REVIEWS

Political,
traditional
folk music

mingle at
festival

Sunshine throughout the weekend, record
crowds and a good cross-sampling of polit-
ics marked the 7th annual Vancouver Folk
Music Festival July 13-15.

Whether it was expatriate South Africans
Tony Bird and Morris Goldberg delivering
the message of African liberation move-
ments in a session entitled, “‘Who are the
real terrorists?” or Headlines Theatre’s
David Diamond performing his Solicitor-
General-Robert-Kaplan-justifying-the-
new-spy-bill routine (a repeat from the
Solidarity rally in Vancouver a week ear-
lier), this year’s festival at Jericho Beach
Park placed unprecedented emphasis on the
fightback at home and abroad.

The. audiences, grouped into tens and
hundreds around several area stages for
mini-concerts and workshops, or spread
out in thousands in the acres-large field fac-
ing the huge evening concert stage, cheered,
laughed and applauded Canadian social
satirists Nancy White and Stringband, or
local traditional music performers Keith
Malcolm and Grizzly Frank Metcalf.

Other sounds abounded. The festival,
which drew an estimated 20,000 to the week-
end’s activities and which may have taken
enough in receipts to ease the annual
$40,000 deficit, also featured bluegrass, old-
timey, blues and “new acoustic music” from
the western world, in addition to the Afri-
can rhythms of Themba Tana, Laotian
music and the antics of a series of mime
artists, magicians and other theatrical
performers.

A special stage devoted to children’s
concerts — dubbed the “Little Folks”
festival — proved a popular attraction that
will likely be repeated in future festivals.

The 1984 festival marked a tradition that
has flourished in Canada since the organiz-
ers of the Mariposa Folk Festival kicked off
the first of many subsequent festivals back
in 1961. The location then was Orillia,
Ont. — the “Mariposa” town in Stephen
Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little

TRIBUNE PHOTOS — DAN KEETON

Folk festival crowd fills grounds at Jericho Park. Top left, Guatemalan exile group Kin Lalat; at right, Jane Sapp.

Town — and it helped launch such Cana-
dian native sons as Gordon Lightfoot in to
international acclaim.

The true value of folk festivals, however,
has never been their occasional tendency to
produce media stars. Rather, it is their abil-
ity to collectively keep alive, following the
lead of a handful of inidividuals such as Pete
Seeger and Alan Lomax, a “people’s
music” that preserves history while promot-
ing a humanism that is timeless.

In preserving traditions, the music
offered at the festival also reflected variety.
Alongside Kathy Fink’s traditional banjo
styles one heard the defiant rhythms of
Guatemalan exiles grouped together in the
Nicaragua-based Kin Lalat, or the Salva-
doran revolutionary musicians in Yolo-
camba Ita.

In workshops and on the main stage,
black activist and singer Jane Sapp gave
new words and meaning to traditional Bap-
tist gospel tunes. Jamaican-born Canadian
Lillian Allen introduced thousands of Brit-
ish Columbians to “Dub” poetry, an Afri-
can heritage updated with the progressive
sentiments and rhythms of the reggae music
of the 70s.

Even within traditional music, the style
changes with time. The “Celtic revival”
boom of recent years gave way this year to
re-emphasis on blues, as veteran bluesman
Brownie McGhee headed up a coterie of
Chicago-area artists reflecting a diversity of
styles within the idiom.

But the 1984 festival showed that the
essence of what is called, more for conven-
ience than any other reason, “folk”

music — and poetry, and theatre — has
not changed. Both the humorous anecdotes
of a naked, amorous barnyard rooster
told by Jackie Torrence, and the clas*
conscious, militant poetry of England$
Adrian Mitchell contained that overwhel™
ing humanism that speaks of the lives 0
everyday people and their persevera”
over adversity and oppression. ;
This year’s crowds ensured, said festival
director Gary Cristall, that there will be
8th annual Vancouver Folk Music Festi¥
in 1985. But festival organizers warn th@
without adequate funding — always. a
short supply — the event may soon be JU
a memory. The festival appreciates all don®
tions, which can be sent to 3271 Ma!
Street, Vancouver, VSV 3M6.
— Dan Keeto#
a

Capitalism, Socialism and Scientific
and Technical Revolution. Progress
Publishers, Moscow, $1.95, 182 pp.
Available at People’s Co-ops Books.

It is not likely that anyone picked up a
newspaper two hundred years ago and
read a headline proclaiming the coming of
the industrial revolution. Nor will such a
headline appear today, even though we are
again going through an historic change
—the scientific and technological
revolution.

Bourgeois politicians are aware that
something is going on, but they believe we
are powerless to do anything about it. In
the purely technical sense, it is true that the
computer chip is as inevitable as was the
harnessing of steam. The social and eco-
nomic consequences of the scientific and
technological revolution (the STR), how-
ever, depend on social and economic
factors. :

The chief purpose of this short book
— part of the Library of Political Know-

ledge series — is to compare the effects of
the STR in capitalist and socialist econo-
mies, focusing particularly on the U.S. and

_ the USSR. Both systems are technologi-
_ cally advanced, and both seek to benefit

from the resulting changes. But the uses to
which the new technology is put are quite
different.

In capitalist societies, the STR has
increased unemployment, as fewer workers

are needed. Productivity and profit per
worker has also increased. This has the

effect — one with which we are now tho- ~

roughly familiar — of an erosion of the
people’s standards of living, one which is
seen to be inevitable, and probably is, as
long as we are governed by Tories or
Liberals.

Most people assume that the changes

The high-tech revolution in two societies

must have the beneficial effect of making
manufacturing methods more efficient
and cheap and improving products. They
should remember that the high costs of the
new technology and the intense competi-
tion it has inspired tend to result in
monopolies. If a few giants dominate an
industry, they raise prices, resist higher
quality, and retard new technologies,
which might threaten the status quo.

Small businesses, already crippled by
high interest rates, cannot stand the com-
petition. The author suggests that the most
significant competition in the capitalist
world is between countries rather than
within them, most obviously between the
U.S. and Japan.

One reason for this is that the main
beneficiaries of the new technology, in the
U.S., are the military and aerospace indus-
tries. These are helped by the taxpayer
(weapons alone will cost the average fam-
ily $5,000 a year for the rest of the decade)
and gobble up a huge share of research
and development expertise and money.

Lacking a profit motive, and enjoying
democratic control, the socialist countries,
on the other hand, have used the STR t0
increase the production of socially desira-
ble goods and to relieve workers from —
drudgery. Shorter working weeks and
longer holidays have been introduced: }
This has been done without creating any —
unemployment. |

It is possible to increase production ©
without wielding the whip of layoffs and
to increase the size of the pie — to borrow ~
a favorite metaphor of conservatives |
— without private appropriation of the
economy. In the 30 years between 1950 |
and 1980, the years of the STR, socialism |
has done better than capitalism, at least a5
measured by the statistics of the chief
examples. The USSR’s average annual
increases in national income, industria! |
production and productivity were between —
double and triple the rate of America? —
growth. ;

— Jeremy Agar

6 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JULY 25, 1984