John Lennon - Revolution

[jazzimov]

We all know that John Lennon was a Dreamer -
But could he also have been a *gasp* Pragmatist? Is it possible to be both? (I submit that it is..... because I'm one!)

Revolution

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know we all wanna change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know we all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know it's gonna be alright, alright
Don't you know it's gonna be alright

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know we'd all love to see the plan, oh yeah
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know we're all doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is, brother, you have to wait

Don't you know it's gonna be alright
Know it's gonna be alright
Don't you know it's gonna be alright, hey, hey

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know we all wanna change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know you better free your mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone, anyhow

Don't you know it's gonna be alright[
To know it's gonna be alright
Know it's gonna be alright

Oh, alright, alright, alright
Alright, alright, alright

Songwriters
LENNON, JOHN / MCCARTNEY, PAUL

[last1standing]

1. I won't try to use a single song to sum up the entire philosophy of a great artist.

But I will say that there's a difference between pragmatism and cynicism.

TPP isn't pragmatic.

Keystone XL isn't pragmatic.

Robbing the elderly through chained CPI isn't pragmatic.

Bailing out banks while leaving the poor susceptible to fraud and foreclosure isn't pragmatic.

[El_Johns]

2. During overdubs..Lennon...altered one line into the ambiguous "you can count me out, in"

He later explained that he included both because he was undecided in his sentiments....

The line referencing Mao Zedong was added to the lyrics in the studio. During filming of a promotional clip later that year, Lennon told the director that it was the most important lyric of the song.[8] Lennon had changed his mind by 1972, saying "I should have never put that in about Chairman Mao".[9]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_%28Beatles_song%29

John Lennon, 1971

TARIQ ALI: Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen?

John Lennon: I’ve always been politically minded, you know, and against the status quo. It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it’s just a basic working class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up in the system...

I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because I knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us–it was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beatle world it got left out, I got farther away from reality for a time.

TA: What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?

JL: Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but I realise in retrospect that it’s the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers. That’s the choice they allow you–now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I’m saying on the album in ‘Working class hero’. As I told Rolling Stone, it’s the same people who have the power, the class system didn’t change one little bit. Of course, there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

Robin Blackburn: Of course, class is something the American rock groups haven’t tackled yet.

JL: Because they’re all middle class and bourgeois and they don’t want to show it. They’re scared of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in America, clinging on to their goods. But if these middle class groups realise what’s happening, and what the class system has done, it’s up to them to repatriate the people and to get out of all that bourgeois shit.

TA: In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?

JL: Ah, sure, ‘Revolution’ . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said ‘count me out’. The original version which ends up on the LP said ‘count me in’ too; I put in both because I wasn’t sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution–but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

On the version released as a single I said ‘when you talk about destruction you can count me out’. I didn’t want to get killed. I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn’t go around shouting about it. That was how I felt–I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.






RB: Well, in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren’t they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment …

JL: That’s what I’m trying to do on my albums and in these interviews. What I’m trying to do is to influence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dream and just put a big question mark in their mind. The acid dream is over, that is what I’m trying to tell them....

I was also pleased when the movement in America took up ‘Give peace a chance’ because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing ‘We shall overcome’ from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution now …

It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult–even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too, with Che and Fidel. In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers’ image of themselves as the father-figure....

YO: The people have got to trust in themselves.

TA: That’s the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can’t be done just by propaganda–the workers must move, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France…the workers began to feel their own strength.

JL: But the Communist Party wasn’t up to that, was it?

RB: No, they weren’t. With 10 million workers on strike they could have led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in the centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all government buildings and installations, replacing de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Soviets–that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They preferred to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiative themselves…

JL: Great, but there’s a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They haven’t woken up yet here, they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer. You should get these left-wing students out to talk with the workers, you should get the school-kids involved with The Red Mole.

TA: You’re quite right, we have been trying to do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening…

JL: I don’t think that Bill can work. I don’t think they can enforce it. I don’t think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but this Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants can’t even live in their own homes now, and they’re selling more arms to the South Africans. Like Richard Neville said, there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it’s in that inch that we live….

RB: It may be true that we live in the Inch of difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we’ll be impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he’s doing us a good turn without meaning to…

JL: Yes, I’ve thought about that, too. This putting us in a corner so we have to find out what is coming down on other people. I keep on reading the Morning Star (the Communist newspaper) to see if there’s any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.

We should be trying to reach the young workers because that’s when you’re most idealistic and have least fear.

Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won’t approach them. But it’s difficult to know where to start; we’ve all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I’ve grown away from most working-class people–you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdinck. It’s the students who are buying us now, and that’s the problem. Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don’t have the impact we had when we were together…

RB: Now you’re trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much more difficult.

JL: Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribution and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn’t have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.

Even now it’s the same; if you’re an unknown artist you’re lucky to get an hour in a studio–it’s a hierarchy and if you don’t have hits, you don’t get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn’t like it. With the last record they’ve censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical–they have to let me sing it but they don’t dare let you read it. Insanity.

RB: Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated.

JL: Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they’re repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought ‘Paul is a good lad, he doesn’t make trouble’.

Also when Yoko and I got married, we got terrible racialist letters–you know, warning me that she would slit my throat. Those mainly came from Army people living in Aldershot. Officers.

Now workers are more friendly to us, so perhaps it’s changing. It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don’t pass on your own awareness then it closes down again. That is why the basic need is for the students to get in with the workers and convince them that they are not talking gobbledegook. And of course it’s difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather* anyway. [Ed. Note: Vic Feather 1908-76 was General Secretary of the TUC from 1969-73.]

So the only thing is to talk to them directly, especially the young workers. We’ve got to start with them because they know they’re up against it. That’s why I talk about school on the album. I’d like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority...

The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.

YO: I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself. In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There’s no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns....But violence isn’t just a conceptual thing, you know. I saw a programme about this kid who had come back from Vietnam–he’d lost his body from the waist down. He was just a lump of meat, and he said, ‘Well, I guess it was a good experience.’

JL: He didn’t want to face the truth, he didn’t want to think it had all been a waste…

YO: But think of the violence, it could happen to your kids …

RB: But Yoko, people who struggle against oppression find themselves attacked by those who have a vested interest in nothing changing, those who want to protect their power and wealth. Look at the people in Bogside and Falls Road in Northern Ireland; they were mercilessly attacked by the special police because they began demonstrating for their rights. On one night in August 1969, seven people were shot and thousands driven from their homes. Didn’t they have a right to defend themselves?

YO: That’s why one should try to tackle these problems before a situation like that happens.

JL: Yes, but what do you do when it does happen, what do you do?

RB: Popular violence against their oppressors is always justified. It cannot be avoided.

YO: But in a way the new music showed things could be transformed by new channels of communication.

JL: Yes, but as I said, nothing really changed.

YO: Well, something changed and it was for the better. All I’m saying is that perhaps we can make a revolution without violence.

JL: But you can’t take power without a struggle…Because, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they won’t let the people have any power; they’ll give all the rights to perform and to dance for them, but no real power…

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It’s quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that’s the dialectic, isn’t it–but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order. I don’t know what the answer is; obviously Mao is aware of this problem and keeps the ball moving...Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running...we all have bourgeois instincts within us, we all get tired and feel the need to relax a bit. How do you keep everything going and keep up revolutionary fervour after you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve? Of course Mao has kept them up to it in China, but what happens after Mao goes? Also he uses a personality cult. Perhaps that’s necessary; like I said, everybody seems to need a father figure.

But I’ve been reading Khrushchev Remembers. I know he’s a bit of a lad himself–but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn’t seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that’s the difficulty.

If we took over Britain, then we’d have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind...

I think it wouldn’t take much to get the youth here really going. You’d have to give them free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It’s already happening, though people have got to get together more.

And the women are very important too, we can’t have a revolution that doesn’t involve and liberate women. It’s so subtle the way you’re taught male superiority.

It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She’s a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That’s why I’m always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women...

As we get beyond the dream this should be easier: that’s why I’m putting out more heavy statements now and trying to shake off the teeny-bopper image.

I want to get through to the right people, and I want to make what I have to say very simple and direct...

TA: How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?

JL: I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They’ve got cars and tellies and they don’t want to think there’s anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They’re dreaming someone else’s dream, it’s not even their own. They should realise that the blacks and the Irish are being harassed and repressed and that they will be next.

As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said: ‘To each according to his need’. I think that would work well here. But we’d also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all.

We’ve got to start all this from where we ourselves are oppressed. I think it’s false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/08/the-lost-john-lennon-interview/


So now, for the first time, you can hear John Lennon and Yoko Ono make the case for revolution, feminism and the racism they faced when they fell in love. He also reveals that Sir Paul McCartney is a conservative and that contributed to the Beatles’ split.

http://socialistresistance.org/5618/exclusive-recording-of-john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-talking-about-revolution