"Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting
anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As
long as it's good and it has passion." — Kurt Cobain.
“God save the Queen/The fascist regime/They made you a
moron”.
Sex Pistols
Matthew Worley's 'No Future' offers a comprehensive academic
history of the connection between punk rock and political culture in Britain
from 1976 to 1984. It covers the initial punk explosion, its subsequent split
into post-punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk (Crass), the Two-Tone ska revival, and the
Rock Against Racism/Anti-Nazi League movements. This work is a thorough and
well-researched cultural history, yet it has notable analytical limitations
that readers should be aware of.
Worley situates punk within a clear social and historical
framework: the collapse of Britain’s postwar Keynesian consensus, high youth
unemployment, issues within the Labour Party and trade unions, and the rise of
Thatcherism. He emphasises that punk is not merely fashion or nihilism but is deeply
rooted in genuine social anger. The book's broad coverage, including bands like
the Sex Pistols, Crass, Sham 69, and the Specials, illustrates that punk was a
multifaceted cultural phenomenon in which class struggles, political beliefs,
and generational discontent interacted in various ways.
Worley’s earlier academic work is highly valuable, offering
substantial examples of historical research. His Cold War article rightfully
cites Discharge's 'Realities of War' (1980) as a significant turning point,
both musically and politically, as it was the first sustained punk effort to
directly address working-class anger towards the war machine and nuclear threats.
His detailed and balanced depiction of Crass highlights that the band was more
than just a musical group; it served as the centre of a genuine communication
network that included fanzines, pamphlets, independent records, benefit
concerts, and connections to CND, squatting movements, and animal rights
groups. He quotes their sleeve notes from 'Christ The Album' (1982), stating: "War
is confirmation of the imposed reality in which we exist." This stands as
a notable political statement.
The " One Nation Under the Bomb article is even more
valuable as raw material. Worley has done hard archival work that nobody else
has done, tracing hundreds of fanzines from Aberdeen to Bristol, from the first
issue of Sniffin' Glue (1976) to the anarchist 'zines of the early 1980s. His
account of the breadth and geographic spread of punk fanzine culture reaching
into Sunderland, Bradford, Telford, and Northampton gives the lie to the
London-centric picture that dominates most punk historiography. He shows that
punk fanzine culture was a genuinely national, working-class youth phenomenon,
not a metropolitan art-school project.
He depicts British punk through the themes of nuclear
anxiety and Cold War politics. This perspective highlights key aspects of the
anti-nuclear movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which
indeed influenced punk culture, especially within the "Oi!" and
anarcho-punk scenes linked to bands like Crass. This was particularly evident
in the early 1980s when Thatcher's deployment of cruise missiles at Greenham
Common coincided with a surge in the peace movement. However, this approach
risks emphasising an ideological or culturally political view at the expense of
the underlying class dynamics.[1]
Worley's focus on the British punk fanzine is historically
genuine in one important respect: fanzines represented something qualitatively
different from the commercial music press. In the pages of Sniffin' Glue,
Ripped & Torn, Kill Your Pet Puppy, Maximum Rock’n’roll, or the
anarcho-punk publications that clustered around Crass Toxic Grafity, Enigma,
Punk Lives, there was a raw, unmediated attempt by working-class and
lower-middle-class youth to make sense of their world in their own voice. The
do-it-yourself ethic ("Here is a chord. Here is another. Here is a third.
Now form a band") was not merely aesthetic posturing. It was a direct
rejection of the cultural gatekeeping of capitalist media.
However, it is essential to examine punk fanzines honestly
rather than celebrate them uncritically. They covered a broad spectrum, from
almost solely music-oriented to explicitly political, and included publications
that primarily served as channels for anarchist propaganda. The political
fanzines linked to the early 1980s anarcho-punk scene, those linked to Crass,
Flux of Pink Indians, and Discharge, are where Worley's Cold War and
anti-nuclear themes are most clearly expressed. Publications
like Scum or zines related to Poison Girls combined an anti-nuclear
stance with feminist separatism, veganism, pacifism, and anti-statism, creating
an eclectic yet recognisable ideological package.[2]
He also correctly identifies the political heterogeneity of
the scene. The SWP's Red Rebel and RAR's Temporary Hoarding sit alongside the
far-right NF's Punk Front and the anarcho-punk Toxic Graffiti as competing
attempts to harness punk's social energy. And he notes, honestly, that punk's
"abiding impulse was to 'do it yourself', not conform to the diktats and
doctrines of self-appointed ideologues", which is why all these attempts
brought "only scant reward."
No Future’s main weakness is that Worley lacks a theory of
class. Despite its ambitions, No Future is largely constrained by the
academic framework Worley employs. Cultural studies, strongly influenced by the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (including Stuart Hall,
Dick Hebdige, etc.), is not aligned with Marxism. Worley views youth
subcultures as symbols of "resistance", resistance shown through
style, music, identity, and subversive aesthetics. Worley consistently
overlooks the crucial question posed: what is the connection between these
movements and the class struggle?
Cultural Studies emerged as an alternative to the class
struggle, acting as a safeguard against revolutionary class politics. Paul
Bond's article on Stuart Hall examines the origins of Cultural Studies. His insightful
obituary of Hall emphasises that it was intentionally developed as a critique
of revolutionary Marxism, particularly its modern form, Trotskyism. Its rise in
Birmingham in the 1960s is linked to the political upheaval following the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the ensuing defections from the British
Communist Party. During this time, the key question was whether disillusioned
individuals would embrace Trotskyism and authentic Marxism or seek a new
intellectual framework that opposed capitalism in theory but not in practice.[3]
Analysing punk through 'subculture theory' reveals endless
nuances about symbols like safety pins and mohawks. However, it doesn't address
the key question: why did punk's social energy, rooted in working-class
alienation and anger, fail to ignite a revolutionary political movement? The
answer isn't in the music or subculture itself. Instead, it lies in the
political context of Britain's working class during that period: the dominance
of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy over the labour movement, the
pseudo-left groups like the Communist Party, International Socialists/SWP, and
the Militant tendency, which diverted social anger into dead-end political
avenues, and the lack of a mass Trotskyist party capable of offering genuine
revolutionary leadership.
Rock Against Racism
and the SWP
Worley discusses Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the Anti-Nazi
League (ANL), movements mainly organised by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
in the late 1970s, focusing on the punk and reggae scenes. He views these
efforts mostly positively as effective youth mobilisation against the National
Front. However, I am somewhat more critical. The SWP exploited RAR/ANL to
enhance its organisational presence while often placing political awareness
secondary to anti-fascist unity. In practice, this meant aligning with the
Labour Party and trade union leadership, simplifying the complex social issues
faced by working-class youth to a single-issue moral campaign against the NF.
This approach neglected to foster independent working-class political
opposition to both Thatcherism and the Labour/union establishment
that enabled it. The SWP's "anti-fascism' strategy created a pressure
group rather than a revolutionary movement.
Anarcho-Punk and Its
Limits
The anarchist element in punk, notably Crass, along with
Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, and others, sought to connect music more
seriously with radical politics. Worley discusses this thoroughly. However,
anarchism's main weakness is also its biggest flaw: its rejection of political
parties, programs, and the pursuit of state power ultimately makes punk
politics ineffective. Crass's politics focused on individualist,
countercultural withdrawal from bourgeois society rather than strategies for
the working class to gain power. Ideas
such as "Do It Yourself," autonomous communities, pacifism, and
lifestyle politics, although sincerely held, cannot overpower a capitalist
state with police, courts, and armies. Worley is too sympathetic to these
tendencies. He views the limitations of the anarcho-punk scene as interesting
complexities, rather than as the result of a petty-bourgeois political outlook
that cannot provide the working class with a way forward.
The Title's Irony:
Its Value and Limits
The book's title, inspired by the Sex Pistols' "God
Save the Queen," reflects a harsh truth: the nihilism and despair among
working-class youth in late 1970s Britain, who believed they had no future
within the current system. However, the historical lesson reveals that a future
did exist, the prospect of socialist revolution. It was the lack of
revolutionary leadership that led many to see "no future" as the
only honest response. Different groups, such as the SWP, the Labour left, and
the anarchists, in their own ways, helped ensure that this genuine social anger
was absorbed, dissipated, and ultimately conquered.
No Future is worth reading as a detailed
empirical account of a culturally rich and politically charged period. But to
understand why the energy of that moment did not lead to a
revolutionary transformation, you need Marxism, not cultural studies. The
crisis that produced punk has never been resolved; it has only deepened. The
"no future" of 1977 is the social reality confronting young workers
across the entire capitalist world today.
Worley's work is genuinely valuable as a historical record
of what working-class youth actually thought, felt, and produced in Britain in
this period. The sheer empirical richness of his research is impressive, and
the raw material he uncovers is politically important. Discharge's "Realities
of War," the network of fanzines stretching from Aberdeen to Bristol, the
Crass collective's fusion of music, politics, and communal living, these things
deserve to be remembered and taken seriously.
To determine whether punk was a revolution, we need to look
beyond Worley's framework. Punk was not a revolution; rather, it was the
cultural expression of a working-class generation overlooked by existing
political organisations. The reason it didn't become a revolution isn't mainly
due to punk itself, but to the movement's failure to build a mass party capable
of channelling that frustration politically. This remains an unfulfilled task.
The factors that fueled punk mass unemployment, imperialist wars, a ruling
class dismissive of workers, and political parties offering no alternatives—are
still present, even more acutely today. The question "no future?"
still awaits an answer.
Notes
Obituary: Joe Strummer of The Clash, dead at 50-Paul Bond- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/01/stru-j13.html
[1]
One Nation Under the Bomb: The Cold War and British Punk to 1984- Journal for
the Study of Radicalism, FALL 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2
[2]
Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1976-84: 'While the world was dying, did
you wonder why?" History Workshop Journal, No. 79 (2015), pp. 76-10
[3]
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political career dedicated to
opposing Marxism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
