Comedy stars Marx brothers and sisters

MANY years ago, when all the world seemed young and there was hope on the breeze, my curiosity led me to the thoughts of Karl Marx.

During the 1960s, the ‘alternative’ media was awash with Marxist thought. Visit middle-class homes in south London, as I regularly did back then, and copies of The Morning Star could often be spotted, strategically placed on Habitat coffee tables placed somewhere between the Indian rug in the fireplace and the fading Che Guevara print on the wall.

In those days, it was vitally important that guests should be aware of the hosts’ political affiliations. A sort of hippy era version of ‘virtue signalling’, I suppose

Late night, dope-fuelled conversations, Sonny Rollins on the stereo, cross-legged participants trying to out-Castro each other, eager talk of taking the struggle to the streets.

Hey man, maybe join the army? Not because we believe in that imperialistic manifestation of a corrupt state’s agents of repression, rather the weapons training might come in handy. Can you dig it, man?

Then come Sunday afternoon, and I would catch the late afternoon Euston train back to Rugby, looking forward to a plate of cheese on toast back at my mum’s. The revolution can start without me…

Reading some of the Facebook comments this week about the Michale Graves gig at Worcester’s Marrs Bar took me straight back to those days. It was if I had climbed aboard the wings of Jimi Hendrix’s mythic dragonfly and alighted in some far-off land to be welcomed by a reception committee led by Tariq Ali.

Local Green Party councillor Neil Laurenson has, according to the Worcester News, called for the Graves concert to be cancelled and vowed that if his demand is not met, he will in future boycott the venue. See link

https://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/25856512.councillor-boycott-marrs-bar-michale-graves-gig/

Councillor Laurenson was also reported to have stated that ‘fascists are not welcome in Worcester’. This comment made me wonder whether Graves would be appearing onstage wearing the full Waffen SS regalia, gleaming jackboots, and an Iron Cross awarded for services to punk music.

Anyway, I had a look online. Not much to go on as it turned out, other than a vague reference to Michale Graves’ alleged support for US President Donald Trump’s alleged supporters.

Note my over-use of the word ‘alleged’. Remember that Trump’s hell-bent on taking the BBC for ten billion smackers. Yes, one must be very cautious here.

And if someone accused a person of being ‘fascist’, and that person subsequently decided to sue for libel, the onus would be on the accuser to prove that was indeed the case.

You may be interested to learn that in a complete reversal of the ‘innocent until proved guilty’ criminal law, during a libel case hearing, the assumption is of guilt until innocence can be proved. Yup. Expensive game, libel. Source: Writer's and Artist's Year Book.

For example, I wrote a newspaper column for 22 years until, after numerous attempts, the local Labour Party successfully lobbied to get it shut down. Despite all that feverish activity, not once during those years did I get done for libel. Nope. Too careful with my use of words. You had to be.

Anyway, in the interests of journalistic balance, I then Googled Councillor Laurenson and discovered that in addition to being a public servant, he is also a published poet, one of his works being titled ExclamationMarx!

Now, this neatly leads me back to those impressionable, formative years and my brief flirtation with the extreme left of politics. So with thoughts buzzing around my Beatle-fringed bonce, and after reading the published thoughts of various far-left writers, I decided to take the plunge and then have a bash at the big one - Das Kapital, by the great Karl Marx himself.

Er, bad move. This has probably got to be the most boring book ever written, riddled with repetition, and with much being lost in translation from the original 1867 German.

After a while, I gave up and started to read The Guardian instead. Far simpler. Nevertheless, some of all this reading matter did eventually sink into my underdeveloped brain, namely this.

Marx believed that capitalist society had to be totally dismantled so that the proletariat could triumph. It could not be reformed - revolution, not evolution was required. And ALL dissent had to be swept aside, stifled, shut down, discounted.

As for disagreement, this was a petty bourgeois concept and an irrelevance that could not be allowed to get in the way of the people’s will. The opposing view had to be smothered at birth. And so on and so on…

Now, I’m not saying that any of the people protesting about the Michale Graves gig are Marxists. You have to be reasonably intelligent for that. But I would say that much of the logic – if a tiny number of this week’s Facebook comments could be termed that – seems to take its cue from the idea that if we disagree with something, then logically it should be shut down, or ‘cancelled’, as the modern parlance would have it.

This idea, rapidly taking root, has now become a major threat to artistic freedom. As for rock and roll, this must always remain a non-aligned, basically anarchic art form that should never, ever bow to the will of any pressure group or minority interest faction, let alone a mainly illiterate bunch of here-today-gone-tomorrow keyboard warriors.

The message must therefore be this. If you don’t like Michale Graves, then don’t attend his gigs. Just leave other people to go should they wish.