Rank-and-File Antiracism: Historicizing Punk and Rock Against Racism

This review essay on recent scholarship on Rock Against Racism argues that the original scholarship on the topic misunderstood the relationship of punk rock and Rock Against Racism to the Left and to transformations in capitalism in Great Britain and beyond in the 1970s. This review offers a reinterpretation of punk rock as a rank-and-file mobilization in the realm of culture at a moment when more traditional venues for rank-and-file mobilization became unavailable.