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Dave Randall is a musician, producer and activist. He has toured the world playing guitar with Faithless, Dido, Sinead O’Connor and many others. He also teaches guitar and creative industries courses at BIMM University Bristol.

For issue 157 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Randall's latest edition of Sound System. Here, he reflects on how the neoliberal era was born from a violent coup in Chile, which silenced dissent by murdering folk singer Víctor Jara, proving the ruling class would rather use brutal coercion than allow genuine democratic change.

To read Randall's interview on Sound System, click here.

We’ve seen how the most popular songs of the twentieth century reveal a creeping sense of alienation, but there’s no doubt the middle of the century was a time of hope for millions around the world. Colonialism was crumbling, workers’ wages rising and cracks were starting to appear in the USSR with the death of Stalin in 1954 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Campaigns for racial, sexual and gender equality gained ground in the US and left-wing movements won popular support across the Caribbean and Latin America. In May 1968, Paris became the centre of a near revolution that inspired a generation into radical politics. The ruling classes were worried. They decided to try to reverse the tide, tighten their grip on society and find a way of extracting higher profits from workers for lower pay. A strategy was drawn up by the Chicago School of economists who advocated the complete deregulation of the market and removal of any obstacles to that end. The test ground was Chile and the first obstacles were a democratically elected left-leaning president, Salvador Allende, and a massive radical workers’ movement. The strategists’ solution was a CIA-orchestrated coup that took place on 11 September 1973, costing the lives of more than 10,000 Chileans including the president. It was here in the destruction of democracy that capitalism’s most recent incarnation – neoliberalism – was born.

One of the victims of the Chilean coup was the singer/ songwriter, poet and theatre director Víctor Jara. A supporter of the elected president’s Popular Unity party, Jara pioneered a new folk-influenced form of politicised music known as Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song). The American political folk singer Phil Ochs told his brother after meeting Jara: ‘I just met the real thing. Pete Seeger and I are nothing compared to this. I mean here’s a man who really is what he’s saying’. Following the coup, Jara was arrested, taken to Chile Stadium and tortured before being shot in the head. Around 3,000 other workers, students, trade unionists and activists were also massacred in the stadium.

This wasn’t the first example of a political singer being executed, but it was the first to reach the consciousness of a generation of North Americans and Europeans. The coup sent a shockwave around the world. Liberals who had previously thought radical change could be peacefully ushered in through the ballot box learned a bitter lesson: when the ruling classes fail to win consent, they resort to ruthless coercion to achieve their aims. Jara had understood this for some time. After being physically attacked by right-wing thugs at a university gig in 1969, his wife Joan noted:

"It made Víctor realise very clearly just what he might expect if he continued to express in his songs what he felt had to be said. But there is no doubt that his commitment and his resolve were strengthened rather than weakened by it. He took a step forwards rather than backwards in the face of violence, taking the risk with his eyes open."

Jara’s eyes were also open to the covert battle to manufacture consent. He could see beyond the immediate threat of fascism and understood the more subtle ways in which people are Sound System 60 manipulated. Protest singers and their songs, he realised, were well within the reach of rulers’ attempts to control culture:

"US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first the commercialisation of so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralising the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song.’"

Excerpted with permission from Sound System: The Political Power of Music by Dave Randall. Published by Pluto Books.

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