Upstream - The Cultural Cold War: Folk Music and Communism w/ Carsie Blanton

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

In this episode, we're joined by Carsie Blanton for a conversation on communist folk music and the role of politics in art. Carsie Blanton is a songwriter, touring musician, and organizer with Artists Against Apartheid and People's Songs—an organization of musicians dedicated to adapting, distributing, and performing songs for liberation. The conversation begins with Carsie giving us a sense of her experience as a Jewish, anti-Zionist musician after Oct 7th and how the repressive atmosphere and her experience on the Global Sumud Flotilla shaped the way she thinks about art and political discourse. She tells us how this experience led her to (re)launch an organization from the 1940s named People's Songs dedicated to adapting, distributing, and performing songs for liberation.  We discuss the ways that communist musicians organized historically and what the response from the FBI and repressive apparatus was to this organizing. We talk about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example, and other soft power approaches by the CIA to promote a noncommunist, compatible left in the sphere of art, music, and culture more broadly. We discuss the repression that musicians faced, from Paul Robeson to Malvina Reynolds, and how the explicitly left, communist politics presentin folk music shifted and dissipated during neolberalism. We end by discussing the challenges facing musicians today in the context of the new Red Scare, how Carsie has navigated this, and how musicians and artists can get involved in organizing. We are now on Youtube! You can find us and subscribe to our channel at youtube.com/@upstream_podcast Further resources: Carsie Blanton's webiste Support Carsie on Patreon! People's Songs Artists Against Apartheid Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, by Francis Stonor Saunders The Folk Singers and the Bureau  The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956, by Aaron Leonard Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism, Gabriel Rockhill (Monthly Review Press) All Power Books Radical artists to explore: Bamboo, Robeson Singers, the Neighborhood Kids, Billy Bragg, The Burning Hell, Devon Sproule, Linqua Franqa, Tuneyards, Nathan Evans Fox   Related episodes: Palestine Ep. 15: The Gaza Freedom Flotilla w/ Chris Smalls & Huwaida Arraf Cuba Ep. 9: Conjuring up the Red Menace w/ Charisse Burden-Stelly The Intellectural World War w/ Gabriel Rockhill The Western Left w/ Gabriel Rockhill US Labor & Imperialism Pt. 1: the War Against Communism w/ Jeff Schuhrke Black Scare / Red Scare with Charisse Burden-Stelly Marxism for the Masses w/ Savannah from All Power Books Voting for Socialism w/ Claudia De La Cruz & Karina Garcia Intermission music: "FBI" performed live by Carsie Blanton Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

As our movement grows and builds power, I think it's going to have to become more robust and include more kinds of people. And I think one of the things we're a little bit missing, or we have been for much of my lifetime, are artists. Like the left has a lot of intellectuals, it has a lot of academics. Doesn't have a lot of artists, at least not in this part of the world. And I think, I believe that artists bring something special to the table. They bring a different way of communicating and a different way of seeing the world. and I think it can only be like a boon to the success of our movements to have more artists enrolled. You're listening to Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Art is not separate from politics. In fact, art and music are one of the most high.

highly contested terrains of class struggle. The CIA will be the first to tell you that. And just as the ruling class has spent countless resources promoting anti-communist, compatible left academics, trade unions, or philosophers, they've also done the same with artists. From Jackson Pollock to Nina Simone, the CIA and FBI have used musicians and artists to push their anti-communist agenda and have punished those who did not and do not comply. In this episode, we're joined by Carcy Blanton for a conversation on communist music and the role of politics in art. Carcy Blanton is a songwriter, touring musician, and organizer with artists against apartheid and people's songs,

an organization of musicians dedicated to adapting, distributing, and performing, songs for liberation. You've likely also heard her music on our show several times as intermission music. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for biweekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers. at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable

and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to find, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's Della, in conversation with Carcy Blanton. Hello, welcome to Upstream. So good to be in conversation with you. We always start with our guests introducing themselves. So let's have you introduce yourself.

and share what inspired you to get into this realm of people's music, revolution music, activism music, however you define it. Sure. Well, hi, Della. Okay, before I even start, I just have to say what a huge fan I am of the show. I've been listening for years. It is one of my very favorite podcasts. And my other favorite podcast is the Blind Boy podcast.

And I've been wanting to say that to you so that your listeners can know to check out another great podcast that talks about all the wonderful Marxist. perspectives that we talk about, but he does it as an Irish storyteller. So I'm just so thrilled to be here. And, okay, who am I? I'm Carsey Blanton. I am a songwriter. I'm a working musician. I've been touring for 25 years, actually, because I think I started at 16. And I kind of did the first half of my music career in the standard way, writing love songs, and then I've done the second half in the less standard way where I'm mostly writing protest songs and have become more and more involved in organizing and activist projects. And lately, I've been really focusing on trying to integrate

those two parts of my life. So I'm very interested in organizing musicians, organizing artists, making art that is itself galvanizing, turning my shows into political rallies, all things like that. I love the intersection of those two passions. Wonderful. And in all of appreciate you too for your music and also for allowing us to feature your songs as intermission songs. The themes are always on point and we get a lot of great feedback when we get to feature you. And then also just share my connection. If I had a Hammer, Songs of Hope and Struggle, Pete Seeger, one of my absolute favorite albums. I have really fond memories of driving through Iowa with my mom just like listening to the whole thing and Banks of Marble, his take on Les Reyes.

this song is one of my absolute favorites as well as turn, turn, turn. So when we thought about having this conversation, I was like, yes, because I've also thought about what has happened to that genre of music over the years, you know, since if I had a hammer. So what indeed. We will talk about all of that today, and I'm so excited for that. I do want to ask one more biographical question before we dive into our topic for today. You mentioned this intersection between protest and activism and music. And so I would love for you to tell us about artists against apartheid and your recent participation in the Sumid Flotilla, because I think that's really a huge example of this. And I'd love to hear how that influences you today and how it brings us to this

conversation. Gosh. Okay, big question. Okay, I'm going to start with Artists Against Apartide. So got involved in socialist organizing around 2020. I joined the PSL, I'm a member of the party for socialism and liberation, and was kind of doing various kinds of on-the-ground work. And then I started talking to my comrades about, like, okay, how is it useful to be a musician, though? Because most of my time and most of my brain power and, like, all of my interesting skills are in this one very specialized area.

And so I started looking for, like, where the intersection is of my musical and artistic. skills and the political moment. And one of the things that started happening after October 7th is it became very clear that Israel and the U.S. were using Jewish Americans to kind of give cover to the genocide and the occupation. And I'm Jewish and, you know, I had some platform as a musician and as a performer. And so even before October 7th, I had been speaking occasionally about Palestine after October 7th. It started to feel like this is the intersection of my different identities this is a place I can actually kind of like apply some leverage politically and it so happened that myself and some other artist comrades had been

preparing to launch a new artist's union it was supposed to launch in October of 2023 and so we had this group set up we had like documents we had a plan and a strategy and then after the seventh we were like all right let's pivot and instead make this new thing called artists against apartheid which was inspired by the South African organization of the same name. And so we very quickly kind of hit the ground running and started reaching out to artists with large platforms and asking them to talk about Palestine, talk about the occupation. And what we found right away is that there was like a big, a real hunger for kind of like political leadership among artists. It was a moment when a lot of artists

felt that they should say something, but it felt like such a touchy topic at the time. Like I don't remember, I don't know if you remember the political climate right after October 7th in the US, but it was like, people were scared to say anything other than, oh, no, Israel, we're so sorry for your loss. And I think it took a real sort of historical grounding to see the larger trends and be willing to speak to them. And so we kind of put some documents together to help artists talk about it on stage in a way that, you know, we said, this isn't going to get canceled. You don't have to be quite so nervous to discuss this. And right away we found the artist really responded to that,

just like feeling like they had some guidance and they weren't having to make everything up in a vacuum, which is very much how we're taught as artists. It's like, you're a special genius, you're an individual snowflake, everything you have to say is important. And so, you know, we hope you personally come up with something really good to say. So as soon as we kind of came in and said,

like, we actually have some context to offer on this topic, a lot of artists responded. So artists against apartheid is still active, but working on that project really helped me frame how I think about the relationship between artists and political discourse and like what is needed. What artists and musicians need in order to become politically activated. So that's artist against apartheid. The second half of your question, how did I end up on the Samud Flotilla? What did that all mean? So it was through my work with Artists Against Apartite that I ended up on the flotilla. I actually, applied as soon as the application went live and then like the next day I got a DM from one of their recruiters saying like you have a big platform will you go on the boat would you ever consider going on the flotilla and I was like yes you already have my application call me anytime and then I think in a week or something I was in Sicily and it was the whole thing was like delayed a lot I don't know if anybody else remembers this part but the whole thing was supposed to take two weeks this is the one that happened a year ago the original global smooth flotilla And it ended up taking five weeks and we were in prison for a week. And so I had like a season of touring canceled in order to participate and it just sort of like it felt like it kept spooling into a larger and larger commitment. And I think what has changed me the most about it was finding that I was able to make that kind of commitment and sort of double down and double down and double down on my willingness to participate in that kind of action. And even to the point of like we did get drone striked at sea. And the morning after that, we had a discussion on our boat that was sort of like,

okay, maybe you didn't believe that your life was at risk. Now that you know it is, how's everybody feel? Are we going to stay? And I was sort of surprised to find myself wanting to stay. And so I think it has really shown me where I actually stand in a way that I feel much more willing to participate in risky actions. I feel like it's okay for me to risk bigger things than I was sure I could before. And it was also just such an amazing show of global solidarity. Like it was really uplifting to see so many people around the world supporting that action

and to get to be there and be part of it. And we didn't break the siege, but it felt like we moved something a little bit. And you know what? That's like feels so good after like a lifetime of just feeling like I'm politically beating my head against a wall. Thank you for that story and for that work. And so bring us from there to our conversation today, people's songs. So just introduce the project briefly. And then this first part of the conversation will go in the history, very critically, what's happened.

And then after our break, we'll go into the people's songs as of today and what the invitations are. But just bring us from that experience to this project in particular. Yeah. Yeah, so just all these different experiences of organizing as an artist has instilled this really strong kind of core belief that I have, which is as our movement grows and builds power, I think it's going to have to become more robust and include more kinds of people. And I think one of the things we're a little bit missing, or we have been for much of my lifetime, are artists. Like the left has a lot of intellectuals. It has a lot of academics. It doesn't have a lot of artists. at least not in this part of the world. And I think, I believe that artists bring something special to the table. They bring a different way of communicating and a different way of seeing the world. And I think it can only be like a boon to the success of our movements to have more artists enrolled. So that's been kind of my organizing perspective for the last few years through Artists Against Apartide and my own work.

And as I was kind of thinking about this, I came across these historical references in various books to an organization. called People's Songs that existed in the 1940s. Pete Seeger was a part of it, Woody Guthr and many other people. And I ended up just diving into a very deep rabbit hole to learn everything about this organization, which resulted in myself and some comrades doing a relaunch. So we're basically bringing back an organization called People's Songs, and we've just launched it last month. Yes. So let's go deeper into the original People's Songs. Tell us about the history. and the purpose of that endeavor. Yes. So the original people's songs began in 1945 in Greenwich Village. It only lasted four years. So it was a very short-lived political project. It was started by Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, Alan Lomax.

Woody Guthrie was around but wasn't like one of the core organizers. Same with Paul Robeson. So it was sort of this clique of musicians and artists in New York who decided to start an organization for musicians. and their first principle was they wanted to gather labor songs and protest songs together. So their first project was they had this monthly bulletin and in the bulletin would be printed a few songs. And often there would be like a cute little intro by Woody Guthrie or Paul Robson saying like, this is why this is an important song, we shall overcome, whatever. And then they would send these bulletins out all over the country and they would bring them to

protest and pass them out. And the idea was we want people to be able to sing together. and then it sort of developed into eventually also having an agency that was called People's Artists, which had a phone number, which would ring a phone in Greenwich Village, and someone would answer, and you'd say something like, oh, we're going on strike in Cincinnati, and they would look at their roster and see if they had any musicians in Cincinnati that they could send to sing at your picket. And then they would send them, and they'd sing at your picket, and they would be singing the songs that were in the bulletin.

So it was sort of easy to learn the songs and sing along with them. So their whole idea was like, what if musicians and working people had this shared catalog of music that we could sing together and wouldn't that like strengthen our movements? And eventually they had a convention for all of the musicians in people's songs. There were something like 30 branches around the country before the demise of the organization.

And the other element they had, and this is so important, is they would fundraise. So they had an element of material support for workers' struggles. So Paul Robson put on tons of concerts to raise money for striking workers. Eventually people's songs kind of modeled after what he was doing and they would throw these things called hoot-nannies.

They threw them all over the country and they'd be like, this is a hoot-nanny to support, you know, like the indicted, whatever, 10 protesters or the striking workers or the, you know, they just closed a factory, so we're gonna, whatever. So they were enrolling musicians and not just ideologically supporting workers and through song and sort of like uplifting people emotionally,

but also actually materially supporting worker's struggles. Yes, I love all of those examples and how accessible the music was that people could learn about it. And as we know through history, wherever there is revolutionary activity, there is counter-revolutionary activity. So I want to bring in a quote from you from a presentation you gave.

The quote is, The Red Scare included a concerted effort to crush the power of organized artists in order to remove art. art and music as tools of the larger labor movement. And those efforts changed American art and music in important ways from which we have not yet recovered. So let's dive into that.

Where there is this beautiful project, there was the counter to it. And I want to reference two books that you sent me in preparation for this conversation, and we will link to them in the show notes. Francis Saunders, the cultural Cold War. Great. And you're holding it up for us, for those who are watching. The subtitled, The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. And then the second book, The Folk Singers and the Bureau, the FBI, the folk artists,

and the suppression of the Communist Party USA from 1939 to 1956. And that's by Aaron Leonard. So, yeah, we're going to be talking about the counter to this people's song movement, this use of culture as an instrument of foreign policy and a tool of the red scare and really just a cultural Cold War. So let's dive into that. Tell us about the Congress for Cultural Freedom, very important player in this story, and what did it do? Yeah. Well, actually, even before I dive in, I just want to mention, so Francis Stoner Saunders wrote this incredible book, The Cultural Cold War. It's actually very readable. And I didn't say this before. So

in addition to being a songwriter for my actual job and not an academic, I also have not gone to any school at all. So I just want to preface everything I say in this episode with the idea that like, I'm trying out this concept of having robust movement and I'm going to bring an artist's voice to this conversation. So I'll try to get my facts and dates correct. But I am not a professor of this stuff. I have all my notes. You can always reference the books. And Gabriel Rockhill, who's been on this show multiple times, I know references this same book quite a bit.

and he's done some incredible research on the compatible left. So if you prefer a drier, more academic style, please check out those episodes. Even if you don't, check them out. As opposed to a wetter style. Exactly. Bringing some moisture to the revolution. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, so that was the cultural wing of the CIA. And I think one of the most interesting parts about it is that that department was founded the same year the CIA was founded.

So, 1947, the CIA is born into existence, and immediately they have a cultural wing. And right at the beginning of the project, there's some very, like, bald-faced quotes about why they have a Congress for Cultural Freedom. I don't have them in front of me, but essentially there's directors of the CIA saying things like, well, the Soviets, you know, are giving people all this hope and making them think another world is possible. So we have to counter that by making them think it isn't. or whatever like they're just saying crazy stuff about how like there was all this optimism about socialism because of the soviet project in the late 40s and like we had just been allied with the soviets to beat the nazis and the western left was very pro-soviet and thus fairly pro-communist

that was true it wasn't like it wasn't like a hallucination the cia was having it was true that the left was very popular at that time so the congress for cultural freedom decided its job was to kind of plant seeds of anti-soviet and anti-communist cultural ideas all over the west. Including in the U.S., they did quite a lot of domestic work, even though that's technically illegal. So they set up this elaborate labyrinth of different academic journals, galleries, radio stations, publications, and they would essentially find intellectuals and artists who were quote unquote, the left but who were part of what they called internally the non-communist left which they would call it the ncl so they'd be like here's a great member of the ncl this abstract expressionist rothko or whatever

let's give them a whole series of gallery exhibitions all over the world so the cia decides they're just going to find artists and intellectuals who identify as left but not communist and then they're going to fund and promote their work in this like elaborate network of billions and billions of dollars of different artistic and intellectual outlets. So they created the assumption that the left was moving away from communism as some kind of organic decision when it was actually happening as they were doing this huge massive propaganda effort, one of the biggest ever, to give that impression. Yeah, it's amazing to read about. And yeah, from the book, the cultural Cold War, I learned that at its height it had offices in 35 countries.

So this was really a global endeavor. And another way to say it is it helped create and finance a cultural ecosystem, right? And it identified intellectual currents that were useful to the American Cold War strategy, right? Particularly anti-Stalinist liberalism and, as you said, the non-communist left. And I think that's really important, this non-communist left, because what it tells us that it wasn't trying to turn general population, or people in the left to the right wing. It wasn't trying to do that. It actually was attempting to shape the boundaries of the acceptable left,

you know, of a left that was permissible, acceptable, a left that was non-communist. So tell us more about that realization, this realization that the most effective opponent or strategy for being against Soviet communism was, you know, former communist, socialist, Trotskyist, anti-Solinist liberals and shaping these boundaries of the left that were permissible or acceptable, this non-communist left. Tell us more about that strategy. Yeah, well, a couple things that have

stuck out to me about it. And first of all, even reading this book and discovering that phrase non-communist left, it changed my life because it explains so much about American culture especially, and actually British culture. It's like a couple of small Western outposts of imperialism where we have a political culture that actually doesn't exist anywhere else on earth, which is we have the far right, we have the right, which runs the country, and then we have liberalism. And the way liberalism works here, it's like it's the air we breathe. You don't even notice what's weird about it. And what's weird about it is it's defanged. It's a kind of leftism that has no power and no way to get power. So it's like, instead of trying to eliminate the left, the CIA just worked to

create a left that had no labor power and therefore couldn't actually make any political gains. And that's what we find ourselves with now. That's how we ended up in this situation. And you can kind of see it in everything. So me as a musician, one of the questions that brought me to this whole project was like, you're saying, okay, you're a kid listening to Pete Seeger. And you're like, wow, these songs are cool. And maybe as you grow up and become political, you're thinking like, wow, that's cool if I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. Or you're thinking about specific songs and specific lyrics and maybe you've seen videos of you know people singing them in civil rights marches or whatever it is or like paul robeson singing in the mines in scotland is an

incredible video he's singing a song to scottish miners while they're on a mining strike so like that stuff used to happen a lot i was born in the 80s nothing like that was happening nothing remotely like that was happening it was as though it had been forcibly removed from the culture And so reading this book and discovering, oh, it actually was forcibly removed from the culture. It's like it opened my whole mind. Like, okay, this explains why there was this beautiful way of writing about politics that wasn't, it didn't feel like rah, rah, ra, go team, like vote Democrat. It felt much more human and much more rooted in emotion and in like the human experience and in empathy and kindness. And that kind of writing was gone by the time I was born.

And so where did it go? So learning about this idea of the non-communist left, to me, explain so much about the world. And the way I think of it now, it's like, okay, maybe you're not a communist. You're probably close to a communist if you're listening to this episode. But maybe you're like, no, I don't like communism. It's not for me. I'm something else. That's fine.

If you lop off the portion of the left that are professional labor organizers, what you end up with is a left with no power. And so the culture and the political system will continue to drift to the right forever because you've created a system where only the rich have power and labor has no power. So I think I was just born into this lopsided world and nothing about it made sense to me until I learned about this CIA and FBI project. Yeah. Now I'm thinking about, you know, after listening to Pete Seeger's music and then listening to the radio and being like, yeah, why are all the songs about, like love songs or breakup songs, right? It just seems like that's kind of the main topic. And of course, do not get me wrong, a good, you know, Adele or like a good breakup song still gets me, of course. But, but yeah, where are these music? So we will talk about them. And of course,

they did not disappear. But they have been targeted against. And I want to share another realization from the book, Cultural Pold War, was that the CIA couldn't directly fund the artists, right that there was you couldn't actually directly show that the CIA was funding artists particularly if they were in the non-communist left or the compatible left and so they had to use public private networks and at times artists didn't even know they were being funded most of the time you know in this way yeah exactly and so tell us more about this and maybe give us some examples of how did they create this cultural ecosystem and these like ways of support that actually the artist didn't even know about.

Yeah. Well, actually, they had so many different methods that it's almost hard to like encapsulate. And that's one of the things that's fun about reading the book, The Cultural Cold War, is she lays out for you. It's almost like reading a spy novel or something. It's like, and then the director of the CIA gets a seat on the board of the MoMA. Like, that literally happened for years. It was the same guy directing the CIA and being on the board of the MoMA.

So like the reason, a lot of people have. probably heard about how abstract expressionism was promoted by the CIA. It was so explicit the way that they did it, but they didn't actually put CIA money into the hands of, you know, Rothko or Jackson Pollock. They just made sure that they had a guy on the board of every gallery, you know, in the Western world. So they could put together an exhibition, send it around the world, make sure that there were journals willing to write about it. And it was really, a lot of it is through these backroom deals where it's like guys who all went to prep school together and some of them end up in the CIA and some of them end up, you know, owning Life magazine or, you know, working at a

national gallery or whatever it is. So it is kind of a boys club and I think a lot of the influence is that kind of, it's soft power promoting other kinds of soft power. But they also set up a lot of publications where they were essentially funneling tax money into, you know, these kinds of projects. They weren't just, they weren't giving grants directly to artists, but they were setting up all these networks of foundations and grant-making organizations, and some of them were organic and didn't involve direct CIA influence, but then if CIA person wanted some influence, they could get a piece. So it's a lot of that kind of stuff. The other thing I want to add, and we might talk about this more later, but the combination of that being the CIA's approach,

this sort of soft power, influence, selecting artists and setting them up with these mysterious funds or mysterious tours or mysterious exhibitions, that was the CIA's approach with promoting anti-communism. The FBI had the hard power approach, which was like, in prison or kill the communists. And I think the combined method of those two approaches is actually so much more powerful than either one alone. So you always have to remember in the same time the CIA's going around just making sure certain books get written. The FBI is within the U.S. actually assassinating people. So the combination was like, you know, oh wow, there used to be a lot of communists around and now there just don't seem to be anymore. It created this feeling

of like the communists have left the building. But yeah, a lot of people were funded by the CIA and didn't know. It's hard to find out who really knew and who didn't. But two great examples on the topic of music, Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong were both sent on state. department tours to promote the idea during American apartheid that there actually wasn't an American apartheid. And look, here are some black people and they're being treated so nicely and we're so proud of them. And Louis Armstrong was sent to the Congo to help unseat Patrice Lumumba famously. Nina Simone was sent to Nigeria. Nina never knew that she was part of a CIA operation. Louis Armstrong, I believe, found out late in life. But neither of them knew or consented to it at the

time. So they were kind of being used as pawns in this like pro-US propaganda operation. Wow. Another example that stood out to me in the film world was Ein Rann's relationship with Hollywood and helping to write kind of the parameters or the rules around the screen and films. And a few of the kind of parameters that she helped write, she said, you know, don't pretend that Americanism and the free enterprise system are two different things. They are inseparable, like body and soul. Don't attack individual rights, individual freedom, private action,

private initiative, or private property. Don't smear wealth. Don't ever use any lines about the common man or the little people. It's not an American idea to be common or little. And the last one, don't glorify the collective. Don't glorify the collective. Don't glorify the collective.

Remember that all great thinkers, artists, and scientists were individual, single, independent men who stood alone and discovered new directions of achievement alone. I'm so glad you brought that up. These were like the parameters or the guidelines of filmmaking in Hollywood.

Yeah, it was the charter for the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, right? Which became a huge force for anti-communism within the U.S. during the Cold War. So they were a force in Hollywood, but they had their fingers everywhere, these guys. And yeah, so when they formed, they got Ayn Rand to write their charter. And that document is one of the most incredible documents in American history because

it does, like the way I was talking about before of sort of being born, like I'm born, I'm becoming an artist and a writer and I'm kind of looking around like, what happened? Like, why is everything a love song? Why do I have to make songs and then sell them as a commodity to people through a record label? Like, this doesn't feel right. This feels wrong. And that Ayn Rand document really outlines, sort of like the rules that we were passed down psychologically by being born as writers in the last century in the U.S. And yeah, they did come from somewhere. Someone wrote them down.

You can find them. Yeah. And Ein Rant. What a great character in history for championing the neoliberal ideology. And you know who else was a major operative in that same organization was a young Ronald Reagan. He got his start in the Motion Picture Alliance. for the preservation of American ideals. He was like one of their mascots.

He would tour around Hollywood talking about the dangers of communism. Yeah. And I love that we're again bringing up the connection between the arts and the politics, right? And they have been inseparable. Yeah. There's actually, there's an incredible film,

which supposedly is responsible for the launching of that organization. The film is called Tender Comrade. It was written by Dalton Trumbo. But it is not really a pro-communist film. It's sort of a wartime. patriotic American film where there's all these women living together because their husbands have gone off to fight the Nazis. The women are all very like, first they're all living on their own but working in a war factory.

They decide to all live together and share household duties. Then they decide to pool their salaries so that everyone will have the same amount of money to work with. This film featured Ginger Rogers. She was one of the leads. Her mother was a vehement anti-communist right winger. And that was the woman who started the motion picture alliance. So she watched her daughter star in this film where she had to say things like, the meaning of being an American is to share.

Share and share alike. That's what democracy is. Like all these lines which you would never be able to write into a movie now. And of course, Dalton Trumbo was a communist. And he was purposefully trying to redefine democracy as sort of a socialist concept. And he really pissed off Ginger Rogers' mom. And I think we're still paying for it. Yeah, and she tried to kind of hide that film in the subsequent years.

Yeah. Tried to hide it. And when that didn't work, she started the Motion Picture Alliance. And she got Ein Rand and John Wayne and Ronald Reagan to come along and try to make anti-communism the coolest thing in Hollywood. So I love that you mentioned that it wasn't only an attempt to fund and promote the non-communist left, but it was also the flip side, which gives us a preview to the second. half of our conversation about the ways that music that was communist or that was radical was depoliticized and repressed, right? So give us an example of that and then we'll take our intermission break, our song break. So just give us a preview to the ways that communist artists

were repressed and targeted and depoliticized. Wow, they had some amazing methods, the FBI during the Cold War. And I will list a few of them, which I found mostly in the war, this book, The Folk Singers and the Bureau. So this book is just about musicians in the 1950s, mostly, late 40s through the early 60s and how they were targeted by the FBI. The FBI had a lot of different methods, and depending who you were and what your position was, they would deploy a different method. But I would say the overarching result of all the methods is that a lot of the great communist songwriters that I should have heard about, as one myself, just simply disappeared out of the narrative.

So they just weren't being played, they weren't being talked about, they weren't being shared. A lot of that had to do with blacklisting. There was a lot more tight control of venues that musicians could play in in the 1950s. So you could be blacklisted the same way you could with Hollywood production studios.

So a lot of artists basically just had their tours fall apart because too many venues pulled out. And then they had to get a different job. There was also a lot of auditing in the Red Scare, which I didn't really know about until I got into this project. So especially people like musicians who have a lot of different income sources, we're traveling all the time, were famously like dunderheaded and not good at keeping track of receipts. So the FBI really found that auditing musicians was a good method

of kind of slowing them down or getting rid of them. So a lot of musicians were just kind of tied up in IRS red tape for years. The FBI did a lot of intimidation and that was their favorite method with white musicians. They would simply go to people's housing. or the houses of their parents or their lovers or their, you know, the parents of their kids and just say, did you know that Malvino was a communist? Did you know she was working with the Communist Party? And try to intimidate people. And there's actually a wonderful quote from Barbara Dane.

It might come around again. She has a great memoir. This bell still rings. Barbara Dane is a wonderful communist musician of the last century, who I wasn't aware of until more recently. And she talks in her book about being openly communist, an open. open organizer with the Communist Party and with other socialist projects for her whole life. And she says that she thinks it protected her from kind of the worst effects of the Red Scare

because she couldn't be intimidated because everyone in her life already knew what she believed. That to me is the most important takeaway from the last Red Scare is a lot of, a lot of the power they were using, even the FBI, was sort of the power of leverage and social contracts. So they would try to freak you out by talking to your friends and neighbors. and if you were an open communist they didn't have that power. So the reason I bring up that intimidation was the main tactic with white musicians is because of course it was very different if you weren't white. So they did a lot of frame-ups and also like slapping people with misdemeanors.

Josh White was one of the more well-known musicians who was involved in the original People's Songs Project. And he was basically he had a white girlfriend who lived in a different state 10 miles away. and the FBI convinced him, and they were probably real, that if he didn't stop his organizing work, they would frame him for kidnapping. Because at the time, if you're taking a white woman across state lines as a black man, you can be charged with kidnapping. So they kind of just threw everything against the wall to see what would stick, and a lot of different things did. And of course, making you talk to Congress and you have this big public trial where you have to say whether you're a communist or not, that was kind of their last ditch effort. And good foreshadowing for where we're heading in later part of our conversation and also into the present time where people are being subpoenaed for their activism. So let's go into a song.

Let's bring in some music. Introduce the song that you're going to sing for us today and tell us, you know, yeah, any connection that you'd like to share about it. Yeah, well, so, you know, I mentioned the reason we need artists in the movement is because we have a different way of communicating. So as I was learning all of this stuff about the FBI and CIA, I was kind of thinking, why have I read 16 books about the Red Scare? I'm not going. I'm not going to write a book about this. I'm not an academic. Where is this all going? And one of the first places it went was into this song, which is called FBI. Well, I went down to the rally just to exercise my rights. Some Joker I ain't never seen was yelling and saying.

starting fights. He's talking trash, flashing cash, making my comrade cry. I said don't pay him no mind, honey. It's probably in the FBI. In the FBI, in the CIA. Working for the feds to fight the reds on behalf of the bourgeoisie. When working people work together is good for you and I. And if someone says that he knows better, it's probably in the FDFDUESA. It's probably in the FDFDIC. Well, I went down to the union hall to sign my union card. Some joker I ain't never seen was picking him in the yard. And he said, this union's problematic, but he wouldn't tell me why. Well, that don't sound too democratic.

It's probably in the FBI. In the FBI, in the CIA is to fight the reds on behalf of the FBI. on behalf of the bourgeoisie. When working people work together is good for you and I. And if someone says that he knows better, he's working for the FBI. Well, it's gonna be a real fast century. We got no time for calling names. Got no time to tear each other down playing identity games.

We got to organize, don't criticize, get everybody on our side. And if someone tells you otherwise, he's working for the FBI. I said, organize, don't criticize. Quit working for the FBI. Thank you so much for that song. And I know that we could have really chosen any of your songs to be appropriate for this conversation. But that one is perfect. So to start us off again, I want to read another quote of yours from a presentation you gave.

The quote is, the CIA was able to amplify pro-American, anti-Soviet, and apolitical artistic voices, and effectively de-amplify others. Meanwhile, the FBI and the blacklist made it politically and economically dangerous to express leftist sympathies. And as always, Capital invested in art and artists who could generate profits without threatening the status quo. The illusion being cultivated was that the left had quietly exasperated. the conversation, an illusion that persists until this day. So that's what we're talking about now is what happened at the end of the original people songs to today. That's where we're heading. So you introduce the people's song, the original project. Tell us how the FBI responded and how it ultimately ended. Yeah. So the original people's songs lasted from 1945 to 49. And the FBI

was brought in to investigate people's songs mostly on behalf of an organization called the Tenney Committee, which was a legislative body in California. They were well known for being the original advocates of Japanese internment during World War II. So the Tenney Committee spent the war saying, the way we're going to win this war is if we deport the Japanese and then a little later lock up the Japanese. They of course got their way. And then when the war ended, they very quickly turned to anti-communism domestically. And they got fixated on people's songs immediately after the war.

And there's an amazing statement they made about people's songs and why the FBI should investigate. They said people's songs is very dangerous because of their appeal to youth and because they're using entertainment as a smooth opening wedge for Marxist-Leninist propaganda, which I love.

I almost wanted to make that the tagline of the new people songs, but I didn't. So the FBI responded to the Tenney Committee and opened an investigation into People's Songs, and they investigated quite a few of the founding members and quite a few of the leaders of the branches around the country. So Pete Seeger, Paul Robson, were already under investigation. Melvina Reynolds was very heavily harassed by the FBI. Lee Hayes, I mentioned Josh White earlier, Barbara Dane, a lot of the young membership of People's Songs.

That's when their files opened is when they joined a People's Songs chapter. And basically the harassment worked and the organizers decided to shut the doors of the organization. People's artists persisted after 1949 but just as a booking agency. So they weren't focused on sort of dispatching musicians to political events anymore. They were just a regular booking agency. And the songs bulletin, which had been their monthly songbook, persisted under a different name. So that the original organizers handed it off to somebody else, they changed the name to sing out. which a lot of people will be familiar with because it went through, I think, the 80s,

and eventually became Rise Up Singing, which was a songbook we had in my house as a kid. Yes. And yeah, a few things that I learned about the folks you mentioned through the research was Pete Seeger's FBI file alone was more than 5,800 pages. And he was called before something called the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1915. 55. Yeah. His testimony to the House on American Activities Committee is great. And another of my favorites is Paul Robesons. If you, you can look up his testimony online. And he basically said, he says something like, you know, they say, are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? That's their opening question. And Paul Robeson says, I have laid many wreaths upon the grays of communists because communists are often at the front lines fighting the fascists or something like that. That's his response. Are you now a member of the Communist Party? Oh, please, please, please, please, please answer, will you, Mr. Robson? What is the Communist Party? What do you mean by that?

Are you now a member of the Communist Party? Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see? Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest the witness be directed to answer the question. You are directed to answer the question. I invoke the Fifth Amendment and forget it. I respectfully suggest the witness be directed to answer the question, whether, if he gave us a truthful answer he would be supplying information which might be used against him in a criminal proceeding you are directed to answer mr robson in the first place wherever i've been in the

world the first to die in the struggle against fascism were the communists i laid many wreaths upon the graves of communists that is not criminal paul robson is one of the most poetic and beautiful to listen to Americans of all time. And he was so politically based for his entire lifetime. So anyway, he's got a great testimony. But yeah, one of the ways they loved to intimidate public figures was by making them publicly speak to Congress about their ties to the Communist Party. And in most cases, it was just a form of intimidation, but in some cases people would end up in jail for being in contempt of Congress, famously the Hollywood Ten. But some of the Some musicians were in that situation as well.

And then you mentioned Melvina Reynolds, and I'll share that I learned through research for this conversation that her song, Little Boxes, that folks may know, great song. Little boxes on the whole song. Little boxes made up tiki-tacky little boxes on the whole sign. It was actually written about a housing tract in Daily City, California. really near to where I am. So, yeah, another grade. And I know that you wanted to mention something about her career. You know, what happened to it as an example?

Yeah, she's one of the people's songs members who I think, basically, her career was not successful enough to survive the Red Scare. So she was always an organizer. She was always a mother and a housewife. And she was also always working additional jobs while being a songwriter and a musician. And so when the FBI started harassing her, she kind of was like, all right, never mind the touring career, like I've got other things to do, which is a great choice as a human being. But it did mean that I didn't encounter her works until much later in my life when I got into this project.

So a lot of people still aren't familiar with Melvina Reynolds. I think she's one of the best songwriters we've ever had on the American Left. She had some beautiful turns of phrase. And it's funny as I started writing songs from the left and started trying to think, like, how do we say this stuff in poetry? instead of like, you know, read Marx's capital or whatever. How do we say this in a way that feels beautiful? And Malvina made so many important strides in that mission. So I really encourage everybody to check her out.

Any examples or brief parts of a song that you want to apply? Sure. Yeah, I actually wanted to sing this one, but I think I couldn't sing the whole thing for copyright reasons or they'd take this podcast off Spotify or whatever. But she's got a great song called I don't mind failing. And it has, it starts, I don't mind. failing in this world and then she says I don't mind wearing the ragged

britches because those who succeed are the sons of bitches so I don't mind failing in this world and we cover that song and my friends the burning hell cover it as well it's so it's almost like a mantra or like a Zen Cohen like the more I say I don't mind failing in this world because look at who's winning in this world it really sinks in and I think think that's the magic of music and art is it hits you in a different place than just reading theory. And I love reading theory. But I like to come to these conclusions from both sides, my left brain and my right brain. Yeah. And I'll just share. Really, that's, again,

for me, banks of marble, right? This less rice song about the banks are made of marble, you know, with armed guards at every door. And those who are actually doing the labor have no access to the silver that is held in the vaults. And the answer, you know, at the end of the song is that what if we owned the banks of marble and we didn't have a guard at the door and we shared the wealth that is from our labor and from, you know, this land. So yeah. It's such a simple, it's actually a beautiful and simple and human idea, socialism. And it's been so, like so much of its heft has been stolen by these sort of culture wars that we're talking about in this episode. So now, when people hear the word socialism or communism, they're imagining something, sort of this

embattled idea that people have to debate and have wars about. But at its core, these ideas are beautiful human ideas. They're about taking care of children and taking care of each other. And that's like, that's the best thing you could possibly write about. It's actually crazy that anybody's writing about anything else. It's the only most beautiful idea. Yeah, solidarity, right? Solidarity forever. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's funny because you mentioned earlier, like, during the time period where I was born and started writing songs, love songs were kind of the only game in town. Like I wanted to be like, who would it have been at the time? I guess like Jewel, you know, or like Cheryl Crowe. I want to be famous and write love songs and be on stage singing them. And I think it took me so much of my life to realize that there's like a bigger love than the romantic love between two people. There's actually a way bigger love. There's the love of the whole world.

And think how many songs are in there. It's like discovering an infinite well of material. Yeah. So in some way, you're still writing love songs. Yeah, exactly. This broader, broader love. Yeah. And so, of course, the concept or the effort of people's songs,

of protest music did not die with the original People's Song project. It has continued. And one of the time periods that Saunders writes about in the cultural Cold War was the 1960s. And in that, it was written about how the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the decolonization efforts across the world, Vietnam War protests, and people more generally critiquing U.S. imperialism was really getting people to question the Cold War and the kind of attack of the CIA on the communist left. So tell us about that time period in music, because that might actually be what a lot of people think about when they think about protest music. Yeah, it's funny because that would have been what I thought about when I heard the phrase protest music until I did this project. And the way I actually think of it now is like when Bob Dylan showed up in Greenwich Village as a 19 year old or whatever, there's a whole movie about this one period of his life that just came out. When he showed up on that scene, there was already something happening.

And the thing that was happening is there were a lot of musicians who had been involved in organized labor in projects like people's songs. So like Pete Seeger shows up in that Bob Dylan movie. Woody Guthrie Guthrie was Bob Dylan's main idol, right? Both of those guys were not just songwriters. They were

doing direct action. Like they were getting imprisoned for singing to striking workers. They took the job of being a folk musician to also mean that they had to be embedded in workers' struggles. And I think that when Dylan showed up, That wasn't the height of that concept of how to be a folk musician anymore because the FBI had seen to it that that got destroyed.

But I think Bob Dylan showed up and kind of picked up the ideas that were left lying around. So I think in many ways the protest movement, the protest music movement of the 60s, not in every case, but in some cases like what we think of as the folk revival was really a hangover from this time when organized labor was so strong that it included artists and musicians. everybody was in organized labor and to be a great musician meant that you were involved in the struggles of working people so I think like Bob Dylan came around at the end of that and he kind of picked up some of the really good memes

and he was a brilliant songwriter so he turned it into beautiful songs but he was no longer acting under the assumption that in order to be in solidarity with working people he actually owed them his struggle not just his songs but his actual material support so I think that idea was gone

but there were still some great songs to be written in the 60s. And then of course the civil rights movement embraced all these beautiful other American folk songs of slavery, spirituals that were adapted for civil rights. And that was kind of the peak of having huge groups of people singing in the streets together in this country was during the 1960s movement for black rights and emancipation and civil rights. And those songs also have an amazing history. like in many cases the songs of the civil rights movement were repurposed songs from church and or from reconstruction and or from slavery. And so those songs were also kind of moving through history and taking on new lyrics and new ideas as they came back up. And they still are. Like there's a wonderful socialist choir out of Cleveland called the Robson Singers who is again repurposing some of those civil rights songs for like, you know, to end ICE deportations and free Palestine.

and kind of like updating them for the struggles of now. And that's one of the amazing things about songs. Yeah, I have seen that film, a complete unknown, the Bob Dylan film. And I loved the fact that Woody Guffrey and Pete Seeger were in the movie. And it is a really interesting story about Bob Dylan and folk music and protest music. And then what happens between him and Pete Seeger and then what happens to his career? Is there anything more you'd like to share? about Bob Dylan from your perspective? Because I think it's a really interesting, like a person,

a figure to look at in relation to all of this. Well, it's like so many things. Like, what was the Ein Rann quote from earlier about how history is made by great men acting alone? Like, that is how we're taught history. And so, you know, for much of my life, when I thought of protest music or folk music, I thought of like, Bob Dylan, he was the best ever. And no shade. Bob Dylan was an incredible songwriter. He was one of the best songwriters we've had, but I also think he actually didn't act alone. He showed up into a context, and that's one of the things that's overlooked about the music-making process and the creativity process in general. All music is created by all other music. It's always a myth that an individual songwriter came along and made some breakthrough that

they did alone acting as one man, says Ein Rand. So Bob Dylan was using a lot of really important ideas and like writing technologies that were around when he showed up on the scene. And I think, yeah, the politicization of song is one of those where he was like, oh, this is what's cool now is, you know, we write songs about working class people. He wasn't a Marxist. Like, he didn't have theory. He wasn't an organizer. He wasn't going to meetings. So where did he get that idea? That's just what was around. When he got to Greenwich Village, that was the idea lying around. So I think a lot of songwriters can be contextualized that way. And I find it very freeing as a songwriter myself because it kind of takes some of the pressure off. It's like I don't have to be

the genius guy who shows up and makes up a new genre or whatever. That's actually crazy. Just show up, see what's going on and try to use the ideas that are around. Yeah. Another interesting thing to look at would be Joan Baez and Bob Dylan talk about influence and relationship. Yeah, totally. So I'd love for you to share from the 1960s to today because we're going to bring in the current project that you're working on. But before we do, anything else you'd like to note by way of just important points or things to highlight, like I'm thinking particularly about hip-hop. I'm thinking about punk music. Like just these other genres, like you said, there's been this illusion that the left has quietly exited the conversation. But is that true? No,

of course not. So what has happened? What have been the threads of protest and activist music throughout the time to today after the 60s. Yeah, I mean, there's been so many. So I think I'm going to just focus on a couple that are especially interesting to me. I think one concept that's really handy is to remember that like the quote unquote music industry, which is now mostly gone, actually, like the kind of machine that creates stars and sucks billions of dollars out of their songs is mostly on the way out. Like there's a, there's your Beyonce's and your Billy Eilish is every once in a while,

but it's becoming more and more rare to be a huge moneymaker as a songwriter. And the peak of that whole system was like the 80s and 90s. So it only came to being around the 1950s, because that was when you could start selling record albums to individual homes. And then they kind of were trying to figure out how to do it through the 60s. And I think while the industry had not yet established how to make money out of music, it was much more diverse. So in the 60s, you could kind of become a popular artist.

doing a lot of different kinds of music. Then the industry established itself, the label system got well established, and I think by the time that happened, it was much harder to be a leftist musician and get a giant corporate sponsorship. So, you know, punk and hip-hop, leftists, although they exist, and there's been this great strain of protest music that has survived, it has simply not had the funding behind it to become popular or mainstream or well-known. So that's one of the things that's been happening in the background.

The other thing I wanted to add, though, is there's still, there's a lot that has gone on that was under the radar to me. And one of my favorite stories is about Barbara Dane, who wrote a wonderful memoir. Barbara Dane was explicitly a communist organizer for her whole life, and she was a working musician for her whole life. And she did a lot of very unusual things with her career and kind of survived it, like managed to keep having a career. She traveled to Cuba. She traveled to Vietnam during the Vietnam War. and when she went there as an American woman and like very blonde and white-looking lady would walk into whatever the organizing space was and say like, I'm a communist and I want to learn your songs of liberation in your language. And then she would learn them. And then she started a record label called Peridon to distribute songs of liberation from many different countries so that Americans could learn them, basically. And she was also one of the founding organizers of the GI Coffee House movement, during the Vietnam War, which was, and this blew my mind, because everyone should know about this,

but many of us don't. So there were networks of coffee houses which were set up beside U.S. military bases in the late 1960s. And they would open a coffee house. They would just, they didn't even serve alcohol. They would serve actually coffee and tea. And they would have a little stage and they would bring musicians through to sing anti-war songs to the active GIs. and their role was to try to enroll GIs in becoming part of the anti-war movement. So to burn their draft card, begin speaking out against the war, refuse service, become a conscientious objector. So Barbara Dane did several tours of GI coffee houses. So she'd be going through like Virginia and Arkansas and Texas talking to these 18-year-old, you know, draftees and saying,

do you think this war is moral? Do you think this is ethical? What do you think is the real purpose of this war? And then she would sing to them in Vietnamese sometimes. And there's an incredible album called FTA Songs of GI Resistance. And it's Barbara Dane with active duty GIs in these coffee houses on military bases singing these beautiful songs of liberation. So anyway, she had an incredible career. She wrote a great book about it.

And to me, since I've read this book, it became my model of like, okay, there's something bigger than just making it, quote, unquote, in the music business. Like there's something else to focus on besides selling records. You could actually focus on being useful to the movement using your musical skills and talents. This is one of the few models for it. Yes, and that's perfect. It brings us to the present and the new project, the People's Song Project, you know, reborn or revisited. You know, before going into that project again, though, I do want to bring us up to the present context that this project is coming from. how would you describe the either promotion of pro-American pro-capitalist music or the repression of communist left music today?

You know, is it still CIA FBI funded? Would we even know? Or is it, you know, algorithms and institutions like Facebook and Instagram? Like, just tell us a little bit about what is it like both personally, but also in the collective that you're a part of to be a communist left musician today. And what are we facing as this project comes to be? Yeah. Well, it's a very interesting time. And yeah, you mentioned we don't really know what the CIA is up to. We never do. They're classified for at least 30 years and often much longer.

So we kind of have to guess, like, what is their strategy right now? And my guess is they're probably really interested in the algorithms. They're probably using AI to manipulate what you're seeing in your feed. If they're not doing that right now, they will be next week. So we can just assume that. And so we're all kind of in this media culture where, you know, most younger people have moved away from traditional media and are getting their media from places like TikTok and Instagram. But that doesn't mean that that media is like outside of the sphere of propaganda because we're all born into propaganda. We're all receiving propaganda from all the institutions that we interact with, from our parents, all that kind of stuff.

So there's sort of multiple intersecting struggles to answer to in your question. I think that I've had to kind of rediscover the technology of being an artist of the left. I'm always working on it. One of the best things I've found is to find my comrades. So I know a lot of other left artists now and we collaborate regularly. And one of my interests in founding the new iteration of people's songs is to create a community of socialist musicians and everything that that means. So one thing that means is that we can work together on songs without being concerned with like, you know, who owns which line, or like, what's the

copyright on this song, or how are we going to monetize this, or how are we going to market this? So all those things will come up in a normal co-writing situation. And I'm really interested in creating an atmosphere where we have a bunch of musicians working together as though music is a commons. It's a shared language. It's a shared love. And we're all sharing that openly together because our goal is to create great songs. And that's something that's in the interest of not just the musicians in this collective, but everybody on earth. So I think learning how to be a left artist has definitely involved finding other left artists and gathering together. As far as like what we're up against, it's your guess is as good as ours, you know?

I think we're trying to find out every day. There is still enough of a music industry that I do see artists kind of receiving funding and accolades all the time where I think to myself, okay, what am I saying that means that I'm not going to get access to that funding? And I can usually identify it. That no longer makes me want to stop saying it. But I went through a phase in my career where I had to really think,

you know, is it worth saying free Palestine on stage if that means I can't ever get this gig again? And that's a real consideration for a lot of artists. And I think I would just like to say to people in that phase of their career, like the bribes are getting cheaper every month. So like streaming rates are getting lower. 60% of Spotify is now AI. So before you sell your soul, make sure you're getting a good price. Because I think musicians really aren't getting enough money at this point to be bribed into not saying what we think.

So I would just welcome everybody into the real level. It's actually pretty nice over here. Yeah, and just to add another example or thing that I've seen is that many comrades have been subpoenaed, right? And I mentioned this earlier, but thinking about Pete Seeger going to the House un-American committee, I think about Manolo de Los Santos, who we've had on the show, as well as Medea Benjamin from Code Pink being subpoenaed. And so I think that that tactic of that fear that it's trying to be generated is still being deployed. Oh, for sure. And yet, as you say, there's new ways and new ways of repression and ways that we don't even know.

The old ways. That are happening. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, People's songs actually just did a hoot-nanny for the Minnesota 15 in Minneapolis. And I think we forget, like when we get into these, into these eras of scare tactics. So like, okay, new red scare is definitely firing up. We're seeing it happen.

And I feel the allure of like going into hiding or becoming a hermit or whatever, taking some time off from, you know, running my mouth or whatever it is. But if I learned nothing else from the last Red Scare, what I learned is that actually the only thing that can protect you is solidarity. Like we can only be protected by making a united front of the left and saying like, all right, put us in jail. Okay, assassinate us. We still believe what we believe because we know it to be true. So I would just invite everyone to like find your solace and your comrades and don't pretend that you can be safe by shutting up and hiding because it literally never works. So I'd love to hear more about what you've learned from the first people's project to inform this one.

What are you doing similarly? Like you've mentioned the hootnannies and also songs that are accessible for people. to take with them and to learn. So what are you doing that is similar? And also, how are you changing or adapting this project? How is it different? Or, you know, what did you learn that you want to update for this endeavor? Yeah. Well, we also, we have a zine. So we're trying to do the Songs Bulletin thing, just like they did. We also have a radio show, which is not quite out yet, but we've made a standalone episode called People's Songs Radio. And it's about an hour long, and we're going to be pitching it to college and community radio. So if you know a good station that might play it, let us know. It's mostly oral histories of existing protest songs, and many of them

are from working musicians, some of them are from activists. So people talking about the history of a song, how to use it in a protest, how to lead the song, stuff like that. It's a really beautiful piece of audio that I'm very proud of. And yeah, hoot nannies are one of the things we're really interested in making sure that we are engaging musicians in the project of materially supporting struggles on the ground. So we're not just giving lip-servees. to supporting struggles. We want to be actually materially involved in that support. So hoot-ninnies are one of the ways we want to do that. We eventually also want to organize musicians to teach workshops about how to lead protest songs at protest events.

I don't know if you've ever been to a protest with really bad singing, but man, it makes it feel like the revolution will never happen. So we're really interested in enrolling people with musical skills in contributing those skills to protest culture. So we want to the singing to be better at protests. That's one of our primary goals. We also have an eye to Marxist education for musicians and artists, and I want to give a shout out to Savannah at All Power Books, who's been on your show before because we're working with her to develop a Marxism 101 class for musicians. Great. So I do want to return to this idea that the CIA, through the Cultural Congress, was trying to define or shape the boundaries of the acceptable left. And we brought up this

of the non-communist left. So how are you working with this relationship between what is acceptable and what is not in these boundaries, right? And particularly one thing I was thinking about was Jesse Wells, who is a modern singer. And I listened to some of his songs and I was like, right on. And my father in love is a musician. We've actually featured him on the show, El Wahiro, a Cuban artist. And I gave him Jesse Wells album because I was like, this is a, you know, I was reading. He's a. He's a. modern-day Woody Guthrie. He's a modern-day Pete Seeger. And yet I also learned that he is, that he identifies as a political or that he doesn't really have a political leaning. And so it just

made me think, like, what are the boundaries today of the left and particularly in relation to the people's music? And one other thing I'll share, I also learned that Pete Seeger actually left the Communist Party in his career, too, although he was still persecuted and still very much identified with communism. But I'm just curious, like, what would you describe as a healthy relationship with these bounds of what is the radical left when it comes to music? Yeah. It's so interesting. This is one of the main topics that my friends and I discuss is, like, what, not just what is the left, because I think we understand what the left is in reality, like what it means to be on the left to us. But what's always changing and kind of faster and

faster is what is the mainstream idea of the left? So socialism, for example, is a word that 10 years ago you couldn't really utter in mixed company because people would be very offended by it. And right now, socialism is wildly popular, but that doesn't actually mean people know what it means. So I think like part of the job of a project like people's songs is that we want to make socialism sexy, cool, fun, sound like a party. Like it's a little bit, the most. The most Dom-Dani campaign is actually great at this. They've done a lot of coolifying of socialism. I also want to coolify communism. I want people to not feel afraid just by hearing the word or like, you know, I don't want people to constantly say things like, well, I'm a socialist, but I'm not a communist,

without actually knowing what that even means, which I would say many young Americans at this point are in that position. They would say that phrase, I'm a socialist, I'm not a communist, but they couldn't define what either of those words mean or what the difference is between them. So that dance is ongoing, and I think it's partly a cultural struggle, like we want to coolify it. And one of the best phrases I've ever heard about kind of defining this part of the left came from my comrade, Claudia Delacruz, another friend of the show, who actually, when I first got involved in this sort of mission to organize artists, I was invited to a class at the People's Forum that was called Art and Revolution. And Claudia was speaking to us a group of artists about what it means to be a revolutionary artist. And she said, the revolutionary artist has two jobs. And your first job is to elaborate the contradictions. Elaborate the contradictions of capital.

In other words, talk about how fucked up everything is. That's something that Jesse Wells is great at. And actually, a lot of songwriters in the U.S. right now are learning how to do that. It's sort of like that's where protest music has gotten to at this part of history. As we're like clawing our way back into writing protest songs, we're getting better at writing. about how messed up stuff is. But to be a revolutionary, you have to have an eye toward the future. So the next thing Claudia said is we have to light the way forward. So if we're just complaining and we're not showing that there's a different possible future, we're just creating more nihilists.

There's nothing revolutionary about that. So I think with a project like People's songs, we want to encourage musicians to use their not just musical skills, but like performance skills and leadership skills and enrollment skills and communication skills to say, not only is this super fucked up, but there's another future, a better world is possible. That's what we want to express. And of course, we're going to link to all of your music, and I'm going to encourage folks to get your albums

and also to go to your shows. I know you're about to go on tour again. And I'm curious if there's any other artists that you'd like to uplift, either communist, radical left, singers, musicians, artists, both because they don't get a lot of attention, but also to share how they connect to what you just said. They're lighting the way forward, not just the critique, or both and.

And then I'd also love to hear how you recommend us supporting these musicians, because we've talked about the complexity of Spotify and how the music industry isn't the same as it once was. So who are some artists you'd like to share about and make sure that we know about? and then also how we might support these artists. Sure. Yeah, well, I made a list because I wanted to uplift artists who are involved in the people's songs relaunch

and who are like very clearly socialist songwriters. So Bamboo is involved in the project. I've been a fan of his for a long time. The Robson Singers I mentioned out of Cleveland. The Neighborhood Kids. Billy Bragg is involved. The Burning Hell from Canada. Devin Sprole.

Mariah Parker, who goes by Linqua Franqua. tune yards, Nathan Evans-Fox. So those are some of my favorite music makers on the true left, not on the non-communist left. And I don't know, I think going to shows is still the best way to support musicians. That's still where a lot of us make our income. If you can buy merch off of our websites, that's usually how we get the most money. Patreon is still kind of the best model we have for direct support, although there's a socialist version of it on the near horizon. So keep your ear to the ground.

And again, we will link to all these artists and your Patreon. And yeah, I will say as we go to our closing invitations, I'm going to create a playlist from all the songs that we've mentioned today and encourage folks to add, you know, their songs and musicians that they'd recommend. So our closing invitations, you know, one of them that I'm really excited about is as I watch movies and I listen to artists of the past, to just have this lens of thinking about the context that they were in and how artists that are on the communist left, how they're really going against some big hurdles.

And for us to even have access to and get to enjoy their music today is so powerful. And to continue to listen for the communist left artists throughout time and of course to support them today. I heard the invitation to if anyone knows any musicians to invite them to be a part of this project, to invite them to lead hootnannies and other forms of offering music at protests and other events. College radio stations, you mentioned, getting them part of this. I think that's a great idea. So yeah, I want to close with your invitations for our listeners. How can we contribute, participate, get involved.

And I'd also love for you to finish with the core message that you'd like for folks to take away from this conversation. What is the core thing you want us to take away relating to music and activists? And before we do, just I want to read two quotes here. One is a Pete Seeger quote, Communism means no rich and no poor. You're against racism and sexism and foolish national rivalries. That's what it comes down to. And then, of course, I have to end my part with the quote from your song FBI that you sang just to again underscore it. We've got to organize. Don't criticize. Get everybody on our side. If someone tells you otherwise, they're working for the FBI. I said, organize, don't criticize, and quit working for the FBI. I just love that song and had to end with that. So your closing

invitations for our listeners and core message you'd like us to take away as we go forth. Sure. Well, so people's songs.org is our website. You can sign up on our mailing list. There's also an email address on there if you want to be involved either as a musician or as an organizer or both. We've also got an Instagram page, People's underscore songs. Our main ask from the organization right now is we need footage of people singing at political events. And we want it to be good singing of good songs. So you can send that to us on Instagram or via email as well. And if you're a musician listening and maybe you're thinking, gosh, I'm not really political yet, but I'd like to be, please join us because that is the goal of our project. Everyone is welcome with open arms. And actually,

can I close by reading a little bit from Barbara Dane's autobiography? Okay, so this was from an excerpt where she's talking about why she wasn't harassed more intensely by the FBI, and her lawyer tells her it's probably because you were always so open about being a communist. And she says, I think the reason the FBI and CIA have been and remain so afraid of a few nonconformist singers willing to express their own ideas and that of people's movements without restraint, is that they understand, much better perhaps, than we even realize, that singers, actors, painters, and dancers can motivate, educate, unite, and inspire people to rise up and defend their own.

They can cut through the brain invasion meant to make people feel powerless and to perceive their own culture as worthless. Barbara Dane Forgive the change in audio quality here. I'm just calling in from my own tour with my Mary Band of Marxists, which was We'll go on through early November. Come and see us. We wanted to add an update to this episode from the cultural front, because this week, the rapper MacLamore was kicked off of Ed Shearin's stadium tour

for saying free Palestine and flying a Palestinian flag during his show. As McLemore described it in an Instagram post, Robert Kraft, the owner of a stadium in Massachusetts, a billionaire 15 times over, and an investor in the Israeli state for decades, told Ed that McLemore would not be allowed to perform, at his stadium, and he also said that if Ed did not agree, he would not be allowed to perform either. Kraft rallied additional stadium owners to his cause, so the threat was tour cancellation,

or having to transfer several hundred thousand ticket holders to an alternate venue. Sheeran caved and kicked McLemore off the tour. Yesterday, McLemore posted a statement to his Instagram, and it had some important context. He said, quote, I am not a victim. Ed Shearin is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety, and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families. The victims are the Palestinian people. MacLamore correctly identified the political and historical context he was working in and found a way to intervene. He's part of a small group of artists, including Neacap, Bob Villan, Kalani, and others, who have been in embroiled in controversies and legal battles for their statements supporting Palestine. He has discovered, as many of us have, over the last three years, that there is a higher calling than playing gigs. Robert Kraft perceived a threat in Macklemore's performances, and he was right.

At the Ed Sheeran shows that McLemore did open for, he led a free Palestine chant in front of 80,000 or 90,000 young people, and most of them sang along. The ruling class is increasingly aware that they have lost control of the public discourse around Israel and Palestine, and that artists have been a large part of that shift. Kraft responded with perfect class solidarity, as billionaires usually do. He made a specific demand to the people who could meet it, and he rallied other members of his class to collective action. The most tragic character in this celebrity melodrama is Ed Sheeran. He was offered an opportunity to intervene in history, and he declined. He can afford to stand-up to craft, but artists like Ed only reached their position by capitulating in thousands of small

and big ways to the billionaire class. He would not be a global superstar if he were not skilled at providing cover for the murder machine of capitalism. And now he lives in a hell of his own making where he can't discern right from wrong or friends from enemies, and worse, he has to play those stupid fucking songs every night. Ed kicked his longtime friend off the tour with some mealy-mouth statement about not taking sides, which for me brought to mind Paul Robeson's 1937 speech about fascism. Robeson said, quote, every artist, every scientist, every writer, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian Heights. There are no impartial observers. The battlefront is everywhere.

There is no sheltered rear. The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I've made my choice. I had no alternative. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Carsey Blanton, songwriter, touring musician, an organizer with artists against apartheid and people's songs. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode.

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