“This is England”: Punk rock’s realist/idealist dialectic and its implications for critical accounting education

Abstract

This paper studies the lyrics of two songs from the Clash, one of the two most important bands from the U.K.’s ‘first wave of punk’ scene. The paper interprets the songs within their institutional, social, economic and political context, i.e. pre-Thatcher and Thatcher Britain. I then draw out the implications of the Clash’s punk ideology for critical accounting educators today, and especially the implications for ethics education. The Clash’s message and moral compass are especially relevant today as (like the Clash’s England) both Bush’s America and an immediately post-Howard Australia have been vastly altered by a harsh neo-liberalism under which alternative (and especially collectivist) voices have been frequently mocked and suppressed. The Clash was able to simultaneously be both realist and idealist and, whilst this contradiction captured the hearts of many, the classic line-up of the band was to disintegrate under the weight of its own contradictions. The critical accounting community is reminded to continue to aspire to both aspects of the realist/idealist dialectic that is so vividly apparent in the Clash’s powerful and poignant early work and especially from the self-titled debut album up to Sandinista!

Keywords:

• Accounting education
• Alienation
• Business ethics
• The Clash
• Critical accounting
• Karl Marx
• Punk rock
• Joe Strummer

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful for the helpful comments of my colleagues at the University of Southern Queensland Simon Fry, Michelle Goyen and Sara Hammer (lecturer in politics), two anonymous reviewers for this journal, and especially the co-editor Glen Lehman of the University of South Australia. I would also like to thank Michael Baczynski (politics lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland) for the illuminating insights he shared with me on such diverse topics as Adorno, Althusser, Foucault, Marx, punk rock and the contemporary Australian political scene during our many corridor conversations in 2007.

Notes

1 The first live gigs played by the three leading bands of U.K. punk’s first wave were: The Sex Pistols 6 November 1975 (at St. Martin’s School of Art, 109 Charing Cross Road, London WC2; Antonia et al., 2006, p. 30; Savage, 2005, pp. 129, 143); the Clash 4 July 1976 (at The Black Swan in Sheffield supporting the Sex Pistols; Antonia et al., 2006, p. 67; Gilbert, 2004, pp. 95–96; Heylin, 2007, pp. 126–127, 132); and the Damned 6 July 1976 (at The 100 Club, Oxford Street, London W1 supporting The Sex Pistols; Antonia et al., 2006, p. 30). Music journalist Caroline Coon regards the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned as the “three prongs” of punk: the Pistols had the personal politics, the Clash the real politics and the Damned the theatre, camp, and good fun (cited in Lydon, Zimmerman, & Zimmerman, 1994, p. 108).

2 Heylin (2007) is the most detailed reference book on punk released to date. Heylin’s (2007) book has a pro-Sex Pistols, pro-Damned tone, but Heylin is clearly not as upbeat about the Clash whom he labels “po-faced” (p. 198). Heylin (2007, p. 147) fails to be convinced by the Clash’s “quasi-political shtick” and he labels their fans “a (largely reactionary) set of souls”.

3 The paper’s emphasis on the Clash is not to deny the importance of the Sex Pistols to the first wave of punk. Dave Ruffy, a punk scene identity from the first-wave, speaks thus about the continued relevance of the Pistols’ message in the mid-90s: “The whole thing about English society is that if you’re a poor boy, you’ve got nobody to tell you that you can do anything. … No one is there to encourage you. The important thing about the Sex Pistols is that they were years ahead of today’s realities. ‘No future’ is much more of a reality for more people now than it was then” (cited in Lydon et al., 1994, p. 224).

4 Regarding instinctual yearnings for release from capitalist oppression, Harman (1997, p. 32, chap. 1, emphasis added) writes that “[t]he [working] class as a whole is constantly engaged in unconscious opposition to capitalism” whilst Cliff (1997, p. 68, chap. 3, emphasis added) in the same volume talks about this class being oppressed by capitalism “materially as well as spiritually”.

5 An anonymous reviewer for this paper points out correctly that outsider music of dissent and solidarity has had a long and colourful history that definitely to a certain extent predates punk’s first wave.

6 The DIY ethic, when combined with complete honesty, sometimes had a downside. Heylin (2007, p. 591) remarks how by 1985 the independent record-label SST, founded by Greg Ginn of U.S. hardcore punks Black Flag, copped much flak from actions that revealed the limitations of its (allegedly) “anti-success” and “un-businesslike” worldview. This paper does not cover the American hardcore punk scene of the early 1980s. For a discussion of what constitutes a “scene” (and why it is a superior concept to “sub-culture”) within the academic literature on popular music, see Harris (2000) and Kahn-Harris (2007).

7 Of course I have not had the pleasure of sitting in on ethics classes conducted by other accounting lecturers. My inference here is based upon an examination of the ethics chapters of four leading Australian financial accounting/auditing textbooks, Arens et al. (2007), Gay and Simnett (2007), Henderson, Peirson, and Herbohn (2005), and Leung, Coram, and Cooper (2007). I presume that many educators (but almost certainly not all as both anonymous reviewers pointed out to me) will follow the order of topics of their preferred textbook and the emphasis given to each topic by that book.

8 The former Immigration Minister in the Howard Government Kevin Andrew’s public decision to reduce the number of Sudanese refugees that Australia would take in the coming years due to their alleged “inability to integrate” is a recent (October 2007) example of life and the moral state of political debate under Howard. A bashing of a black man in Melbourne occurred several days after Andrew’s public pronouncements.

9 Heylin (2007, p. 303) meticulously regards the first wave of punk as concluding as early as November 1977 with the release of Wire’s Pink Flag album, released only two weeks after the Sex Pistols’ studio debut full-length Never Mind the Bollocks. The best definition of the first wave of punk belongs to Savage (2005, p. 588): “This [term] includes the very first groups formed in response to the Sex Pistols or the existing groups who sped up their R&B modes: common throughout is the Ramonic style which became the standard definition of Punk”.

10 I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this article.

11 The song “London’s Burning” (1977) draws heavily for inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise about the deterioration of social order in a apartment tower block (Gilbert, 2004, pp. 39, 94, 148; Savage, 2005).

12 Regarding the contemporary sociological concept of the underclass, see Giddens (1989, pp. 221, 752), McGregor (2001, pp. 26, 272–286), Waters and Crook (1993, pp. 193–207, 262–285), Wild (1978, pp. 21, 40, 63–65, 173).

13 The two most visible social change agendas in critical accounting are probably Tinker’s (1999, 2004, 2005) ‘Marxist humanism’ and Gallhofer and Haslam’s (1997, 2003, 2004) ‘liberation theology’. Tinker’s (2004) paper suggests that these two idealistic worldviews should not be regarded as fundamentally incompatible since anti-capitalism has been an important plank in both of these traditions. As Tinker has written in another place (Tinker, 2005), the critical accounting community has been historically defined more by what we oppose (the excesses of the capitalist system and in some cases capitalism per se) than by what we espouse.

14 This song originally appeared on 1979s Cost of Living EP and also appears on the posthumous 1994 album Super Black Market Clash.

15 There are parallels here of course with the Sex Pistols. After “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save the Queen”, what more was there possibly left for them to say? Sex Pistol John Lydon has remarked in interviews in 2007 that anything important that he had to say is already there on the debut album Never Mind the Bollocks. The replacement of Glen Matlock with the hopeless tragic Sid Vicious was both the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end for the Pistols.

16 “Bankrobber” was released as a single prior to the Sandinista! (1980) album and also appears on 2003s The Essential Clash compilation.

17 For a clear expression of the Frankfurt School’s theory of false consciousness, see Adorno (1994b); McPhail (1999, pp. 841, 843).

18 As Weil (2006, p. 44) also writes: “That is why those who plunge men into affliction before they are prepared to receive it are killers of souls”. A whole ethics course could easily be built around this brilliant sentence (and what a fantastic course it would be).

19 For a vivid indicator that the early punks perceived that they were “alienated against their fellow-men”, and were railing against this alienation, consider the following December 1978 quote from guitarist John McKay of Souxsie & the Banshees: “We feel alienation all the time … which is why we’re in this band. Alienated from society, alienated from the rest of humanity” (cited in Antonia et al., 2006, p. 116).

20 In Blumberg’s (1989, p. 47) words, in the spirit of Marcuse, “[h]e [the capitalist salesman] is thus alienated from his own sensible purpose and ultimately from his own integrity. The marketplace takes a skilled human resource, squanders it, and turns it against those who might be helped by it [i.e. customers]”.

21 To the best of my knowledge, “Something about England” appears only on the Sandinista! triple-album of 1980. With lyrics like these, it can rightly be argued that lyrically (although probably not musically) the Clash peaked on Sandinista! Strummer seems reinvigorated and the depression evident in songs such as “Death or Glory” on the previous year’s London Calling seems somewhat dispelled.

22 In regards income inequality in the specific contemporary context of globalization see Boyce (2006), diFazio (1998), Esposito, Aronowitz, Chancer, diFazio, and Yard (1998), Fishman (2006), Held and McGrew (2002), Hoogvelt (1997), Jones and Fleming (2003), Korten (2001), Nederveen Pieterse (2002), Worthington (2000).

23 Writing under the name of a pseudonym is a common literary device of philosophers as Søren Kierkegaard did in his classic existentialist books Fear and trembling (1985) and The sickness unto death (1989). It allows the philosopher to make certain observations about the world without being forced to defend every little thing that she/he has written.

24 “Gazing into the face of the Other” (Everett, 2007; Levinas, 1969; Stratton, 1998, p. 210) should facilitate a shared commitment to real and culturally-appropriate social change (Marcuse, 1968, chap. 1). “The other” to McPhail (1999, following Bauman, 1993) is simply “opposite” (p. 861, n. 13) or “other people” (p. 857). In an immediately post-Howard Australia, post-9/11, the Bali bombings, and the Cronulla riots, the Other would include the Lebanese Muslim Australians living in suburbs such as Bankstown and Lakemba in Sydney’s inner-West.

25 Noon and Blyton’s (2002, pp. 228–236) industrial relations/sociology of work textbook uses Marx’s four-fold alienation theory as the theoretical foundation and starting-point for their “Survival Strategies at Work” chapter (Chapter 9). Accounting students at the moment do not have exposure to this theory.