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Dragon Teeth

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Parent Issue
Day
9
Month
July
Year
1971
OCR Text

A Column by JOHN SINCLAIR Chairman, Rainbow People's Party  "Bringing It All Back Home": Rock & Roll Imperialism (part II) 

I started out last week to write about rock & roll Imperialism and I've been thinking about it all week, but there's so much I want to say that I never know where to start. Then it occurred to me that maybe alot of people don't know what I'm talking about when I say "imperialism"--it's a word some people use all the time without bothering to see if anybody else understands it, you know, so I thought I'd better try to break it down before I race on with this other stuff just to make sure everybody knows what the deal is. Imperialism is an economic (and political and cultural) system in which one people controls the economic, political and/or cultural life of one or more other peoples. It is a higher stage of capitalism, a social system in which the control of the life of a people is held by a small minority class of "owners" who have managed to rip off land and other natural wealth, usually by means of force, and who keep it and use it for their own gain, while the rest of the people are made into workers who have to sell their labor to the "owners" in exchange for food, shelter, clothing, and everything else they need to survive. Under a capitalist system the "owners" not only control the wealth (the means of production and the products created by the labor of the workers) but they also control the educational, information and communications systems through which the people's ideas and attitudes are shaped, so that the whole people comes to think and act the way the "owners" want and need them to.

That's pretty simplistic, but I hope it will do for the purposes of this rap-if it's not enough maybe I can spend some more time and space on it sometime soon. But my point here is that imperialism is an extension of capitalism, so that the capitalist "ownership" or ruling class controls not only the rest of the people of its own culture but other whole peoples as well, with the wealth of whole nations going not to the people who produce that wealth but to the "owners" who have ripped off the land and resources of those peoples. You dig? So that the Rockefellers, say, "own" whole countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as huge holdings in their native country (the U. S. of A. ), and if they don't "own" all of these countries themselves, well, they get together with their cousins and classmates and cohorts and stake out "areas of interest" for themselves, with the end result being that an interlocking cartel of capitalists (disguising themselves as corporations like Standard Oil, IT&T, RCA, General Electric, etc. ) controls vast areas of the globe and all the people who live in those places.

I think I talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago when I was talking about Vietnam - the way the Euro-Amerikan imperialists want to turn the whole world into one big shopping center, the way they spread their decadent culture everywhere they can, trying to turn all the people on the planet into super consumers who will gladly give up their time and energy (labor) in exchange for ridiculous shit like electric toothbrushes and girdles and tin-can cars that fall apart in three years so you have to buy a new one. Not only their labor, but their humanity itself is drained out of them in exchange for these dehumanizing products in and as long as the "owners" control the schools and the newspapers and the tv networks and all the means by which the people find out anything about themselves and the world they live in, as long as the "owners" can control the information the people get, all the people will be able to know is the perverted, inhuman, degrading world-view projected by the imperialists.

But fortunately things don't remain static - there are always contradictions developing everywhere there is life, and things are always changing from one state of being to another. A contradiction is like a conflict on one level or another, like the contradiction between life and death: nothing is all life or all death, the two forces are always in conflict, one rises while the other declines and vice versa - like the song says, if you're not busy being born you're busy dying, you know what I mean?

Anyway, even though the imperialists try to keep everything under control so they can exploit people better, there always seems to be a force or a combination of forces working against that control, trying to break free into a better world where people can exercise control over themselves and their own destinies instead of having a little bunch of chumps run their lives for them. This force or these forces are in the final analysis a production of the contradiction between life (self-determination) and death (total control), and on another level the product of more immediate contradictions, like the contradiction between repression and rebellion, or the contradiction between low energy and high energy forms.

For example, the repression of black people who were brought over here by the Euro-Amerikan capitalists to work their land as slaves produced what we know as black music, particularly the blues, which was at first a means of expressing the slaves' agony and pain under their inhuman captivity-a means of expressing and preserving their humanity under the most inhuman conditions ever known to men and women on earth --- which then carne to be a source of great inspiration and strength to the slaves and their descendants as they began to struggle for their freedom. ft helped them preserve their human dignity, it strengthened their sense of peoplehood, it carried their hopes and dreams of freedom from one plantation to the next, from generation to generation, keeping alive the seeds of liberation while the historical forces which had made and kept them enslaved began to change through the inevitable development of their internal contradictions. It wasn't the music all alone that made it possible for black people to preserve themselves until they could strike for their freedom, and it wasn't the music alone which made it possible for them to move for their liberation, but I don't think anybody can deny that black music has played a powerful role in the life of the black colony, nor that it still plays a large role as the black liberation struggle grows nearer to its ultimate victory.

The music interacted with other social forces - particularly economic forces like the disintegration of the plantation system in the south and the growing migration of black ex-slaves and their descendants to the factory centers in the north - to help bring about the necessary conditions for change. In the 1950's this black music of rebellion intersected other monumental social (economic) forces - the development of electronic technology and the emergence cf a new class of people, the post-war youth natives who were born into this new electronic world - to produce a new cultural force: rock and roll music !

Rock and roll in its turn gave voice to the rebellious feelings of the youth natives, who felt that they were entrapped in a hostile system which wanted to keep them slaves to the economic and cultural dictates of the same Euro-Amerikan ruling class which had exploited and oppressed black people for 400 years. Rock and roll didn't just spring up out of nowhere - it was the product of very specific socio-economic contradictions, and it reflects all cf those contradictions just as any other cultural form does. Mostly, though, it reflects the contradiction between the low-energy control forms of Euro-Amerika, and the high-energy life form of the post-western youth natives - the powerful surge of new life that says people can finally be free from want and need, people don 't have to be machines, people don't have to repress their feelings and their humanity any more because we can all be free! 

Rock and roll serves the same function for post-western young people as the blues and other forms of black music have done for black people - it gives expression to our feelings of rebellion, it gives us a strong sense of peoplehood, it carries our hopes and dreams of freedom in a whole New World--and more than that, it is also our basic product as a people. In an agricultural society the crops produced off the land are the basic product of that people in Industrial nations the products of the factories -- the wedding of human labor with machines - are the basic product of those peoples; and in a post- industrial society, where advanced machine technology extended through the medium of electronics does most of the work of human laborers in terms of producing the products people need to survive, it is services and culture which are the major products of industrial people. Since people have their basic needs taken care of by their cybernetic technology they are liberated from the necessity of working and slaving at agricultural and industrial tasks, and they are free to create and to participate in new cultural forms which can raise their level of humanity to a whole new stage.

What we are caught in now is the contradiction between the industrial age and the industrial era - the capitalist barons of industrialism are trying to hold onto their system even though it's historically obsolete, and they want to suppress the forces that threaten their rule. At the same time they are engaged in a different conflict with western peoples all over the world who have been enslaved by industrial -these peoples are demanding their own freedom from imperialist control, they are struggling to secure the right to determine their own destinies without Euro-Amerikan interference, and their rebellion increases the pressure on the Euro-Amerikan ruling class which is having a hard enough time at home to begin with. The imperialists started taking over and exploiting other peoples because they couldn't hold their own oppressed classes down any more and still increase their profits, so when they're faced with rebellion both within and without the mother country they're in big trouble coming and going. The rebellions outside of the mother country (Amerika) make it even more important for the ruling class to put down their internal rebellions, but that gets harder and harder to do as the spirit of the oppressed people grows and grows in direct proportion to the growth and development of the contradictions in the capitalist-imperialist system.

I know this is all pretty stiff and maybe it's hard to understand at first, but it's really important for us to understand what's happening in the world and why it's happening, especially as it relates to our own situation here in the rainbow colony of Babylon USA. The vultures and vampires who run this country, and who try to run the rest of the world, want us to think that all of this is beyond our comprehension, and that if we just listen to them and follow their orders everything will be all right. Well, we can see for ourselves that things aren't right at all, but unless we understand why they aren't right and what these vampires are doing to us, we won 't be able to move the right way to win our freedom from their madness. Can you dig that? I hope you can bear with me through this stuff until I can get to the easier part again, which should be about halfway through next week's little installment, ok? It's as hard on me trying to get this shit down as it is on people trying to read it, you know what I mean But it's gotta be done, and I'll keep trying as long as I can stand it. Meanwhile, I think I better turn on the radio and see if I can pick up some killer rock and roll music so I can remember what this is all about. Long Live Rock and Roll ! Rainbow Power to the People of the Future! Down with Maggie's Farm!  

THERE ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE A FORCÉ WORKING AGAINST CONTROL, TRYING TO BREAK FREE INTO A BETTER WORLD WHERE PEOPLE CAN EXERCISE CONTROL OVER THEMSELVES AND THEIR OWN DESTINES INSTEAD OF HAVING A LITTLE BUNCH OF CHUMPS RUN THEIR LIVES FOR THEM.