It seems fitting to write this particular instalment of Punk Rock Philosophy as the news (certainly in the UK at least) is full of coverage on the ‘cost of living’ crisis- the combination of factors that have raised the cost to just exist in a basic homeostasis to beyond the reach of millions of people. And this is echoed around the world, not just the impact of the global pandemic but corporate expansion, climate change and other factors have put those who are not ‘comfortable’ in an even more precarious position. Everything has gone up- fuel, food, energy, rents- whilst pay and benefits have gone down. This is not the first cost of living crisis in recent memory and the thing is, what is currently considered a crisis, will quickly just become the new standard of living. And as this current status quo becomes entrenched, then it seeps out of the public eye as people desperately try to make things work and it all becomes old news. A crisis is (at least by my definition) finite- an accepted lower standard of living just becomes the new norm.
This is all relevant to punk as punk has, from the start, included a commentary on the working class and those disenfranchised and ‘left behind’ by the relentless strides of capitalism and corporate growth. There are songs that speak to the more political elements of class designation and songs about the lived experience of being in a financially precarious position. The impacts that financial precarity, poverty and deprivation have on an individual, a family, and a community have been part of punk’s rhetoric from The Clash to D.O.A, from Crass to Bad Religion. Punk has played a practical part in alleviating gaps left by the state since its inception- playing fundraising gigs, protesting, campaigning and using public platforms to bring people together and provide a voice of dissent and an avenue for analysis. Punks joined the striking miners in fundraising and holding picket lines; the hardcore punk community rallied around evictions in San Francisco, the riot Grrrls raised money for Planned Parenthood and victims of domestic violence. Of course, these are not exclusively issues of poverty but also politics, however poverty is a political issue, and you cannot easily separate one from the other.
Considering how global the issue of poverty is and much it is entangled in world history; it is surprising that the issue is not centre stage of every philosophical movement through the ages. But it isn’t.
How big a deal is poverty?
How does poverty come about? Well one of the main reasons, particularly, in the modern era is income equality. The world isn’t poor, there is enough food, space and resources for everyone. Some nation states are ‘poorer’ (either in terms of economy size, natural resources, marketable industries and access to global markets) than others but there will often still be wealthy people within that country. And being less affluent than your neighbour doesn’t make you poor per se. So, what gives? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and development (OECD) observes there has been a significant increase in income inequality over the last 40 years at least. And no matter where you get your figures from, statistics are stark. Inequality.org- a global think tank and researcher- state that adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the world’s population but hold less than 2 percent of global wealth. The world’s wealthiest individuals, those owning over $100,000 in assets, total less than 10 percent of the global population but own 84 percent of global wealth.
Poverty affects the majority of the global population. Indeed, in 2014, according to an Oxfam statistic, it was estimated that:
the richest 1% of people in the world owned 48% of global wealth, leaving just 52% to be shared between the other 99% of adults on the planet. Almost all of that 52% is owned by those included in the richest 20%, leaving just 5.5% for the remaining 80% of people in the world.
UNICEF estimate that twelve children die of poverty related issues per minute. These include malnutrition, poor access to medicine, exposure to disease and other factors that relate to the financial position they exist in.
How exactly is poverty defined? A Dictionary of Sociology (2009), defines it as “a state in which resources, usually material but sometimes cultural, are lacking” (Scott and Marshall, 2009).
Poverty and inequality are deeply interconnected, and they can be broadly defined as the functioning and the outcome of the same system (Wachtel, 1972): the economic system based on capitalism.
I bet philosophers have been all over this topic for years?
You would think that during the age of enlightenment- the time when apparently loadsa people were having loads of good ideas as a result of a big ol’ think- making things better for the poor or tackling redistribution of wealth in society would be problem number 1 to solve. But actually….not so much. Poverty wasn’t really seen as a problem that needed to be solved until much later. Although the poor were the majority, the big wigs of 18th century thinking were not really recognising that people being poor was a bad thing that people could seek to change the system. Some people being poor was just an inevitability in a modern, functioning, industrialised society.
Take Edmund Burke for example. He was an Irish-Anglo political theorist and philosopher writing in the 18th century, and very much a Conservative. He was a staunch supporter of free trade and the market economy so needless to say he found a way to rationalise the existence of the poor in order to prop up this free market system. In a 1795 essay (Thoughts and Details on Scarcity) he double downed on the idea that the market is the primary consideration, and the government should not be providing welfare for the general citizenry. He believed in the old adage that the market will iron out any major crises due to its response to general ebbs and flows, and there is no need for meddling by the state. If people are still in need despite a thriving free market system, then other people should provide help for them through voluntary donations, charitable enterprise and perhaps philanthropy. Sounds very much like the Rees-Mogg school of thought that praises the existence of food banks as evidence that polite society is fulfilling its duty- a duty outsourced by the state.
It was part of this whole idea that was popular at the time (and arguably still is now) that the rich are not the enemy, that making things more difficult for them- in terms of taxes, confiscation, regulation etc- would actually hurt the workers more for several reasons.
Firstly, poverty (or the threat/possibility of poverty) actually creates a labour force that would not otherwise exist to do the jobs that no one really wants to do- dangerous, unstable, low paid and undignified jobs. People will do them as they are preferred to the alternative- living in poverty.
The other reason is because it is the rich creating the jobs in the first place. Both the business owner and the labourer are important- they should work in synchronicity and the needs of both are not mutually exclusive. Now, this idea- that workers and bosses live in harmony together- would obviously not be the Marxist interpretation but we are not going to stray too much into this as we have already explored some of these issues in other PRP. But needless to say, there were (and still are) rationales in Conservative circles as to why the state of having a rich and a poor is not a bad thing and requires no action on the part of the state.
According to the mercantilist thinking that dominated European thought between the 16th and 18th centuries, poverty was socially useful.
“Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious,” the English writer Arthur Young argued in 1771. Blimey.
Young is not representative of every philosopher at this time though. Immanuel Kant’s views on human dignity, Adam Smith’s support for anti-poverty programs, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s argument that poverty and inequality are symptoms of bad institutions were also circulated and discussed. Still, the idea of systemic action to eradicate poverty altogether was some ways off from being popular.
It would often be literary figures who were using their writing to raise the issue. Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical essay in 1729 entitled A Modest Proposal (full title included “for preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick) that suggested (satirically) that poor Irish families could sell their children to the rich in order to address their financial issues. The purpose of this satire was to mock the heartless attitudes towards the poor that Swift observed.
Charles Dickens was famous for his social commentary. He was a critic of the existence of poverty, the social class system of Victorian society and his works such as Oliver Twist and Hard Times contained unflinching portrayals of crime, poverty and upper-class indifference. He was a journalist as well as novelist and campaigned on issues such as sanitation, workhouses and societal neglect of vulnerable children.
If the state is not expected to do much about poverty and inequality, then what about the individual? Do we need to lay all of the responsibility at the feet of government when we are all capable as citizens of collectively of solving this problem? Philosopher Pete Singer (Australian writer and philosopher born in 1946) has commented extensively on the existence of poverty as an ethical and moral question for the world to tackle. In one of his famous thought experiments, he posits a scenario in which someone has the ability to save a life but would have to sacrifice an item of value to them (new shoes in the most common telling of the scenario in which a child is drowning). He suggests that the vast majority of people would do this due to the costs/benefits analysis and the value inherent in a human life. But, if we can all agree on taking that action, why do we not act comparatively in real life, i.e., sacrifice material possessions in order to save lives? Certainly ,there has to be something said for the fact that people are much more likely to act locally than think globally and a dying child in front of us- in our communities- would surely galvanise more response than knowing that at any given time, children around the world are suffering? Why is this?
It is possibly a question of obligations- and therefore a question of individual freedom. For example, I have the freedom to keep my money, decide what it is spent on and therefore I cannot- should not– be compelled to hand it over. Freedom is not moral- it is not a prerequisite for freedom that you use it for any good purpose.
So, I assume punk has something to say on this issue?
From the very beginning, punk bands (particularly those from the UK) wore their working- class hearts on their sleeve. Low ticket prices, accessible musicians, a rejection of bloated rich boy rock stars, the DIY principle…. all a way of demonstrating where punk musicians saw themselves. As one of the people and speaking for them, to them and alongside them.
The Clash recorded numerous songs which have messages or themes regarding the soul-destroying impact of monotony and obedience to prescriptive, narrow societal ideals- Career Opportunities, Janie Jones, Magnificent Seven, Death or Glory, to name a few. In various interviews, members of the band talk about the lack of prospects for working class children in the UK in the 70s and 80s.
“All the power in the hands…of people rich enough to buy it”
70s American punk band The Dils were forthright in their observations about class war in their song, well….Class War. Formed in California in 1976, you don’t have to look far in their back catalogue to see their views on capitalism- their first single was called I Hate The Rich. Their song Class War dreamt of an uprising:
In New York and LA
City Halls are falling down
There is no escape
When a class war comes to town
In songs like that, the rich, the hoarders of wealth, will need to pay for their part in the suffering of those whose exploitation from which they have profited.
In 1979, The Jam released their song Eton Rifles– a commentary on class struggle in 1970s UK. Paul Weller has spoken about the track in various interviews:
“I was watching the news on TV, and I saw this footage of a Right To Work march going past Eton, where all the kids from the school came outside and started jeering at the marchers. I just thought what a great fucking image it was. I didn’t think of it as particularly political.”
He may not have considered it political to write the actual song, but the event that inspired it- public schoolboys jeering at marchers who were asking for some dignity and stability- is incredibly political and a shocking indictment of the divide between the privileged and the rest of the public. All this was lost on the Conservative PM David Cameron who, in a radio interview in 1998, said it was his favourite song which sparked a rebuttal by Weller.
Comparisons have been drawn between the earlier referenced Swift piece and the Dead Kennedys track Kill The Poor. The Dead Kennedys have been known to use satire in order to demonstrate the ridiculousness of capitalist policies. Kill The Poor was the third single to be taken off of Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables and hypothesises that the rich would wipe the poor out with a bomb if they could get away with it, that the poor are considered a problem to be dealt with. The right wing celebrate the dropping of the bombs in the name of economic growth. A true reflection of foreign policy- some people are just expendable in the name of economic growth. Think of the war in Iraq and the incredible amounts of money to be made through the destruction of war, to hell with the casualties. Madeleine Albright’s remark in 1996 that the deaths of Iraqi children are a price worth paying to achieve US foreign policy goals echoes this.
The sun beams down on a brand-new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight
Contemporaries of the DKs- bands like The Minutemen- wrote most of their songs about the world around them including issues of class, exploitation and capitalist destruction. In songs like This Aint No Picnic, Corona and Sell or be Sold, The Minutemen empathise with those struggling to pay the bills and taking on jobs to survive in the harsh landscape of Reagan’s America.
Canadian punk band DOA in their song World Falls Apart, sing about the impact of state neglect and the lack of compassion and “mean streak” that has removed the “safety net” for vulnerable people that are then listed in the song, including a disabled man, a single mother and a young abuse victim. The song puts in your face the real people who suffer when a government and a community turn a blind eye.
And of course, there are real people and real impacts behind any discussion on poverty. Lives deprived of their full potential and emotional, physical, psychological impacts that shorten life expectancies. The Child Poverty Action Group research shows that:
Living on a low-income increases parents’ stress levels, in turn affecting relationships and family dynamics. All areas of a child’s life are adversely affected by poverty: home, school, friendships and more. The most visible aspect is that they do not have what their friends have. Child poverty impacts on children’s ability to enjoy their childhoods and achieve their aspirations.
Punk can certainly be proud that it has not shied away from addressing issues of inequality and providing commentary that is a thorn in the side for anyone that wants to bury their head in the sand rather than show solidarity and act for those who need it. From Crass to Redskins, from Chumbawamba to Rancid, punks stand with the oppressed, the left behind and those whose stories should be told.