There’s a series on Public Books called “No Future” Lexicon, which the website explains was commissioned “to explore the question: can we reject the future?” The series caught my attention as I’m trying to meditate on the general theme of decline and decay for an inchoate writing assignment. One of the entries is about (“God Save The Queen” needle drop here) – punk! The entry on punk, by Annette Liebing and Matthew Worley, frames the question of rejecting the future vis-a-vis punk’s contradictions. Punk “envisaged both an end and a beginning.” It was “a reaction” that was, simultaneously, “something proactive.” The piece is ultimately a bit unsatisfying, like eating only one Ho-Ho in the package; it consists mostly of long quotations from a book about aging punks (called Punk, Ageing, and Time, though Being and Nothingness is catchier) that seems to be an ethnography of, well, aging punks, and how they’re reconciling their punk values of nonconformity and rejection with parenting and homeownership. (From Liebing and Worley’s piece: “To get older while tied to a punk identity is therefore complex.” You don’t say.) The authors conclude that “ultimately, No Future [the Sex Pistols song they use to frame the essay] doesn’t have to mean there is no future” and that “for their part, the anarchist band Crass always insisted that they saw Johnny Rotten’s use of that slogan not as an indictment but rather as a challenge.” Double-take. Crass?!
It may surprise you to know that I, of the laptop job and the STEM PhD, the neurotic obsession with housework and the fastidious habits of personal cleanliness, count myself among the biggest Crass-heads this side of the Atlantic. Where the Sex Pistols were the O-Town of punk bands, Crass were the feral crusties squatting in the forest. (Literally, members of Crass are the best-known residents of Dial House in Essex, certainly best-known to me as they’re the only residents I’ve ever heard of. There is a picture, living eternally online, featuring Penny Rimbaud naked and grinning upon a composting toilet out there.) It may not surprise you to know that my deep Crass fandom – legitimately, Penis Envy is in my top ten studio albums – has caught me endless ridicule and general shit from people within and without the “punk scene,” whatever that is.
It’s easy to understand where the normie disdain comes from. Crass’s production is, uh, confrontational, even by punk’s anti-production production standards. The riffs have an atonal quality, the verbose and intensely didactic lyrics provide the only, and only occasional at that, anthemic potential of Crass’s songs, as in their arguably most famous song, “Do They Owe Us A Living?” (“‘Course they do, ‘course they do!”) Every song on The Feeding of the 5000 (“Do They Owe Us A Living?” is the second track) opens with a nearly-identical affected faux-martial drum pattern; every song has the same shrill, harsh guitar over Pete Wright’s rubbery bass. All this, plus extended meditations on “The System,” anarchist values, political subcultures in 1970s-1980s Britain, patriarchy, and imitations of Margaret Thatcher. They are, in a word, Political in a way that is easy to parody, ridicule, and dismiss.
Whither the ridicule from punks, fellow travelers, though? This is just an ethnographic observation all my own – no aspiration to general truths here. But I think something about the uncompromising earnestness of Crass, what a slack-jawed Gen Z kid might call “cringe” if Crass’s music were to ever penetrated the short-form video content market, is uncomfortable for cynical American punks, livin’ in the belly of the beast, born to rock but forced to work in demeaning jobs, getting X’ed up for shows on weekends and showing up to eat shit for the boss on Monday. Getting your shit absolutely rocked by a flat tire or an unexpected case of strep throat or something. Of course, the broader political economy structures what kinds of lives, normie and alternative, are possible. Crass’s aesthetic and politics are absolutely of the moment – that moment, bleak Thatcherism, neoliberalism comes to Britain, TINA, and there are ways in which our world is leaner and meaner than theirs. Among the choices presented by any historical moment, withdrawal and mischief are always one, although it’s sometimes endlessly frustrating to try to interpret withdrawal from “The System.”
Also often frustrating is the reality of Crass’s actual politics, which can feel a little exasperating and precious, especially at this late hour on the Doomsday Clock. I do think that there are important qualitative differences between “pogo[ing] on a Nazi” and spit[ting] on a Jew,” whereas Crass apparently perceive no such difference, dismissing both (in “White Punks on Hope”) as pointless posturing violence. A persistent lyrical theme for Crass is a kind of petulant horseshoe theory about how far left and far right are equally violent and full of shit; see also “Bloody Revolutions,” which is still a banger. With what I’ve gathered from the embittered disillusionment of the British New Left with ‘50s Stalinist orthodoxy and their persistent inability to mount a popular response to Thatcherism or right-wing retrenchment, maybe it made more sense in context. A tantalizing question with an unknowable answer: what did Doris Lessing think of Crass? I bet she wouldn’t have liked them, if The Good Terrorist is any indication. I do, however, feel like the critical bite of The Good Terrorist betrays some kind of similarity, perhaps underground, to Crass’s skepticism of organized politics.
What does Crass have to tell us about the future, or the lack of one? I dunno, it seems like kind of a nonsense question to me. The real experience I have had of punk scenes is that intentional communities structured around the rejection of dominant society and the creation alternatives tend, entropically, in the direction of reproducing the very same power and social hierarchies of the straight world. Transducing the logic of one niche subculture to another, there is an incredibly annoying tendency in whatever passes for the left in the US today (which has retained all of Crass’s scolding verbosity but none of their critical incisiveness or mischievous sense of humor) to talk about everything in a hopelessly abstracted future tense. When everybody gets their mind right, when we’ve finally attended to the creation of the right Spaces, once we’ve excavated all the Logics and carefully dusted them off like so many fragments of an ancient urn, then peace and justice will prevail. This is, of course, a way of fantasizing about alternative futures without actually engaging in any of the hard, miserable, increasingly dangerous work of political struggle. (No, panel discussions do not count.)
Crass’s anarchism was and is, at the very least, less self-deluded than this. Of the several very funny hoaxes Crass perpetrated over the years of its existence, one – the so-called “Thatchergate tapes,” a tape edited together from fragments of public statements by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – attracted the attention of actual intelligence agencies. Following an attempted prosecution for obscenity (unrelated to Thatchergate) and some other pressures, the band broke up, citing their ambivalence towards the form of “political power” they had achieved through their notoriety and public performances. Essentially, they explicitly disclaimed an intention to enter into political struggle, or to treat their music and performance as “praxis.” This is a good deal more honest than what goes on among “serious” US leftists today, which is something like a sublimation of the revolutionary impulse into System-compatible productive work and a fetishization of that work – living the way I do is the struggle, appearing on podcasts is reconfiguring the future in a more leftist direction. Crass exists in my mind as a sort of rebuke to this kind of red-tinged solipsism.
We only get a tiny bit of future that gets shorter and shorter every year. My disillusionment with leftist scenes is no less bitter than my original disillusionment with punk. In both cases, where I see the movements shatter themselves into irrelevance over and over again is this: over-leveraging the present to pay for some kind of perfect future that exists, of course, only in our imaginations. For example, it’s extremely common, in both of these subcultures, to treat the people present in one’s actual life in horrible ways that are expressly contrary to leftist (or punk) values, out of a malformed expectation that doing so will hasten the dawning of a new day. But it won’t. The only way into the future is through the present, right now, with the people around us.