Politics & Power Quote by Lester Bangs

Bangs is skewering the lazy glamour of rebellion: the politics that lives on a lapel, not in a mind. The Chairman Mao button isn’t just an accessory here, it’s a prop - a shortcut to moral posture and countercultural credibility. He’s pointing at a particular late-60s/70s phenomenon, when radical imagery circulated faster than radical practice, and when rock scenes could turn ideology into stagecraft. The “shake your fists in the air and all that” aside is doing heavy work: it reduces the ritual to choreography, a pantomime of resistance that costs little and changes nothing.

The jab lands because Bangs understands how subcultures metabolize symbols. A Mao badge can mean “I’m against the system” without forcing you to specify which system, what replaces it, or what you’ll sacrifice. Reading the Communist Manifesto is his stand-in for the unsexy part: sustained attention, historical literacy, argument, and the messy business of organizing. He’s not romanticizing Marx; he’s insisting that even disagreeing responsibly requires doing the homework.

Underneath the sarcasm is a critique of consumer capitalism’s genius for repackaging its enemies. The marketplace can sell you the feeling of dissent - even the face of a revolutionary - while safely diverting you from the actual levers of power. Bangs, the rock critic as cultural diagnostician, is warning that performance politics doesn’t threaten authority; it flatters it by turning opposition into fashion.