From shows in squats to militant action, punk shows the convergence between class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness, and consciousness-raising (1/3)

~ Alex Ratcharge ~

In memory of Marc, aka Papi (1965-2022)

“We operate as a kind of clandestine, blundering, haphazard anarchist collective, made up of a group of friends who like to do things together”

– Giacomo Stefanini¹

For all intents and purposes, let us say that I am neither a theoretician, nor a philosopher, nor a specialist in political matters, but a humble 40-year-old reader, also a fanzine publisher and the author of a novel (Shortcut to Nowhere) exploring the world of punk and autonomous squats in France and Navarre – fictions inspired by my experience since, to quote NOFX, “I’ve been a punk- rocker for most of my life”.² Or more prosaically: for better or for worse, I am one of the countless cogs in the wheel of what I will call here “radical punk”.³

I use this term in reference to a decentralised global network that its participants have called, over the decades, “DIY punk”, “HC punk DIY”, or “anarcho-punk” — designations that are as porous as they are shifting, none of which seems more appropriate to me. On the one hand, the acronym “DIY” (Do it Yourself) has been emptied of its subversive potential and diverted towards self-entrepreneurship, “creative hobbies”, and this tendency to keep telling us that “doing everything yourself”, in a socio-economic context, would be a guarantee of freedom and not of precariousness. On the other hand, the term “anarcho-punk” seems to me to be too unrepresentative of the different sensibilities, even if they are all very left-wing, at work in radical punk: anarchists, certainly, but also libertarian communists, autonomous, post-situ, “without labels”, even “classic voters” or quasi “apolitical”. Especially since this term has tended, for at least two decades, to become synonymous with ultra-codified sounds and aesthetics, which means that a group that sounds like Crass, will tend to be described as “anarcho-punk” regardless of its practices, while a group of anarchists playing, for example, Oi!, will simply be described as an Oi! group.

For these reasons, I have chosen the term “radical punk”, which has the merit of referring to the term “radical left”, of making a distinction with other types of punk and, above all, of allowing us to name it without needing long-winded explanations such as punk-where-we-favor-squats-and-whose-actors-are-feminists–anti-racists–anti-authoritarians–etc. (Reminder: the word “radical”, derived from the Latin radix [“root”], means among other things “Which aims to act on the root cause of the effects that we want to modify.” Knowing that the “effects to modify” here are those of capitalism, patriarchy, etc.).

A horizontal movement, radical punk is not supposed to have flagship groups: it is internationalist, plural, and each of its actors is theoretically replaceable. To make my point, here are a few names. In the 1980s, let’s randomly cite Crass, Alternative TV, The Door and The Window, The Desperate Bicycles (United Kingdom), Heimat-los (France) or Minor Threat (United States); in the 1990s, let’s pick Harum-Scarum or Los Crudos in the United States, Sin Dios in Spain, or Seein’ Red in the Netherlands. In the 2000s and 2010s, why not come back to France with Gasmask Terrör, Holy Fuckin’ Shit! (Bordeaux), La Fraction, Nocif (Paris), Zone Infinie, Litige (Lyon), Traitre, Douche Froide (Lille), etc..⁴ In terms of labels, they are virtually as numerous as the groups (in France, among dozens of others: Panx, Stonehenge, Creepozoïd, Mutant, LADA, Symphony Of Destruction…), and as for the media, besides the infinity of small fanzines, most of which do not exceed two issues, but which play an important role in the liveliness of this movement, I will limit myself to citing important English-language titles which are now defunct: Slug & Lettuce, Profane Existence, Heartattack , Reason To Believe and especially Maximum Rock’n’roll, which we will come back to soon.

I cite these names to anchor my point, and not to give some more importance than others. Because one of the general rules of radical punk, home to thousands of bands and other ephemeral collectives, is that all its participants are of equal importance, whether they are musicians, concert and/or tour promoters, label bosses, fanzine editors, squatters and/or “owners” of venues, participants without roles or titles — all these functions being infinitely interchangeable, so that a radical punk can be seen, on the same night, in the role of singer, cook, working on the door of the show, mopping the floor, or simply leaning on the bar counter… This interchangeability of roles being, it seems to me, one of the ways to distinguish radical punk from other types of punks.

In short, radical punk is a decentralised global network that aims to establish or maintain a “parallel society” with its music, customs, diet, debates, media, and even its own postal network. Its strength owes much to international tours managed with the means at hand, to its principles of hospitality and reciprocity, to its uninhibited relationship with illegality and/or clandestinity, to its places, its media, as well as to its countless moments of conviviality: meals, drinking sessions, dances, and daily tasks are often practiced in groups. Hoping that all this seems a little clearer to you, let’s move on to the thousand-euro question: how did I come to want to report on the practices of radical punk? It would be difficult to explain it without mentioning the North American agitator Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) and the British theorist Mark Fisher (1968-2017).

What is the connection between Mark Fisher, Abbie Hoffman, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and the so-called “DIY” punk network? This is the question around which this article is structured. The article would not have seen the light of day without these four elements.

* * *

"The idea that 'I don't intend to work and I should stop worrying' was the key element of the counterculture. What the capitalists feared was that the working class would become hippies on a large scale, and that was a serious danger." 
– Mark Fisher

In 2018, the French translation of Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, published by Entremonde, was an event for some readers, including myself. Philosopher, blogger, music critic, Mark Fisher has devoted a good part of his life to building a body of work whose keystone is precisely this “capitalist realism” – that is, the persistent impression that in times of climate chaos, after four decades of neoliberal rule, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism”.⁵

Under Fisher’s pen, pop culture reveals its intentions; behind its a-political facade, it would be a site of ideology. From blockbusters to music videos to reality TV, the bulk of mainstream culture of the twenty-first century would thus have the aim, conscious or not, of reinforcing neoliberal hegemony by polluting our imaginations with this notion dear to Margaret Thatcher: there is no alternative. Utopias buried, counterculture defeated, avant-gardes forgotten: for freaks, punks, hippies, left-wing radicals and other revolutionaries, the time would have come to bow down, that is to say, to join the ranks of the great war of all against all, if possible isolated in a cybernetic cocoon based on telework and/or self-exploitation, like in a good old Covid nightmare.

For Fisher, whose primary subject of study is music, from the post-punk of The Fall to the dubstep of Burial, this observation explains the endless loop of “retromania”⁶ in which the fourth art has been mired since the end of the 1990s: if the listener becomes bogged down by revival after revival, rehash after rehash, it is not because everything has already been done or said, but because our imaginations have been colonised, wasted away and then cryogenically frozen by capitalist realism. Neither dead nor alive, our ability to imagine another soundtrack, and as for making other futures, now floats in limbo, like the “spectre of a world that could have been free”⁷…Or, quite simply, as in one of the oldest punk slogans, the so-often misunderstood “No Future”.

Blog post after blog post, conference after conference, Fisher ploughs his furrow. What he fights is neoliberal ideology and the way it infiltrates our bodies, our minds, our workplaces and even our songs, all the while managing to convince us that it is not ideology, but pure pragmatism. According to its advocates, late capitalism would be humanity’s final destination after millennia of wandering; despite its “small flaws”, it would therefore be unconscious to look elsewhere.

But here’s the thing: for Mark Fisher, this belief in the inevitability of capitalism would be nothing more than an ideological presupposition that needs to be torn to pieces as a matter of urgency. Whether he’s writing for his blog or in the pages of The Wire, about Tricky or Joy Division, about Kanye West or The Cure, about Scritti Politti or Public Enemy, our man is dedicated to this task. He co-founded the publishing house Zero Books, reworked his blog posts, and published them as books. And then in 2016, after more than a decade of identifying the problem, here he is tackling a new task: formulating a solution.

This way out of capitalist realism, Fisher calls “acid communism”.⁸ A concept that “refers both to real historical developments and to a virtual confluence that has not yet materialised”. He wrote the introduction to an eponymous essay (Postcapitalist Desires) which ends with these words: “the material conditions for a revolution are more present in the 21st century than they were in 1977. But what has changed since then is the existential and emotional atmosphere. People are resigned to the sadness of work, even as they are told that automation will make theirs disappear. We must rediscover the optimism of the 1970s, and we must analyse the machinery that capitalism has deployed to transform our hopes into resignation. Now, the first step in reversing this process of deflation of consciousness is to understand how it works”.⁹

This seems to announce a program, but no one will know it: on January 13, 2017, Mark Fisher, a notorious depressive who vilified the “privatisation of mental health,” took his own life in his home. A year earlier, during a conference on acid communism, the man who was banking on the plasticity of reality declared that “We are on the threshold of a new wave, on which we can begin to surf towards post-capitalism”.

Is it because of Fisher’s suicide and its unfinished aspect that the essay Acidcommunism struck me so much? In part, yes. It must be said that it all seems like a bad joke: after hundreds and hundreds of pages of criticism and definition of the contours of capitalist realism, it is in this text that the theorist finally seems determined to propose a solution, that is to say a possible way out, a liberation from the almost invisible chains by which this ideology suffocates us, depresses us, separates us, destroys our planet, etc. This unfinished text therefore evokes a future corpse on its deathbed, taking its last breath a second before being able to dispense its precious advice.

But that’s not all. The second reason for my obsession is that the ideas mentioned in this introduction to Acidcommunism resonated with me, as if some of Fisher’s words had held up a blurry mirror to me, reflecting elements of my own experience, without me dwelling on them carefully enough to put my finger on the reasons for this disorder… At least until someone put a book by another deceased author in my hands: Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman.

(More next week…)

from Audimat via Lundi Matin, corrected machine translation

1. Member of the Italian label and concert organising collective Sentiero Futuro ↩︎
2. “Theme From A NOFX Album”, on the album Pump up the Valuum (Epitaph, 2000) ↩︎
3. I think I first came across this term about fifteen years ago, in the fanzines of the Spanish anarchist punk Teodoro Hernández, who wrote it with a “k” in “radikal”. Perhaps it was then a derivative of the term “radical rock” which was attached to Basque punk groups including Eskorbuto, RIP or Delirium Tremens. ↩︎
4. I only cite Western groups here, but the radical punk network is active all over the world, with groups from Latin America to Japan, via Southeast Asia, Russia, Morocco, Algeria, etc. ↩︎
5. According to the formula attributed to the Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. ↩︎
6. To use the expression dear to his colleague and friend Simon Reynolds. ↩︎
7. K-Punk, p.753. Repeater Books, 2018. ↩︎
8. Ibid, p.758. ↩︎
9. M. Fisher, Postcapitalist Desires, p. 770 (Audimat, 2022) [trans. back from French, refer to original –Ed.) ↩︎