AGIT PUNK FORM

The concert was on August 15, 1980, and as the festival’s archival report indicates, the event was not successful, as the “political manifestation” was reduced to a concert.6 Apart from the negligible influence it had on a few local bands and organizers, the Pop Group concert was overall a fiasco and remains virtually unknown in the annals of Finnish alternative music history.7 As a member of the Pop Group later recalled: “In Helsinki [we played] a massive anti-apartheid gig in an ice rink with about eight thousand people. About eight of them knew who the hell we were.”8

The communist youth of Spartakiadit went to great lengths to promote the event to a wider audience. They redesigned the organization’s “official” newsletter with an image from one of the Pop Group’s albums on the cover, and included essays on subcultural squats and alternative venues in Helsinki. This coincided with the “opening” of the Communist Party of Finland and the broader moment of “democratization” of communist parties in Europe. Two weeks after the gig, the Spartakiadit festival committee criticized the “domination” of punk over the other types musical acts present at the festival, particularly over workers’ songs and classical music, which organizers also considered “youth music.”

The Pop Group’s performance divided Spartakiadit into two factions: veterans familiar with traditional socialist music (represented in Finland by Agit-Prop and bands released on the Eteenpäin! label), and newcomers who were enthusiastic about punk and demanded more autonomy and independence. According to reports, the “punk youth” subsequently gravitated towards Lepakko, a newly founded, self-managed social center and music venue. The Spartakiadit committee insisted on a “wide range of musical events” for future festivals, and criticized punks for being “dogmatic.”

Love for Punctuation

Punk and socialism did not have a happy marriage. Apart from the Trotsky-influenced Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which supported Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League (ANL), most leftists were unconvinced by punk’s anti-capitalism. Through the ANL, the SWP found in punk a non-chauvinist and non-moralizing working-class culture based on Lenin, who “loved Mayakovsky, Grosz, electricity, cinema and explosive punctuation.”9 Despite the ANL’s success in fighting against the growth of the fascist National Front,10 punk was routinely dismissed as fascist by the far left. Cornelius Cardew’s Progressive Cultural Association published an article titled “Punk Rock Is Fascist” in the first issue of its magazine, Cogs and Wheels, in 1977. The group briefly adopted the article title as a slogan and used it on numerous public occasions, but then dropped it. Still, its views on punk were indifferent at best, seeing the racist elements of punk culture as an imitation of the mainstream.11 Other leftist critics were equally dismissive. In their essay “The End of Music,” proto-situationists Dave and Stuart Wise criticized the appropriation of punk by the “fossilized” left and attacked the fusion of punk with reggae, calling it a “pathetic pseudo-attempt to fight racism.”12 For Chris Cutler, drummer in Henry Cow and the promoter and theoretician of Rock in Opposition, a collective of progressive rock bands,

punk was a middle-class form, which came principally out of British art schools and was puffed up by the Rock press. It claimed proletarian roots but didn’t have them—the only “working class” (actually, lumpen) form of punk was “Oi” Music, the music of the youth of the British Fascist movement.13

Some early punk did connect with socialist themes. Songs like the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” and The Clash’s “Career Opportunities” addressed unemployment and social tensions. In 1977, the Young Communist League even sent an open letter to the Sex Pistols suggesting a consolidation of punk and communist ideas, and held a New Wave Forum at its Red Festival, featuring Sham 69 delivering the live soundtrack.14 For activist writers like David Widgery, punk allowed Marxist ideas to be transformed from “badly translated Russian” into “plain English prose,” formulating a “punk Marxism” relevant to the 1970s.15

Today’s punk scholarship largely denies punk’s connection to progressive politics. Most papers published in the journal Punk & Post-Punk or read at Punk Scholars Network conferences agree that punk had nothing to do with “left leaning, liberal and progressive positions” or “revolutionary and progressive movements.”16 Punk is, as Matthew Worley writes, politically formless at best: “Both the left and the right sought to assign political meaning to punk and provide opportunity for music, youth culture and politics to coalesce. This was never successful; punk and its associated cultural forms remained too amorphous and diverse to forge a coherent politics.”17 Despite this perceived incoherence, I argue that punk contained a radical core of militant subjectivity. This is the essence of punk politics.

Althusser, Punk Stalinist

“Popular Culture and Revolutionary Theory: Understanding Punk Rock” by Neil Eriksen, published in the Maoist Theoretical Review in 1980, defends punk’s militant line by introducing it as a “revolutionary cultural practice.” This Marxist-Leninist interpretation drew on Louis Althusser’s concept of “ruptural unity” in popular resistance, a radical position that the bourgeoisie “could not defend”—in other words, a mass rupture difficult for ruling regimes to swallow and co-opt.18

Althusser’s extreme theory has attracted other punk researchers, including Dick Hebdige. His seminal study of the semiotics of punk—which he defined as a “temporary blockage in the system of representation”—describes punk’s ideological “noise” as the flip side of what Althusser called “teeth-gritting ‘harmony.’”19 Althusser, memorably, used this phrase to explain how repressive state apparatuses “shield,” or secure, ideological reproduction and enforce capitalism’s domination:

It is here that the role of the ruling ideology is heavily concentrated, the ideology of the ruling class, which holds State power. It is the intermediation of the ruling ideology that ensures a (sometimes teeth-gritting) “harmony” between the repressive State apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and between the different State Ideological Apparatuses.20

For Althusser, it was exploitative class violence that determined this machinery. In a private conversation during the first International Punk-Kongress in Kassel in 2004, Dick Hebdige explained to me that his theory of punk came out of his class consciousness: while writing his first book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, his mother was working as a cleaner in the part of London where Malcolm McLaren lived.

As for “punk Marxism,” this idea more closely resembles the Marx of Critique of the Gotha Programme than the utopian Marx of The German Ideology. Critique of the Gotha Programme ridiculed the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party’s “rubbishy phrases” and “ideological nonsense about ‘equal rights’ and other trash.”21 This is more punk than Marx’s vision in The German Ideology of “communist society making possible for me to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”22

Waiting for the Communist Call

The Pop Group’s first album, Y, released in 1979 by Radar and featuring a cover image of a group of Asaro people from Papua New Guinea performing a “Mudmen” dance, launched their international career. They soon learned from the Red Krayola’s Mayo Thompson that Radar’s parent company, Warner Arista Electra, was linked to the Kinney conglomerate, which was involved in the arms trade.23 Their second album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, released on Rough Trade in 1980, did not enjoy the same popularity among the music press as Y had. As Simon Reynolds wrote in his book on post-punk, the music on the second album was “still fiery and actually more focused than on Y, [but] it was hard to stomach the hectoring and lecturing album, unpoetic as a fringe leftist pamphlet.”24 The press, including the New Musical Express, which was earlier supportive of the Pop Group’s “primitivism,” dismissed the new album as elitist, “bad drab,” and “self-righteous soapbox agit-prop.” Years later, when Mark Fisher asked Stewart about this change in the Pop Group’s approach, Stewart replied bluntly: “We thought the world was going to end, it wasn’t the time for French Romantic poetry!”25

Punk’s view of capitalism is generally described as absolutist. As Geoffrey Waite argues, punk discourse sees capitalism as a “self-contained interiority admitting no radical exteriority or difference.”26 Folded in on itself, this world of commodities faces no challenge to its rule; punk exists in the “future anterior” where everything “has already happened.” In other words, punk believes in no future. This worldview leaves no room for chance or the aleatory. Capitalism appears as “ahistorical,” eternal, the ultimate truth. In the punk imagination, capitalism is a “windowless, monadic sites of enunciation,” “permanent and unalterable,” with no possible external intervention.

From this perspective, the Sex Pistols’ line “I was waiting for the communist call” from the group’s 1977 song “Holiday in the Sun” describes a moment of madness and delirium, of impossibility, rather than a conscious political demand. The possibility of exteriority, of communism, becomes a terrifying, “inarticulable terrain.”27 As a result, Waite argues, Johnny Rotten’s “I was waiting for the communist call” actually calls for the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and ultimately, for the flattening of the unevenness of capitalism. This punk gesture sees the other side of the Wall as an external threat to the monadic compactness of punk’s world, since “the real terrifying thing was actually existing socialism.”28 For all its anger and ferocity, punk was calling for normalization. As Waite ironically notes of an image of the Sex Pistols in front of the Berlin Wall in 1977: “Punk met the law, and the law won.”29

From this point of view, no version of socialism could be integrated into the punk imagination. This failure wasn’t due to punk’s hedonistic, antiauthoritarian, proto-anarchist attitudes—positions that, in the 1980s, were in fact welcomed by Western communist parties undergoing Eurocommunist reforms and by socialist countries from Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union. It was rather due to the logic of punk thought, which operated in absolutist and totalizing terms. To paraphrase the earlier critique of the Pop Group by the youth of the Communist Party of Finland: what caused the blockage was punk’s “dogmatism.” To take this idea further, we can put forward an absurd-sounding thesis: the militant punk dogmatism of the late seventies was not compatible with Eurocommunism’s eclectic and liberal revisionism.30

Punk’s politics are usually understood as an egalitarian critique of commodity capitalism based on punk’s DIY ethos and democratization of production—summed up in the slogan “anyone can do it.” Some scholars have invoked Marx’s idea of “direct production processes” to explain punk’s economic organization and its ethics of autonomy and independence.31 From this perspective, punk represents hope for humanity’s “full realization,” though as Pete Dale, who proposed this thesis, admits, it’s impossible to distinguish this politics from the politics of folk music. To understand punk’s anti-capitalism, we must also address its agitational form and its potential to overturn capitalism as a totalizing, self-destructive machine.32 The Pop Group managed to do this to some extent, but could not be classified as socialist.33

In For Marx, Althusser called the future anterior a pseudo-theory, insofar as it functions as a conspiracy theory. Its self-enclosed system cannot explain the ideological workings of capitalism; on the contrary, it reflects ideology itself. The Pop Group’s analysis of capitalism does exactly this: in their songs, capitalism’s totality reflects back on itself.

In a way, the Pop Group’s concert in Helsinki responded to a communist call but communicated in punk language. In an interview I conducted with Mark Stewart via Twitter a month before his sudden death in March 2023, he wrote: “The lyrics are always the way I best communicate my ideas. They are the ‘praxis’ of the Pop Group.”

None Dare Call It Conspiracy

In the mines of Bolivia
In the factories of South Africa
In the streets of Indonesia
Exploitation
Greed
Feed the hungry
More than ten thousand men women children
Die of hunger every day
Poverty is organised human greed …
Western bankers decide who lives and who dies
Twenty-eight people
Twenty-one of them children
Die of hunger every minute

—The Pop Group, “Feed the Hungry,” For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?

America wants Britain to be a floating launch pad for its cruise missiles. The US would only be happy if Britain got into a small nuclear war, because it wouldn’t go that far. It wouldn’t be their problem if half of Britain was blown up. They just want the missiles as far away from their own cities as possible.

—The Pop Group quoted in Mikko Montonen, “Pop Group: Kuinka kauan tätä täytyy kestää?!?” (The Pop Group: How Long Do We Tolerate This?!?), Soundi, 1980.

Eurocommunism not only rejected the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; it also made concessions to the NATO pact, militarization, and nationalist chauvinism. For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? captured this political defeat. To understand it better, we need to place it in the context of 1980, the year of its release.

A diagram juxtaposing the political conjuncture with slogans from the album For How Much Longer Will We Tolerate Mass Murder?

On December 12, 1979, at a semi-secret meeting in Brussels, NATO decided to deploy 572 nuclear missiles in Western Europe in response to a perceived nuclear threat from the Warsaw Pact. The missiles were to be installed in Germany, Holland, Italy, and the UK by 1983. Leaving aside the validity of NATO’s argument that Soviet SS-20 missiles posed a real threat to European stability, the plan sparked a massive peace movement in Europe, with protesters linking the war industry to capitalist expansionism. In 1983, huge crowds of people marched against the deployment of the nuclear missiles—some four hundred thousand in Bonn, 350,000 in London, 350,000 in Rome, 350,000 in Brussels, and five hundred thousand in The Hague. Western governments saw the peace movement as a “real threat” and responded with repression and illegal surveillance.34 Edward Thompson’s influential 1980s essay “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization” provides the best theoretical overview of this new conjuncture. The military industries, he argued, had a distinct and autonomous way of organizing work and research. They operated with the same logic in Western capitalism and Eastern socialism. Arms were omnipresent and acted as if they had an “independent will.” The nuclear arms race, Thompson wrote, had reached a point where it no longer had any rationale. He presented militarism as an almost self-sustaining system of the future anterior, “self-generating,” “independent of the ebb and flow of international diplomacy.” The weapons industry appeared “possessed by an independent will” that “self-reproduce[d] the imperatives of a bureaucracy.”35 In a similar vein, historian O. K. Werckmeister wrote that the “all-pervasiveness of the war” created a “citadel culture,” absorbing everything from popular music to contemporary art.36 The Pop Group’s lyrics identifying war with capitalism and imperialism accurately reflected this reality of the 1980s. As Stewart declared on his 1983 solo album Learning to Cope with Cowardice: “None dare call it conspiracy.”

Punk Propaganda

Punk’s vision of political reality consisted only of repressive apparatuses; its vocabulary was comprised of slogans. As Dan Graham suggested, propaganda art, unlike high art, is “ephemeral and not timeless,” and through punk rock it took on a fierce and contemporary form.37 Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism is an intellectual heir of this punk logic, as it advances a “totality vision of capitalism” “absorbing” and “colonizing” everything.38 Two pervasive social problems are symptomatic of this closure, according to Fisher: declining mental health and the increasing bureaucratization of society.

This image of the contemporary (postmodern) world resembles Fredric Jameson’s analysis of “the conspiratorial allegory of late capitalist totality” in his study The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System.39 Jameson translates this totality into Hegelian terms, proposing that “now, from our perspective, Absolute Spirit is rather to be identified as Capital itself … as our true ontology.”40 Though Jameson primarily analyzed Hollywood thrillers as representing large-scale financial machinations, his analysis of totality-as-conspiracy provides insight into punk’s relationship to systemic power and aesthetic resistance to it.

The dominant feature of totality-as-conspiracy is, Jameson writes, “epistemological closure,” which he defines as the “suppression of mediation”—a rejection of dialectics and compromise. Differing positions are forever separated: “The opposing poles are held apart and frozen in their incompatibility in such a way as to ‘produce’ their incommensurable antagonism as an object of aesthetic contemplation.”41

This can produce a sense of eternal sameness, where everything—as in conspiracy theories—is absorbed into one absolute system. Jacques Attali saw dominant forms of music this way: “The entire history of tonal music, like that of classical political economy, amounts to an attempt to make people believe in a consensual representation of the world”—a world of repetition, tautology, self-assurance, and reaffirmation.42 According to Attali, noise challenges this “network of repetition,” subverting established codes and refusing to repeat familiar messages. Noise’s dissonance embodies radical alterity; it gives rise to forms yet to come. As Jameson wrote in his foreword to Attali’s seminal book Noise, superstructural cultural forms can “anticipate historical development” and “foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way.”43 One could argue that punk’s musical dissonance offers the potential for liberation and self-determination. Attali optimistically claimed that the “right to make noise” allowed the “permanent affirmation of the right to be different—that is, the right to compose one’s life.”44 This perspective is too liberal for punk. As Jameson observed, this “do it yourself” ethos contains both utopia and dystopia, “and the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which is that mode of production’s baleful mirror image”—a dialectic that punk history clearly exhibits.45

The Pop Group ended one of its Helsinki concerts by having the spoken-word song “E Pluribus Unum” by the Last Poet’s played over the PA. A noisy dub cover version of this song appears on For How Much Longer, retitled “One Out of Many.” The song presents a paranoid-analytical study of the semiotics of a dollar bill, revealing that the profit-driven world is run by racist and feudal ideologies maintained by militaristic machinery.

The Pop Group’s last live performance was in 1980 in front of five hundred thousand people in London’s Trafalgar Square, as part of a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protest. In 1986, the Black Audio Film Collective used part of a recording of the Pop Group performing “Jerusalem” at the protest—later released on a one of Mark Stewart’s solo albums—in its film Handsworth Songs, which captured the apocalyptic mood and political tensions of the eighties. By presenting the dystopia of capitalism as an accomplished fact, with no spontaneity possible except riots, and no tools of analysis except dream-like musing, Handsworth Songs represents a post–Pop Group reality, resonant with punk’s understanding of the world.46

Five silkscreen posters based on the Pop Group’s lyrics. “Agit Punk” exhibition, Kalasataman Seripaja, Helsinki, 2023.

As Kodwo Eshun wrote about Dan Graham’s punk fantasies, “Without realization of the elevated role that rock [and punk] culture had played within artistic thinking, it would not be possible to understand what had made art avant-garde in the 1970s and ’80s.”47 This statement is also true of the Pop Group, but the question remains: Can their “arrogant” critique of capitalism resonate with today’s struggles? Punk is overdetermined by contradictions; at the heart of this subculture, as Hebdige wrote, “lies the frozen dialectic,” a tension that gives it “its curiously petrified quality, its paralyzed look, its ‘dumbness.’”48 This is similar to what Slavoj Žižek famously described in 1983 as punk’s “dehumanized apathy,” an unattainable, impossible gesture—in other words an “objet petit a.”49 A gesture beyond language and utterance, a total denial.

By emphasizing the “words” and “slogans” of the Pop Group, I’ve tried to show a strong heuristic dimension that exists within punk. Although expressed in absolutist and even conspiratorial terms, this critique of capitalism lacks analytical precision and is unable to identify modes of production that correspond to actual forms of exploitation. But punk understood early on that capitalism was heading toward self-destruction, authoritarianism, and neofascism dominated by war. Through listening to the Pop Group, you may come to a conclusion similar to Edward Thompson’s: “The USA and the USSR [read Russia, if you like] do not have military-industrial complexes: they are such complexes.”50