No.
Did mass media create false narratives, stoke fear, and misrepresent them. To sour opinion against them and preserve the hierarchy. Yes. If you knew one or are one you knew the narrative was BS.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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I absolutely agree. To me, anarchism is, and always has been, about empathy, mutual respect and the dignity of life. Capitalist media made it about aggression and destruction, because that is the lens through which capitalism views the world. Conquest and subjugation.
Yes, the same can generally be said of the original punks. Those were broadly their ideals as well. You will always get those just aping the aesthetic like John Lydon (Johnnie Rotten), vs those politically activated like Eric Boucher (Jello Biafra). But like with the goths etc, capitalism has distilled it down to just a pop culture aesthetic to try and slap on random things. Without understanding the less visible core elements.
I actually had a thought about this in a discussion last night. Capitalism is based on the assumption of infinite growth, which is physically impossible with finite resources. So it turns inward, in a process of internal reduction. People are reduced to numbers, life is reduced to statistics, and so on. But that is also unsustainable, because this reduction weakens the core. To quote Yeats, the center cannot hold. These social movements like punk and goth get hollowed out by the commodification you describe, until they collapse. But hey, I'm a bit drunk right now, so maybe I'm just rambling.
I'm sober rn and it definitely makes sense.
Well the modern concept of capitalism is a warped funhouse mirror of the originally envisioned economic-liberalism. Distilled down to it's worst aspects under circumstances those that originally envisioned it couldn't conceive. Much like the authoritarian socialist projects.
As individuals we all know about the limits of things and try to take care of our own immediate environments. It's why the scam of pushing recycling on to consumers but not the businesses was so popular. There's nothing wrong with recycling and those who do it. But without a duty and responsibility for business to do the same. It's just pissing in the ocean unfortunately.
But large hierarchies of power insulate people from the negative outcomes of their actions. Decoupling those concerns and short circuiting any possible checks on that destructive behavior. Leaving a purely exploitative ravenous beast.
And I don't know if hollowed out is quite the right term. But definitely projecting a false, marketable image. Groups born of outcasts and the fringe can only really exist in those conditions, and we still do. Billy Joe Armstrong is still doing his thing, despite blowing up in popular culture. With people stumbling across his politics wondering when he got political. Always. Greg Graffin while I don't think he's gotten a fraction of the recognition he should have. Doesn't care and is still staunchly doing as he always has as well. Definitely one of the most interesting geology/zoology lectures you'll ever meet. I don't think either have necessarily self identified politically. But praxis is always more informative than what someone chooses to call themselves.
i don't think it's at all fair to blame the punks. the "anarchism=chaos" argument has been pushed by every authority figure since time immemorial to try to justify their own power over others.
plato used it that way in the republic, at least in the version i read
Ok
But punk movement wasn't about chaos and destruction, so that's your answer. Anarchism and its image has nothing to do with punks except that quite some were and are anarchists (while some were conformist skinheads, too).
It wasn't, but it was. It was about building different for many. Which for the status quo looked like destruction.
It wasn't but it was, couldn't be phrased better.
It's not that it wasn't about it, and I'm aware of the skinhead movement too, I'm tallking about perception, and specifically perception today and how to move on. A lot of people, if not most, seem to associate anarchy with punk, and punk with chaos.
I'm not saying it's right, as a matter of fact I know it's wrong, but that's what it is.
Exactly; it's associated with chaos. Yet it's in the wording exactly - the punk movement didn't ruin any of this; police/media resistance did, by associating both with each other and with all the evil scarecrows they could come up with. The conformist masses did, by following the proposed narrative. You could do any righteous thing that harms capitalist powers - from mailbombing to feeding the orphans saved from Epstein/Trump/Putin island - media will attack it with full powers of institutionalized philosophy mills with terrible wheels multiplied by media tools. Picking out details of what actually happened is beyond usefulness at this state of matter.
It's similar how Islam got associated purely with terrorism and radicalism just as a flow of anarchic thought influxed the islamic school of thought, culminating with Bei. We don't draw associations between Christianity and terrorism even as Russia mounts christian jihad faith warriors to strike Ukraine - media ignores that because there are no serious religious anarchist works coming from orthodox church, it does not question the status-quo at all.
Similarly, early Black Sabbath were singing about their drug dealer and stuff, nobody cared. They release "war pigs" - got all the blame in the world about destroying the fabric of society.
This might sound stretched, but I just happen to graduate from Moscow State University, where philosophy was a mandatory subject for science people even in BS/MS; those people from philosophy department made no secret about their true purpose - marketing and propaganda - and the latter had quite straightforward alignment. It's an automated mill, as everything in the system.
Punks culture has nothing to do with this image of anarchism.
No, this representation goes back to the last days of the Tzar.
Anarchism has always been denigrated by opposing, dominant hegemonic narrative. Punks are not to blame for this, but they have been used for this. Punks, like other anti-authoritarians, won't be widely portrayed for having noble ideals or resisting an evil empire. It will be Sid Vicious caricatures almost every time.
I think that others have done a sufficient job of answering the main question. I have things to say about the secondary questions:
how badly damaged is it?
I am wondering how it would be possible to reverse or remove that opinion of so many.
I've actually put quite a bit of thought into this problem. Countering the intentional destruction of language in general seems to be basically impossible to do directly because of how many people there are who have no particular interest in figuring out what the word really means, and who just perpetuate the current zeitgeist via sheer inertia. It also doesn't help that there are a great many who claim to be anarchists who actually want the term to be misunderstood. The nihilistic version of anarchism that you're calling out is perfect for sociopathic individuals who want a world without accountability.
My conclusion is that the word itself has become effectively destroyed and unusable (except in contexts where you know that your audience is made of the small subset of people who actually understand what it is supposed to mean) and needs to be replaced. However, attempting to just invent a new term for the same ideas won't quite work either, because it will just be equated to the old one, and destroyed by the very same actors as before. We may be able to buy some time, but we need to do something about the forces that work to destroy the language itself if we want a lasting solution.
We need to learn how to protect ourselves from the actors that consistently sabotage our efforts to communicate, form communities and institutions, and actually accomplish objectives. We need to learn how to recognize those actors reliably, and keep them out of our spaces. Feds and such aren't really the main issue here - it's the people that claim to be our allies but instead subvert our rhetoric and activity to their own selfish ends that we need to be most wary of.
Once we can keep our spaces clean, we'll have control over our language again, and we can use a new term or the old one. Those who are actually interested in doing good can be kept safe from the interference of bad-faith actors as long as they are able to find their way into these spaces.
Thanks, it took a few days, but it did directly reply to most of the question at hand 🙂
The language, use of the word in some of the literature that I have picked up over the years (many from the 90's and 2000's) often had the etymology and/or the ideologies behind it, summarised beside the word as a caption. I think that's when I first got interested, it's definitely when I first took notice of what exactly anarchism was.
I don't believe that the punk movement helped anarchism in any way really, other than people that dig into it and studied some more.