties, namely because by the time I hit the University of Oregon, the only Communists around were the Avakian Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade types, and, well, I'm just not a Maoist. Doesn't sit well on me.

I did, however, hang out with Stupid (not sure what his real name was, but he posted many lovely poems and screeds around Eugene, was a former CIO muckamuck with impressive eyebrows), and I think he was a Trot. Not sure about that.

When all is said and done, I think I'm more IWW than anything else. But like any good anarchist, I've not bothered to join.

(and if anyone tries to call me a libertarian, either small or large L, well, that's fightin' words)

Pete Seeger explicitly said, over and over, in many contexts, that he actually thought his audience knew damn well what was going on, and understood the issues just fine. He wasn't up there educating anybody when he sang. He was giving people songs to march to and to sing along to and to use as work songs, that expressed things they already knew and felt. The power of a Pete Seeger type of song is not that it tells you something new. It's that it gives you a singable tune with a memorable refrain that says what you've already got on your mind.

What you said here is the key. Unless you've actually walked a picket line, you don't realize what power these sorts of songs have to get folks through the ugly nasty grind of getting out there in all sorts of weather to represent what they believed. Contrary to what those who've never marched believe, songs like those Pete Seeger wrote have power in those settings. They bring the participants together. They give the participants heart. They let the participants express their feelings while taking care of themselves around hostile forces.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

OH, you said it better than me, thank you.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the lovely complement.

Once I am free of the Day Jobbe, I may write up the strike story. I took notes throughout the strike, and it lasted three weeks.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Oh, do it. Those kinds of memoirs are really invaluable.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm thinking self-publication for the strike story. I'm also taking notes for a short memoir about horse rehab and my reflections after ten years teaching special education. That one is Leaving Narnia--not C.S. Lewis's Narnia, but the epithet thrown at the school's students by a rival school in the district during a long and snowy winter, because "it's always winter and you live in the trees." In response, our students passionately adopted the label "Narnian" and the 8th grade promotion that year had the theme "Welcome to Narnia."

I'd say the Mountain kids were a wee bit mad about that.

Anyway, all three of these works are probably unpublishable except as self-pub. Which is no big deal, these days--and I find I want to write them.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

UK politics is very different from US politics and having been a lifelong Socialist, I have never had anything to do with the Communist Party, which never gained much traction over here.

I do agree with you that Steven Brust's reference to Seeger being a Stalinist and claiming that the simplicity of his songs was somehow patronising is missing the point. Why do people sing hymns in church, hymns that state and re-state the basics of Christianity? It's not that "the audience couldn’t be trusted to understand" anything more complex, it's because it's a group of people bonding via shared beliefs stated in a straightforward way. Seeger's song served the same purpose.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Ourselves, we are Anti-slavery Whigs a/k/a Conscience Whigs -- United States version. See the 1840's.

Love, C.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I have the strong sense of missing an ideological point. Stalinism, in my limited understanding, was the ideology of dictatorship to achieve Communist goals as promulgated and practiced by Stalin in the USSR. It is hard for me to believe that Seeger ever pursued a US version of that, at least, though I suppose he could have held such views in his youth.

Is there some ideological sense of Stalinism that is not that?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Everybody means something different when they say Stalinist. I think Trotskyists generally mean "somebody whose ideology and alliances we disapprove of." But if you want to see an actual discussion of the meaning of the term, follow the link to Brust's blog: he's been explaining what he means to people there.

The thing is, when Pete Seeger was in the CPUSA, it was the organizing principle for doing most of the cool things that a committed activist would want to do. The largest number of sincere leftists were in the Party. I don't want to detract from the other left parties of the time and since, at least not here and now, because there were really good people in a lot of them. At the same time, the CPUSA really wasn't independent, either of the CPUSSR or of the Democratic Party. That's an accusation made over and over by the Trotskyists and the Maoists that is true. And it had bad repercussions. One of them being the disarray that the American Left has been in for generations because the CPUSA basically disintegrated itself "for the duration" as a gesture of something or other during World War Two and despite some pretty good activity intermittently since then, neither the Left nor the labor movement ever really recovered from that.

Pete Seeger, like almost all of his generation, took his turn at trying out democratic centralism, which has as a central tenet that you help argue out the Party Line and then you follow it until the next time there's a pile od meetings and you argue it out and follow the next line. Any left-wing organization that pretends they don't do this themselves is lying, even -- maybe especially -- the anarcho-types who believe they have no spokesperson and say they do everything by consensus and everybody is free to pursue their own line regardless.

One of the more surprising things to come out of all this is that the Trotskyists still think the defining moment of Pete Seeger's 95 years is writing an anti-war song in 1941, months before the Soviet Union joined the war, and writing a pro-war song after.

The party line beforehand was that the war was another capitalist squabble in which workers would die to make the rich richer, and then they said "Now the war has changed, because there's a chance to defend the SOviet Union."

If you notice that the concentration camps are missing from the narrative at this point, well, yeah, it was missing from the US official narrative too.

Meanwhile, these people who are still excoriated for being insufficiently eager to fight Nazis in 1941 were on the front or raising support for the fight against fascists in Spain five years earlier.

If you think it's really weird to be hashing out this argument in 2014, I agree with you. I think it's strange that I am doing this, myself.

But I'm doing it over here, where I can just be kind of mumbling about it, and not picking fights with Steven Brust, at least. I could be doing worse.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Thank you. That's fascinating. I am going to have to be careful of the term in the future, since just using it negatively creates the false appearance of allegiances on both left and right. There is apparently no unambiguous term that names the policies and politics of the USSR under Stalin, which makes it hard to talk about them. I am left in mind the saying of a fascist poet: "When language is corrupt no truth can be spoken." Or at least it is much harder to speak truly, and harder still to be heard.

It is not only the Trotskyists who are keeping this alive—conservatives desperately want to tie Seeger to Stalin's horrors, and since there is no honest way to do so, they resort to calling him a Stalinist.

I am not sure the left or the labor movement could have recovered from the wave of reaction that swept the USA after World War II, Communist Party or no. We are, of course, going through another such wave at this time, and there seems no stopping it, even though there is overwhelming support for something better—who, after all, wants to live in a depression? And yet no political leaders have arisen to do the simple practical things that would ameliorate the depression, let alone the more radical things that would end it. It is hard for me to see why. As I wrote to my elected representatives, "Why do the Democrats never stand up on any issue that might help the vast number of people who are out of work, not working enough, working under intolerable conditions, or just being paid dirt wages? You could have the whole damn country on your side if you would just stand up." Why do they choose the losing side? For the very wealthy will never trust them, no matter how much they bow and scrape. They would rather have one of their own, a man like Mitt Romney, who apparently sincerely believes that nearly half the country is surplus population.

This has wandered. In any event, thank you for the clear and informative answer.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Context will make it clear if you aree using the term in a truly historical sense, don't worry.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I adore Pete Seeger. I grew up with him and the Weavers. My dad was a huge fan, and I associate them. He also wore a silly red hat :) So my dad died 8 years ago and I still had Pete and I knew when his wife died (married fifty years?) he'd die soon. Just like June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash

I'm from Berkeley, and I knew CP members. Of course in places like Berkeley (and probably Santa Cruz but I don't know for sure) you can be to the left of communism :)