Check out Half Man Half Biscuit for a folk/rock sound with left(ish) lyrics.
Some very funny lines and catchy tunes, often actually based on folk song tunes.
This is an interesting one - a single I bought back in the 80s, when the book Spycatcher was published, containing lots of juicy Cold War anecdotes from an ex-MI5 man.
Exceedingly controversially, Margaret Thatcher banned the book, though it was subsequently published in Australia. However - anecdotally the Oyster Band and Billy Bragg got round the censorship rules, because summarising the book in song form wasn’t illegal. Thus the entire book’s content is reproduced in doggerel in The Ballad of a Spycatcher.
Bonus was the B-side Song of the Free Press, with the chorus (from memory):
*We are the press
The great free press
The guardians of
The national interest.
Fearlessly our daily tune
Is down with trendy lefty loonies
Down with scroungers on the dole
And down with strikes
(Except in Poland).*
Hmm, on further Googling I find the following
[quote]
(Rocklist.net...Banned Recordings...) from Leon Rosselson, showing my memory to be clouded: they wrote it specifically for it to be banned, and its publication was illegal.
Part of the union - Strawbs.
Pretty much any song by the Manic Street Preachers. (Most of their song titles seem to be taken from communist propaganda slogans from the Spanish Civil War.) Lefty songs:
I always took that to be anti union. It seems completely sarcastic, and it was written when the British unions were in the early days of their ascendancy towards toppling the government. Just a thought.
Bob Seger’s Makin’ Thunderbirds.
I like this version of Joe Hill.
Mustn’t forget L7’s When We Pretend That We’re Dead.
Chumbawumba - Tubthumping
KLF - It’s grim up north - needs some explanation, following the 1980’s recession when pretty much the whole of the North of the UK had a deep recession, and the South of the UK was in boom time, the message appeared on a motorway bridge a graffitti and was taken up as a meme - the north had been effectively written off as far as the London politicians were concerned.
Here is a very old one, its been used by trade unionists for a good hundreed years, though probably not as a reggae number I would imagine, the lyrics are not too clear on the vidd, so here they are - well out of copyright.
I can’t believe Joan Baez gets no mention here so far,
Joan Baez -Dona Dona - This song became part of the anthem for the velvet revolution in Czeckslovakia.
No list could even begin to be correct without the following - the grandaddy of all revolutionary songs…
Someone already mentioned this, here is the link
James Connolly - Black 47 (Live version but whatcha gonna do?)
That’s an interesting intepretation. It’s based upon the song Union Maid though I think. The lyrical structure seems the same etc.
http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Union_Maid.htm
If you look at the Strawbs’ lyrics, I think they’re a deliberate pastiche of Union Maid, rather than a paean:
When we meet in the local hall
I’ll be voting with them all
With a hell of a shout
It’s out brothers out
And the rise of the factory’s fall.
Why would a worker want their place of employment to be ruined? Unless of course they were deluded and drunk on power.
So though I’m a working man
I can ruin the government’s plan
Though I’m not too hard
The sight of my card
Makes me some kind of superman.
And I can’t see the above verse as anything but sarcastic.
David Rovics (US - everything left-related you can think of)
Attila The Stockbroker (UK - anarchist)
Robb Johnson (UK - anti-war)
Anne Feeney (US - labour)
I’ve seen this chap live. He’s pretty good.
Timbuk 3 is pretty good for left-leaning lyrics (thanks again, dbygawdcapn, for the CD!).
Try “Grand Old Party” for general Republican debauchery (though I get shades of Chappaquidik in it too):
My heat seaking whistles
And misguided missiles
Went a little bit too far,
And a back seat cuddle
Turned into a struggle
And I totalled my car;
If you are what you eat
I’m dead meat
But weren’t we hale and hearty?
At the end of the day
I really have to say,
It was a Grand Old Party.
“Dirty Dirty Rice” for empathising with homelessness, and “Waves of Grain” for innocent parties getting caught up in covert CIA counterterrorism manuevres (eerily pre-empting the whole Extraordinary Rendition concept by 15 year).
Was the Strawbs’ song popular with union folk at the time?
What kind of jackeen would leave Luke Kelly’s version of Rising of the Moon off that list? 
Mr Wicky Pedia says:
I promise you I didn’t insert that bit about saracsm.
Blackleg Miner http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWA7QujvQl0
I’m not sure how left-wing it is, but it certainly deals with labour issues: The Chemical Worker’s Song by Great Big Sea. I have no idea what’s going on with that video, but the audio is what I’m talking about.
Fortunate Son by CCR has some anti-upper-class stuff in it, too.
Is that song really lefty though? Everyone from rightwing conservative to the other end of the spectrum can enjoy that song.