'Sex, Drugs and Rave (Not Control): A Post-Lockdown Manifesto for Anarchy' / Robbie Mason
As lockdown restrictions ease, it’s time to rethink urban landscapes. Robbie Mason releases a battlecry on sound terrorism, screwing and the speculative fiction of the rave utopia.
As an opportunity to reinforce normative social relations, lockdown is a neoliberal fantasy-cum-reality. State governments have segregated populaces according to geography, family units and established relationships. We have witnessed a period of unprecedented state-mandated monogamy. Our domestic space has transformed into our workspace. Work is now all-consuming and pervasive, leaking into and staining our private lives. By global standards, Australia’s biggest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – have endured particularly long-lasting lockdowns. Entombed in funeral-like silence, they are no longer sites of motion and chaos. It is as if they are frozen in time – stock, unobtrusive postcards remarkable only for their mundaneness. This sanitised lifestyle is a return to conservatism. Now that the necessary evil is largely over, a leftist orthodoxy, accused by Leigh Sales of bullying and harassing journalists daring to criticise the militant approach to COVID of Labor Premier Dan Andrews, must now burst the lockdown bubble with a nail gun.
Far more than just a “fuck you” to conservative forces, sex, debauchery and partying are valid tools for political emancipation. I don’t believe by any means that these phenomena are the most important weapon in the militant’s arsenal. Mired in identity politics, they are far from it. But they do have some uses.
In an era of rising techno-totalitarian state surveillance and biopolitics, we often feel like lab rats, scurrying around cages under the watchful gaze of invisible forces. DIY events, however, are an affront to capitalism – a refusal to drink from the tubes lowered into our enclosures with drug-laced liquids. They are also a collective prison break.
Image courtesy: Chris McClymont. http://mcclymont.photo
Via underground raves, Australia’s young population have escaped observation and resisted the state’s regulation of private life and bodily autonomy. I’m talking about the kind within urban ruins — warehouses, abandoned stadiums, empty office blocks and squats. By virtue of location, organisers and attendees partake in law-breaking. Maybe you’re cutting barbed wire and padlocks to wheel in gear. Maybe you’ve reclaimed public space or occupied private property. You’re hyper-aware of the space’s material conditions and who you’re up against. This is partying as civil disobedience.
This manifesto is in no way an endorsement of plague raves but a recommendation – now that lockdown is ending – to embrace nightlife, to fuck, to connect and to reclaim cities from police and army personnel. At night we must fill parks and public spaces with music, screaming and raucous laughter – a mock military salute to the yuppies and private developers who would prefer to see our cities become vapid, cultural wastelands as soon as the sun sets. In a nutshell: sound terrorism with gut-punching bass.
Teeming with hope and envisioning alternative futures, raves could not be further from the end-of-history tunnel vision which obscures from view any alternative to capitalism – a cultural phenomenon diagnosed by Mark Fisher as “capitalist realism”. The ways in which Australians have acquiesced without question to state power during the pandemic has only accelerated this process of “capitalist realism”. As Jeff Sparrow has suggested in Overland, the COVID-leftist orthodoxy in Australia is a far cry from the radical utopianism and abolitionist thinking of the BLM movement. Clearly, it’s time for change.
Image courtesy: Benjamin Weser. A Dunj event at the Kalyx warehouse in Sydney in 2021. https://benjaminweser.com/
Central to underground rave culture is prefigurative politics. Prefigurative politics inhabits a holy place within the inner sanctums of anarchist praxis. Unlike strategic politics, which involves the separation of means and ends, prefigurative politics involves the direct co-operation of utopian desires and practices. That is, it involves being the change you want to see. The in-house Occupy theorist David Graeber has described direct action as “a kind of micro-utopia, a concrete model for one’s vision of a free society”. The anarchist John Holloway has perhaps summarised the issue most eloquently in Crack Capitalism: “struggle for a different society must create that society through its forms of struggle.” This is DIY culture as emancipatory.
Libertarian socialists and anarcho-communists believe that prefigurative politics offers a more sophisticated and refined toolkit than the blunt force trauma of spontaneous, Marxist-Leninist revolution. It is a toolkit curiously both non-revolutionary (in the Marxian sense) and non-reformist.
Anarchists envision a classless society. Discounting the aberration that is anarcho-capitalism, anarchists promote the reappropriation of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth. Anarchist economic analyses are, for all intents and purposes, Marxist economic analyses.
However, from an anarchist viewpoint, social change is contingent, incremental and non-linear. In lieu of the grand, Marxist metanarrative – that the proletariat, surfing a revolutionary wave, will rise up and liberate all humanity in some distant future – anarchists believe we need to start mucking in now. Perhaps, Marx’s teleological vision of history makes us careless? On the one hand, there is the tired Socialist Alternative workhorse, flogged by their SAlt overlord, scribbling on a clipboard, processing membership applications online or filling out Excel spread sheets. On the other hand, there is the anarchist, decked out in all black, ears laden with piercings, more likely to be organising a breakcore “fundraver” in an abandoned post office or brainstorming safety measures with their affinity group for an upcoming rally, in case of police violence or local fash rocking up, alongside other customary leftist tactics.
Anarchists favour creativity, experimentation and, judging from the iconic, polemical piece ‘Your politics are boring as fuck’ from anarchist media outlet CrimethInc., a good dollop of fun. Admittedly, this may result in backwards and forwards steps. But what is important is trying now, and before it is too late.
Image courtesy: Benjamin Weser. A brief intermission between Sydney’s lockdowns at the Dunj warehouse in Sydney, April 2021. https://benjaminweser.com/
One of anarchism’s more controversial darlings is Hakim Bey’s “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ). Bey coined the term TAZ to describe everyday occurrences and non-hierarchical spaces within late stage capitalism which break apart social norms and resist control from state authorities. By proving what is possible, a TAZ would allow participants to creatively rethink social relations. Bey acknowledged the revolutionary potential of the internet, and the text from which TAZ theory derives spread like wildfire there. But he was distinctly critical of the overreliance on virtual communities in political organising. More than anything, temporary autonomous zones were about physical space and people coming together.
The publication of T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism in 1991 coincided with the emergence of a global rave generation and the term has become synonymous with the Freetekno movement. Partying had always been a form of political resistance, but suddenly dancing took on a newfound significance as a way to radicalise friends, encourage alternative ways of thinking, fundraise, build cross-cultural alliances, express solidarity and establish safer, more inclusive spaces for socially-excluded communities.
Raving has always had a vibrant queer history, for instance. In response to the AIDS crisis and associated queerphobia, queer communities in Australia found refuge in clubs and bars. From disco nights in the 80s to hi-NRG events on Oxford Street in Sydney and techno raves in the 90s, queers challenged heterenormative orthodoxies by becoming more visible, more forthright and more outrageous. Venues became information centers and sites for fundraising – even health clinics. Queer Sydney writer, performance artist and former musician Fiona McGregor has penned an essay collection Buried Not Dead which sparkles with affectionate memories, dropped in and scattered like glitter, of drag performances, queer parties and warehouse raves in Sydney’s inner city – a firsthand testament to the centrality of partying to queer identities and politics. The book ends with a eulogy to Surry Hills named, as if the sharehouse Golden Retriever, ‘Surro’.
McGregor explains in her essay ‘Looking for Lanny K’ that they were fighting for the right “to be kinky, dirty fuckers, without shame: to not sanitise ourselves in the bid for equality”.
“Often great culture blossoms on the cusp of oppressions and liberation, like jazz at the turn of the century. Our community was mostly white but only recently decriminalised. We had the best health system in the world but were still dying of AIDS, estranged from our families, getting sacked, unable to hold hands in the street. Coming together to dance was a celebration, a lament, a political statement. Parties habitually gave part-profits to AIDS or other queer charities.”
In her essay promoting the emancipatory potential of sex, ‘Collective Turn-off’, Sophie Lewis, meanwhile, acknowledges the influence and “hard-fought shamelessness of the countless militant lesbians and gays who refused to be blackmailed by the state into monogamy, abstinence or a ‘work ethic’… The denial of pleasure to populations is a grave historic harm, and the denial by some leftists of the centrality of pleasure to liberation struggles is a correspondingly serious error.”
Image courtesy: Chris McClymont. A Marrickville laneway rave. Reclaimed space — in many senses, an authentic TAZ. http://mcclymont.photo
In the 80s, a range of feminist and queer scholars repudiated the sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism emerging, at the time, within feminist circles and kick-started the so-called “feminist sex wars”. Today, emerging generations are distinctly less enamoured with sexual liberation. In recent months, media reports have highlighted the Zoomer distate for the raunchiness of Pride festivals. On Twitter and Tik Tok, a new wave of queer-left Gen Z’s and Millennials parrot conservative disapproval and kink shame. Just three weeks ago in the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg declared: “sex-positive feminism is falling out of fashion”. But this is hardly an entirely new trend. Certainly, amid the precarity of the COVID-19 pandemic, sex has dropped down our list of priorities. However, as Sophie Lewis argues, the pandemic has only exacerbated a pre-existing issue within late stage capitalism. “We are too overworked, under capitalism, to be deeply collectively horny, too overworked to even realise that this is the case”, she writes.
While some ‘respectable’ queers like to think they owe little to sexual subcultures they dismiss as sleazy, these public sexual cultures paved the way for their own success and their own political rights. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner wrote in 1998: “Gay men have come to take for granted the availability of explicit sexual materials, theatres or clubs. That is how they have learned to find each other; to map a commonly accessible world; to construct the architecture of queer space in a homophobic environment; and, for the last fifteen years, to cultivate a collective ethos of safer sex.” Protestivals, such as Sydney’s Mardi Gras Parade and the recent, anti-corporate counter-protest organised by Pride in Protest, are key ways in which queer communities combat queerphobia. The louder, more risqué and more radical they are, the better. By celebrating and normalising queer bodies, bringing them into the mainstream and proving that their erasure is impossible, we can ensure that the sense of revulsion, which dictates queerphobia, lessens. Queer nightlife achieves much the same goal.
Transgressive sexual practices including cruising and polyamory, even “promiscuity”, chip away at the heteronormative aspirations of the nation – goals centred around kinship, the nuclear family, domestic space and procreation. Outsiders have often misinterpreted these practices as predatory and perverted precisely because they destabilise norms. Hegemonic powers work to make sex seem irrelevant, personal and private. We must work to do the opposite.
This process of resisting heteronormativity is a constant tug-o-war entwined with urban planning and inner-city gentrification. It’s everywhere once you know where to look. Take, for example, the current redevelopment plan of the City of Sydney Council for the iconic queer beat that is Oxford Street. This plan involves opening up Taylor Square to further high-rise development – a move which will gentrify the area further, if we allow it to go ahead. The subtext to this surreptitious neoliberal takeover of queer geography is clear: the wealthy want even more of a stake in the area so the freaks, queers and bohemians need to move on.
After the introduction of the lockout laws in 2014, Sydney lost Kings Cross. Now its queer counterpart faces extinction as a party hotspot.
But every city needs a seedy underbelly. Drugs and alternative lifestyles give birth to artistic innovation.
Image courtesy: Chris McClymont. A snapshot of Breakbeat Chaos 2 at the warehouse 2Flies in Sydney, 14 July 2018. http://mcclymont.photo
* * *
The flaw in this everyday erotic dissidence, this pattern of libertarian drug consumption and adoration for the TAZ, is not the politics itself per se but the capacity for this politics to become the only means of resistance. The danger is that treating the personal and the body as political can quickly mutate into a perspective whereby the political need only be personal. In the last 40 years, pro-sex feminists and queer critics have dismantled oppressive systems of sexual stratification, foregrounded intersectionality and defended sex worker rights. By positioning sexual resistance within current power relations, however, this politics has not always addressed the political and economic conditions which – to take one example – devalues queerness in the first place.
If we jump onto this train of thought and fall into a slumber, indulging ourselves as free-riders, we awake at the end of the line – a sand-swept station in the middle of nowhere – exhilarated but wishing for a way to return to a civilisation which remains unchallenged. Taken to an extreme, we will embody a lazy form of lifestyle anarchism.
In other words: identity politics has a place but it must never displace class politics.
Image courtesy: Benjamin Weser. A Big Ting Recordings and DUNJ event on New Year’s Eve, 2018, in Sydney. https://benjaminweser.com/
In his polemical essay Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, Murray Bookchin argued that Hakim Bey’s concept of a TAZ and temporary ferality exemplifies the “lifestyle anarchism”, “social indifference”, “egotism” and disinterest in revolution of young, urban professionals. Bookchin suggests “a TAZ is a passing event, a momentary orgasm, a fleeting expression of the ‘will to power’ that is, in fact, conspicuously powerless in its capacity to leave any imprint on the individual’s personality, subjectivity, and even self-formation, still less on shaping events and reality.”
I largely agree. But I do believe that certain anti-commercial raves, at an abstract level, encourage alternative ways of living and provoke critique of dominant systems and constructs. Admittedly, these particular raves are few and far between. But the political potential of raves – when organised correctly – comes back to prefigurative politics.
While prefigurative politics is usually placed on one side of a spectrum with strategic politics on the other end, this does not mean prefiguative politics is not strategic. To the contrary, advocates posit prefigurative politics as the best method to achieve change; primarily because they believe the traditional methods – whether parliamentary or insurrectionary – have failed. Seen in this light, strategic politics absent-mindedly stumbles into the quagmire of immediacy, searching for a checklist of tangible outcomes, while latching onto traditional, (neo)liberal entities such as parliaments and non-government organisations to free itself from the bog.
Like a malleable metal, heated in the furnace of class struggle, strategic politics bends and buckles under the crude hammer blows of Marxist-Leninism. It is not unfathomable that an elite vanguard – an intellectual cabal of the most politically-conscious workers – may exploit and co-opt strategic politics, entrenching social capital and power within a core group of ideologues and leaving important questions unanswered until after a successful revolution. There is, after all, over one hundred years of historical precedent for this. The anarchist fear is that the revolutionary vanguard may become simply another political party, a bureaucracy, limiting democracy and reproducing traditional hierarchies.
So: what the hell does this have to do with partying?
Kissing a stranger on the dancefloor, stripping off at a warehouse party, dressing up in drag and hauling a genny through swamp land for a DIY rave advertise a better way of life. These lifestyles do not eliminate the male gaze or necessarily escape the chains of capitalism because they involve acting as if the future has already arrived. These actions will never start a revolution. Sex and partying are niche, often privileged, tools for liberation and they’re nowhere near the most important. But they do demonstrate to the public what is possible. They’re a form of preparation for a new world – a rehearsal of sorts to avoid the past failures of the red bureaucracy.
As we lean into liminality, this in-between space before we can properly party but following the easing of lockdown restrictions – I’m talking 300 people in a cramped warehouse moving as one – I’m inclined to indulge myself in the speculative fiction of the rave utopia.
What we need is free party culture, bunker raves, 24 hour house parties and cheaply-ticketed warehouse events – not arena-filling MDMA fests and 60 dollar yuppie-filled warehouse parties. There must be more effort to curate diverse crowds, not simply diverse lineups, otherwise we focus too narrowly on the figureheads within a movement. To decentralise and advance artistic scenes, we need to stop worshipping cult figures with social capital.
What we need now, more than ever, is radical optimism, open dialogues around sex, the freedom to sleep with whoever we choose without judgement and anarchy – not heterofatalism and fear.
And, above all else, what we need now that lockdown is ending is a healthy dosage of fun. If we’re smart about it, it’s possible we may even make the world a better place while we do it.
Words by Robbie Mason (@robbiemasonlhs).
Photography by Benjamin Weser. https://benjaminweser.com/
Photography, including thumbnail image, by Chris McClymont. http://mcclymont.photo
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