I don’t know much about Stereolab, but it’s interesting to see that Laetitia Sadier has named her solo project Socialisme ou Barbarie after the french left communist group and is name checking Cornelius Castoriadis (aka Paul Cardan, arguably their leading light, although ‘the cult of celebrity’ is supposed to go against the grain of such groups) in the new issue of The Wire.

I don’t claim to have studied this stuff particularly rigorously, but I’ve always felt that S ou B were among the more human of the hard left groups I’ve looked at, probably because I don’t have a very firm grip on economics, and so am more attracted to texts that discuss the more psychological aspects of capitalist relations like alienation:

“The humanity of the wage worker is less and less threatened by an economic misery challenging his very physical existence. It is more and more attacked by the nature and conditions of modern work, by the oppression and alienation the worker undergoes in production. In this field there can be no lasting reform. Employers may raise wages by 3% per annum but they cannot reduce alienation by 3% per annum.”

S ou B also included Guy Debord as a member briefly, as far as I can remember, and the group inspired the UK’s Solidarity, who I have a couple of texts from on uncarved. (To continue the lefty trivia theme, Solidarity must surely be the only organisation that has included both Class War founder Ian Bone and Ken Livingstone as members?)

As ever, musicians using radical credentials can be dismissed out of hand as recuperators, but my guess is that Sadier’s interest is genuine and that Stereolab fans will already be aware of the group’s interest in the continental left.

(note to pedants – I am just bashing this stuff out at work – your comments and denouncements are welcome!)