1888

Though reputed to have been quite musical, especially in his youth, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had little to say about music. Probably his most famous remark on the subject comes from the reminiscences of Maxim Gorky. As much as he loved the Appassionata, Gorky reports Lenin to have said, he could not listen to it or any other music too often. The trouble was that its beauty might distract him from the ugliness of the bourgeois world from which it was born, softening his resolve to commit the revolutionary violence necessary for the proletariat's triumph.Footnote ⁹ Like other posthumous recollections, Gorky's should be viewed with scepticism. No doubt one reason the quip has gained such traction, apart from its caricatural militancy, has to do with the fact that there is so little else to go on in reconstructing a Leninist theory of music's politics. Leafing through the volume Lenin on Literature and Art, one finds but two articles dealing with music: one celebrating the development of the worker's chorus in Germany, the other commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of Eugène Pottier, author of the lyrics to the Internationale.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet this paucity of writings on music has a heuristic value. That the only musical topics Lenin saw fit to address were these and these alone is significant, and tells us something about the status music was accorded within the socialist movement during the period of the Second International.

Let us begin with the worker's chorus. An extensive literature attests to their importance within socialist parties of the Second International. Likewise, the frequent affiliation of individual ensembles with party organizations underlines the importance of socialism in constituting the workers’ chorus as a sociomusical phenomenon. The workers’ chorus helped to make socialism, just as socialism helped to make the workers’ chorus. There are several reasons for this mutual imbrication. As a cultural practice transcending national boundaries during the late nineteenth century, choral singing was an ideal symbol of internationalism. That choral groups readily accommodated individuals possessing varying levels of musical competence further clarifies why their proliferation has ‘often been associated with the rise of democratic movements’ during this period.Footnote ¹¹ And, as vehicles for making workers’ voices heard, such ensembles contributed to what Kevin Callahan has dubbed the ‘demonstration culture’ of international socialism c. 1900. For Callahan, the term ‘demonstration’ is an expansive concept, encompassing not only the actions that comprised the tactical repertoire of socialist parties during this period (circulating petitions, organizing protests, issuing manifestos, holding rallies), but also the work necessary to persuade others of international socialism's strength and vibrancy. The Second International, he observes, ‘created a demonstration culture in order to display effectively socialist unity and solidarity in the public sphere while nourishing such sentiments in its sections’.Footnote ¹² By this account, ‘demonstration’ was less a matter of exhibiting an already existent quality or phenomenon – worker solidarity, socialism as a political movement, etc. – and more a means of conjuring such qualities and phenomena into being. Choral singing helped produce the cause of which it was ostensibly an effect.

But if socialism during the Second International cannot be reduced to a set of institutions, like parties, workers’ cooperatives, and international congresses, neither can it be reduced wholly to a set of performative acts. In addition to the various ways socialism was enacted in the present tense, it was also defined by a specific relation to the future. A crucial part of its existence was its inexistence, its status as an as-yet unrealized promise of a better world, where exploitation would be a thing of the past. Both temporal mediations of Second International socialism mediated the worker's chorus in turn. As regards the work to be done in the present, choruses were valued above all for the propaganda function they performed, as vehicles for expressing protest and hope in the better days to come (‘great results are certain in Socialism's grand cause by the use of so powerful a servant’ one American socialist proclaimed, in exhorting his comrades not to overlook music as ‘an agency of Socialist propaganda’).Footnote ¹³ But choral ensembles were also valued on account of the specific powers associated with group singing. Among the most important was its capacity to transform a disparate collection of individuals into a fused entity. ‘Nothing brings the hearts and minds of a great mass of people together more ardently and powerfully than unison singing’ wrote a correspondent for the Lieder-Gemeinschaft, describing the rousing rendition of the ‘Arbeiter-Marseillaise’ that customarily ended party congresses of the Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (SPD).Footnote ¹⁴ According to the author, those participating in such collective performances were ‘filled with one and the same emotion and conviction’, a sentiment so overwhelming that it could only be relieved by ‘singing as one man with one voice’, thus ‘demonstrat[ing] the solidarity of their hearts through the solidarity of musical notes’.Footnote ¹⁵ Here, too, the performative aspect of such musical demonstrations must be borne in mind. Instead of expressing a shared sentiment so intensely felt it could scarcely be contained, unison singing helped produce the very solidarity of which it was assumed to be the outward expression.

Apart from its role in performing socialism as an actually existing movement, the workers’ chorus also bore the mark of socialism's orientation to the future; here socialism's status as a still-to-be-attained outcome of social struggle mediated the worker's chorus, casting it as a prefiguration of a post-capitalist order. Important in this regard were the tangible feelings of fulfilment, both aesthetic and social, that singing in concert engendered. As Chris Waters observes in his history of popular culture in British socialism, collective singing was prized by its advocates as an activity that ‘might allow workers . . . temporarily to feel transported to the promised land’.Footnote ¹⁶ Moreover, insofar as the coordination of voices in song involved collective labour, it gave workers a practical education in socialism. So argued Montague Blatchford, a key figure in the Clarion movement, a specifically English brand of socialism that flourished in Victorian Britain, notable for the dense network of clubs, associations, and interest groups it fostered (cycle clubs, scouting organizations, rambling societies, etc.). Of particular note were the Clarion Vocal Unions, amateur choral groups organized under the leadership of Blatchford. In his estimation, singing together provided participants ‘a lesson in discipline and socialism of the most convincing sort. It shows the interdependence of each on all; the necessity of each member doing a given duty in a given way at the proper time.’Footnote ¹⁷ As a means whereby a socialist future was made vividly present, choral singing prepared individuals for the new world they aspired to construct.

Blatchford's comments point to one way of aligning these two temporal mediations – socialism as project in the present and socialism as prefiguration of the future. The argument that choral singing's anticipation of a society based on cooperation rather than competition might have the benefit of inculcating the ethos of this future society was echoed by other proponents of the practice. The Austrian socialist and musician Josef Scheu, for instance, contended that collective music-making had positive political effects. The fleeting glimpse it provided of a post-capitalist order could not help but fuel the desire to make this vision a reality. ‘Rather than being a distraction from his other activities as a man of the party’, Scheu contended, choral singing ‘will lift him above everyday toil for a couple of hours a week, making him feel strengthened and refreshed. His entire life of thought and feeling will be raised and ennobled . . . and his refreshment and ennoblement can have only a beneficial effect on the rest of his party work.’Footnote ¹⁸ For Scheu, singing in concert produced not just music, but a passion for socialism as well. Yet the fact that he felt obliged to pre-emptively disavow the possibility that singing might be a ‘distraction’ from party activities suggests that the interaction between present action and future outcome – and music's role in mediating this relation – was not always smooth or seamless. Indeed, by providing participants with a momentary taste of utopia, collective music-making could invite complacency just as well as resistance. If some of socialism's benefits could be experienced in the present, by means of music, then the need to change the existing social order might not seem so pressing. Dave Russell sums up this dilemma in his observation that ‘the appeal of radical politics was blunted because many amateur musicians, through their own musical experience, discovered that society as it existed had much to offer them’.Footnote ¹⁹ But even when such ensembles did not (inadvertently) reconcile workers with capitalist society, it could be and often was perceived – contra Scheu – as a distraction from political work. At least this is how choral societies were perceived by leaders of certain national parties. For instance, at a party congress in 1907, the leadership of the SPD identified a number of activities detrimental to the political education of workers. Drink was one; song was another. A report enumerated a number of ‘enemies of worker's education’, including ‘alcohol . . . and singing societies, which cost workers so much time and money that they no longer have much left over for educational purposes’.Footnote ²⁰

Equally problematic was the fact that workers’ choruses were not just mediated by the socialist movement. They were also mediated by other formations, whose social composition and political orientation were less clearly drawn. Of these the most significant was the amateur choral movement that flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²¹ As part of this broader movement, existing alongside church choirs and employer-sponsored ensembles, workers’ choruses were embedded in a more sociologically diffuse and politically anodyne assemblage. Widely held beliefs regarding music's ethical value, for instance, enacted the workers’ chorus in terms akin to their petty-bourgeois counterparts, as a medium of social harmony and moral uplift – as an agency of individual change rather than class struggle.Footnote ²² More concretely, the activities of workers’ choruses overlapped substantially with other choral ensembles, including those possessing very different social profiles and ideological persuasions, whether religious, petty-bourgeois, or nationalist. In part, this was due to similarities in their organization, conduct, and forms of sociability. But such overlap was also due to the eclectic repertoire of workers’ choruses. While socialist anthems and other politically themed songs were a part of many groups’ repertoire, the paucity of expressly political music, coupled with the overrepresentation of other kinds of choral material, meant that the music performed by most workers’ choruses was a hodgepodge. One survey of the music performed by British socialist choirs is telling: while over half their repertoire consisted of popular Victorian choral music, of the sort performed by more middle-class ensembles, less than 5 per cent were expressly political songs.Footnote ²³

The contents of many socialist songbooks reflected this heterogeneity. Edward Carpenter, editor of the collection Chants of Labour, admitted as much in the introduction to his songbook: ‘Some of the songs [in this volume] are purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone, there are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while many are of a highly ideal and visionary character.’ But there was a reason for such eclecticism. That the ‘existing social transformation covers a lot of ground’, and that it ‘is carried on by bodies of men and by methods very various both in name and nature’, made it imperative that the choice of songs adhere to a principle of ‘variety rather than exclusiveness’.Footnote ²⁴ These points of overlap between workers’ choruses and the bourgeois culture to which they were ostensibly opposed led one German observer to describe them as ‘hermaphroditic’, combining ‘bourgeois elements’ with ‘new influences’.Footnote ²⁵ While certain socialists were pragmatic about the need to appeal to a wide public, opting, like Carpenter, for ‘variety rather than exclusiveness’, others found such hybridity troubling. One response was to try to purify the workers’ chorus, eliminating any ‘bourgeois elements’ it had absorbed. This prompted a drive to develop a body of music proper to the workers’ chorus, part of the larger project of creating an autonomous working-class culture, seen as critical for instilling in workers the class consciousness necessary to fulfil their appointed role as revolutionary subjects.

One figure who felt compelled to create a repertoire more befitting the workers’ chorus was Gustave Delory. Cofounder of the northern federation of the Parti ouvrier français, by the late 1880s he had taken over the management of a café in Lille, ‘A la ferme’.Footnote ²⁶ It was there that a local workers’ chorus found a space to rehearse upon its establishment in 1888. Appointed secretary of the ensemble, Delory presented its director with a volume of poetry, Chants révolutionnaires, in the hope it might inspire him to set some of its verses to music. The name of the ensemble was La Lyre des Travailleurs, the name of its director Pierre Degeyter, and the author of the volume Eugène Pottier. The rest, one might say, is history. Degeyter selected a poem of Pottier's, ‘The Internationale’, that had languished in obscurity since its composition following the Paris Commune. Degeyter's musical setting soon became a favourite of local party activists.Footnote ²⁷ Its notoriety only increased when one such activist, Armand Gosselin, was sentenced in 1894 to a year in prison for having published and sold the song, on account of its seditious character.Footnote ²⁸ From the local level, Degeyter's setting of Pottier's poem was soon taken up by groups at the national and international levels. In little over a decade, ‘The Internationale’ had spread throughout Europe and beyond. Its success was such that, along with the workers’ chorus, it became one of Lenin's two pillars of socialist music culture.

If the workers’ chorus was enacted in a number of different ways, not all of which aligned cleanly along ideological or sociological lines, the same was also true of ‘The Internationale’. Its composition may have been motivated in part by a desire to purify the workers’ chorus of its association with elements of bourgeois culture, to develop for it a repertoire in keeping with its sociopolitical composition. Yet just as the workers’ chorus found itself caught up in practices that were not unambiguously socialist, so too did ‘The Internationale’. To see how it became not just an instrument but also an object of political struggle, we must attend to a small yet consequential quirk of its history.

In 1888, the first edition of the song was published by Boldoduc. Copies bore the designation ‘Musique de Degeyter. Paroles d'Eugène Pottier’. Subsequent editions carried the same attribution. Why these early editions gave the poet's full name, but only the composer's surname, is unclear. Whatever the reason, the omission would prove significant. By the early 1900s, Degeyter had drifted away from the party, partly because of his relocation to Paris, partly because of his disillusionment with its hardening political line. Curiously, one of the causes of his disillusionment was the socialists’ growing commitment to internationalism, which offended Degeyter's patriotic sensibilities. Degeyter's musical output reflected his somewhat paradoxical politics. In addition to socialist anthems, he also set to music a number of revanchist texts, whose declarations of Gallic pride were matched only by the contempt they expressed towards the country's Teutonic neighbour. A case in point is his song ‘France et Belgique’, which exhorted the two countries to join together in the face of their shared enemy, Germany (‘The enemy over there threatens us / It's up to us to join ranks / For the invader of Alsace / Will attack us, we shall see’).Footnote ²⁹ Notably, the text to this song was not adopted from an existing poem, as was the case with ‘The Internationale’, but was written by Degeyter himself. Equally notable is that to set these newly composed verses, Degeyter did not write a new tune, but instead made use of an older one: the melody of ‘The Internationale’. That the composer of a song celebrating international solidarity could write others voicing unabashedly nationalist sympathies – and that he could use the same music for both – may seem incoherent. But it proves less inscrutable when one bears in mind Callahan's observation that the Second International was less a site of peaceful cooperation than of intense rivalry. And nowhere was this rivalry more intense than between its two largest national sections, those of France and Germany, each of which sought to impose itself as the hegemonic force within the International.Footnote ³⁰

However contradictory his allegiances may seem in hindsight, Degeyter's patriotic sensibilities distanced him from the milieu for which he had created ‘The Internationale’. After sustaining an injury that kept him from working, he looked into receiving some compensation for his composition, having previously abjured receiving royalties for it.Footnote ³¹ It was at this point that the ambiguity of the song's attribution acquired a significance it previously lacked. This was because Delory – the same Delory who had given Degeyter the volume of poetry that inspired his setting of ‘The Internationale’ – now disputed that his former comrade was the song's composer. According to Delory's allies in the socialist press, the Degeyter indicated in all the editions published to that point was not Pierre, but his younger brother Adolphe. As for Pierre Degeyter's claim to the contrary, that he was the true composer of the song, this assertion was met with one of the harshest rejoinders imaginable within socialist circles: that he was seeking to profit off of the labour of others. ‘This tactic of cuckoos, who lay their eggs in the nest of other birds’, fulminated one journalist aligned with Delory, ‘has always been that of ministerialists, neo-methodists, autonomists, etc. . . . A conception that conforms very well to their bourgeois mentality. The work of others belongs to them, just as the product of workers’ labor belongs to the capitalist.’Footnote ³²

What prompted this argument over the paternity of ‘The Internationale’? According to Louis Sarran, an attorney who took up Pierre Degeyter's case, part of what motivated Delory's conduct was a desire to secure for the party the profits – both symbolic and material – that would accrue to whomever claimed ownership of so celebrated a song. ‘The socialist party’, Sarran exclaimed, ‘seeks to win for itself the glory and the profit of this song [which] it has made its song of struggle, the official hymn of the international proletariat’.Footnote ³³ But profit, whether symbolic or economic, was not the only thing motivating Delory. Also driving his actions, it appears, was a desire to punish Pierre Degeyter for his political deviationism, and thereby remove from ‘The Internationale’ any taint of this discomfiting association. This, at least, is what Sarran contended in arguing the elder Degeyter's case: ‘the socialist party, led by Delory, in order to retain ownership of its musical standard, in order to purify it of a sort of original sin, dreamed up from scratch the paternity of Adolphe Degayter [sic], which would preserve at once the honor of the name and that of the party’.Footnote ³⁴ To excise any ideological discordant associations, it was necessary for ‘The Internationale’ to be enacted not as a composition of Pierre Degeyter, traitor to the cause, but of Adolphe, faithful party member.

To adjudicate these competing enactments, Pierre Degeyter appealed to a different institution – bourgeois property law – whose own enactment of the song would presumably settle the truth of its identity. At the same time, legal struggles over the song's paternity brought into sharper focus another sociomaterial ensemble ‘The Internationale’ was caught up in, that of the commercial publishing industry. Indeed, the ironic fact that a song advocating for the abolition of private property had itself become a form of intellectual property (among other things) was what made this controversy possible in the first place. In each of these different spheres, different versions of ‘The Internationale’ were realized: within the party, it was enacted as a means of heightening class consciousness; within the legal system, as an object of an ownership dispute; and in the publishing industry, as a means of capturing a portion of the social surplus.

More could be said about this curious chapter in the history of ‘The Internationale’. But one point worth highlighting is that Degeyter's song, like the workers’ chorus, always exceeded the claims made upon it by any single person or group. Socialist parties c. 1900 were no exception, regardless of how closely they were identified with this particular musical institution and this particular song. If the social existence of a piece such as ‘The Internationale’ was a function of the various mediations to which it was subject across its history, then it was never the product or property of a single person – not even Pierre Degeyter, despite his status as the song's composer. Ontological production, like material production, is a collective endeavour. Written as part of an effort to develop an autonomous working-class culture, ‘The Internationale’ became something other than an expression of this culture once it was taken up by other persons, for different purposes, in different sociomaterial assemblages. As a result of these competing enactments, the song itself became the object of struggle, as did the workers’ chorus; and they did so to the extent that they transcended the fixed identities that any given agent attempted to bestow on them. This slippage between means and ends, between music as instrument and music as object of social struggle, may have risked diverting energies that might have been directed elsewhere, towards the effort to socialize the means of production. Yet such conflicts also attested to the fact that the objects in question were worth fighting over. Indeed, conflicts like these did more than simply attest to this fact: they were, after all, one of the principal ways the worth of both ‘The Internationale’ and the workers’ chorus was generated in the first place.

1981

The first case study examined music and socialism in the context of the international – both as an institution and as an ideal expressed in song – during a period when socialism was more an aspiration than a living reality. The second turns to music and socialism in one country, during a moment when the practicalities of socialist governance had come to the fore. Specifically, one of the ways in which the French socialist party refounded after 1968 differed from the one Degeyter, Delory, and others belonged to was that it came into being in a conjuncture where socialism no longer existed exclusively in the future tense. Unlike its precursor, the SFIO (Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière), the new Parti socialiste had to position itself relative to ‘actually existing’ socialism, such as existed in Cuba, the Soviet bloc, China, and elsewhere. But it also had to contend with local surrogates of these various state socialisms, notably the Parti communiste français, which had split with the socialists fifty years beforehand, precisely over the question of whether to submit to the leadership of the Soviet Union within the Third International.

Cultural policy, including music policy, was one area where the new socialist party sought to distinguish itself from the PCF. It also represented one axis along which the distance separating the PS from its antecedents can be gauged. As noted above, during the Second International socialists tended to enact music as a part of the superstructure, as a means by which class consciousness and class solidarity might be fostered. By contrast, French socialism in the wake of 1968 enacted music in other ways. Partly this was due to developments endemic to music, in terms of its quantitative growth as a sector of the economy – a development famously registered in Adorno's and Horkheimer's notion of the ‘culture industry’ – as well as the qualitative changes it had undergone in the decades since the publication of Degeyter's setting of ‘The Internationale’. But the new status the socialists accorded music was also a function of political pressures, given the party's need to position itself vis-à-vis the ruling Gaullist Party to its right and the Communist Party to its left. In response to these changed circumstances, musical as well as political, the Parti socialiste treated music as one of the domains in which the transition to socialism might be effected. No longer was it primarily enacted as a tool in the struggle to socialize the means of production, as was the case with the workers’ chorus and ‘The Internationale’. Rather, music increasingly figured as an arena where this struggle might itself play out. This struggle could assume a number of forms. To the extent that musicians were identified as workers, their exploitation by commercial interests needed to be overcome, no less than the exploitation of any other worker. And to the extent that cultural alienation, the dispossession of one's creative capacities, ranked alongside economic alienation as one of the deformations capitalism imposed on its subjects, the struggle to socialize the means of musical production was no less important as the struggle to socialize the means of production tout court.

As a domain colonized by capital, and hence as an arena where the struggle against capitalism might be waged, music came to be enacted within the socialism of the 1970s less as a thing than as a space. Moreover, it was enacted as a space in need of radical reorganization, if the exploitation and alienation that afflicted it were to be overcome. Yet this enactment of music as a space of socialist intervention was crucial for another reason. Namely, it advanced the project of reinventing the socialist party as a viable political force. Making music and culture conspicuous objects of the party's solicitudes served as a means to win the arts community over to the socialist assemblage in the making. By treating the musical field as a complex, heterogeneous realm, possessing its own specific logic, the socialists sought to persuade members of the musical community of the respect it had for art's (relative) autonomy. In doing so, it distinguished itself from the PCF, the latter still tarred by the image of ideological dogmatism inherited from its Stalinist past. In this way, the Parti socialiste presented itself as the embodiment of a more liberal form of anti-capitalism.

Calls to socialize the means of musical production did not stem exclusively from the new socialist party, however. It would be more accurate to say that the party was the beneficiary of a broader set of discourses and practices it adopted, reworked, and recoded to suit its own ends. Socialist cultural policy was no less of an assemblage than the reinvented Parti socialiste. Particularly prominent after 1968 – and particularly influential for the PS – were discourses valorizing the emancipatory potential of creative practice, casting it as a model of the kind of unalienated labour that would cease to be an exception, and instead become the rule, in the post-capitalist order the socialists would usher into being.

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Attali's 1977 book Bruits is perhaps the most well-known expression of this current, with its prognostication of an imminent arrival of a society (that of ‘composition’) wherein each individual would participate in ‘the invention of new [musical] codes, of the message at the same time as the language’.Footnote ³⁵ While Attali's book had no direct connection to the party's cultural policies, his status as an advisor to François Mitterrand meant that his text was nonetheless regarded as a promissory note, depicting the kind of radically democratic, post-capitalist culture the PS hoped to institute once in power. Reinforcing this impression was the fact that Attali's vision of an impending society of composition in many respects reworked ideas already in circulation among socialist policy-makers. Indeed, an early effort at formulating a distinctive socialist cultural policy, a set of proposals drawn up in 1974 by the new party's Secrétariat nationale des affaires culturelles (SNAC), drew heavily on post-1968 discourses of worker self-management in envisaging a more egalitarian culture. Denouncing the passive, consumerist ethos promoted by the culture industry, the SNAC instead called for a transformation of arts institutions, the aim being to ‘enlarge them, deprofessionalize them little by little’.Footnote ³⁶ Crucial was the need to no longer ‘make invention the specialty of particular category of individuals, the “creators”, but to try on the contrary to extend the capacity to invent to the greatest number of people’.Footnote ³⁷ Doing so would result in more than just a ‘culture for all, in the service of all’; it would also – and significantly – be ‘a culture made by all’.Footnote ³⁸

Such policy proposals not only resonated with, but were also shaped in response to other, more radical approaches to cultural democratization ascendant after 1968. Key in this regard was the spread of what came to be known as ‘animation culturelle’, a catchall term used to describe a range of practices whose shared goal was to narrow the gulf separating artistic creation from the general public. At one end of the spectrum were fairly traditional forms of arts appreciation and pedagogy, many of which benefited from the support of centre-right governments during the 1960s and 1970s. At the other end were more experimental and/or expressly political initiatives. Representative of the latter current was the Mouvement d'action musicale (MAM). Founded in 1977, spearheaded by the musician-activists Jean-Claude Lartigot and Eric Sprogis, MAM brought together a heterogeneous group of educators, animateurs, composers, social workers, and performers, whose goal was not only to transform social relations within musical practice, but also to overhaul the structures and institutions responsible for perpetuating cultural inequality.Footnote ³⁹ The stance of Lartigot and Sprogis, as well as of the group they helped to found, is encapsulated in the title of a book the pair published a few years prior to the establishment of MAM: Libérer la musique (Liberate music).Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet the text's call for an emancipation of music was also a call for a emancipation from music – or at least from music as it was enacted by state monopoly capitalism, where it functioned as a ‘release-valve’ absorbing aspirations for a better world left unconsummated by existing socioeconomic arrangements. Echoing the Situationist critique of art, the peroration of their book envisions a future in which music is so thoroughly integrated with life that it is transcended as such: ‘Art . . . must be an appeal for a world in which we will no longer have need for a release-valve, a world in which it will be labor, [in which] creation will be mankind's entire activity, and the word “art” will appear in the memory of men as one of those characteristics of this old society that needed to conceal its realities in order to subsist.’Footnote ⁴¹

In Lartigot and Sprogis's reading, a number of impediments, both ideological and material, stood in the way of this utopian vision. At an ideological level, musical skill was imagined as the province of a small number of ‘gifted’ individuals. So thoroughly had people internalized a belief in their own musical incapacity that it had become a practical reality. The only relation to music most individuals could therefore entertain was that of passive consumption. ‘The dominant musical ideology’, Lartigot and Sprogis write, ‘in general seeks to codify the relations the individual has to music.’Footnote ⁴² It is not that a particular kind of music was foisted on the public, only a particular way of engaging with music. In their estimation, the freedom of choosing ‘between Adamo, Mireille Mathieu, or Chopin’ was the only freedom people were able to exercise.Footnote ⁴³ At a material level, technologies and infrastructures of musical distribution enforced the divide separating producers and consumers. The effect was to mutilate the individual. Instead of an engagement of the total self in acts of musicking, one was reduced to a single sensory organ. According to the two authors, ‘the use nowadays of means of mass distribution teaches us to become ears, without any possibility . . . of creating our own music’.Footnote ⁴⁴ By moulding not just the public's self-understanding but also its object world, state monopoly capitalism stifled musical creativity. Unable to serve as a means of self- and collective realization, creative practice appeared instead as an alien force confronting subjects.

Just as notable as the critiques that Lartigot and Sprogis levelled against music's debasement by capital was the echo they found among socialist party officials. Even after the Left's victory in the 1981 presidential and legislative elections, members of the new, socialist-led government continued to voice their commitment to the ideal of radically democratizing cultural life. Such was the case with Maurice Fleuret. Appointed to head the Ministry of Culture's music division, Fleuret observed how the previous, centre-right government's music education policies had disempowered the public. Using language reminiscent of Lartigot and Sprogis, Fleuret remarked in one interview that these policies had ‘mass-produce[d]’ individuals ‘capable of listening, but incapable of making music’ – individuals who were ‘mute’, but who had ‘big ears’. To change this state of affairs required a radical reshaping of the musical field. Here, too, one can detect an affinity between the situationist ideals of Lartigot and Sprogis and Fleuret's stated aims: ‘It seems to me that our goal is the disappearance of artists, that there might no longer be any artists’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Yet this way of figuring music – as an epitome of the unalienated labour that will only be realized once the split between producer and consumer is overcome – butted up against other ways of enacting music. Of particular importance were those enactments performed within the everyday practices of working musicians, another important element within the artistic coalition whose support the socialists were seeking out. For creative workers and their union representatives, the division between producer and consumer was not so much an obstacle to be overcome as a precondition of their livelihood, at least within the capitalist economy as it actually existed. Just as the workers’ chorus found itself pulled in opposing directions by the different temporal mediations to which it was subject, so too was the project of socializing the means of musical production. Realizing the artistic potential latent in each and every person, such that there might ‘no longer be any artists’, may have been an admirable goal in the long run; but in the short run, absent a change in the broader economy, such a turn of events would have the effect of saturating the artistic labour market, undermining musicians’ ability to make a living from their art. It was for this reason that amateur musicians had long been regarded with ambivalence by one of the principal musicians’ unions in France, the Syndicat des artistes musiciens de Paris (SAMuP). Unobjectionable as a private pastime, amateur performance became problematic the moment it had the effect of depressing musicians’ wages. Thus one of the union's main goals in the decades after the Second World War was the institution of a ‘carte professionnelle’ which, by restricting entry into the musical labour market, would help protect musicians ‘from an amateurism that is inundating us’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Only those who had worked exclusively as a musician for a number of years, or who had passed a certification exam administered by union members, would be eligible for the card.Footnote ⁴⁷ The objective (never attained) was to establish a stricter boundary between professionals and amateurs, lest the latter act as a kind of reserve army, a surplus creative population driving down the wages of working musicians.

By the time of the socialists’ accession to power in 1981, SAMuP and other musicians’ unions had softened their position on amateur performance, perhaps in response to the continuing degradation of the musical labour market, which increasingly transformed music into a sideline for many would-be professionals (‘There is no special law for those that are wrongly labelled “semi-professionals”’ remarked SAMuP's head, Pierre Allemand. ‘Whether he is a student or an amateur, each time he works, he must be considered as an employee.’).Footnote ⁴⁸ Even so, there were still other pressures on the socialist coalition that ran counter to calls for a radical democratization of musical practice. As regards animation culturelle, the practice was increasingly criticized for having diverted resources from activities deemed central to artistic life (creation), channelling them instead to what was arguably a subordinate concern (mediation). By this reading, the meagre investment that centre-right governments under Georges Pompidou and then Valéry Giscard-d'Estaing had made in animation was a cheap substitute for the more substantial investment that cultural production demanded. Outreach efforts, that is, functioned as a form of ideological cover: regarded as an ‘alibi that the government uses to justify its retreat from creation’,Footnote ⁴⁹ measures aiming to better integrate art and the everyday were recast as tokens of art's devaluation by the left's political adversaries.

Ironically, the appeal to ‘creation’ in critiques of animation culturelle pointed to one way that tensions among the socialists’ different artistic constituencies could be smoothed over, if not actually resolved. Even as the newly elected socialist government increased funding for state-sponsored ensembles, opera companies, and other sites of musical employment, even as it granted greater recognition and support to various forms of popular culture (rock, folk, etc.), it also sought to elide competing claims through the deployment of what Laclau and Mouffe would describe as empty signifiers. Foremost among these were the buzzwords ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, which, as historian Jean Caune has observed, were ‘charged with every virtue’ in socialist discourse both before and after 1981.Footnote ⁵⁰ The vagueness of the concept, coupled with the generally positive connotations that accrued to it, were such that it proved ideal for papering over the potential lines of fracture that ran through the socialist coalition. On the one hand, socialist policy-makers often played up the inherently subversive quality of creative activity, casting it as a resource the left needed to mobilize in its efforts to ‘change life’ (changer la vie), as one of the socialists’ slogans put it. Here, again, Fleuret provided a reliable mouthpiece for the socialists’ valorization of creativity's disruptive potential: ‘It is society that must be changed in order to ensure the free flourishing of music, just as it is . . . the flourishing of music that will change society.’Footnote ⁵¹ On the other hand, creativity could just as well be construed as an economic stimulant of sorts, less a means of disrupting the economy as a means of kick-starting it. By gesturing simultaneously towards radical change and an amelioration of present conditions, the PS cast creativity as a public good whose promotion could satisfy the claims of all sorts of constituencies – professional musicians as well as those seeking to deprofessionalize music.

Perhaps the most visible expression of the socialist government's valorization of creativity was the Fête de la Musique, inaugurated by Fleuret and Culture Minister Jack Lang in 1982. Now an annual event, one that has been adopted by a number of other countries across Europe and the rest of the world, the inaugural Fête was a hastily organized affair. As with paeans PS officials sang to the powers of creativity, the idea of inviting one and all to come out to the street and make music on the summer solstice was, among other things, a way of bridging a gap between different constituencies. A circular distributed by the Direction de la Musique underlined this last point: ‘21 JUNE: FESTIVAL OF ALL MUSICS. The new music policy does not impose a single model: it favors diversity and differences . . . The Fête de la Musique will thus be the festival of all musics, of all practices.’Footnote ⁵² Neither amateur musicians nor underserved communities were the sole beneficiaries of the Fête; professional ensembles were also invited to take part. By putting France's different musical constituencies on display, the Ministry was able to maintain that there was no contradiction in democratizing culture and providing protections for music workers. But by the same token the Ministry was able to point to the fact that there existed a substantial clientele – and hence a need – for its services. The event thus served to legitimize not just different forms of music-making, but the Ministry of Culture itself.

Equally of note, however, was the social value that Lang and other party officials ascribed to the event, beyond whatever musical value it possessed. Describing the Fête as an occasion ‘for each of us to celebrate the awakening of the summer’, Lang also attributed to the event the power to bring about a different kind of awakening. The Fête, he noted, was an occasion ‘to show that the France that wishes to reawaken economically believes in itself, has confidence in its forces, has confidence in its future.Footnote ⁵³ In a speech given a few weeks after the first Fête, Lang expanded on culture's power as a means of reviving France's flagging economy:

Echoing the comments of other socialist intellectuals and policy-makers, Lang's comments are symptomatic of the shift then underway in how the relations between base and superstructure, material forces and ‘forces of the spirit’, were to be imagined.Footnote ⁵⁵ What it marks, in brief, is the moment when discourses extolling creativity's power to point beyond the capitalist economy were scaled back in favour of discourses extolling creativity's power to spur growth within the capitalist economy.

From here it was but a short step to the kind of backsliding that would only escalate once the Mitterrand government abandoned its experiment in socialist economic policies in 1983 – a backsliding whose endpoint was the debased form the Parti socialiste assumed under the presidency of François Hollande (2012–17). No longer casting itself as the agent of a transition to socialism, the party under Hollande seemed content to carry out the austerity politics of the European Central Bank. And no longer cast as a site of socialist transformation, music and culture were transformed instead into remedies for the problems wrought by a newly unbridled capitalism. Already in Lang's remarks from the early 1980s, we can see music being enacted in a form that would become commonplace during the 1990s and beyond: as an expedient, a palliative that can be set to work on all kinds of problems (most notably, social exclusion). In this respect, the trajectory of French music policy since the 1980s has closely tracked what George Yúdice has described as a post-Fordist turn in cultural policy, one that elides its specificity, collapsing it into yet another tool of social and economic policy.Footnote ⁵⁶

2019

The third and final vignette picks up where the last left off: with music's increasing transformation under contemporary capitalism into a resource for addressing various problems, social as well as individual. Within certain circles, such a functionalist approach to music marks a positive turn. Or, to be more exact, it represents less a turn than a return, a rediscovery of values music was once seen as possessing, but that were disavowed once the post-romantic ideology of artistic autonomy became ascendant. For instance, in his book Healing Songs, Ted Gioia notes how ‘long before music became an aesthetic activity, its efficacy as a change agent was paramount’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, he adds, this ‘potency is all but forgotten today’, insofar as musical performances and recordings are widely regarded ‘as merely artistic products, their value determined by considerations of their aesthetic or entertainment value’.Footnote ⁵⁸ What is necessary, for Gioia as well as for others, is that we recognize other values music might possess beyond aesthetic ones, as an instrument for self- and interpersonal care. At first blush, such arguments seem unobjectionable. Who, after all, would dispute the idea that musicking might bear social benefits? Certainly not policy-makers, foundations, or NGOs, for whom the identification and exploitation of such benefits have become guiding principles since the 1990s. One might cite in this regard efforts to use music to combat social exclusion, as in the World Bank-supported ‘Put Your Rights to Music’ initiative in Argentina.Footnote ⁵⁹ Or the harnessing of music to improve ‘learning outcomes’ in the production of human capital, as in the United Kingdom's national singing programme for primary schools, ‘Sing Up’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Or the use of music to promote healthier lifestyles, as in the initiatives undertaken by the non-profit Hip Hop Public Health.Footnote ⁶¹ Still other examples might be cited, too many to enumerate.Footnote ⁶²

While these and other such initiatives may be well intentioned, and may even succeed in delivering the benefits that they promise, there is still something disquieting about music's enlistment as a tool for personal and social improvement. It is not that this betrays some sacred principle of musical autonomy, or that music is being put to ends other than purely musical ones. The problem, rather, concerns which ends it is being put to – and which ones it may end up serving inadvertently. Called on to alleviate the negative impacts of neoliberalism, music may thereby serve to prop up neoliberalism. One way of framing this dynamic is to say that if neoliberal governmentality enacts music as an expedient, it does so in order to put music to work in managing what a range of theorists have dubbed the crises of social reproduction that neoliberalism has engendered.Footnote ⁶³ These include the strains placed on activities responsible for the sustenance of both labour power and life itself – that is, activities involved in caring for oneself and others, in rearing children, and in the psychic and emotional regeneration necessary to get from one day to the next. But music's use in mitigating these strains, its enactment as a means of social reproduction, is not just a matter of public policy and the governance of populations. Increasingly, it also informs the musical practices of individuals, in connection with the growing ubiquity of music that digital media make possible.Footnote ⁶⁴ While people have long used music to regulate themselves and others, as Tia DeNora has documented, new modes of music distribution have routinized such everyday uses of music.Footnote ⁶⁵ Particularly significant are services such as Spotify or Google Play, whose recommendations serve to commodify processes of musical self-regulation and self-regeneration. ‘Fall into a deep relaxing sleep with these soothing sounds. Sweet dreams’: so reads the blurb accompanying the ‘Sleep’ playlist on Spotify.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other services promise to improve one's study habits (as with Pandora's ‘Beats for Studying’ station),Footnote ⁶⁷ to lift one's mood (as with Deezer's ‘Happiness Boost’ playlist),Footnote ⁶⁸ or intensify one's workout (Google Play's ‘Industrial Cardio’ radio, for instance, enjoins listeners to ‘get in shape for post-industrial collapse’ with a ‘high-energy mix of dystopian ragers and dance beats’).Footnote ⁶⁹ The proliferation of playlists like these mark a shift, as what has long been a quasi-artisanal practice of musical self-care is subjected instead to an industrial logic.

Whether technologically facilitated or performed by individual listeners, the mobilization of music to work on ourselves is inseparable from the work necessary to reproduce ourselves as labour power. That is to say, as a ‘technology of the self’, as a means by which moods, physiological states, and social relations may be produced and sustained, music is not simply a resource people put to work for their own benefit; it is also a means for producing and reproducing the kind of affective, cognitive, and communicative labour-power that capitalism increasingly demands of workers. That we might engage in such musicalized self-work of our own accord, or derive pleasure from it, does not preclude it from benefiting others. As Marx himself observed, ‘the fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the matter’.Footnote ⁷⁰

In many respects, the appropriation of music's ameliorative capacities is of a piece with other developments in the global economy. Notable among these is the way utopian ideals and non-capitalist spaces have been commandeered by capital, resulting in what Paolo Virno and others have dubbed a ‘communism of capital’.Footnote ⁷¹ What this phrase encapsulates is how many of socialism's long-standing aspirations have already been realized, albeit in a distorted, dystopian form. A case in point is the way efforts to use music to promote the common good coincide with its use to sustain capital. But others abound. Doesn't the ‘gig economy’, embodied in work for firms such as Uber or TaskRabbit, represent a parodic inversion of Marx's image of communist society, where one can ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic’?Footnote ⁷² Hasn't the withering away of the state that was supposed to take place under communism also come to pass, in neoliberalism's dismantling of the public sector? And, in relation to music, haven't the barriers to creative practice that activists such as Lartigot and Sprogis once denounced now been diminished, thanks to technologies brought to the market by the giants of digital capitalism? Yet these same technologies have also helped make the already precarious livelihoods of working musicians even more precarious, at the same time as their affordability results from the cheap labour of newly proletarianized workers in the global South. The technologies that promise to make cultural alienation a thing of the past may appear inexpensive, but that is only because workers at the far end of the digital supply chain are the ones paying for the discount their end-consumers enjoy.

Making these and other instances of the so-called ‘communism of capital’ all the more pernicious is their role in exacerbating crises of social reproduction. Where once the state had defrayed the costs of social reproduction through social insurance, neoliberal governance shifts these costs onto the shoulders of individual citizens. At the same time, the expansion of the gig economy contributes to the time depletion at the root of the ‘crisis of care’ – and this is not even accounting for the loss of benefits that occurs once one is reclassified as a contractor rather than an employee. And as regards the disintegrating boundary between amateur and professional creation, this is one of the factors driving what we might designate as a more specific crisis of musical reproduction. By removing barriers to entry, lowering the cost of musical production and distribution, and demonetizing recorded music, digital media have jeopardized musicians’ capacity to earn a living from their practice, and thus their capacity to reproduce themselves as musicians.

Even as music workers are among those afflicted by the crises of reproduction, music itself, as we have seen, is increasingly called on to address these crises. How might we understand music's twofold relation to this crisis, its status as both one of its casualties and one of its potential cures? Important in this regard is that systems of social reproduction all tend to rely on unwaged labour. A key insight of Marxist feminists in the 1970s was their identification of the domestic labour that is a condition of possibility for capitalist accumulation, but that is devalued because it is deemed external to the ‘real’ economy. Their demand of ‘wages for housework’ had the virtue of making visible the work – typically gendered as ‘women's work’ – required to produce the labour power capital both depends on and disavows. A similar argument has been advanced by Jason Moore, in connection to capitalism's reliance on what he calls ‘cheap nature’.Footnote ⁷³ As he notes, a sine qua non of capitalist accumulation is the appropriation of the work of natural systems, likewise enacted as standing outside the ‘real’ economy. No payment is deemed necessary for the work nature performs in producing resources and absorbing waste, much as the affective and material labour of domestic life is assumed to be something individuals will readily engage in, out of love or duty.

That the work of social reproduction is most often not recognized as work – and goes uncompensated as a result – has some bearing on music's entanglement in the contemporary crisis of social reproduction. Much like the affective labour of family care, music is often enacted as a labour of love, whose poor remuneration is made up for by the psychic satisfaction it affords. And much like the work of nature, musical production is often figured as a free gift, a natural impulse that humans cannot help but indulge, being part of what makes us human. Such is the argument advanced by digital capitalism's apologists, in response to concerns that digital technologies, by demonetizing recorded music, might disincentivize musical production: we need not worry for music's future, the argument goes, since people will continue to make it even in the absence of recompense.Footnote ⁷⁴ Most important, however, is the way that music (and the artworld more generally) has been separated from the general economy within Western modernity, enacted as an exception. The result is what Pierre Bourdieu famously described as an upside-down economy, where it is the loser who wins, precisely by forsaking material reward in favour of symbolic compensation.Footnote ⁷⁵ It is small wonder, then, that music has come to be enacted as a means of social reproduction: undervalued and underpaid, music becomes yet another cheap resource that capital can appropriate in reproducing both its subjects and itself.

This may seem a rather pessimistic place to close this article. But as Antonio Gramsci famously observed, ‘pessimism of the intellect’ does not preclude ‘optimism of the will’. Are there reasons for hope? Consider again the two tendencies in the neoliberal economy I have focused on in the final part of this article. While we might read both the communism of capital and its long-standing reliance on the unpaid labour of social reproduction as instances of the economy's power to progressively incorporate that which stands outside it, we might also take these as signs of capital's insufficiency, its need for various kinds of extra capitalist fixes to sustain itself.Footnote ⁷⁶ Such dependencies, in other words, may represent points where leverage can be exerted, demands made, and cracks in neoliberalism's facade of inevitability widened. In connection to music's enactment as a means of social reproduction, we might see this as a base upon which a critique of musicians’ undercompensation may be formulated, along with a demand – ‘wages for artwork’, as it were. But if such a strategy would appear to affirm the system of wage labour rather than contest its logic, we might instead look to music's role in social reproduction as a way of revalorizing the kind of alternative gift economy that the artworld has long incarnated. This might form the basis for a different demand: a demand for a mechanism that would expropriate from the expropriators the resources necessary to subsidize this non-market gift economy, perhaps through the provision of a universal basic income.

These two avenues for mobilization are in some respects contradictory, one revalorizing musicians’ work in the existing economy, the other providing conditions for a different economy, one in which unwaged labour might be freely pursued. Which is the correct path forward? The choice depends of course on the conjuncture. But perhaps this is the wrong question to ask; perhaps making a decision is less important at present than opening a space in which one can be made. After all, one of the main themes of this article has been multiplicity: the multiplicity of socialism, of music, and of the relations between the two. I have presented this as a methodological principle, one that is grounded in a particular understanding of ontology – ontology not as that which is given, but that which is made. Perhaps we would do well to convert this methodological principle into a normative claim. Instead of being concerned with how we might reconstruct socialism, a socialism in the singular, we should endeavour to cultivate as many socialisms as possible. A useful point of departure might be found in J. K. Gibson-Graham's work on the diverse economies that already exist within and in spite of capitalism.Footnote ⁷⁷ For the same reason, we should be less concerned with identifying a single way for music to engage with a renewed socialist project, but instead cultivate as many different relations as possible: music as a means of ideological persuasion; music as a site where an alternative economy might be realized; and music as a means not just of social reproduction, but of socialism's reproduction.