Welcome to a (very) belated special Labor Day-themed episode of Well Versed.
There’s something ironic about Labor Day. We live in a country that has historically had the most disorganized labor organizations out of any modern industrialized nation. It’s a day better known for the slashed prices at Kohl’s and Macy’s than the actual people the holiday was made for. In fact, the unions that started the holiday aren’t even around anymore. Which may not seem like a big deal at first until you compare it to the rest of the world — for instance, the Trades Union Congress in England, founded in 1868, is still alive and kicking,
Not to get too Marxist here, but Labor Day feels like some cheap appeasement that the ones who own the means of production have granted the workers — just enough of a momentary respite from their grinding everyday struggle to keep them from getting any funny ideas about rising up. Truer in the late 19th century than it is today, but I can’t help but feel like this holiday is a quick fix for something that we all know isn’t quite right, even if it’s hard for us to put it into words. Simply put: the system we live in isn’t as good as it should be.
This year, amidst a global pandemic with record-breaking unemployment, Labor Day seems more ironic than usual. At least before covid, the people working in groceries and retail stores on Labor Day weren’t risking their lives.
There are a lot of songs about working. One of my favorites is The Clash’s Clampdown. And I love it because it does a great job of telling the truth about what work really is for most of us. Particularly these two verses:
The voices in your head are callin’
Stop wasting your time, there’s nothing comin’
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothin’, so boy get running
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal
But, you grow up and you calm down
And you’re workin’ for the clampdown
You start wearin’ blue and brown
And workin’ for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes ya’ feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
Make your first kill now
For many people for the past century and even before, this is what work is like.
First a little background: this is the ninth song off of The Clash’s seminal album, London Calling, and this particular track came out in 1980. The album, like most of The Clash’s work, is a social critique of capitalism, consumerism, and the corruption of modern politics. This song is no different.
The verse starts inside the perspective of the proverbial “you” of the song, a sort of Everyman, functioning similarly to how Bruce addresses the listener in Badlands (which I go over in detail in the first episode of Well Versed). The line goes:
The voices in your head are callin’
These “voices” seem to be the hopes, dreams, or desires of the character being addressed — even if it’s just the hope of escape from the drudgery of everyday life to something more exciting. But, the song immediately undercuts that hope:
Stop wasting your time, there’s nothing comin’
Only a fool would think someone could save you
From here, the song moves outward from the interior life of the “you” to the exterior world surrounding this character. And things are not looking good. It seems that this character from this verse is being taken advantage of by upper management, as The Clash sings:
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothin’, so boy get running
At this point, we learn a few things: the person being addressed works in a factory and is young. He is the “boy” while the “men” are “cunning,” which, in this context, suggests that they’re out to get him. With this information, it’s clear that this song is not only about the struggle of the workers versus the bourgeois, but it’s also about the youth versus the old. There’s a class and culture war going on here. But this seems like a war the “boy” is bound to lose: things are so hopeless that The Clash tell the boy he’s better off simply running away. And maybe for good reason, given that, as the following line states:
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal
Who is this “they” that The Clash are referring to? I think it’s difficult to give a concrete answer here. It could be the old men at the factory. After all, they are the ones that sign his paycheck, which, we can assume, he desperately needs (after all, it’s for 99% of us). But it could be someone else. What seems clear is that whoever “they” are, they’re the ones that have power over the “boy.” It seems likely that this entails all of the societal forces that control the life of this Everyman character in this verse. It also seems clear that this “they” will “steal” the “best years of [the character’s] life” through money and debt, both being different sides of the same coin that is work. In short, we need money to survive, or we end up in debt. And then we really need money to survive.
The only way to get the money you need: trading your life away for a living.
And once “they” (i.e. the Establishment, or The Man, for lack of a better word) have you beholden to them — whether that’s through the need for a steady paycheck or the debt you’ve incurred — you’re now a part of their system. At that point, all hope of escape is lost; according to The Clash:
You grow up and you calm down
And you’re workin’ for the clampdown
You can’t stay young and idealistic forever. You’re destined to conform to society in order to survive, just like everyone else. And once you do that, you end up working for the clampdown.
The word clampdown is defined as “a severe or concerted attempt to suppress something.”
To The Clash, the clampdown is an omnipresent force that keeps people in their place. It’s the Establishment that prevents you from living the life you want. It puts you into a position where you have to spend most of your days doing things you don’t want to do in exchange for the dream that tomorrow you’ll be able to do what you want. After all, isn’t that what money means for most of us?
Of course, that dream is often never realized. Instead, you spend your life wearing “blue and brown” — blue being the color of a factory worker's’ uniform. It’s also worth noting that brown was the color of nazi uniforms, and it’s likely The Clash are using this here to bring up that connotation. In which case, the band is arguing that our modern democratic society is actually right-wing extremism masqueraded under a different name (i.e. capitalism). Or, in short, that there is something inherently fascist about capitalism itself. This may seem like a stretch, but it would certainly be in line with the band’s politics.
This isn’t necessarily the “boss’s” fault. The workers keep this kind of social hierarchy in place themselves. And The Clash show this brilliantly, saying:
So you got someone to boss around
It makes ya’ feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
Make your first kill now
There is a cyclical nature to the system the character in this verse lives in. People like him have no agency, especially when they’re first entering the working world. Over time, many may get promoted and put in charge of other workers — sometimes this is based on merit, sometimes this is based on age alone. Put in this position, he then has the power to “brutalize” the person he gets to “boss around,” just like how the “old men” at the factory get to “brutalize” him now. There is an inherent paradox here: the “boy” wants to have more control over his life, but the only way to do that would be to encourage all of the workers at the factory to band together and demand more, whether that is through their own place of work, or from the political institutions of their society. But instead of doing that, many of them spend the energy they have increasing the divide amongst workers.
It may seem like I’m reading too much into this verse. So to further support my analysis, I want to bring in a quote from Joe Strummer in an interview with The Los Angeles Times from 1984:
“I only saw my father once a year (after being sent to boarding school). He was a real disciplinarian who was always giving me speeches about how he had pulled himself up by the sweat of his brow: a real guts and determination man. What he was really saying to me was, ‘If you play by the rules, you can end up like me’. And I saw right away I didn’t want to end up like him. Once I got out on my own, I realized I was right. I saw how the rules worked and I didn’t like them.”
There is a generational push towards conforming to the “good life.” The parents sacrifice so the younger generation can live better. But where does the sacrificing end and this “good life” begin? At what point are we all collectively pushing our hopes and dreams onto a tomorrow that never comes?
I didn’t get into The Clash until 2016. I think it was some kind of reaction I had to Trump, some mind-logic that led me down a road of nothing but punk for months on end. It felt good, listening to someone sing the same anger I was feeling — that desire to burn down the world and start over again.
Of course, lot’s changed since The Clash wrote this song. Fewer and fewer people in America and the westernized world work in factories. But I don’t think we have to look any further than a company like Amazon to see how this same con-job is going on today, just as bad as ever- but without the unions that offered some level of protection in the 20th century.
Listening to this song now, I still feel that same anger: the world should be better than this.
But it’s not. And I’m not sure what we can do about it.
We live in a world that is becoming increasingly optimized for profit and nothing else. It’s easy to say that. It’s another thing to make you feel what that does to someone’s life, daily and long-term.
And that’s what’s so powerful about this song. The Clash, they make you understand — or maybe remember — what it’s like to be the young worker in a factory, the kid who just wants to get the fuck out there and keep running.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed your Labor Day.
Did you like reading this essay? You can enjoy it in audio form on the podcast version here.
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