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industry and broke down the performer–audience divide. Again, the essay – based on a discussion held at the Film Co-op in Chalk Farm – was resonant of the time.20 Though too shy to join in the debate with those suggesting rock, not folk, was ‘the music of the masses’, Whitman’s subsequent reflections fed into an analysis of punk’s Whose culture? -59- importance. Two observations stood out. Punk, as with all cultural forms, was full of contradictions, hence its containing ‘tendencies towards both fascism and anarchism, which are polar opposites’. Like culture more
viability of an isolated communal experiment (which in fact can only survive so long as the surrounding society feels strong enough to tolerate it) problems raised include the conflict between necessary internal organisation and anarchist ideals, the division of labour and the product of labour, the role of intellectuals, the status of women and the social effect of the family. Since La Cecilia is a historical film, there is further tension between the terms of 1976 and those of nineteenth-century anarchism, available to the historical
way for lots of people to do that.20 Indeed, the newly evolving anarcho-punk narrative encompassed a range of interrelated and sympathetic ideological positions, ranging from anti-war statements (often aligned with the resurgence of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)21 to emerging forms of what might be termed anarchofeminism, animal rights,22 attacks on organised religion and key debates on the nature of resistance and models of anarchism in theory and practice.23 Content concerns were also reflected in the choice of images. In some cases this resulted in
daily lives. It seemed to me a very attractive proposal, with lots of dynamic elements that could hit a wide audience. Not one Commissioning Editor went for it. 221 222 The documentary diaries The second proposal dealt with the history of anarchism, an often violent movement, that had raised its head very frequently in Europe and the USA in the last century and a half. It was a film that I thought would be particularly attractive to the Spaniards, given the central place of the anarchist moment in the Spanish Civil War. The reaction of the commissioning editors
Reaction, Varukers), reviews (of records, cassettes and concerts) and collages, the title itself – appropriated from California’s The Middle Class, widely regarded as responsible for releasing the first American hardcore record – provided an indication of the future. The fanzine was adorned throughout with the circled ‘A’ of anarchism and graphics taken from leaflets and pamphlets promoting anti-nuclear and anti-authoritarian messages; symbols of a nascent political consciousness that erupted in embryonic form through a centrespread -220- Memos from the frontline
contributors taking place over numerous issues on topics such as anarchism, socialism, communism, capitalism, sexism, racism and fascism. Raket, therefore, provides a vivid snapshot of Dutch punk in 1979–80, and particularly the growing political tensions of the time. Politically oriented punk (primarily left-wing) had by this point become an established part of The Netherlands’ subcultural landscape, fostered by an organised squatting movement and a tradition of anarchism (including the Provo movement) that had engaged closely with Amsterdam’s alternative cultural life.8 By
association of violence with his character. The claim of anarchism was one Franju had himself already rebutted in an interview with Buache for Positif in 1957, indicating that the dispute over him was ongoing, one element in the rivalry between Positif and Cahiers du cinéma active at the time. As might be expected, Franju’s rebuttal alluded to the preference for collectivities over the individual already described: ‘Je suis
because of his commitment to the negation of the present order, Benjamin’s apocalyptic last writings imply a form of anarchism.22 In a study of his early theological activism, Eric Jacobsen confirms the consistency of the anarchistic theme in Benjamin; characterising his position as ‘ethical anarchism’, Jacobson carefully explicates its crucial dimension of radical hope, a hope informed by the complete 110 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF PUNK ‘transformation of society and the individual’.23 Redemption is synonymous with revolution in late Benjamin, where the concept of
, capitalism, and France’s ongoing colonial exploitation. Turning to Trotskyism, anarchism, and Romantic utopianism, the French surrealist group sought out alternative routes for radical political action in their vigilant struggles against what Breton later defined as ‘miserabilism’, or the entwined threat of Stalinism, fascism, and capitalist technocracy. 20 Surrealism’s deviation from the dominant tendency in left politics combined with its explorations of myth and magic led to a marginalisation in aesthetic and intellectual history that is far from proportionate when
the last unique stimulus in social life.’ 13 Nash was sceptical of the line that Vaneigem had advanced at the conference in Gothenburg and did not subscribe to what he perceived to be a more political and theoretical turn in the Situationist group. The Situationist International was an art group, not some kind of political vanguard. Nash regarded the coming into being of the Scandinavian welfare societies in this period as an erosion of Marxist theory and practice, and he drifted towards anarchism, describing his practice as anarcho-Situationist. While Debord was