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Title: Music as a Weapon
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: October 22, 2018
Language: en
Topics: music, Punk, analysis, Rolling Thunder
Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/10/22/music-as-a-weapon-the-contentious-symbiosis-of-punk-rock-and-anarchism
Notes: This is a revised version of a text that originally appeared in issue 7 of our journal Rolling Thunder.

CrimethInc.

Music as a Weapon

From Victor Jara to Public Enemy, music has played a pivotal role in

countless cultures of resistance. A large proportion of those who

participated in the anarchist movement between 1978 and 2010 were part

of the punk counterculture at some point; indeed, many were first

exposed to anarchist ideas via punk. This may have been merely

circumstantial: perhaps the same traits that made people seek out

anarchism also predisposed them to enjoy aggressive, independently

produced music. But one could also argue that music that pushes

aesthetic and cultural boundaries can open up listeners to a wider

spectrum of possibility in other spheres of life as well.

Yet just as anarchism was coming into its own in the US around the turn

of the century, radical activity in the domestic punk scene began a

nosedive. Now that it is no longer possible to depend on the punk1

subculture as an incubator for anarchists, we should set out to

understand how and why it served that role for thirty years.

---

Preface: When Punk Was a Recruiting Ground for Anarchy

“People talk about ‘preaching to the converted’—well who fucking

converted them?”

-Penny Rimbaud of Crass

There are countless reasons not to tie the fate of a revolutionary

movement to the fortunes of a music scene. Coming into anarchism via

punk, people tended to approach anarchist activity in the same way they

would participate in a youth subculture. This contributed to an

anarchist milieu characterized by consumerism rather than initiative, a

focus on identity rather than dynamic change, activities limited to the

leisure time of the participants, ideological conflicts that boil down

to disputes over taste, and an orientation towards youth that made the

movement largely irrelevant upon the onset of adulthood.

Yet during the decades of global reaction that followed the 1960s, the

punk underground was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of

anarchism. Were it not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the

world might still be choosing between stale brands of authoritarian

socialism.

Granted, the average punk show was as dominated by patriarchy as a

college classroom. All the hierarchies, economics, and power dynamics of

capitalist society were present in microcosm. And anarchism was not the

only creed that utilized this soapbox: countless ideologies competed in

the punk milieu, from Neo-Nazism to Christianity and Krishna

“consciousness.” But all this only makes it more striking that anarchist

ideas fared so well, considering that they gained less purchase in other

circles at the time.

We can attribute that success to structural factors. Many years before

internet access became widespread, the do-it-yourself punk scene offered

a rare model for horizontal and participatory activity. Organizing their

own affairs in decentralized networks, participants experienced

firsthand the benefits of leaderless autonomy. Once you’ve booked a tour

yourself, sidestepping the monopoly of profiteering venues, record

labels, and tour promoters, it’s not hard to imagine organizing other

aspects of your life in a similar way. At the same time, in a youth

culture founded on opposition to authority, there were fewer built-in

mechanisms to suppress radical ideas.

It’s also possible that anarchist values took root in the punk scene

precisely because they were so marginalized elsewhere: in an era when

radical ideas were pushed to the periphery, peripheral subcultures

teemed with them. This can create a feedback loop that keeps those ideas

marginal, as they are not associated with popular or successful

initiatives. The romanticization of obscurity and failure that made punk

hospitable terrain for revolutionary ideals in the 1980s did not

encourage their new partisans to fight to win outside the punk ghetto.

But the self-imposed exile of the punk community was also an effective

defense mechanism through an era of capitalist cooptation. The punk

scene helped keep anarchist ideas alive between the 1970s and the

21^(st) century in the same way that monasteries preserved science and

literature through the Dark Ages. Although the demands and influence of

the capitalist economy recreated the same power imbalances and

materialism that punks had hoped to escape—limiting the punk critique of

capitalism to a variant of the liberal maxim “buy local”—the

anti-capitalist DIY underground displayed a remarkable resilience. In a

cycle that became familiar, each generation expanded until profit-driven

record labels skimmed the most popular apolitical bands off the top,

setting the stage for a return to grassroots independence and

experimentation. So the punk scene provided the music industry a free

testing and development site for new bands and trends, but this process

also served to cleanse it of parasites.

Far from MTV talent scouts, competing independent labels, and

alternative consumerism, you could find something beautiful and free at

the heart of the DIY underground. At best, it was a space in which the

roles of protagonist and audience became interchangeable and the

dictates of the dominant culture were shaken off.

Let’s contrast this with the models of anarchist activity that are

currently in vogue. While political activism often focuses on matters

outside the daily lives of the participants, and thus tends to cost more

energy than it generates, DIY punk was basically pleasure-oriented,

offering activities that were fulfilling in and of themselves. Although

this might appear frivolous, sociality and affirmation are as essential

as food or housing. In some parts of the world, the punk scene was

significantly more working class and underclass than much of the current

anarchist milieu; this may indicate that it provided for real needs,

rather than catering to the middle class propensity for abstraction. In

contrast to protests, which are often criticized as reactive, at its

best punk emphasized creativity, demonstrating a concrete alternative.

It was youth-oriented, yes; but as youth are among the most potentially

rebellious and open to new ideas, this could be seen as an advantage. In

focusing on self-expression, it enabled participants to build their

confidence and experience in low-risk efforts, while producing a great

deal of artwork that doubled as outreach material; as a decentralized

cultural movement, it reproduced itself organically rather than through

institutional efforts.

Were we to attempt to invent a cultural counterpart to contemporary

activism that could replenish energy and propagate anarchist values

among young people, we could do worse. Meme culture alone has

considerably less to recommend it.

Anarchists often complained that in actuality, the punk scene was full

of people with no regard for anarchist values. Unfortunately, if you

want to introduce new people to anarchism, you’re going to have to deal

with a lot of people who are not anarchists. This is especially true in

the United States, in which so few people grow up with any exposure to

radical ideas at all. In Italy, by contrast, anarchist punks could say

“Punk equals anarchy plus guitars and drums; anything less is just

submission.”

There’s a lot to be said for operating in diverse environments, in which

the ideas of individuals and the culture that connects them are still

evolving. Because the punk scene was not beholden to any rigid

ideological framework, it offered a more fertile space for

experimentation than many more explicitly radical milieus. Had this

lesson been applied elsewhere—had anarchists initiated influential

projects in other politically diverse, horizontal, network-based

milieus—anarchist ideas might have spread further afield.

Though critics often accused the punk scene of being nothing more than a

playpen for privileged First World consumers, punk has been integral in

the resurgence of anarchist ideas far outside the US and Europe. While

punk arguably originated in Britain and the US, a great proportion of

the activity of the global punk underground took place in Latin America

and the Pacific rim, not to mention South Africa, Israel, Australia, New

Zealand, and the former Soviet bloc. In many of those nations, punk is

still more overtly associated with radical politics than it has been in

the United States; punk was especially instrumental in revitalizing

anarchism in contexts in which there was no radical alternative to

Marxist hegemony. It would be instructive to examine why punk took root

in nations like Brazil, Malaysia, and the Philippines but not India or

most Arabic-speaking nations, and study how this correlates with the

spread of anarchist ideas over the past thirty years.

Punk and Resistance: A Trajectory

The first major wave of politicized punk can probably be traced to the

British band Crass, which drew on Dadaism and other avant-garde

traditions to fashion early punk rock into a form of cultural agitprop.

Decades later, a visitor to Britain could find small circles of

middle-aged anarcho-punks who had been politicized by Crass still

participating in the same independent music underground and resuming the

same arguments about The Clash whenever they got drunk.

In the United States, over a decade later, the DIY underground of the

mid-1990s contributed to an increase in animal rights activism and

helped pave the way for the anti-globalization movement. Magazines such

as Profane Existence introduced radical perspectives on everything from

feminism to firearms; DIY communities developed in which everyone wrote

a zine, played in a band, or hosted basement shows; even in the most

macho scenes, every band addressed the audience between songs—if only,

in some cases, to urge people to dance more violently.

On the eve of the debut of the anti-globalization movement,2 hundreds of

punks gathered in Philadelphia late in April 1999 for Millions for

Mumia, a march to deter the state of Pennsylvania from executing Mumia

Abu-Jamal. For many, it was the first time they had traveled out of town

for a protest; likewise, though no major conflict took place with the

police, it was the first time most of them had assembled publicly in

black masks and sweatshirts. This moment, in which politicized punks

realized that there were enough of them to constitute a social force,

set the stage for everything that came after; a year later, many of the

participants fought shoulder to shoulder at the demonstrations against

the IMF/World Bank meeting of April 2000 in Washington, DC. The night

following the march, a standing-room-only crowd assembled at Stalag 13,

a local DIY venue, to see His Hero Is Gone; there was a feeling in the

air that there was no real distinction between subcultural identity and

political activity. That same year, the Primate Freedom Tour achieved a

synthesis of punk music and radical activism, using a series of shows

around the country to promote regional demonstrations against

laboratories experimenting on primates.

The DIY boom of the mid-1990s fed into the momentum of the

anti-globalization movement. Those who had been in or around punk bands

already understood how an affinity group worked; operating in

decentralized networks and coordinating autonomous actions came

naturally. It was easy for people who routinely traveled across the

country to engage in rowdy subcultural events to shift to traveling

across the country to participate in rowdy anti-capitalist

demonstrations. So-called “summit-hopping” offered many of the same

inducements as punk—risk, excitement, togetherness, opportunities to be

creative and oppose injustice—along with the additional attraction of

feeling that you were on the front lines of history.

In the period leading up to this explosion of political activity, punk

music and culture had become more experimental as punks sought to match

daring aesthetics to radical rhetoric. There had always been a tension

in punk between the folk art aspects of the craft—three-chord musical

progressions and hand-drawn layouts—and the desire to innovate and

challenge. As the subculture offered participants broader conceptions of

what could be possible, they began to play music and make demands that

strained against the limitations of the medium. On one hand, innovative

music could make radical ideas more compelling: following an unfamiliar

yet exhilarating experience, a listener might be more likely to believe

that an entirely different world was possible. On the other hand, this

experimentation contributed to the fragmentation of the punk subculture,

as traditions were abandoned and the standards for musicianship and

creativity reached prohibitive heights.

Volatile phenomena eventually break into their constituent elements and

stabilize. The Swedish band Refused, for example, who had combined

hardcore, techno, jazz, and classical music on their final album, split

asunder in 1998, and the members went on to form much more traditional

bands according to their individual tastes—none of which were nearly as

interesting as Refused. Once there was an anarchist movement for the

most politicized punks to join, a similar process occurred within the

punk scene. Until 1999, politicized punks tended to stick around the DIY

underground, as there was usually no larger revolutionary milieu to move

on to; playing music and writing zines were seen as political activity,

despite the narrow horizons of the subculture. All that changed after

the 1999 WTO protests, which kicked off an era of non-stop

demonstrations and political organizing. Most of the people who were

serious about their politics shifted focus away from the punk scene.

Meanwhile, the people who were involved in punk only for music and

fashion remained, and led a reaction against political engagement of all

kinds. While others focused on anarchist convergences, black blocs, and

accountability processes, the reactionaries were the ones still booking

shows and recording albums, and they set the tone for an apolitical and

musically conservative 21^(st) century punk scene.

Between 1998 and 2002, nearly every band that had helped to politicize

the punk underground broke up, and many influential magazines ceased

publication. By May 2002, when Boston anarchists staged the Festival del

Pueblo, a rupture had developed between the aesthetic and political

elements in the subculture, evident in tensions between punks who only

attended for the shows and anarchists striving to establish a

revolutionary movement. To name a single example, the person who had

booked the His Hero Is Gone show after Millions for Mumia and later

played a role in anarchist organizing against the Republican National

Convention of 2000 came to perform with his band, but headed home

afterwards rather than attending the demonstration scheduled for the

following day.

A few years later, the split between punk and anarchism was complete.

Even Against Me!, the progenitors of the folk punk reaction to the

stagnation of the anarcho-punk scene, had deserted the DIY movement and

eschewed their former anarchist politics. From Ashes Rise, who had been

colleagues of the uncompromisingly independent His Hero Is Gone, signed

to a larger record label and recorded a final album with songs about

nuclear war—a regression to 1980s nostalgia all the more absurd in the

midst of the Iraq war—before breaking up. Punk—at least for that

generation—had reached the end of its trajectory as a force for social

change.

Technology, Legitimacy, and Accessibility

Let’s return to the resurgence of folk punk shortly after the turn of

the century. His Hero Is Gone had been one of the first DIY bands to

shift from single speaker cabinets to full stacks, and within a few

years every band that wished to be taken seriously had done the same.

This led to an arms race and a sort of aesthetic inflation: no volume

was loud enough, no recording powerful enough, no gear expensive

enough.3 Folk punk was a reaction to this: an accessible, cheap,

self-consciously unrefined format. Yet it never achieved the popularity

of gear-based punk; tellingly, the flagship band Against Me! shifted to

standard rock instrumentation in the course of their shift to corporate

careerism.

Similarly, one might ask why, out of all the formats that flourished in

the DIY underground, there were never any traveling drama troupes. On

the face of it, theater would be the perfect medium for independent

performers with limited access to resources. A drama troupe could travel

without expensive equipment or need of a large vehicle; performances

could take place practically anywhere. Dario Fo, the Living Theater…

radical theater has had a rich history in every other nation and era.

Puppet shows were practically a cliché on the DIY circuit—so why not

drama?

This indicates a lingering materialism in DIY culture. Equipment, be it

a shoddy cardboard puppet stage or ten thousand dollars’ worth of

amplifiers, conferred the legitimacy that both performers and audiences

longed for. “Look,” working class dropouts could say to themselves,

gesturing at a rusty van full of gear that cost them years of wages,

“we’re a real band!”

In capitalist society, activities are invested with meaning primarily

through the marketplace and the media. Rock music was originally a

working class art form that came to be cultivated by capitalists as a

cash crop; the meaning people find in it is real enough, but it is

generated through forces largely beyond their control. Rock stars are

important precisely because not everyone can be one. Paradoxically,

punks took up the rock format as a way of asserting their own

importance, even in the process of rebelling against the corporations

that introduced them to it.

One could read the rise and fall of DIY punk as the historical “hiccup”

during which record-releasing and printing technology first became

accessible to the general public. Crass was one of the first bands to

release their own records; this was exciting because they were using

technology that had been largely unavailable to the working class.

Within a couple decades, however, this development was rendered moot by

technological advances and oversaturation. Once anyone could release a

record, it wasn’t meaningful anymore—it wasn’t “real” in the sense that

everything on television is “real” while our lives feel unreal and

insignificant.

The punk scene had been founded on the tensions created by limited

access to the musical means of production; with the arrival of

technologies that extended this access to everyone, its structures

collapsed. The internet replaced painstakingly built distribution

networks and zine cultures with the offhand immediacy of music

downloading and blogs; some of this took place in genuinely

decentralized structures, but more of it was based in corporate

counterfeits such as myspace.com. The proliferation of the latter was

particularly ironic in that the DIY underground had been a testing area

for the sort of network-based systems that the internet universalized.

When every band of middle-class teenagers could have their own webpage

and home recording studio, the ensuing disenchantment revealed how banal

the promise of rock stardom had been in the first place. In some ways,

it is healthy to be divested of one’s illusions, especially the ones

instilled by one’s enemies. On the other hand, if nothing takes their

place, this only drains the world of meaning even further—and pure

nihilism helps maintain the status quo.

Punk had been exciting because, in contrast to corporate rock, it

offered a relatively unmediated experience: one could meet one’s

favorite musicians, dance and interact outside the prescriptions of a

repressive society, even form one’s own band and remake the subculture

itself. Thousands of people attended Black Flag shows because they

offered a genuinely different experience than anything corporate

capitalism had to offer. But once the internet made every band into its

own promotions agency and youtube.com made it possible for everyone to

appear on the equivalent of MTV, independent music was no less mediated

than corporate music, and no less vapid.

Learning from Punk

Punk’s long run as a breeding ground for anarchism shows how much we

stand to gain from social activities that are pleasurable and creative.

In nurturing organic cultural currents, we can create social movements

that do not depend on any one institution but are naturally

self-reproducing. Ideally, they should be subversive while not

immediately provoking repression—it’s important that the lines be drawn,

but participants must have enough time to go through an evolutionary

process before the police break out their batons. A sustainable space

that nurtures long-term communities of resistance can ultimately

contribute more to militant struggle than the sort of impatient

insurrectionism that starts with confrontation rather than building to

it.

As much as punk has been dismissed as insular, the success of

anarcho-punk demonstrates how effective it can be for anarchists to

invest themselves in ongoing outreach in a milieu of a manageable scale.

All the better if it is a politically diverse space in which debate and

dynamic change can occur and new people can encounter radical ideas.

At the same time, it is crippling for a social movement aimed at

transforming the whole of life to be associated with a single

subculture. Learning from years of anarchist organizing rooted in the

punk scene, we can see the importance of creating spaces that bring

people from many backgrounds together on an equal footing. Likewise, we

can learn from the factors that both produced and crippled punk, such as

the love-hate relationship with rock stardom. Channeling desires

fostered by capitalist society into resistance movements can produce

swift growth, but also fatal flaws that only come to light over time.

Today, in the anarchist movement, we sometimes miss the Dionysian spirit

that characterized the hardcore punk underground at its high point: the

collective, embodied experience of dangerous freedom. This is how punk

can inspire us in our anarchist experiments of today and tomorrow: as a

transformative outlet for rage and grief and joy, a positive model for

togetherness and self-determination in our social relations, an example

of how the destructive urge can also be creative—and vice versa.