Why Workers Love the Boss

Springsteen’s music seems to come from an intuitive understanding of oppression, exploitation and life at the margins. As a multi-millionaire, Springsteen is, by any Marxist definition, no longer working class, but he is from the working class, of the working class, and his understanding of the complexity and contradictions of working class life transcends his economic status. His work has a boundless empathy for those holding on for dear life, eking their way from one day to the next, from his father and his factory colleagues ‘outside the foreman’s gate, with death in their eyes and hearts filled with hate’ to the sad-eyed sex worker in ‘Candy’s Room’, which juxtaposes a typically muscular, whooshing E Street Band chorus with a delicate, twinkling first verse that treats the titular Candy with tenderness and sensitivity.

That sensitivity is extended to those who can’t work; on ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, Springsteen manages to write in character as an AIDS patient, shedding the power and bombast on which much of his output and popularity was predicated. His songs capture the everyday desperation and alienation of lives at the subordinate levels of the productive process and of lives lived beyond the circuit of capital, and he doesn’t draw on some romanticised notion of workers—the working people of Springsteen’s songs make bad decisions (‘I got Mary pregnant, and man that was all she wrote’) and lapse into criminality and squalor. ‘It was a small town bank, it was a mess/Well I had a gun, you know the rest,’ the protagonist of ‘Highway 29’ tells us, wryly, while the guy who’s ‘got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack’ from ‘Hungry Heart’ lurches from cock-up to cock-up almost cheerfully.

As with much of American counter-culture, there’s a frustrating inability to transition to full-throated anti-capitalism. He comes close, perhaps most notably on ‘Youngstown’ (‘The story’s always the same/Seven-hundred tons of metal a day/Now sir you tell me the world’s changed/Once I made you rich enough/Rich enough to forget my name’), but social patriotism and sentimentality—Springsteen writes nostalgically in his autobiography about the ‘good industry’ of the Nescafe factory he grew up near—always seem to prevent him from making the leap. In the early 80s, Springsteen was already railing against the nascent neoliberal capitalism that led to deindustrialisation and the systematic dismantling of working class communities. ‘I’ve been looking for a job but it’s hard to find,’ sings the doomed aspiring gangster on the electrifying ‘Atlantic City’. ‘Down here it’s just winners and losers, and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.’

The version of ‘Born In The USA’ featured on the Tracks album (originally meant for Nebraska) is stripped of the bandanas and bombast and tracing paper snare drum of the single, and such is its taut, blistering ressentiment that you wonder how even as fatuous an opportunist as Ronald Regan could possibly have interpreted this tirade against the treatment of ex-squaddies as unreconstructed flag-waving. Amidst the social democratic hand-wringing, there’s often an inert, tacit sense of disillusionment with the American dream and its inherent tethering to capitalism. This is most apparent on 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, with its elegiac and understated marrying of ambient keys and pedal steel, its hollow laughter at George H. W. Bush (‘Shelter line stretching round the corner—welcome to the new world order’), and its spine-tingling final verse:

Now Tom said, ‘Mom, wherever there’s a cop beating a guy

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries

Where there’s a fight against the blood and hatred in the air

Look for me, Mom, I’ll be there’

This is Springsteen channelling Steinbeck, but also channelling the kind of crusader he perhaps wishes he was.

Why the Left Loves the Boss

There’s no need to ‘claim’ Springsteen for the left, but it’s worth exploring why many people on the left identify with him—beyond his financial assistance for striking miners—‘the only boss we listen to’. ‘I felt a sense of accountability to the people I had grown up alongside,’ Springsteen said in 2010’s The Promise documentary. ‘I began to wonder how to address that feeling. All of this led to the turn my writing took on ‘Darkness…’’ ‘Darkness’ refers, of course, to 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, and it was here that Springsteen began wrestling with his identity. ‘Rise with your class,’ goes the old saying ‘not out of it’, and Springsteen had been propelled out of his class and into the stratosphere by the undreamt-of success of his ‘Born To Run’ album. ‘I was 27, and the product of top 40 radio. Songs like The Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’, ‘We Gotta Get Outta This Place’… were infused with an early pop class consciousness.’ Springsteen had gone from wanting to be the best hot-shit gunslinging guitarist on the Jersey Shore to an already-jaded rock star stuck in a protracted legal dispute with his former manager and conflicted about how to ‘honour’ his background while also satisfying his existential yearning for something bigger.

Affinity for workers is only part of his appeal. Where Springsteen finds a further commonality with socialists is in the yearning for something more that he communicates via his songs and the characters in them. ‘Darkness’ is a song, Springsteen says, about ‘resilience and commitment to life. To the breath in your lungs.’ ‘There’s a lot of things that, hey, you should be compromising on. And there’s some essential things where you don’t wanna compromise, y’know. what’s the part of life where there’s a part of life where there’s a part of yourself you can’t compromise with or you lose yourself?’

The show-stopping title track from Darkness on the Edge of Town exemplifies an alienation that left-wingers can perhaps see in Springsteen and identify with. Springsteen has written about unemployable drifters who lose everything to their obsessions to a point where it is slightly comical, but committed socialists—whether they are activists, organisers, writers, academics or whatever—can surely relate to Springsteen and the characters in his songs, because we too have chosen to let something that seems esoteric to most define us, and to let its pursuit become all-consuming, even when it becomes deleterious to our own individual interests. We too have experienced something consciousness-expanding and find ourselves searching for something that’s currently shapeless and incorporeal and subject to ridicule. We too sometimes live at the margins, sometimes drifting away from partners and friends who don’t understand. We too have passions and principles that lead to heartbreak or gut-wrenching compromise. We too pay the cost for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness at the edge of town.