Join the new world

A few annoying alt-right edge lords and their openly fascist cohorts have been acting out lately hither and yon.

In street confrontations, the red-and-black blocs of Antifa and their various allies seem to win the upper hand more often than not. Antifascist and pro-democracy community organizers and co-conspirators have successfully deployed useful political counter-measures in Philly, in Boston, in Heraklion, and elsewhere. Social media plays an important role in exposing white nationalists and similar racists.

Not all is well, of course. But my purpose here isn't to review the entire political context.

The most wackadoodle neo-Nazi nasties in the USA are their own worst enemies: getting into fights with their dads over sleeping with their step-mother, denounouncing each other for being "Strasserite Communists", accumulating massive debts from speaking tours rather than making a buck, and similar extraordinary expressions of family values, brotherly solidarity and entrepreneurial know-how.

In other words, despite their pretentions, these guys aren't quite the brain trust of the master race. We're talking about goobers who have "beat in" rituals that involve naming breakfast cereals while getting punched in the shoulder by their super-doodle-dandy bro's.

My subversive topic today, though, is both more mundane and more profound. I am not concerned so much with the day-to-day politics of the incelite brigades, but with with their attempted appropriation of fashion. Too dull-minded, perhaps, to come up with something fresh or quirky, like, say, appropriating yellow jackets as a symbol of mass insurrection, or reclaiming "redneck" as a symbol of armed anti-racist community defense, instead they've played at expropriating counter-cultural looks originating in multi-cultural trends from the late 1960's: mods and skinheads.


-- from Quadrophenia (1979), based on 1973 album by The Who


Skinhead, in particular, these days, conjures up images of white racist hooligans. It is a particular aesthetic adopted by some neo-Nazis. In the mid-to-late '60s though, the look reflected a multicultural subculture that fused Jamaican "rude boy" styles and music with the working class cultures of English mods (Modernists) who decked themselves in fine Italian suits and shoes, listened to American soul, jazz, and R&B, and rode Vespa scooters. Skinhead style emerged in the late 1960s as a simplified version of Mod, with a greater emphasis on projecting working class masculinity and a love of Jamaican reggae and ska.

In the 1970s, the skinhead look morphed into the punk rock scene, then the 1970s saw the start and the 1980s saw a wholesale attempt to co-opt the skinhead look by white nationalists. A good number of punk rock and post-punk bands and venues fought back, defending their look from the attempts by racists to claim it. Emblematically, there was the Dead Kennedys 1981 single "Nazi Punks Fuck Off".




Mods, Skins, Punks, Ska. All were ways for subordinate classes and groups to challenge their status within the framework of a capitalism that accumulates "cultural capital" at their expense. The hegemonic culture attempts to contain, define and eventually absorb into its orbit all other cultures. Subcultures thus inevitably enter into resistance against the dominant culture, from which it typically inherits and often turns inside-out many of its attributes.

The importance of style should not be underestimated. Projecting sub-cultural style requires appropriating the commodity, redefining its use and its value, and finally relocating its meaning within a totally different ideological context. Such semantic rearrangements help to preserve a private dimension against passive consumer roles.

British skinheads acted "hard" in order to project an "authentic" working-class ethos, expressed especially in the forming of "firms" to support football (soccer) clubs. The development and quick commodification of punk in the 1970s led to Oi! music, simplified punk that could not be mainstreamed. Non-racist bands like Sham69 led the way.



"They can lie to my face,
But not to my heart.
If we all stand together,
It will just be the start...

"If the kids are united,
Then we'll never be divided.
If the kids are united,
Then we'll never be divided."

-- The Kids Are United, Sham 69


The far-right National Front in the UK started recruiting skinheads at soccer matches by scape-goating immigrants for the decline of the white working class. Neo-Nazi bands were part of this political opportunism, along with a militarization of the look that started appearing in the US as the 1980s wore on.

Counter-measures were soon deployed by authentic sub-culturists. The cultivation of an "original" look became, like choice of music, a litmus test of authenticity. A "bone head" or "bald punk" was a glue-sniffing far-right windbag, while an authentic punk celebrated the Black musical roots of the subculture. "Unpolitical" and left-wing skins started to organize to "take back" the subculture from the radical right starting in the early 1980s and continuing into the '90s.






The foremost organizational expression of the resistance was SHARP, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, founded in NYC in 1987. The SHARP logo was reflected in that of Trojan records and aligned to bands like The Oppressed who led the charge with confrontational Oi style that directly attacked the racist opposition. The band allied itself directly with Anti-Fascist Action, founded in 1985 in the UK, in the spirit of similar groups in Germany and Sweden.


"We gotta, work, work, work together,
fight, fight, stay alive,
work, work, work together,
we're fighting to survive,
You'll know when we arrive, oh yeah.

"Work for all in a carefree state,
No more anger, no more hate,
No more fighting, Black and White,
We must all learn to unite..."

-- Work Together, The Oppressed


Smaller groups like RASH (Red and Anarchist Skinheads) added a more polticized element to SHARP's anti-racist stance. Both of these groups embraced some "post-mod" styles with a North American twist, in particular Fred Perry shirts and the laurel wreath associated with the brand, into their style. Plaid shirts and blue jean jackets made an appearance too.



RASH anti-fascist logo featuring the Fred Perry laurel wreath

As the crisis of world-wide capitalism deepens, these long-running partisan style battles continue. It is a murky arena of combat, not always easy to read given the apparent vagaries, with a lack of exact knowledge of the symbolisms attaching to forms, colors, textures, postures, and other expressive elements of given dominant- and sub-cultures. On top of that, such expressive elements tend to have different symbolic references in different areas.

A skinhead look, or variation of it, could represent a white nationalist expropriation of rebel culture, a far-left attitude towards anti-fascism, or even still a "simpler" and more "traditional" celebration of multiculturalism and musical syncretism.

For the latter two, keeping a claim on and defending the "Spirit of '69" is a battle against corruption and political reaction. Such "ownership" of a "brand" may seem trivial, but it is, in effect, a struggle for agency, for a free space, in defense of ideological struggle via appropriation of contested material culture.







Relevance?

I'd offer that the on-going insistence by groups of players, over a fairly considerable amount of time, that something like a "Socialist Freedom Party" must exist and must have a role to play in the "New World" probably emerges from a similar, if perhaps considerably less weighty (though sometimes almost as fiercely contested) urge to carve out a free "Gramscian" space within the more dominant cultural materials.