Shit-Fi © 2024
Flyer denouncing the two-day benefit gig for the striking United Mine Workers (March 20–21, 1978) at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco
(Read this flyer first!)
What I love—yet also hate—about this flyer is its arrogant sense of self-evidence. By this I mean that the flyer presumes that anyone who reads it will automatically understand its point. Of course, judging by the reactions of those to whom I’ve shown it, including a friend who is a scholar of the history of anarchism, this flyer is confounding and more-or-less inscrutable. It’s also interesting personally because, as some of you who have been reading my writing since I was a teenaged zinester will surely attest, I used to adopt this tone myself (maybe still do, to some degree), and I was inspired by people like the anarchist behind this flyer. So let me try to unpack what’s going on here.
Although this particular story registers as barely a footnote in the grand scheme of both punk and US radical historiography, it energizes me for a few reasons, which guide this article. First, the developments behind this flyer are the transformations of global capitalism of the 1970s that fascinate me and that I maintain are essential for understanding the present. Second, despite its antipathy toward punk, this flyer, and the gig that is its object, represent a moment when radical political movements in the US and punk rock were in dialogue and allows me to discuss how its misreading of punk means a misreading of punk's radicality. Third, the flyer itself suggests failures of analysis, theory, and praxis that I recognize as plaguing some strands of anarchist or radical left politics in the US with which I otherwise sympathize. Finally, the flyer, the gig, and coverage of the miners' strike in Search & Destroy open on to several unpredictable turns of events that beg recapitulation.
But, from the radical perspective informing this flyer, the tumult of 1968 demonstrated, in France particularly, that unions and official left-wing parties, like the French Communist Party (PCF), in order to hold on to their power, were willing to capitulate in the face of insurrection rather than attempt to push forward to revolutionary overthrow of the hegemonic system. The corollary perspective informing the flyer is that the unconstrained insurrectionary tendencies of the late 1960s, which continued through the 1970s, in many countries demonstrated that the unions could no longer be said to speak for the working class. May 1968’s wildcat general strike in France, the country’s first, was evidence of the working class taking matters into its own hands (and evidence that the “working class” as such could no longer be considered solely the male, native-born industrial proletariat, which the postwar compromise had made comfortable, in contrast to women, students, immigrants, etc.).
For the US coal industry, the 1970s were marked by several interrelated shifts. First, the mine corporations realized that they could stockpile coal to enable them to continue to supply the energy industry in the event of a strike. In addition, overall, as the economy declined during this period, their extractive capacity exceeded that needed by the energy industry itself, making many workers redundant. In turn, worker redundancy led to increased worker militancy. But worries surrounding labor militancy caused some energy suppliers to shift to other sources besides coal. And, finally, changing extractive technology was also diminishing the need for large numbers of miners. Therefore, the United Mine Workers of America was in a compromised position, with workers having taken part in creating their own redundancy, cementing the ineffectiveness of tactics like strikes, because they had themselves produced the surpluses of coal in the course of their regular work. These industry-wide shifts, however, were not accompanied by the one shift miners most desired: a decrease in the danger of their profession.
In 1977, coal miners were some of the most militant union workers in the US. Capital-intensive industries like mining were among the most severely affected by the overall economic decline of the previous decade, which is why this industry was at the forefront of clamping down on labor in the effort to preserve its profitability. Among the workers a bitter fight throughout 1977 over national union leadership represented a broader struggle between the rank-and-file members, the leadership, and the industry over work-safety conditions, pay, benefits, and the very ability of miners to strike. Wildcat strikes occurred across Appalachia. In Kentucky, where union locals bore a long history of radicalism—workers for whom the gig mentioned on the flyer was a benefit—gunfights broke out between industry-hired security and miners. In the face of increasing militancy, the industry refused to give in to demands, which led to further wildcat strikes. By year’s end, after failed negotiations, bombings, shootings, and strikes, 180,000 union miners struck nationwide. What the union could do, it seemed, was hold on to its tenuous position by ensuring cost-of-living increases for its members and trying to hold the line on lay-offs, even if it meant resolving not to allow wildcat strikes at individual mines. In early March 1978, the White House intervened to compel striking miners to return to work. (Presidential intervention in labor disputes was a pattern that would be reproduced and escalated by President Reagan, as well as by Margaret Thatcher with striking miners in Britain, marking a central tendency in neoliberalization.) The rank and file, particularly the younger and more radical miners, such as those in Kentucky, rejected the newly negotiated contract. But eventually the contract was adopted, with a bare plurality in a vote. And within a couple months, newspapers were reporting that miners were still dying with alarming frequency in the mines.
In this light, the flyer’s line, “Many miners are increasingly fed up with this whole arrangement provided for them,” becomes somewhat more understandable. But the flyer is critiquing the existence of unions themselves. Rather than seeing the United Mine Workers as stuck between a (bituminous) rock and a hard place, it argues that the union and the industry want the same thing. What they both desire is a cessation of worker militancy, such as “absenteeism, sabotage, turnover, hatred of both union and company officials,” outside the bounds of sanctioned tactics. The workers, it presumes, based on this militancy, are not solely concerned with their contract. What they want is less “servitude.” The flyer decries the strike as a sanctioned tactic, a “sham ritual” designed to help workers “release pent-up hostilities.” Following from the lessons of May 1968, the flyer remarks that allowable disagreement surrounds who may represent the workers but not whether the workers should be represented at all. This line of thinking derives from the French social theorist Henri Lefebvre, who was excommunicated from the PCF, and from his one-time comrades in the Situationist International (SI), particularly Guy Debord. A key argument of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, one that was particularly prescient because it preceded the events of 1968, which is often overlooked in discussions of its ideas, is that the alienation the society of the spectacle engenders is political. Mediation is not just an effect of “media,” it also obtains in the modern conception of democracy. When Debord speaks of “Separation Perfected” or “The Culmination of Separation” (depending on the translation) at the beginning of the book, he is arguing that the political vector of mediation through democratic representation in the modern liberal nation-state has become entwined with the vector of mediation—estrangement—of wage labor and commodity fetishism.*
A passing irony: I have until now coyly avoided mentioning that this flyer was created by the anarchist writer John Zerzan, who is well-known in some circles for authoring many works extolling so-called anarcho-primitivism. The ironic part is that in the late 1960s, he was a union organizer in the Department of Social Services in San Francisco. In 1971 Contradiction, a local radical group influenced by the SI, attacked him for being a radical but working within the union framework—from Contradiction’s perspective an irresolvable paradox. Indeed, in their open letter to Zerzan, they named the now-famous historical examples of worker self-management (autogestion, as Lefebvre called it), such as Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936, and Hungary 1956, wherein workers abolished the need for representation of any sort, doing away with unions and bosses alike.** By the late 1970s, however, Zerzan had adopted precisely the perspective Contradiction accused him of lacking. Yet the flyer does not broach the subject of autogestion, leaving the reader with the feeling that it begins a sentence it does not know how to end.
What would autogestion in the coal industry entail? One can perhaps imagine worker-controlled coal mines, which would put safety first. But to what end? Coal’s centrality to capitalist industry means that worker control of its production would engender worker control of one necessary link in an otherwise globally destructive system of production. Even if the environmental degradation attributable to coal-fired energy plants and coal mining techniques was not as well recognized in the late 1970s as it is today, Zerzan’s silence on the issue of autogestion, the logical next step after abolition of union representation, speaks volumes about how thorny the issue actually is. As Lefebvre writes, “One cannot claim in [autogestion’s] name to ‘transcend’ the market, the profitability of businesses, the laws of exchange value. Only centralized statism has had this excessive ambition.” And we know Zerzan is fundamentally against centralized statism. Lefebvre continues, “The principle of autogestion revives the contradiction between use value and exchange value. It tends to restore primacy to use value. It ‘is’ the use value of human beings in their practical relations. It valorizes them against the world of the commodity, without, however, denying that this world has laws that must be mastered and not neglected.” Zerzan’s fervent wish, it seems, is that the use value of human beings—the qualities of life that exploitation extinguishes—could be valorized though the abolition of unions, without facing the logic of commodification itself. What Lefebvre suggests is that workers’ self-management of, for example, coal mines would necessitate a radical questioning of whether the use value of these workers’ lives could be valorized without maintaining the exploitative status quo in related industries. Lefebvre: “Once someone conceives of autogestion, once one thinks its generalization, one radically contests the existing order, from the world of the commodity and the power of money to the power of the State.”*** Although Zerzan’s rhetoric is full of bluster, and he accuses the punks of not being willing radically to contest the existing order, he fails to offer any concrete proposal of a modality for so doing.
* Marx, and later Georg Lukács (who greatly influenced Debord), both understood, in outline form, this tendency of liberal democracy as well. They described the commodity form as supplanting other, traditional social bonds and imposing its own logic upon the whole of society, including upon citizenship, which is fundamentally “abstract equivalence” in the political realm. Although this point may seem tangential, I would argue that the flyer’s difficulty is partially explained by its studious unwillingness to engage issues like the state, which its intellectual forebears would never condone.
** Arguably the most successful example of autogestion occurred in Portugal from 1975 to 1976, not long before the matter at hand.
*** Lefebvre's "Theoretical Problems of Autogestion," the source of these quotations, appeared in 1966 in a journal called Autogestion et Socialisme but was not published in English until last year's collection State, Space, World. Although Debord and Lefebvre had severed all communication well before May 1968, Raoul Vaneigem, whom Lefebvre originally had introduced to Debord a few years earlier, would publish in the SI's final journal issue (in 1969) a theorization of autogestion and critique of the May 1968 attempts thereof, called "Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized Self-Management." This article shares commonalities with Lefebvre's 1966 take, of which he was almost certainly aware, enriched by the experience of successes and profound failures in France in the May explosion. He extended this discussion in a 1974 book called From Wildcat Strike to Generalized Self-Management.
So how does punk rock fit in with all of this? By the late 1970s, Zerzan had left union organizing. He was affiliated with Fredy Perlman, one of the key anarchists of Detroit, who was partially responsible for introducing English-speaking audiences to Situationist ideas; Perlman was one of the translators of the initial English translation of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.* But Zerzan took his history as a union organizer to heart in critical research on the history of unionism, and work, or alienated labor, more generally. At the same time, as I hinted above, the so-called “revolt against work” of the 1970s was spreading, with absenteeism and sabotage increasing around the globe. I argue that it is in this context that the emergence of punk must be understood. Due in part to conflation of the class of 76 with the class of 79, as well as the failure to distinguish—while noting the continuities—between the decline of the Labor Party in the UK and the Democratic Party in the US from the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, respectively, punk’s historiography has stumbled when situating punk in the context of the global transformations of the 1970s. Of course the caveat that punks did not articulate a monolithic position is necessary, but what energized many first-wave punks in Italy, France, the US, and the UK was not so much the rampant unemployment among young people that characterized the late 1970s and early 1980s (ie, after the initial wave[s]) as the realization that even if one got a job, it was going to suck.
Technological and organizational transformations that made work so unappealing were part of the tendency of deskilling in the workplace that punk answered in the streets. What is punk if not a de-monopolization of the skills ideologized as necessary to create art, to rock? The quirk of history was that many punks, in their pre-punk lives, already possessed musical skills. The process of becoming punk was thus a process of unlearning, of shedding, and of redeploying. Therefore, UK DIY was able to explode because of the abundance of instruments other than guitars, basses, and drums that now filled junk shops, whereas so many punk riffs and song structures were constructed negatively, through the stripping away of the ornaments that characterized the music of the preceding decade. Punk was therefore an affirmative deskilling, willingly chosen, as a revolt against what 60s radicals intuited as an increasingly untenable plenitude marked by banality (in Lefebvre’s felicitous phrase, the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption). It was the moment when plenitude receded—the economic collapse of the 1970s—that enabled this spark, carried through from the 60s, to become the punk conflagration.
And, as you may have guessed, I believe that punk rock was a concrete example of autogestion. It may not have had the ambition of autogestion in Lefebvre’s conceptualization, but punk must be defined provisionally as, on the one hand, a path-dependent set of musical or sonic figures and approaches that tendentially coalesce into a flexible and porous constellation relationally constituted against given historical musical and sonic figures and approaches, and, on the other hand, a process of and apparatus for the self-managed production and dissemination of this music.** If punk thought of the music industry as analogous to the state in Lefebvre’s conceptualization (ie, with self-management radically contesting the existing order, including the power of the industry), the stakes of its attempt at autogestion become more clear. It may be true that the music industry outlived punk’s attack on it, but it was far from unscathed, just as unions and official left parties did not emerge from 1968 unscathed.
* I should note that Zerzan would likely have learned a bit about autogestion from Perlman (ie, not the SI or Lefebvre directly), who wrote a definitive English-language account of the tendencies toward autogestion manifest in May 68, Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May '68. Perlman and a comrade experienced factory takeovers in France and were among the first to publish accounts of them in English, which were soon collected, along with a critique of the experience, in that book. Thus, Perlman's account, and its potential influence on Zerzan, was based on empirical evidence, whereas the Lefebvre quotations above on autogestion were theoretical in orientation. I feel that Perlman's keen narration and unsentimental critique of the failures of the May revolution makes it even more baffling that Zerzan would be so unwilling to take his attack on the punk-miner alliance down that path.
** Yeah, I just defined punk in the least punk terms possible. If you don’t like it, fuck off. I'll save unpacking what this definition means for another day.
Here is how Zerzan subsequently described his encounter with punk rock:
1977 was the year of the original punk rock explosion in San Francisco, imported from its birth in the U.K. about a year earlier. No one thought its vehemence was the rebirth of the ‘60s, but it occasioned an exciting outburst of nihilist energy. Punk might be thought of as a kind of aftershock of the ‘60s quake, although many punkers were explicitly contemptuous of that earlier scene (especially of hippies). The first blast of raw, angry punk was bracing as hell, and some went further than music performance. For instance, a small bunch went up to Pacific Heights more than once to bash new Mercedes, BMWs, and the like with chains and metal bars. More characteristic, of course, were the drug O.D.s that occurred all along, even during the 1977 heyday, as well as later.
By early ‘78 the initial rush was over, particularly for the more political types like myself who secretly hoped that punk might actually re-ignite significant resistance. Sixties illusions and groundless idealism were effectively dead and the new defiance of punk went deeper, even with its cynical overlay. Or so it seemed for a season.
This flyer dates to his realization that by early 1978, punk was not going to overthrow the dominant system of political and economic organization. But, as one can see, there’s more cynicism than analysis, explanation, or, to be sure, hopefulness on display. Zerzan's invocation of the "cynical overlay" of punk above is an accurate characterization of some punk but not all of it, and the tone in the flyer projects his own attitude on to the benefit gig. In essence, he decries the punks for not being more cynical. My overweening critique of the flyer is that, on the one hand, it asks too much of punk (for this reason, I feel comfortable subjecting it to rigorous critique even though it is not a book or even an article, of which Zerzan has produced many). On the other, the flyer assumes the punks to be stupid and dogmatic. But it’s worth examining the specifics of it as well.
The phrase “a couple of pseudo-radicals who alternate calls to revolution with record company ads in their misnamed little tabloid” seems to be a reference to V. Vale and Nico Ordway of San Francisco’s Search & Destroy zine. It carries with it a familiar snobbishness—again, something I still can’t help but find alluring—that believes radical politics need not dirty its hands with the sphere of mass culture. But the flyer evinces ambiguity here too: are we to believe X-Ray Spex to have been exemplary of Zerzan’s politics of refusal? If Zerzan were adhering closely to Debord’s line of thought, he would recognize that alienation on the shop floor and in the political realm (eg, unions) are of a piece with alienation in the artistic realm (broadly including pop music). That punk was opposed to alienation nevertheless could not change the fact that its opposition would necessarily be mediated through alienated cultural production after the collapse of 60s social movements. Anyway, in the sixth issue of Search & Destroy, which featured the appositely (for my article’s purposes) titled “Industrial Music for Industrial People” feature on Throbbing Gristle, Nico Ordway explained why punks should support the nation’s mine workers in a piece called “Coal Strike . . . Dimensions of a Crisis.” I call attention to this article because it shows that my critique of Zerzan is not simply an example of retrospective criticism based on knowledge that was not available then. Instead, the article is, if anything, far more perspicacious and prescient than Zerzan was. Its organic connection to the San Fran punk scene makes its sharpness particularly thrilling for me, as I feel like I am constantly attempting to defend punk's radical left politics against today's reactionary lunkheads in its midst.
Ordway offers a fairly standard Marxist take, and, unlike Zerzan, he describes the proximate goals of the strikers as intimately connected with broader issues facing the working class. He says that the strike was based on two issues: first, the union members’ very ability to strike without penalty, and, second, the protection of miners’ health. These two issues are linked: because of a failure to improve safety conditions, a key focus of activism in the previous decade, miners across the country were striking with increased tenacity in individual mines that were unsafe. Although the miners had the right to strike individual mines, the union representatives, in collusion with the corporations, wanted to restrain this activity, which, for many miners showed how bankrupt the union was. Therefore, when the industry proposed a contract, with increases in wages, that would penalize miners for striking individual mines, the union accepted it without the widespread agreement of the rank and file. The contract also restricted healthcare coverage for miners (pretty much inevitably) injured on the job. As mentioned, after Carter’s intervention, the contract was adopted.
The broader context, which Ordway underscores, explains why the industry would not simply improve safety conditions, which would decrease the likelihood of strikes. The stockpiles of coal made the strikes less effective in hurting the industry, which meant that they could be more easily ignored. But more broadly, Ordway suggests, industrial giants “have suffered a fall in the rate of productivity and profits over the past decade.” Today, this explanation is more or less accepted by radical critics of neoliberalization as its catalyst. He continues, “Especially in the past two years, industrial employers have been on a coordinated campaign to boost their profit margins by trimming workers’ rights and benefits.” Because of the centrality of coal to a range of industries in the US, and worldwide (for he ties in the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the industrial interests that stood to benefit there, as well), controlling costs of coal while boosting the industry’s profitability would serve as a benchmark for broader industrial restructuring. The cuts to healthcare, like the refusal to improve mine safety, were part of an overall retrenchment of social-welfare policy that began as a response to diminished profit rates and labor militancy in the 1970s. Not to give an inch became capital’s ethos on such matters ever since, but against ideological claims of decreasing state interference with the market, neoliberalization, as Carter’s intervention in the mine strike showed, entails the state taking an active role in ensuring the smooth functioning of capital accumulation. Autogestion seeks to detonate that alliance.
Unlike Zerzan’s accusatory flyer, Ordway sees the miners’ strike as inseparable from the revolt against work that had so inspired Zerzan. The flyer fails to recognize that the nationwide strike, which elicited Carter’s intervention, was the culmination of the individual wildcat strikes, sabotage, and gunfights by more radical locals. This radicalism forced the national union to take the drastic step of the broad strike. The punks were in support of the radicals, and it seems plainly mistaken to have assumed that the punks or the radical miners thought the national union and its contract fixed the problem. Dynamite and semi-automatic rifles, which some Kentucky miners used against the corporation that owned the mine, are as “unsanctioned” as it gets. Zerzan seems certain that the punk gig will support the union, rather than, say, the saboteurs. But, because the show was recorded on video and excerpted in the “Faster Shorter Louder” video, we can see that, for example, Penelope Houston of the Avengers made reference to “the miners” only, not to the union or the contract. Perhaps other bands had a more specific critique, but, from what I know about punk rock, I’d say it’s safe to assume the punks were more enamored of explosions than of contracts. But the organization of the gig itself demonstrates that punk rhetoric and punk practice differed, something Zerzan's adoption of punk's nihilistic rhetoric does not seem to recognize.
Zerzan’s anti-union position echoes the very critique Contradiction mounted of his own activism in 1971. But it seems that even by 1978, still before Reaganism, the conditions of possibility had dramatically changed. Ordway notes that the radicalism of the miners was due in part to a younger generation having gone down the shafts and found safety conditions not to have improved since the previous century. The industry’s decision to clamp down on the previously won ability to strike individual mines was its way of testing how far it could push back against this new generation’s militancy. He writes, “It is because the mine workers are angry at being treated as disposable objects that the mine strike has taken on the character of a fundamental protest against the domination of the employers over the workers.” Zerzan, in contrast, with his fetishization of the union, actually has a much more parsimonious political program, if one could call it that, than the punk-miner alliance had. In later writings, Zerzan’s idea of revolution is shown to be not just the overthrow of the domination of the bosses but of the commodity form, work, and civilization itself, but his focus on the union here does not so indicate. Moreover, I do not see the distinction between anti-work and strikes as so sharply drawn. And I do not think the punks did either. The miners whom the punks were supporting were some of the most radical in the industry, similar in age to the punks of San Francisco, and feeling the same rebellious urges. These miners first compelled the national strike through their militancy and then rejected the contract eventually imposed upon them. Ordway closes his discussion with this defense of the benefit show for striking miners: “Because most punk rockers have experienced the boredom, oppression, authoritarian-patriarchal bureaucratic repression, and simple exhaustive exploitation of office and industrial WORK” the punks are in solidarity with the miners. Ordway understands that repression of the miners would extend across the working class, and that “all who rebel have a stake in this conflict.” The work of ideology is to sever such links, to make it seem as though the motor of one group’s oppression is different from that of another. The punks were able to cut through this set of blinders, even if they may not have described it in those terms.
In contrast, Zerzan is caught up in trying to separate the authentic, radical-enough-for-him rebellion from the actually existing, organic radicalism before his eyes. I find this flyer’s desperate, moralistic, holier-than-thou attitude quite repulsive (baby, you’re so…). Because I felt as though Zerzan and his ilk had the answer when I was younger and that the answer was itself to try to be more radical than anyone else, without attempting to explain what that entailed, and to use that position as a cudgel, it particularly bothers me. In fact, if we take the word radical to mean “going to the root,” Ordway shows how the punks were the radicals here. The revolt against work meant confronting the oppressiveness of work here, there, and everywhere, so to speak, to show that solidarity could bridge ideological lines like urban/rural, gay/straight, white/black, etc. It meant refusing work and refusing those who would make work so intolerable. But it also meant trying to understand how the oppressive relationships outside the shop floor (or mineshaft) are related to those of the capitalist to the worker. I am in agreement with Zerzan insofar as I believe that work sucks and unions are so often bankrupt and in the pockets of the industries, or are industries unto themselves. But I simply do not believe that the way to increase the ranks of radicals is to make your fellows who are similarly oppressed feel bad because they are not like you, as informed, or as radical. Moreover, comfortable middle-class lives, if such things exist, may be premised on the oppression of the poor, but rather than making the middle class feel guilty about this arrangement, as liberal apologists and many radical leftists do, a better approach would be to demonstrate the shared contours of oppression and alienation between these groups. It may be true that capitalism would crumble if everyone suddenly decided to stop working in their miserable jobs all at once.* But telling people they’re stupid for continuing to work is only going to increase the ranks of those who identify with the hegemonic, oppressive ideas. In fact, neoliberalization has meant that Zerzan’s wish has largely been achieved: unions retain a small fraction of the power they did even in the 1970s. Can they still be said to be “the chief enforcer of wage labor”? No way.
* Actually, I doubt it, as the history of capitalism is capital’s sequence of attempts to emancipate itself from the working class, as Mario Tronti, a chief theoretician of the revolt against work, once wrote. The insane growth of financial speculation in the past couple decades can be taken as proof of this proposition, as it denotes the growth of money without the intervening production and sale of commodities. The crisis, however, indicates that, contrary to capital's dream, it cannot escape the need for labor.
Punk rock certainly deserves critical appraisal. But whether it’s the peculiar criticism on display here or the more common criticisms that we encounter, about its failures at inclusiveness or even its failure to overthrow capitalism, for example, I find that these criticisms revolve much more around the subjective experiences of those mounting them than about punk rock as it has existed. These subjective experiences are valid and important but they should not be mistaken for generalizable features of history. Punk is too heterogeneous and wide-ranging for such narrow but general critiques to succeed. With the availability of archives today, from zine and mp3 blogs to encyclopedic reference works, there is no excuse for failing to confront punk’s history with more care and less caprice than its critics and historians have done in the past, even as it was developing, as Zerzan did here.
Some last quirks of history: Ordway was affiliated with the Dils, one of the most iridescent examples of the mixture of radical left politics and three-chord punk rock the US scene offered. He wrote the classic song “Class War.” (In September 1978, the Dils would play another benefit for striking workers, this time, from the railroad union.) Through his columns in Search & Destroy and his zine NO News, he was able to describe and analyze the politics of punk, and punk’s relationship to broader political trends, as they were unfolding. Today, Ordway, whose real name is Stephen Schwartz, is a Muslim-convert neoconservative pundit. Yeah. Ouch. Even more odd is that Schwartz’s father was a friend of the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who featured in a book Schwartz penned about, and against, the left in California (available used on Amazon for 2¢), and Ken Knabb, of Contradiction, is today one of the writers most associated with documenting Rexroth’s work. Schwartz is one of many Trotskyists who became a neocon in recent years. But he is probably the only one who was a punk rocker and wrote lyrics to a classic punk song. In a way, he is still a Trotskyist, finding Stalinism everywhere.
I have contemplated whether his current politics invalidate what I perceive to be the accuracy of what he wrote in the 1970s, and I can say only that I must take what I see at face value. I cannot perceive any inkling of what was to come decades later in his articles on punk rock. I do not know what instigated his move to the right—Jeff Bale, Maximum Rocknroll cofounder and another active Bay Area punk rocker who extolled this very benefit gig in a newspaper op-ed, also ended up as a neocon—but Schwartz’s Trotskyist phase followed his punk phase. It was obviously a good primer for the petty idiocy that characterizes neocon (and mainstream) discourse today. Although Zerzan has stayed true to his anarchist principles, from the long view we are now afforded, it becomes clear that his holier-than-thou critique of the punks, who in the end raised over $3000 for the striking miners (make of that what you will), echoes the highly masculinist and macho factional left arguments of the twentieth century. His present anti-civilization line is another variation of the "who is the most radical" one-upmanship of the flyer. To be clear, capitalism is the problem—that is the foundation of my politics—but oppression on the axis of gender—another concern of my politics—predates capitalism; primitivist anarchism, from my point of view, fails to historicize this distinction and naturalizes most of the oppressions of capitalism as precapitalist.
If the right, as capital’s self-proclaimed adjunct, is today united in its determination to maintain a system bloated on self-satisfaction to the point that it cannot but fiddle as the edifice crumbles around it, we can note with some pride that the right’s internal unity is based not on equanimity and solidarity, as the San Fran punks’ unity with striking miners was. Rather it is premised on exclusion, on expulsion of those whose views differ. For many, that ethos entails basic white supremacist heteronormativity; for some, like Schwartz, it entails constructing catch-all phrases like “neofascist” to describe those with whom they disagree. Today, I do not believe the left need tolerate bigots no matter what their guise, but I am certain that political radicalization is happening regardless because conditions are so intolerable around the world. Whether broadly anticapitalist radicals, including today’s punk rockers, can be humble enough to realize that the answer is often dictated by how the question is asked remains to be seen. I can only hope that the allure of Zerzan’s moralistic method of asking the question, on display in this flyer, will wither.
January 19, 2010