Twenty-five years ago this week John Lennon was murdered outside his home in New York City.
Countless tributes have been paid to Lennon in the last few months - 9 October would also have been his 65^th birthday.
All of the tributes talk about Lennon the musician and Lennon the Beatle.
What many of the tributes omit, is homage to Lennon the political radical. John’s radical phase was between 1969 and 1973. A key factor in Lennon’s political development was his marriage to Yoko Ono.
During his early years with Yoko he found a radical edge and a political voice concerning a number of issues.

In 1969 he was at the forefront of the movement against the Vietnam War with Give Peace A Chance a number two hit in the UK.
By 1970 Lennon’s politics would become more focused and class conscious. In Power to the People he wrote: “Millions of workers working for nothing. We got to give them what they really own.”
That same year, Lennon wrote the seminal Working Class Hero, a fusion of political and psychological emotions about being working class. This was perhaps the first time in a pop song that working class life had been so graphically illustrated:
“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school. They hate you if you’re clever and they despise the fool. Until you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rule!”

Lennon’s political consciousness was not just confined to music, and in the early 1970s he was intensely active.
Alongside the Vietnam War, he spoke out against British imperialism in Northern Ireland. And he supported financially and politically the Upper Clyde Ship Builders when they occupied their workplace in the early seventies.
In 1971, he gave his most overtly left wing interview with Tariq Ali and the then underground magazine Red Mole. In the interview Lennon discussed the formation of his political consciousness:
“I’ve always been politically minded and against the status quo.
“It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up like I was to hate and fear the police as the natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.”

He also discusses the question of revolution and how to destroy the capitalist system: “I think only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream.
“They think they are in a wonderful, free speaking country. They’ve got cars and tellies and they don’t want to think there’s anything more to life.
“They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They’re dreaming someone else’s dream.
“As soon as they start being aware of all that, we can really begin to do something. The workers can start to take over. Like Marx said - ‘To each according to his need’.”

In 1972 Lennon released his most politically conscious album Some Time in New York City. The songs covered issues such as British imperialism in Ireland (The Luck of the Irish), the revolt of prisoners in New York (Attica State) and the struggle of the women’s movement (Woman is the Nigger of the World).
The latter, based on a remark he heard Yoko make, is a little known feminist classic: “We make her paint her face and dance. If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love.
“We tell her home is the only place she should be. Then we complain that she’s too unworthy to be our friend.
“We insult her everyday on TV, and wonder why she has no guts or confidence.
“When she’s young we kill her will to be free by telling her not to be so smart. We put her down for being so dumb.”
Despite Woman is the Nigger of the World, Some Time in New York City is a disappointing Lennon effort, in a musical sense.
It adds to the old cliché that good politics does not always mean good theatre.

If there is one song that sums up Lennon politically, it is Imagine, released in 1971.
Imagine is the political anthem of today’s generation.
I know the older lefties like raising their clinched fists and singing The Internationale.
But for me Imagine is the song that sums up the reason why I am a socialist. The beauty of the song is its simplicity as Lennon sings about a world free from hunger, greed, war and religion. No other song captures the essence of socialism better.
In poll after poll, Imagine is continually voted the best song of all time and that’s important for socialists, as it is as much about political idealism as it is about music.

Lennon’s brutal murder in 1980 denied us of one of the finest songwriters of recent times and also robbed us of a radical cultural and political thinker.
It’s a shame that Lennon wasn’t around for the 1980s. I’m sure that he would have found much to say about the greed, hypocrisy and cynicism, which surrounded that decade.
Today, his take on Bush and Blair and Iraq would also have been interesting.
The political side of Lennon is one which is deliberately ignored by the establishment.
Lennon may not have been politically consistent on every issue but he remains in the true sense of the word a ‘radical’.
And it is for that reason that the left should celebrate his political and cultural legacy.
After all, the ultimate aim of socialists should be to build the type of world that John Lennon helped us to imagine.