More often than not, I have found my resources for this project in anti-capitalist or extreme-leftist anthologies or bookstores. This being said, a primary focus of my historicization of specific aspects of punk has alluded to a confrontational anti-consumer/corporate impetus for action that denote instances of the political (i.e. fliering or postering, as Penelope Houston recalls in Fucked Up + Photocopied, part of the thrill was the fact that it was illegal).
It was pointed out to me that a contention in discussing the trajectory of DIY through Emerson and into 1950s domestic magazines is that the latter instance of the DIY ethos is more of a liberal capitalist instantiation of this ethos very much embedded in the self-made-man-American-dream version of the do-it-yourself-spirit. There then arises a need to separate the DIY ethos of punk from this all-American entrepreneur version, placing punk further left on the political spectrum.
This would not seem to be a problem for my research, per se, as the leftist leanings of punk clearly outline much of my attraction to the culture and the trajectory of its existence in the late ’70s into the ’90s. However, in discussing the practices of zine-making and music-playing, the anyone-can-do-it spirit and peer-promotion strategies of punk slowly begin to align, in my narrative, with contemporary open source software and peer-to-peer formations concomitatnt with the rise of internet technologies. What begins to surface as the problem is making a clear delineation of the radical and liberal. More specifically, this is problematized by my new thoughts around the word “democratic” in relation to the production, promotion and reproduction of punk culture by its constituents, as I have a hard time separating the term “democratic” from capitalist America. To further elucidate this musing, I refer to something I recently read, and consequently the reason for this problematization on peer-to-peer theorist Dale Carrico’s blog amor mundi:
“But I believe no less that a radical democratic politics of global technological development will likely emancipate humanity at last. Radical democracy needs to take up its revolutionary stance again, to gain and remake the world for us all before the world is utterly lost to us all.”
Now, I would not consider my thesis to enunciate technology as the emancipating of humanity, but I would edge toward the idea that I am discussing the emancipation of culture in some sense of the concept (particularly open content initiatives). Something I think punk was laboring toward (intentionally or not) by taking matters into their own hands and confronting corporate and mainstream models of music production and promotion. Further, the term “radical democracy” is one that I am not yet comfortable ascribing to my outlining of peer to peer activity (then and now), but am interested in thinking around the term in my grand and broad quest to discuss punks radical activity as outside of the liberal model while simultaneously recognizing the participatory nature of this activity inside the context of an American political climate. Even further, aside from thinking about punk from this contemporary standpoint, I have made little assertion as to any futurological meaning of these shifts in cultural production and consumption.
