Reading Denning, Shouting Crass

Do They, in fact, owe Us a living?
Crass, in their highly imitable fashion, pose a fundamental question for our time: do ‘they’ owe ‘us’ a living? We’ll assume that the ‘they’ in question refers to capitalists or those in power – the Man, as it were. The ‘us’ is a bit more ambiguous – Crass don’t appear to be referring to the working class or, more generically, ‘the people’. The lyrics refer to those in school who are constantly shit on, those who become outcast over time, the scapegoats, and the teeming masses constantly attacked for their vice-ridden ways by media elites and politicians. It seems apparent, then, that they are demanding a living for the social rejects, those who become principal targets for attack when the economy is down or disaster strikes, and for those who unable or unwilling, for a myriad of reasons, to assimilate into society. We could call these the unemployed, the underemployed, the never employable as well as the rejects and burnouts (and anarcho-punks). After describing the players, they then claim that it is self-evident that these same, those wit limited organs for self-defense or advocacy – and thus not the working classes, especially in the early 1980s when the attack on said class was still in its birth pangs – are owed a living by society.