The Short, Tragic, and Instructive Life of Anarcho-Punk

By Jackson Albert Mann

“I don’t think that the politics of anarcho-punk had that much to do with anarchism anyway… more like militant liberalism.”[1]

This is how Ramsey Kanaan, ex-vocalist of the Scottish punk band Political Asylum and founder of left-wing publishing houses AK Press and PM Press, characterized the politics of anarcho-punk, the wave of anarchist punk rock bands that washed over the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. His reflection comes from the final section of Ian Glasper’s colossal anarcho-punk oral history, within which similar sentiments are expressed by many former anarcho-punk musicians. They are right to feel ambivalent. In the first years of Thatcher’s rule, anarcho-punk developed into a surprisingly dynamic politico-cultural movement. Yet, by the end of the decade the movement had disappeared just as quickly as it had emerged, leaving behind a few catchy hooks, some memorable graphic design, but virtually no coherent political culture. For all of its bluster about political commitment, anarcho-punk was a spectacular failure.

Reading through Glasper’s numerous interviews, one is tempted to locate the origins of anarcho-punk’s aimless demise within the movement itself. Indeed, this is what many participants, fans, and scholars believe. According to Punk graphic design scholar Ana Raposo, it was competing “claims for authenticity” within the movement that generated the “cliquey, insular, and negative” attitudes which led to its downfall.[2][3] I would argue, however, that anarcho-punk’s eventual anticlimactic decline was a symptom of something external to the movement; the dire position of left-wing politics in the 1980s UK. To dismiss anarcho-punk without a proper analysis of its full politico-historical context is to do the contemporary Left a great disservice. An exploration of the movement’s rise and collapse holds important lessons for socialist cultural activists now aiming to construct what William Harris recently called “working-class cultural institutions.”[4]

A Political Economic Perspective

Alastair Gordon is one of the very few punk scholars to have analyzed the anarcho-punk movement from a political-economic perspective. In his short monograph on legendary anarcho-punk band Crass, Gordon proposes that the historical material foundation of anarcho-punk’s emergence was the UK’s rising youth unemployment rate combined with the effects of the country’s still comparatively generous welfare state.[5] At the turn of the decade, the UK unemployment rate doubled from six to about thirteen percent and remained around this level until 1987.[6] Lack of jobs created a state of enforced idleness for tens of thousands of young people and due to the welfare state’s material support, they had no compelling reason to protest or change their condition. This produced a social environment in which large numbers of youth began to pursue full-time their interests in a whole host of cultural activities, including music-making. It was this free time and disposable income, more than anything else, that formed the foundation of anarcho-punk’s most compelling structural feature; its economic independence from the UK music industry. Accordingly, the nature of anarcho-punk’s opposition to the music industry went far beyond the rhetorically subversive gestures of its first-wave predecessors such as the Sex Pistols or the Clash, who were branded as sell-outs by anarcho-punks for signing major label deals.

The early 1980s saw an explosion of anarchist-flavored independent, often band-run record labels, venues, and recording studios, as well numerous band- and fan-edited magazines. Punk scholars are correct to attribute much of the impetus for this explosion to Crass. Using the financial resources they gained from their unexpectedly successful 1978 debut album, Feeding of the 5000, the band established their own record label and press at Dial House, an informal artist colony and collective living space north of London, which drummer Penny Rimbaud had been running for almost a decade. It goes without saying that Crass’ do-it-yourself approach to cultural production was an inspiration to many young people in the UK. But, what made the early 1980s unique was the material reality of mass youth unemployment. It was these conditions that allowed the widespread replication of the Crass model by hundreds of young Punk musicians.

Indeed, Crass Records became merely the first in a vast patronage network of loosely-affiliated band-run record labels independent of the music industry proper. Anarcho-punk groups such as Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, The Mob, Poison Girls, and Chumbawamba, all of which got their start on Crass, went on to form their own labels. Despite the excessive amount of ink that has been spilled to interrogate anarcho-punk’s subversive aesthetics, it was the sustained economic independence of this expanding patronage network that was the truly defining feature of anarcho-punk as an oppositional politico-cultural movement. The movement’s emphasis on its structural-economic autonomy and hostility to the capitalist music industry as the primary elements of its authenticity were in fact its most salient connections to anarchist ideologies, resembling a form of cultural syndicalism. These were advantageous conditions for an emerging oppositional movement of politically committed musicians. So why did nothing much come of anarcho-punk?

The Patronage Network Needs a Patron

In a recent article I co-authored with art historian Patricia Manos on Nueva Canción Chilena, the political folk music revival that swept Chile during Salvador Allende’s tumultuous socialist administration, I claim that for a politically committed culture to blossom, it must be actively mobilized by political groups.[7] In the case of Nueva Canción Chilena, a musical movement that already possessed a certain level of internal organization was actively courted, supported, and finally incorporated into the structure of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and later on, into Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) socialist coalition government. In both instances this was done through the establishment of political record labels run semi-autonomously by members of socialist and Communist youth organizations.

Anarcho-punk emerged in very different circumstances. The early 1980s were a disastrous moment for left-wing politics in the UK and no militant left-wing organization capable of courting, supporting, and absorbing this wave of young, politically committed musicians existed. The Labour Party, never a bastion of radical leftism, was, nevertheless, entering the first years of a decades-long crisis, a catastrophic period during which the Party was thoroughly neoliberalized by a hegemonic, Thatcherist Toryism. Despite this, individual anarcho-punk musicians and bands did attempt to forge formal connections with issue-based political organizations such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and numerous anti-fascist and anarchist splinter groups. However, these organizations found themselves in a similar position to anarcho-punk: that is, the lack of an ascendant progressive movement left them atomized, often ineffective, and in no position to be the patrons of a nationwide cultural movement.

Attempts were made to mobilize the anarcho-punk movement for political action independent of organizations. Working through the structure of environmentalist NGO Greenpeace’s London office, a coalition of anarcho-punk musicians and fans organized the Stop The City (STC) protest of September 29th, 1983, during which several thousand activists occupied London’s financial district and severely impacted its normal operations. A second STC took place on March 29th, 1984. Notably, while a large trade union demonstration in support of the 1984 Miners’ Strike was held in London on the same day, no effort was made to integrate the two events. Punk scholar Rich Cross believes that anarcho-punk’s inability to develop a meaningful relationship with a trade union movement in the midst of a historic strike “highlighted not only the weaknesses in the culture’s ability to broker alliances, but also… its lack of interest [in] a wider common cause.”[8]

A Lesson In Tragedy

Cross may be right that by 1984 anarcho-punk musicians' interest in building coalitions with left-wing organizations was waning rapidly. A deeper analysis, however, reveals this developing apathy as a consequence of external factors. It was the declining UK Left’s inability to court this musical movement, a clear expression of general political, economic, and cultural discontent within the mass of young people, that led to anarcho-punk’s inward turn. Without the patronage and momentum of an ascendant Left, anarcho-punk became an insular world and its most negative aspects, such as competing claims of ideological purity, fracturing cliques, and anti-political apathy, became its defining features.

Reduced to its angry rhetoric and subversive aesthetic, anarcho-punk may appear as a utopian farce, in which masses of idealistic youths screamed truth to power over crunching chords and pounding drums, but took little interest in real political action. In context, however, the anarcho-punk movement represents something very different; a cultural expression of mass discontent emerging just as the political forces necessary for its development were entering full retreat. Anarcho-punk’s very lack of direction constitutes yet another profound tragedy that took place during a period of British history already filled with bitter setbacks for the working class. In the dark Thatcherist years following the National Union of Mineworkers’ devastating defeat in the 1984 strike, anarcho-punk’s cohesion as a unified politico-cultural movement disintegrated, and what could have been the soundtrack of a heroic left-wing resurgence became the last thing the British working class heard before lapsing into a decades-long neoliberal coma.

Notes

[1] Ian Glasper, The Day The Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 446.

[2] Ana Raposo, “Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho-Punk Movement and Sub-cultural Internecine Rivalries,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 89.

[3] Glasper, The Day The Country Died, 410.

[4] William Harris, “Why We Need Working-Class Cultural Institutions,” Jacobin Magazine, July 18th, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/social-poetics-working-class-culture.

[5] Alastair Gordon, Crass Reflections (London, UK: Active Distribution, 2016), 89-90.

[6] James Denman and Paul McDonald. “Unemployment Statistics from 1881 to the Present Day.” Labor Market Trends 104, no. 15-18 (Winter 1996).

[7] Jackson Albert Mann and Patricia Manos, “The Case for a Culture International: Learning from the 20th Century Latin American Left,” Socialist Forum 2, no. 1 (Winter 2020).

[8] Rich Cross, “‘Stop The City Showed Another Possibility’: Mobilization and Movement in Anarcho-Punk,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 143.

Further Reading

Berger, George. The Story of Crass. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009.

Beastly, Russ; Binns, Rebecca. “The Evolution of an Anarcho-Punk Narrative, 1978-1984.” In Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Punk Fanzines from 1976. Edited by the Subcultures Network, 129-149. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Cross, Rich. “‘There Is No Authority But Yourself’: The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk.” Music & Politics 4, no. 2 (Summer 2010).

Donaghey, Jim. “Bakunin Brand Vodka: An Exploration in the Anarchist-punk and Punk-anarchism.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2013): 138-170.

Gosling, Tim. “‘Not For Sale’: The Underground Network of Anarcho-Punk.” In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 168-183. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

Ignorant, Steve; Pottinger, Steve. The Rest Is Propaganda. London, UK: Southern Records, 2010.

Lake, Steve. Zounds Demystified. London, UK: Active Distribution Publishers, 2013.

Robb, John. Punk Rock: An Oral History. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.

Rimbaud, Penny. Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Diamond Signature & The Death of Imagination. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1999.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Last of the Hippies. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015.

Savage, John. England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1991.