The Banks Are Made of Marble
Sometimes We Have to Sing and Cry and Hit the Streets…
by Harry Targ
Fred was dating a young woman who gave him the two Weavers Carnegie Hall albums for Chanukah in the winter of 1958. He brought the albums over to my 
house so I could listen. He never got them back.
I’m not a Red Diaper baby. I didn’t read Marx until the 1970s. I don’t know when I decided I was a Marxist. I didn’t start teaching Marx and political economy until the late 1970s. But I became a small “r†red when I first heard those albums. Then on to Pete Seeger alone, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and later Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, and even Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Springsteen.
From time to time I reminisce about all this as I still listen to the music that makes me mad, makes me cry, and makes me want to hit the streets. I forget the fine tuned lectures I listen to (and even give) on neoliberal globalization, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over-production and under-consumption, and financialization — and break into song and tears as I hear the old music in the car or at home. (more…)
