There is, or was--I don't know if she is still alive, she was living in Detroit when I was living in Michigan, but she was old and that was over a decade ago--a folksinger named Sarah Ogan Gunning, a radical West Virginia coal miner's widow, did things like "Dreadful Memories," a riff on the old sappy hymn "Precious Memories," voice like a barrel of tenpenny nails, tough lady. She was a veteran of the coal field battles of the 20s and 30s, recruited to unionism by life and to radicalism by NMU communist organizers.
Anyway, she did a song in the 30s called "I Hate the Capitalist System," absolutely dynamite. It was collected by Lomax, Sr. in the late 20s or early 30s as part of his folk song project, he heard her sing it, and suggested that she say, "I Hate the Company Bosses." Well, she thought, I hate them too, so she changed the words.
Twenty years later a next generation folkie came around to collect the song again, which she knew as "I Hate the Company Bosses." Sarah Ogan Gunning said, "I've had some time to think about it, and I should never have let that man sweet talk me into changing the words. I had it right the first time." So she recorded, "I Hate the Capitalist System," the way she did originally composed it. Boho trendiness? I think not.
Capitalism is a more abstract notion. But it is the fundamental target. That's something Sarah Ogan Gunning saw, and she didn't even finish sixth grade. I don't mean it was an easy thing to see. It's not. But it is the important thing to see, and that is why it mattered to her to get the words right at last.
--jks
> Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> >That does not sound very encouraging at all. Corporations are real
> >entities with names and addresses, endowed with material resources, whereas
> >capitalism is well.... and abstraction, a heuristic model if you will.
>
> No, I think you've got this wrong. There's a certain kind of petit
> bourgeois radicalism that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s
> that railed against "corporations" as usurpers and besmirchers of the
> beauties of the Smithian market. See, for example, David Korten and
> the International Forum on Globalization - and, for that matter,
> Ralph Nader, who seems to think competition is a good thing. I think
> this shift from corps->K'ism signifies something deeper - a critical
> look at the system of monetization and commodification that's
> regulated by competitive markets. It's looking at underlying social
> relations rather than the scope of enterprise, and I think it's a
> very welcome development.
>
> Doug