Thatcher, Reagan, Jaruzelski

This chapter examines punk’s intertwined relationship with the rise of neoconservative/neoliberal politics amid the regimes of US president Ronald Reagan, UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and martial law Poland under first secretary of the Communist Party General Wojciech Jaruzelski. In each country, punk was intertwined with a shift from a Cold War political framework toward neoliberalism and an increasingly culturally based political alignment. Examining Oi! and 2 Tone in the United Kingdom, and straightedge, hardcore, and the punks around the ’zine Maximum Rocknroll in the United States, it shows how punk scenes around the world became entangled in these shifts and found themselves fracturing along the newly relevant political categories. In Eastern Europe, market reforms and efforts to revive the Polish economy and cultural sphere exacerbated tensions between subcultural capital and actual capital, creating analogous divisions within its punk scenes.