“On punks & reproles
Love and Rage was shaped by its social base of reproletarianized white punks. In a 1994 position paper called ‘Love and Rage in the New World Order’, Chris Day argues that while most members were the children of the middle class, this did not necessarily 1/
reflect their economic reality. According to Day, they were undergoing a process of ‘reproletarianization’ driven by changes in the global capitalist system. Proletarianization is a Marxist concept used to describe the birth of the modern working class through primitive 2/
accumulation – separating peasants from land to turn them into wage laborers. Day adapts this concept to explain the effects of post-Fordist economic restructuring. Although white people in the United States had made a deal with capital to become ‘middle class’ in exchange for 3/
labor docility and anti-Blackness, this compact broke down in the late twentieth century as neoliberalism produced a generation of downwardly mobile youth. Reproles were what we today might call the precariat: a class defined by its inability to find steady, good paying jobs. 4/
They were predominantly white because of the particular historical interplay in the United States between race and class. Because of their reproletarianization, many young white people came to anarchism through the punk scene rather than the labor movement. 5/
As political theorist AK Thompson argues about a similar milieu within the anti-globalization movement, this race and class constellation produced a form of ontological politics that sought a new way of being in the world rather than solely changing the mode of production. 6/
This entailed a total rejection of the mainstream world and a commitment to radically reshaping everyday life. Unlike many people of color, these white rebels felt that they had no alternative cultural tradition to draw upon – indeed, their families were the beneficiaries of 7/
white supremacy. But the material benefits of white skin did not necessarily lead to happiness. Their white middle class experience was alienating in a particular way that produced a fear of not being truly ‘in’ the world. As Thompson puts it, these anxieties yielded the 8/
‘nervous injunctions regularly issued by the army of white middle class dissidents striving to really live.’ This type of politics was expressed as ‘dissidence’, which Thompson explains is a form of ‘cultivated distance’, a ‘state of being set apart from others by a sense that 9/
something feels wrong.’ Young dissidents found a natural home in the punk scene. Punk offered an intertwined radical lifestyle and politics that appealed to the everyday political orientation of white reproles. Subcultural identity was a way to live one’s politics as a total 10/
break from the prevailing order. It is no coincidence that anarchist punks drew heavily on the Situationists, who advocated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ – punks sought to live anarchism. But Thompson cautions that politics based on the particular ontological lack of white 11/
middle class existence do not have universal appeal – certainly not to an oppressed and exploited multi-racial working class. This problem lies at the core of the contradictions of whiteness and revolutionary politics for the white middle class. 12/
Read more in my chapter “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-1998)” in the new edited volume DIY OR DIE! from Active Distribution, available now from PM Press 13/13
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