Punk Rock, Radical Republicanism & the Politics of Joy: Beyond the Ivory Tower with Stuart White
When I mentioned anarchism to friends or family, the response was always, “That’s impossible—get rid of government and you get chaos.” So I wanted real answers.
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability; the substance and structure of the conversation remain unchanged.)
Sanat: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Stuart.
In one of our conversations, you mentioned that your early exposure to punk rock helped draw you into political theory. I’d like to begin by hearing your story of this path.
Stuart: Glad to be here!
In 1980 a school friend lent me a record—a single by Poison Girls and Crass. The Crass track was an anarchist critique of Marxist revolution, and the vinyl sleeve was packed with text: lyrics, bits of anarchist theory, provocative commentary. I remember being completely blown away—by both the sound and the ideas.
The Crass song, ‘Bloody Revolutions’, had this torrent of lyrics attacking Marxism, and I found myself fascinated by both the Marxism being criticized and the anarchism doing the criticising. The Poison Girls track, ‘Persons Unknown’, was striking too; there was an instrumental section at the end that, in my 14-year-old mind, sounded like what an anarchist society might feel like. It was evocative enough that I wanted to put theory and words to that sound.[1]
So I went down to the public library and started checking out books on Marxism and anarchism. That’s what set me on the path. I tried to use the ideas to make sense of the politics around me at the time – I was scared by the new Cold War and helped set up my local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. A lot of what I’ve done as a political theorist still traces back to that first encounter: an interest in visions of society that are deeply egalitarian yet strongly libertarian in the sense of valuing individual freedom and democratic life. I’m not an anarchist, but that early brush with punk anarchism was hugely influential.
Sanat: Wow! Before I ask you more about punk rock, am I right in thinking that, politically and theoretically, you’ve ended up closest to a kind of radical republicanism? I’d like to hear more about that—what you mean by it, and how it differs from anarchism.
Stuart: Yeah, great question. In a sense, I’ve spent a long time working through different isms—Marxism, liberalism, and anarchism—trying to understand what a society that genuinely combines liberty and equality might look like. Rawlsian liberalism has been a big influence, as has Marxism. It took me a while to get anarchism, but thinkers like Colin Ward helped the penny drop. My own view kind of sits at the intersection of these traditions, and I have tried to give theoretical form to this as a version of ‘radical republicanism’.
By ‘republicanism’, I mean a vision of politics where an active popular sovereign governs itself according to the common good, and where at the core of that common good is freedom as non-domination—the shared interest people have in not being subject to arbitrary power. So: an active demos, a commitment to the common good, and freedom as non-domination.[2]
The ‘radical’ part signals a few things (as discussed in a book I co-edited with Bruno Leipold and Karma Nabulsi). I’ll mention two. First, achieving those commitments may require significant social and political change; I don’t assume that welfare-state capitalism and current representative democracy are sufficient. We need to take socialist critiques of capitalism seriously, for example. Second, radical republicanism interrogates who the demos is. Historically, republicanism has been bound up with narrow, exclusionary notions of citizenship. A radical version has to keep asking where those lines of exclusion fall—and how to overcome them.
Sanat: I think that gives us a clear outline of radical republicanism. Could you give us a similarly clear account of what punk rock is?
Stuart: Okay, well, that’s much harder! Punk—though I’m not a specialist and others like Matt Worley know the history far better—is essentially a music-based subculture, or really now a family of subcultures. It emerges in the UK and US in the mid-to-late 1970s—roughly 1975 to 1977—with what we now call first-wave punk: the Sex Pistols, for example, are part of that first wave. That initial burst then splinters into a range of musical and cultural offshoots.
Crass and Poison Girls, whose record I mentioned earlier, were pioneers of what became known as ‘anarcho-punk’. The Sex Pistols used the language of “anarchy,” but without much connection to actual anarchism. Early punk’s transgression went in all sorts of directions, including things like Nazi armbands as shock value. Rock Against Racism helped pull punk in the UK in an anti-racist direction. Anarcho-punk also gave punk more ethical and political content – one much more grounded in historical anarchism, with lyrics that carried political theory: anti-militarism, feminism, and, in some of the later bands influenced by Crass, animal rights, vegetarianism, and veganism.
At the same time, other strands developed—post-punk, for instance, which was more musically experimental and lyrically introspective, exploring experiences of oppression that were psychological or existential rather than straightforwardly political. So punk becomes a broad, branching subcultural world.
And importantly, it didn’t disappear. Punk and its offshoots are still alive globally, not just in the UK and US. In some places, punk has had tangible political effects. For example, a book by Tim Mohr, Burning Down the Haus, shows how the punk scene in 1980s East Germany played a role in the fall of Communism. The mass demonstrations of 1989, which forced the opening of the Berlin Wall, grew out of tiny weekly protests—and those tiny protests were kept going, week after week, in the face of the police, largely by punks drawing on anarcho-punk ideas to make sense of, and resist, the regime. So punk is not always just this sort of thing on the sidelines, you know, an admirable subculture. It has real political effects.
Sanat: In some other works, as well as earlier in this conversation, you mention that Colin Ward’s book, and a track by Poison Girls played an instrumental role in helping you realize what anarchism is really about. Could you tell us more about that?
Stuart: The Poison Girls track—‘Persons Unknown’—took its title from a trial in the UK just before the single came out, where some anarchists were charged with “conspiracy to cause explosions with persons unknown”. The defendants who pleaded Not Guilty – who included Iris Mills and Ronan Bennett – were acquitted. Most of the song is this tense, dramatic meditation on state suspicion and the shared vulnerability beneath our differences. But then it fades out and restarts with this beautiful instrumental section which sounded to me like an evocation of what the world might feel like after the anarchist revolution. The Crass song was about the revolution; the end of the Poison Girls track felt like its aftermath.
But that then pushed me to the question: how would any of this actually work? When I mentioned anarchism to friends or family, the response was always, “That’s impossible—get rid of government and you get chaos.” So I wanted real answers.
I read Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action. Ward was a post-war English anarchist—edited the journal Anarchy in the ’60s, wrote on housing, was active from the late ’40s through the ’90s.[3] The book is a set of chapters on different areas of social life—self-help groups, adventure playgrounds, housing—and at first it struck me as fragmentary. It didn’t add up into an answer to the question of how an anarchist society is going to work.
What I later realized, after returning to Ward over many years, is that he doesn’t think there is or could be a fully anarchist society—just as he doesn’t think there could be a purely free-market society or a fully social-democratic one. For him, societies always use a mix of mechanisms: markets, state bureaucracies, and what he calls anarchist techniques—mutual aid and collective self-help. Anarchism, on his view, is centrally the normative preference for solving needs through mutual aid.
So you don’t start with the question ‘How would everything work under an anarchy?’ You start from where you are and notice that some needs already are met through mutual aid—that’s the “anarchy in action”—and then you ask how to build more of it.
For a long time I dismissed anarchism because it didn’t answer the whole society question. I focused instead on combining Marxism and liberalism. But now I’m much more open to bringing anarchism—understood in this Wardian, incremental way—into that mix. I’m not sure that fully comes through in my work on radical republicanism, so that may be an area I need to develop further.
Sanat: That final thought closely connects to my next question. Your recent works have focused extensively on the idea of radical republicanism, including your recent book on the same topic. In one of these works, you mention that anarchism is not immune to the risks of radical republicanism, because it itself is a version of radical republicanism. Is that still the view that you hold?
Stuart: This connects back to your earlier question about how anarchism relates to republicanism, which I didn’t really answer! Anarchism often presents itself—Crass’s ‘Bloody Revolutions’ is a good example—as rejecting all forms of government, rule, and law. There’s a line in the song about “oppression and restriction, regulation, rule and law,” which seems to condemn “rule and law” as such.
But there’s another strand of anarchist theory where the aim isn’t the abolition of rule and law, but their radical democratization. Think of Isaac Puente’s Libertarian Communism—adopted by the Spanish anarchist trade union before the Spanish revolution in 1936—or of Murray Bookchin’s libertarian communalism. What you get in these visions is extremely decentralized, participatory democracy: not the absence of rules, but rules that aren’t alien because people directly participate in making them—a very Rousseauian idea.[4]
From that perspective, some strands of anarchism look, institutionally, like a very radical form of republicanism. That’s not the whole story, of course. Alex Prichard’s and Ruth Kinna’s forthcoming book on Constitutionalizing Anarchy explores a way of thinking about anarchy that doesn’t collapse into republicanism. And the Ward-style anarchism I just spoke about doesn’t either, at least not in full. But some of the institutional anarchist theory I’ve read does, at first glance, resemble an especially radical republican project—one centered on making rule and law deeply participatory.
Sanat: That does make the picture clearer, and I can see why you’ve been more drawn to calling yourself a radical republican rather than an anarchist. What does radical republicanism look like in practice? You’ve written a bit about UBI—so what kinds of policies or institutional arrangements does radical republicanism point toward? Community wealth building? Basic income? Some combination of these? I’d love to hear more about that.
Stuart: Great. So institutionally, on the economic side, in The Wealth of Freedom I talk a lot about universal basic income (UBI).[5] There’s already a substantial literature linking UBI to freedom as non-domination, so that’s definitely part of the picture. But you also have to consider tax: inheritance and wealth taxes, for instance. I put forward what I call the ‘dual wealth thesis’—the idea that a republican political economy needs both a floor and a ceiling on wealth (as well as income). The ceiling idea connects with Ingrid Robeyns’ terrific work on Limitarianism. Reducing wealth inequality is essential.
Beyond that, I emphasize workplace democracy, investment democracy, participatory forms of welfare state provision, and strong trade unions.[6] Public ownership also has a role—there’s interesting work now on ‘socialist republicanism’, such as by James Muldoon and Tom O’Shea, and Bruno Leipold has explored republican elements in the formation of Marx’s thought. So, when you put it together, the economic agenda of radical republicanism isn’t one magic bullet: it’s UBI, inheritance and wealth taxes, participatory public services, workplace democracy, trade unionism, and public or social ownership—all within an institutionally pluralist framework.
Moving somewhat outside of the book’s remit, there’s also an institutional agenda for radical republicanism around the political system, narrowly conceived: improving on representative democracy through Citizens’ Assemblies, plebeian assemblies, and so on. This connects to the ideas discussed by Camila Vergara in her Systemic Corruption. That’s where the overlap with anarchism – or with what I see as the radical republican current within anarchism – comes back in.
And finally, there’s a cultural dimension. Melvin Rogers, in The Darkened Light of Faith, which explores African American political thought about democracy, argues that domination is rooted not only in law and policy but in norms and culture. Overcoming domination therefore requires cultural transformation—changing the norms we’ve internalized, which also means changing ourselves. Rogers argues that this is why music, art, and literature have a crucial role in republican politics. On this basis, one can argue that subcultures—including punk, I’d argue—have a constructive role to play.
Sanat: So among all the policy and institutional proposals we’ve discussed, the core value—if I had to single one out—would be non-domination, right? But in one of your papers, you describe republicanism as involving three distinct virtues. First is non-domination, understood partly as a critique of arbitrary or unaccountable power. Second is public participation—the idea that freedom requires active involvement in collective self-rule. And third is the priority of individual judgment.
You illustrate each of these through examples from punk rock, but the one that really stood out to me was that third virtue: the priority of individual judgment. That’s also where the anarchist streak becomes most visible. So maybe you could say more about that connection, and especially how it plays out in relation to the song ‘Bloody Revolutions.’
Stuart: I should start by adding a nuance: while I do think freedom as non-domination is central, I don’t think the common good should be defined only in those terms. In The Wealth of Freedom, I argue that we need to bring Rawls’s work, and potentially many other theorists’ work, into a republican account of the common good. Concerns like fair equality of opportunity can’t simply be reduced to non-domination, and if we try to make the common good all about that, we end up with an overly narrow view. At the same time, Philip Pettit and others have done real service by making the interest in non-domination explicit in a way liberal theory doesn’t. So, what I’m after is a kind of synthesis—drawing on both neo-republicanism and Rawlsian liberalism—while leaving room for further contributions.
On your question about the virtues of radical republican citizenship, and why punk helps illuminate them: punk, for me, is one resource for thinking about the dispositions citizens need to build and sustain a republic. The three virtues you mentioned, which I discuss in a forthcoming paper, map onto this.[7]
First, there has to be a willingness to repudiate sovereign power when it dominates. In the paper, I use the Sex Pistols’ song, ‘God Save the Queen’, as a text for thinking about this first republican virtue.
Second, republicanism requires a commitment to help form a popular sovereign—rejecting domination can’t be done in isolation. There has to be connection and collective agency aimed at remaking the political and social order. I use Faith & the Muse’s song, ‘Sovereign’, to reflect on this second republican virtue.
And third, republicanism demands individual moral judgment. This is a Rousseauian idea: if we’re going to identify the common good collectively, each of us has to exercise our own independent deliberative judgment about what it requires. So republicanism’s emphasis on collectivity has to be paired with an emphasis on individual responsibility.
To explore this virtue of republicanism, I come back to Crass’s ‘Bloody Revolutions’—as a warning about how appeals to “the people” can be oppressive. I don’t follow Crass into their full-throated anarchism, but I take the warning seriously. One way to guard against this danger is to insist that citizens always retain the right and duty to offer their own best judgment of the common good—even, and perhaps especially, when they find themselves in the minority.
There is also a contextual and personal dimension to my interest in this relationship between punk and republican civic virtue. In the US and the UK, but not just in these places of course, we are in a period of growing oligarchic authoritarianism, linked to xenophobia, racism, sexism, and transphobia. I am disappointed and shocked, on a daily basis, by how unable or unwilling many ‘respectable’ people seem to be at drawing lines and standing up to this. We see this in relation to Gaza. I am not immune to this pull of respectability. But one way I can fight it is by staying in touch with my inner punk.
Obviously I’m not saying that punk is the only resource or subculture that can help us in this way, but it is one.
Sanat: You’ve already suggested that a project like radical republicanism isn’t just about institutions or policies—it also demands a broader social and cultural transformation, and that’s where art can matter. But I wonder if there’s another dimension here. You sometimes talk about the role of joy in politics, and I’d like to hear more about that. Do you think this is one way of bringing joy into political life?
Stuart: Great question! And yes—this is something I’ve recently started to work on. I should start by acknowledging a huge debt to the ACFM podcast, hosted by Novara Media. The presenters— Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle, and Keir Milburn—frame their show as examining the links between emancipatory politics and ‘experiences of collective joy’. Bringing that idea into conversation with radical republicanism might be really fruitful.
Republicanism often gets saddled with this reputation for being dour, austere, moralistic—the image of the republican citizen as someone perpetually self-sacrificing, giving up pleasure for the public good. Pleasure, in this picture, is seen as something that pulls you away from republican virtue. I think we need to reclaim pleasure for republicanism, and to show that a politics of pleasure can sit comfortably alongside or within a politics of civic virtue.
There’s a moment in The Wealth of Freedom where I paraphrase Emma Goldman—she’s reputed to have said, “It isn’t my revolution if I can’t dance.” And I say: It isn’t our republic if we can’t dance. And you’re right to connect this to subcultures like punk – because these are spaces in which we can find pleasure, such as at a gig, while also building virtues. That link—between pleasure, subculture, and civic virtue—is something you’ve helped me articulate more clearly than I have before, so thank you for that.
Green politics, too, carries this stereotype of being about hardship and sacrifice. In the Global North, moving to a globally just ecological future likely means ‘degrowth’, which can sound like a recipe for hardship. Kate Soper, in her book Post-Growth Living, argues for what she calls “alternative hedonism”: the idea that a less consumption-driven, less hurried way of living can offer its own distinctive pleasures—more time, less stress, enjoyment of the journey rather than constant rushing.
I think Soper is right. I also agree with her that if degrowth or the like is going to be politically viable, it will only be by cultivating alternative hedonism—by showing that a different mode of life can be more pleasurable, not less. For republicanism, the research question becomes: how do we make this fun? How can republicanism embrace forms of pleasure that strengthen, rather than undermine, civic virtue?
That, I think, is a crucial part of the project.
Sanat: That’s such a nice way to put it and I can’t think of a better note to end this conversation.
Stuart: Great, thank you so much, your questions were wonderful!
[1] This is discussed further in Stuart White, ‘Colin Ward and the Sound of Anarchy’, in Andrew Kelly, ed., Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchy (Nottingham, Five Leaves Publications, 2024).
[2] The idea of freedom as non-domination is of course developed by Philip Pettit in works such as Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997) and On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory of Democracy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012). Other contributions include Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Dorothea Gädeke, ‘From Neo-republicanism to Critical Republicanism’, in Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi and Stuart White, eds., Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020).
[3] See Sophie Scott-Brown’s excellent discussion of Ward’s life and work, Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy (London, Routledge, 2023).
[4] For a related and helpful discussion in connection with Noam Chomsky’s anarchism, see Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, ‘Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky’, New Left Review I/187, May/June 1991, 5-27.
[5] The book currently retails at the price of £99.00. It is available electronically for free if you have access to a university library that subscribes to Oxford University Press publications. I am exploring how I can raise the funds so that OUP put the book online for free for everyone.
[6] The chapter on trade unionism in The Wealth of Freedom is co-authored with Martin O’Neill.
[7] Stuart White, ‘‘Sovereign, True and Free’: Punk, Republicanism, and Civic Virtue’, forthcoming in Edward Avery-Natale, Mike Dines, and Grace Healy, eds., Being and Punk: Essays at the Intersections of Punk and Philosophy (Bristol, Intellect).
