The end of the twentieth century was marked by a sense of closure for many in the West. The Cold War was over, Western democracy had triumphed, and the future of neoliberalist capitalism seemed secure. The ‘end of history’, as Francis Fukuyama prematurely called it was, of course, short lived.1 The new century ushered in a series of economic and political crises that have shaken fin-de-siècle complacency to its core. Events ranging from the banking crisis of 2008 and the economic collapse of countries such as Greece to recent scandals surrounding ‘fake news’ and the activities of organizations like Cambridge Analytica have posed serious challenges to the primacy of neoliberalism, capitalism, and contemporary democratic processes. At the same time, the rise of far-right extremism and populism has resulted in bewildering shifts to the political discourses of both Europe and the United States. One response to these unsettling changes has been a resurgence of leftist politics. Over a century after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and fifty years on from the protests of 1968, socialist ideals have found a renewed impetus in the rise of movements such as Occupy, Podemos, Syriza, and grassroots support for politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

This article asks how we might map the complex relations between music and socialism. If an abiding concern of socialism is the collective appropriation of the means of production, what are the points at which music might participate in this project? Three moments from the history of music's entanglements with socialism shed light on this question. The first considers music's role in workers’ struggles in Europe c. 1900. Here what is at stake is how music and musical associations (most notably workers’ choruses) were mobilized as a tool in the struggle to socialize the means of production. A second vignette turns to France after May 1968, when music itself became a site of political intervention. Here what is at stake is the struggle to socialize the means of musical production, part of the struggle to institute a truly democratic culture. The third vignette turns its attentions to the proximate future, considering music's place in emerging forms of digital capitalism. Crucial in this regard is the way music is being transformed into a means of production in its own right – a means, that is, of producing the kinds of subjects required by contemporary capitalism – as well as the political constraints and possibilities these shifts present for a socialism of the future.

Our fraught political moment is a propitious one for renewing the Marxist approach to music. Because that approach has consistently been folded into a more general Marxist discourse on art and aesthetics, any attempt must begin by revisiting what is essential to that discourse. I take its keystone to be the realist conception of art. This conception holds that artworks are a means by which at least some of their appreciators come to know truths about the world outside consciousness. Insofar as they are representational, painting, fiction, music, and drama potentially constitute vehicles for coming to understand the real world. Artistic representation on this view is understood to be analogous to mental representation.

Previous studies of Marxist aesthetics have followed Maurice Merleau-Ponty in making a sharp distinction between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ branches of the tradition. The Eastern, beleaguered by the exigencies of Communist Party rule is often presented as the corrupt twin of the Western. The latter, developed in relative freedom and informed by a Hegelian legacy suppressed by Stalinism, alone commands theoretical, rather than merely historical, interest. This article departs from this Cold War framework in arguing that the Hegelian strand in Marxist aesthetics grows out of its Bolshevik predecessor and, crucially, shares with it a realist conception of art. After reconstructing the emergence and development of this conception (paying special attention to how music is directly addressed in the literature), I evaluate the compatibility of the realist conception of art with the materialist conception of history as it is found in Marx and Engels. I ultimately argue that moving past the realist conception of art is key to renewing the Marxist approach to music for our time.

This article examines the labour of socialist music in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on composer Paul Dessau's use of political cryptography and quotation in a number of compositions from the opera The Condemnation of Lukullus (1950) through to Choral Music No. 5 (1976). Most famous for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, Dessau was the leading avant-garde composer of the GDR and its chief practitioner of serialism. He believed that only difficult, progressive New Music could convey the struggle(s) of socialism. This brought him into conflict with the authorities, who accused him of formalism. Choral Music No. 5 is a setting of a poem by Heiner Müller based on a speech by Erich Honecker (Žižek refers to the text as an ‘obscenity’). Dessau's composition is complex and dialectical, abrasive in its rhythms and counterpoint, and pluralistic in style. It is the embodiment of Dessau's belief in socialist music as rewarding hard work.

Members of the rock band Henry Cow co-founded Music for Socialism in early 1977 with the assistance of several associates in London's cultural left. Their first large event, a socialist festival of music at the Battersea Arts Centre, gathered folk musicians, feminists, punks, improvisers, and electronic musicians in a confabulation of workshops, performances, and debates. The organization would continue to produce events and publications examining the relationship between left politics and music for the next eighteen months. Drawing on published sources, archival documents, and interviews, this article documents and analyzes the activities of Music for Socialism, filling out the picture of a fascinating, fractious organization that has too often served as a thin caricature of abstruse failure compared with the better resourced, more successful, and well-documented Rock Against Racism. As important as the latter was to anti-racist activism during the rise of the National Front, it was not concerned with the issues that Music for Socialism considered most important – namely, how musical forms embody their own politics and how musicians might control their means of production. Affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party (UK), Rock Against Racism produced massive benefit concerts and rallies against the fascist right, drawing together musicians and audiences from punk and reggae. The much smaller events of Music for Socialism enrolled musicians from a range of popular music genres and often placed as much emphasis on discussion and debate as they did on having a good time. The organization's struggles, I will suggest, had less to do with ideological rigidity than it did with the itineracy and penury of musicians and intellectuals lacking support from the music industry, governmental arts funding, labor organizations, or academia.

In this article I examine the use of music in modernist and politically engaged Yugoslav cinema of the 1960s through three groundbreaking black wave films: Želimir Žilnik's Rani radovi (Early Works, 1969), Dušan Makavejev's WR: Misterije organizma (WR: Mysteries of the Organism, 1971), and Lazar Stojanović’s Plastični isus (Plastic Jesus, 1971). With a specific focus on the use of Partisan songs, I analyse how key political moments are encoded with new levels of meaning in these films, often through parody, irony, and satire. I identify a ‘sonic turn’ within black wave cinema and propose a method of ‘intertextual listening’ to reflect the importance of contextual knowledge in identifying and interpreting the cultural and political baggage trafficked into these movies. I ask how does music shape the discursive strategies and communicative potential of these films, rendering pre-composed music a powerful medium for social and political critique? And in what ways does film music construct the Yugoslav socialist experience more broadly, reflecting how ideals of reform socialism found musical expression in Yugoslav novi film?

Central to the official identity of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was the state's positioning of itself as the antifascist and anti-colonial other to West Germany. This claim was supported by the GDR's extensive programme of international solidarity, which was targeted at causes such as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. A paradox existed, however, between the vision of a universal proletariat that underpinned the discourse of solidarity and the decidedly more exclusive construct of socialist identity that was fostered in the GDR itself. In this article, I explore some of the processes of othering that were embedded in solidarity narratives by focusing on two quite contrasting musical outputs that were produced in the name of solidarity: the LP Kämpfendes Vietnam, which was released on the Amiga record label in 1967, and the Deutsche Staatsoper's 1973 production of Ernst Hermann Meyer's anti-apartheid opera, Reiter der Nacht.

This article considers the role of Marxism in the history of popular music studies. Its approach combines the sociology of knowledge with a personal memoir and its argument is that in becoming a field of scholarly interest popular music studies drew from both Marxist theoretical arguments about cultural ideology in the 1950s and 1960s and from rock writers’ arguments about the role of music in shaping socialist bohemianism in the 1960s and 1970s. To take popular music seriously academically meant taking it seriously politically. Once established as an academic subject, however, popular music studies were absorbed into both established music departments and vocational, commercial music courses. Marxist ideas and ideologues were largely irrelevant to the subsequent development of popular music studies as a scholarly field.

Nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have got used to seeing the Bolshevik Revolution as the prelude to a failed political experiment, albeit one that lasted a remarkably long time. But why do we see it as a failure? After all, the Soviet Union was a vast empire regarded as the military equal of the United States, feared and hated by successive US presidents, whose influence extended far beyond Soviet borders to include regimes in Africa, South East Asia, Central and South America. Had Mikhail Gorbachev not been removed in 1991, and had the Soviet system been able to reform itself into something like the form of communism we see today in China, no one would regard those seventy-plus years of Soviet power as a failure at all. What is meant by failure, in truth, is not really military or economic failure so much as a failure to sustain and uphold the ideals of equality and social justice that originally drew so many to the communist cause. The haemorrhaging of members from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1956, for instance, was a result of widespread feelings of shock and disgust after Nikita Khrushchev's revelations at the Twenty-First Party Conference that year, at which he delivered his so-called ‘secret speech’ condemning Stalin's regime. For those who left the CPGB, and other communist parties across Western Europe, it was painful to realize that what they had for decades dismissed as ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ had in fact been accurate reportage. Most shocking of all was learning that the mass arrests and disappearances of the 1930s, and even the show trials of prominent Politburo and party members, were not proportionate, if regrettable, responses to plots to murder Stalin and overthrow Soviet power at all, but rather Stalinist crimes of epic and tragic proportions. Right up to the end of the Communist regime in Russia, reports of political and religious repression, the continued use of the Gulag system, confinement and forced treatment of dissidents in mental hospitals, literary and other cultural censorship continued to filter through the Iron Curtain.

We are now reaching the last flurry of half-century commemorations of the 1960s. What is striking in these backwards glances – most recently, fifty years since 1967’s Summer of Love, and fifty years since ‘1968’ – is the truncation of events, the conflation of ideas, the simplification of meaning. Years and eras are impossible to encapsulate in sound bites or longer narratives of public memorialization, so music often serves as a convenient shorthand; yet popular songs of 1967 and 1968 only occasionally spoke to contemporary events, and more often skated over the surface of deep cultural rifts and political upheaval. What we now retain is a sort of shared mythology – 1967 was peaceful, 1968 was violent – that complicates our ability to see the past in the present. As I aim to show here, the 1960s continue to resonate today in ways that force us to confront history, for as William Faulkner wrote, ‘the past is never dead. It's not even past.’