UB40 - Labour of Love

Good lord, seriously? "Unvaccination" remedies? I just can't even. All i wanted to do after last night of no power in an ice storm during potentially our last weekend inventory was enjoy a random stack of new old records. I've tried to end the Marx thing like a thousand times, but here i am holding UB40s 4th album, and it's an album of covers called Labour of Love. Why can't i stop waking up every morning? 

Now, this might come as a real shock, but UB40 has been known to express a leftist opinion or two. They wanted this to be their first album, but the label said no. Now here they are with the label demanding another album like they're a hot commodity or something. UB40 has a stable lineup and tangible success for close to 30 years, but i need to go check something, be right back... yep, their 8th album is self-titled. Ridiculous. 

Also ridiculous, Communism only exists in the future. Saying The Soviet Union was a Communist Nation is absolute nonsense. What you mean is that Lenin successfully led the Bolshevik Revolution that violently seized control of the government and forcibly attempted to convert the still tangibly peasant subsistence-farming majority of the Russian population into a Capitalist society, which then passed to a State Monopoly under Stalin's unified Communist Party and politically crumbled under Gorbachev's gradual shift to Liberal political and economic policies that weakened the one-party regime. The Soviet Union was in every sense of the word a Corporation of Republics that operated under a very strict model of Socialism (which as i've pointed out is still Capitalism, but with an inversion of the distribution of surplus). We also have to remember that we abandoned Smith/Marx Classical Economics during our own Revolutionary War and France's Revolution where they executed Louis the XVI. So, you have to keep in mind that the Bolsheviks in 1917 are looking around thinking "it's like we're living in the 1700s here, c'mon people!" Lenin very much believed in Communism, but notice that he isn't calling himself that because Communism is what happens AFTER we get through this Capitalism thing. 

He IS waging a truly horrible war on any  peasant population he can find by forcibly taking all the food and goods they produce to feed and clothe his armies and only returning their allotted surplus which forced them to increasingly move to industrial centers exactly like every other country including us did. Gotta cram a couple hundred years of civil unrest and technological innovation into a few decades, after all; we just can't let oligarchs do it to make themselves the economic elite at the expense of the workers (which is exactly what happened when the Soviet Union fell and those business leaders with ties to former Communist officials made a fortune buying unsecured government resources whose prices hadn't yet adjusted to the wider market. The peasants fought back by growing less food and being openly hostile. Lenin and Stalin sent them to the Gulag like any other enemy of the Proletariat. If you actually go read personal accounts of people who lived there you'll find quite a lot of people much preferred their lives under Soviet Socialism as opposed to their parents' lives as peasants or the shock of having to pay for medicine on top of rising food costs afterward, particularly the availability and freedom of choice they had in where they worked and what they actually did to earn money. A lot of people didn't like it though, and i'm not picking sides; i'm arguing about the too many contradictory meanings for the words we vomit into the ether.

Would you look at that, we managed to actually get back to unemployment benefits. There's lots of propagandized versions of arguments about the purpose and effectiveness of unemployment benefits from all sides, but what there isn't is any argument about the actual structure of the American version. It is a corporate managed insurance system audited as part of the State budget, a completely capitalist alternative to taxation, so there's 51 of the darned things. You see, when you fire people for no reason other than you're tired of paying them they lose their source of income and often have to accept lower pay to find a new job if they are desperate. That makes lots of things worse for everyone except the guy who gets to keep that money and yell at everyone else to work harder. 

Labour of Love is much like David Bowie's Pin Ups (which i totally skipped when doing his entire discography), these were songs that meant something to them as Reggae when they were kids. Colin Irwin says it's beautiful and comparing these versions to the originals misses the point, Christgau says it really does grow on you after repeated listens, Bottle points out that they had just obtained the means of production in the form of their own studio so they felt happy, relaxed, and free to experiment while also feeling pressured to churn out albums for their label/owners (that's Socialism inside a Capitalism bubble if you're trying to keep track of it all like their labels certainly are). You see, "the economy" is just the data collected from business deals, not the actual business, and who ever it is who actually interprets that data is "the government." Actually an Auditor goes through it first and the government makes decisions based on the filtered version of the results from it, but that's a bit fussy. The point is that there are governments who tell you what they are doing and governments who don't; i much prefer the former. 

The UBs are telling me to shut up. These were Reggae songs some kids loved back before using Reggae as a political statement was even a thing, just pure love of the music. They honestly had no idea Neil Diamond wrote Red Red Wine. The artwork has some shrapnel in its eye, but we'll accept the naivete for the wink they say it is. These are mostly all love songs of one form or another, it's street party dance music, and it's fun. It is. I like it a lot.