When Anarchism Met Punk

Abstract

This chapter outlines how certain repertoires of contention became regenerated and enacted in the Swedish 1980s when anarchism met punk. It shows how the meeting between the Swedish anarchist movement, and the subcultural punk scene, fostered a breeding ground for new forms of activism, a hotbed that regenerated political repertoires buried in the social soil—like pyrophile plants sprouting through a wildfire. The chapter exhibits how the anarchist periodical Brand, published on a regular basis since the late 1800s, was rebranded through anarcho-punk aesthetics and increasingly synchronized with the repertoires of contention signatory to the broader autonomous movement in Europe. Hence, the anarchist politics of direct action prompted in the Swedish 1980s a revived struggle accompanied by the disorderly rebelliousness of punk and the disobedient temporality of prefiguration. When anarchism met punk, the radical struggle against hierarchy and for freedom was not primarily a political goal located at the horizon of time, but rather a politics to enact, to prefigure, a desirable future already in the present.