How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People [1st ed.] 978-3-030-15205-5, 978-3-030-15206-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxvii
Outlaws and Supporters (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 1-27
Sublime and Power (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 29-59
Sovereignty and the Political (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 61-114
Sacred Order and Symbolic Immortality (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 115-170
Solidarity and Sacrifice (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 171-200
Back Matter ....Pages 201-214

Citation preview

How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People Tereza Kuldova

How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People “For many, the current political tumult indicates a renewed struggle for popular sovereignty against the post-political technocrats who administer neoliberalism’s unforgiving market logic. For the excellent anthropologist Tereza Kuldova, the condottieri of this struggle ride Harley Davidsons at full throttle to outrun the forces of incorporation. Chock-full of brilliant insights. A mustread for anyone who wants to understand today’s volatile interface of culture and politics.” —Steve Hall, Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology, UK “How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People provides an important contribution to our general knowledge of motor cycle clubs and the sociology of deviance more generally. It is original, creative, and well researched. Specialists and non-specialists alike will learn a great deal from reading it.” —Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, University of California, Berkeley, US

Tereza Kuldova

How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People

Tereza Kuldova Department of Archaeology University of Oslo Oslo, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-15205-5 ISBN 978-3-030-15206-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933878 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Tereza Kuldova This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty (the best friend I ever won, and influenced—and vice versa)

Acknowledgements

Travelling across Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, attending outlaw biker events, and collecting material for this book, I have met many exciting individuals with whom I had the pleasure to engage in sincere and heartfelt conversations about life, politics, crime, economy, and culture; some of them became friends. All of them remain anonymous in this book, as promised. I hope to do justice to their desires and fears. Outlaw motorcycle clubs are a counterculture that is, in its current form, a product and a mirror image of our neoliberal times. At the same time, I view it as a form of practical cultural critique. It would be easy to reduce the outlaw bikers to the one-dimensional stereotype of organized criminals on wheels, but social life is messier and more complex than that. Inspired by the conversations with outlaw bikers, their supporters, and people who admire them, this book attempts to go beyond the material seductions of crime. It tries to account for what it is that attracts the people to the outlaws beyond the potential access to the illegal market and a quick buck. Or else, what is it that the hang-arounds, prospects, supporters, and admirers see in the outlaws that social theory has remained blind to? I thank all my informants for making me see the world from their standpoint, and for expanding my own horizon of meaning. vii

viii     Acknowledgements

Parts of this book have been presented at conferences across Europe, and certain segments have been previously published—even if they appear here in a significantly reworked version. Over the last two years, I have benefited from comments by conference participants and reviewers, colleagues at the University of Oslo, and University of Vienna, members of the Extreme Anthropology Research Network, as well as family and friends. I thank all of those who contributed their time and their ideas—you know who you are. Chapter 2 is a reworked and extended version of an article previously published in Visual Anthropology, 2017, 30(5): 379–402, under the title, ‘The Sublime Splendor of Intimidation: Outlaw Biker Aesthetics of Power.’ I thank the publisher for the permission to republish it in this monograph. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2017.1371545. Last but not least, this book would not be possible without the funding for my individual research project Gangs, Brands and Intellectual Property Rights: Interdisciplinary Comparative Study of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Luxury Brands, provided by the Research Council of Norway through a FRIPRO Mobility Grant, contract no 250716 (the FRIPRO Mobility grant scheme (FRICON) is co-funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under Marie Curie grant agreement no 608695).

Contents

Prologue

xi

1 Outlaws and Supporters 1 2 Sublime and Power 29 3 Sovereignty and the Political 61 4 Sacred Order and Symbolic Immortality 115 5 Solidarity and Sacrifice 171 Epilogue 201 Index 205

ix

Prologue

In March 2016, as part of the official annual book fair in the German city of Leipzig, the Hells Angels organized a press conference and a book launch of Jagd auf die Rocker: Die Kriminalisierung von Motorradklubs durch Staat und Medien in Deutschland or else ‘Hunting Bikers: Criminalization of Motorcycle Clubs by the State and Media in Germany,’ a book written by the Hells Angel, photographer and PR spokesperson of the club, Lutz Schelhorn, in collaboration with several journalists (Schelhorn and Heitmüller 2016). As the title suggests, the book’s aim was to problematize the one-sided, negative, and sensationalist media portrayal of outlaw motorcycle clubs and challenge the different measures taken by the state to combat organized crime. The event was accompanied by a concert and a screening of Lutz Schelhorn’s movie Ein Hells Angel Unter Brüdern (‘A Hells Angel Among Brothers’, 2015), a film conceived as a counterbalance to the stereotypical media image of outlaw bikers as ruthless criminals, showing the club in a positive light, engaging in charity, and riding as a big happy family of ordinary ‘men with a hobby’ (Koetsenruijter and Burger 2018). During the book launch, the door to the Hells Angels clubhouse opened to the public, offering the visitors a glimpse into what the media deem the den xi

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of evil. ‘We do this for people to make up their own mind, to find out for themselves what the real truth about the club is,’ an Angel remarked. Times have changed, the days of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels (Thompson 2012) are long gone; rowdiness has been progressively transformed into controlled and regulated behavior, dirty clubhouses have become polished buildings with toilet scent diffusers, young rebels have been turned into iconic and celebrated criminal heroes selling autobiographies, movies and starring in TV shows, filthy initiation rites reveling in sex, shit and piss have become far more casual events, sexual freedom itself has flipped into its opposite—a reactionary and conservative valorization of family relations vis-à-vis the hated individualist and consumerist society—and the local American clubs themselves have become powerful transnational organizations, the only American export criminal organization as some say (Barker 2010), engaging top lawyers, and running as many legal fronts as illegal dealings. Over the years, outlaw motorcycle clubs established recognizable and aspirational brands endowed with a commodified spirit of the American frontier (Slotkin 1992). Today, outlaw motorcycle clubs are no longer deviants, even if they operate at what the bourgeois would deem the ‘margins,’ where the legal and the illegal are intimately bound together (Nordstrom 2008). Contrary to popular imagination, they are well integrated, and they have incorporated, trademarked their logos, and expanded globally, even to places such as Namibia or Japan. They are investing great efforts into legitimizing their existence and informal power, into recruiting new members, gaining supporters, and expanding their territorial reach (Kuldova and Quinn 2018; Kuldova 2018b). They compete with the state in the business of protection and engage in vigilante justice as much as ‘providing social welfare.’ They commodify and sell their own countercultural brand image, and use their brand power and reputation to voice the anti-establishment resentment of a significant segment of the population, channeling the rage of these people against the state as much as against the capitalist system that has no use for them any longer, and no respect to offer them either—thus further expanding their ranks (Kuldova and Sánchez-Jankowski 2018). The popularity of outlaw motorcycle clubs is rising, not merely as an object of fiction and popular culture, but as real, alternative non-state actors governing ‘from below’ (Lea and Stenson 2007) to which people look up to.

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However, while the clubs certainly invest much energy into their organizational growth and propaganda, their success would not have been possible were it not for the structural socioeconomic transformation of the last three decades—the clubs matured and grew in tact with and enabled by the increasingly destructive effects of decades of neoliberal policies. Only under such conditions could they transform into non-state actors that fill the vacuum created by the neoliberal state, a state that fails to control the economy to the advantage of the majority of the population, a state that compensates the failure to regulate the economy by increasing securitization and control of individual and ‘anti-social’ behavior (Kapstein 1994; Hadfield et al. 2009; Wacquant 2009). In 2018, this has manifested itself in the controversial law expanding police powers in the German Bavaria.1 This law was widely discussed in the biker community as representing a threat to civil liberties, and indeed, with good reasons. The same law has seen a lot of resistance from the left as well. However, this critique was quickly instrumentalized by the PR spokespersons and lawyers affiliated with the outlaw motorcycle clubs to fuel resentment against the state and to position the clubs as legitimate opposition and heroes of ‘the people’ in the process. The popularity of outlaw motorcycle clubs is most pronounced among those who are disillusioned, hopeless, and frustrated by the harmful effects of neoliberal capitalism, and those who feel abandoned by the state, which they view as, if anything, increasingly curbing their freedoms as opposed to protecting their real interests. How Do Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People analyzes in detail the reasons and motivations that lead people to support, admire, and affiliate themselves with outlaw bikers. This book investigates the desires, needs, and longings to which the clubs provide, not a cure, but a remedy that offers temporary relief. This remedy is necessarily shallow, attacking the symptoms rather than curing the disease; it uncannily mirrors the larger developments in that it does not offer any (utopian) hope of a better future, any vision of progress, or exit from the very system in which it thrives—for a simple reason, it depends on this system for its own success, and thus, its interest lies in the reproduction or even acceleration of the harms connected to the system, rather than the opposite (Kuldova 2018c). The people we encounter on these pages, especially the supporters, are so disillusioned by the system that they trust and

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openly venerate the icons of the underworld over any state representative—a phenomenon we are familiar with from places such as India, where people willingly support criminal politicians precisely because they are criminal (Vaishnav 2017). But this phenomenon is becoming increasingly common even in well-established democracies, where criminal capital becomes an asset and a source of allure, rather than of delegitimization—as in the case of Andrej Babiš, the Prime Minister and second richest man in the Czech Republic, investigated for fraud, which paradoxically added to his popularity among many voters, rather than diminishing it. This phenomenon should not be taken lightly, as it is bound to become stronger under the current criminogenic conditions of rising inequality, social injustice, takeover by corporate power, de-democratization, and decreasing accountability of the elites (Giroux 2004; Hall 2012). It is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the rise of the right, as much as with populist politics (Jupskås 2017; Brubaker 2017; Winlow et al. 2017)—both of which are effectively mobilized by the big outlaw motorcycle clubs, irrespective of how apolitical they proclaim themselves to be. But we should not assume, as leading media often do, that this move toward support of either outlaw motorcycle clubs or right-wing movements comes easy to people. To the contrary, it is often a result of painful struggle to belong that ends up in failure, and thus in resignation and proud embrace of self-exclusion in order to restore meaning. To these people, the biggest enemy here are not the immigrants, but the liberal left, the hated ‘cultural Marxists’ that brand them as ‘Nazis,’ while claiming their own moral high ground (Winlow et al. 2017). When people openly proclaim ‘I am not a Nazi, but if you call me that, then yes, I am a Nazi, and I am proud to be one,’ such as during the right-wing violent demonstrations in Chemnitz in August 2018 following the fatal stabbing of a carpenter Daniel H by Iraqi and Syrian suspects, we are in serious trouble. Unless we take this dynamic seriously, our fight against organizations such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs will always take the form of a battle against the mythological Hydra: When one head is cut off, two more grow. The Herculean battle ahead of us is a revolutionary one—we must fight the very conditions under which such organizations grow and thrive. * * *

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Back at the book launch in Leipzig, members of affiliated clubs, ordinary bikers, and a number of supporters and friends, as well as a few curious members of the public, showed up. I struck up a conversation with a woman sporting an 81 Support T-shirt, the official support merchandise of the Hells Angels (8 and 1 standing for H and A in the alphabet). I was curious to know what made her, like many others, publicly display her support. The words of one Angel still resonated in my mind; after he gave me a support top, he warned me of wearing it in public: ‘if you wear it, you will most probably end up in a police database, that’s not good for research.’ One has to be willing to bear this cost of flaunting one’s support. She remarked that it makes her stronger, gives her courage, and establishes connection and proximity to those she admires. An act of publicly displaying support of what law enforcement deems a criminal organization is necessarily an act of self-exclusion, of removing oneself from the ‘polite society,’ and of aligning oneself with the mythologized bikers on the wrong side of the law. But it is not merely an act of self-exclusion, it is also an act of sublimation. This act transforms the, often painful, experience of being rejected by society, disrespected, looked down upon, or considered a loser, into an experience of empowerment. Those she looks up to have already found an effective way to deal with the same problem: establishing their very own structures within which respect can be earned and bestowed, and human dignity restored (Cohen 1955). Her personal experience, like that of many supporters, is projected onto the outlaws as she establishes both an imaginary and real alliance with them—i.e., onto individuals even more despised by the system, but also, and most importantly, feared. This identification fills the perceived lack of control and power under the conditions of insecurity and restores a certain sense of narcissistic omnipotence through the powerful Other who becomes part of the self (Freud 1959; Anker 2012). But this act also transforms that which is deemed obscene and filthy into something pleasurable and even empowering—identification goes here hand in hand with sublimation. ‘Being around gives you strength, they are a role model,’ as she put it. Sublimation is not, as is often believed, a process by which, for instance, sex drives are converted into poetry, but rather it is a process by which the same object or practice becomes transformed: ‘something

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which cannot always be unproblematically perceived as pleasurable— something obscene, awful, tasteless – is transformed into an agent of heightened pleasure precisely because of its problematic qualities’ (Pfaller 2009). This book can be read as an account of the logic of sublimation and identification under current neoliberal order. It is thus less about the clubs themselves, their criminal dealings or their inner workings, that have been dealt with by criminologists elsewhere (McGuire 1986; Veno and Gannon 2004; Barker 2010; Barker 2011), than about the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions under which these clubs are sublimated and transformed from ‘vulgar and filthy bikers,’ ‘deviant criminals,’ ‘public enemy,’ into something sublime and wonderful that is admired by increasing amounts of disillusioned people. These people, in their experiences of powerlessness and lack of control, seek identification Barker with the more or less phantasmatic outlaws who appear to them as sovereign heroes, strong and in control. The book deals with this intersection of material structures, ideology, and phantasmatic ways to cope with the unstable, chaotic, messy, and unpredictable realities one is thrown into without one’s choosing. How Do Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People argues that the growth of these and similar groups under neoliberalism is not coincidental but inevitable. It insists that the critical question we must ask today is: Why do certain people in increasing numbers support, admire, and aspire to membership in outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations? Answering this question is crucial if we are to fight not only the harms caused by these groups, but more importantly the very social harms enabling the proliferation of these groups and leading people to idolize such groups. We must understand what makes these clubs appealing, and under what conditions do they become an object of desire. What do these groups offer, what needs and desires do they satisfy, what lacks do they fill? In other words, how do they win friends and influence people under the current neoliberal regime? Finding such answers is not straightforward, but requires a great dose of sociological and criminological imagination (Mills 2000; Young 2011). When looking for an explanation of the increasing support for such groups, we could be tempted to resort simply to an analysis of the different legitimization strategies used by the clubs, like the aforementioned book

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launch, charity work, or other PR stunts aimed at improving the public image of the clubs vis-à-vis the police, media, and governmental pressures to fight them. While analyzing the ways in which these strategies mobilize support and uplift the image of the clubs and reveal their high level of integration rather than their ‘deviance’ is certainly worthwhile and something we have written about elsewhere (Kuldova and Quinn 2018; Kuldova and Sánchez-Jankowski 2018; Kuldova 2018b), the popularity of outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organized groups on the ‘edge’ of society cannot be merely ascribed to their successful selfpromotion, image uplifting, and self-commodification. Irrespective of how comforting such an explanation would be, as it would immediately imply concrete strategies of fighting such legitimization efforts, it does not touch upon the Real (Hall 2012). An ultra-realist perspective and analysis on the other hand clearly show that in reality the reasons run far deeper and are far harder to effectively combat (Hall and Winlow 2018b). Fighting mere visible harmful symptoms does not cure the social disease. The fact that branding and conscious efforts at changing public opinion are not a sufficient explanation for the increasing pull factor of the subculture came to light later in my conversation with the female supporter. When formulating the answer to why she publicly displays her support, she placed great emphasis on making sure I understood that she is not naïve, that she knows and is no dupe that has fallen victim to the Angels propaganda machine: ‘They have done it all: murder, robbery, drug trade, human trafficking, blackmail, kidnapping, prostitution. I know that… But they are still great, we need people like that.’ And so, at an event where outlaw bikers were desperately trying to improve their image, gain credibility and legitimacy by bringing in facts and accounts of injustice and prejudice to which they fell victim, this woman made a simple point: knowledge is not the problem, to the contrary. The battle that is being fought is ideological and facts have little effect on ideology (Althusser 2008). The aforementioned efforts to present a legitimate facade do little to improve the outlaw biker’s public image. At best, they only partially ameliorate the impact of the lurid crimes attributed to them by police and media. On the other hand, they can be effective in shaping, mobilizing, and benefiting from a sense of

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resentment toward the government and the state, especially when injustices, ‘criminalization,’ and curbing of citizen rights are brought into the discussion. This, again, is not necessarily a matter pertaining to knowledge, but rather to the ability to mobilize affects and direct passions— through populist myths—against an enemy, in this case the ‘impotent state’ (Citton 2010; Lordon 2014). People often act in certain ways despite knowing better—psychoanalysis terms it disavowal, a structure connected both to pleasure and to ideology (Žižek 1989; Pfaller 2014). The structure of disavowal, discovered by the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, can be summed up as follows: ‘I know well, but all the same…’ (Mannoni 2003). This structure is at the heart of a great deal of our innocent and dirty little pleasures (Pfaller 2014), but it is also at the core of the most violent excesses of humanity, as Stanley Cohen vividly documented in his States of Denial (Cohen 2001). With the time spent in the field, it became more and more obvious to me that since we are not dealing here with a problem of knowledge, we cannot simply tell people, as one conference participant suggested, ‘look, maybe it is not too smart to support the Hells Angels, after all, you know, they have been involved in all sorts of criminal activities.’ Likewise, it is problematic to assume that the reverse move of improving the image of the club by sharing positive narratives, be it of their charitable work or of their joyful brotherly camaraderie, would make anyone really believe that this is how they truly are. To the contrary, knowledge here sustains the very cynical distance which in turn enables the ideological fantasy to persist and take on real material effects. Similarly, despite all the shocking statements and acts, that would for anyone else amount to political suicide, Donald Trump maintains high levels of support. We could rather say, not despite but precisely because of them. Or as Trump himself put it in his astonishment: ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.’ Trump belongs here to the same order of phenomena where support and endorsement persist despite better knowledge. Trump supporters are not unlike the lady in 81 Support T-shirt, they also know too well: Misinformation and ignorance are not the real problem and hence knowledge is not the cure. The problem is not, as some media psychologists would like to convince

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us, that ‘they’re not smart enough to realize they’re dumb’ (Azarian 2016). We are dealing here with an ideological fantasy. An ideological fantasy is practically impossible to unsettle by knowledge (Pfaller 2005). As Robert Pfaller aptly argued, ‘it is precisely our “subversive”, “cynical” distance towards a certain ideology which subjects us to this ideology and allows it to exert its social efficiency’ (Pfaller 2005: 115), ‘even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’ (Žižek 1989: 32). Ideology that relies on cynical distance is widespread today; if we look carefully, it can be observed all around us—Trump supporters, Indian voters endorsing criminal politicians, or those idolizing criminal bosses are only some of its extreme manifestations. Consider for a moment all those consumer activists, who—in a reverse move to that of the Angels trying to tell us how good they actually are—inform us about all that labor and environmental exploitation to which we close our eyes in order to satisfy our consumerist desires. All these activists, perceiving awareness raising as the ultimate solution, identify the political problem as ‘one of ignorance and the role of the activist is to shine light on the darkness and reveal the true nature of things’ (Duncombe 2012: 362). It is not a coincidence that they fail time and time again—even here, knowledge is not the problem. People tend to consume and even enjoy products that are a result of exploitation precisely against their better knowledge (Kuldova 2016, 2018a)—not without a dose of perverse pleasure. The simplest of examples is revealing here—cigarettes: as Klein has nicely shown in his book Cigarettes Are Sublime, ‘if cigarettes were good for you, they would not be sublime’ (Klein 1993: 2), and if we did not know they were bad for us, we would not take pleasure in them either. While not all of us fall for cigarettes, or the simple ‘I know they are bad, but I still smoke them,’ none of us exists outside of this ideological structure. The ‘enlightened’ that suggests one simply informs people and they will change their behavior (like they do on cigarette packages) that supporting criminals may not be the best idea—can neither see that this does not work, nor that he himself is not outside of ideology. The naïve idea that all it takes is simply sharing a bit of knowledge allows the

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‘enlightened’ to think of himself as superior and to cast the Other as duped, ignorant, mystified, a victim of populist propaganda, or simply unknowledgeable. The one who believes himself to be ‘enlightened’ does not realize that he, too, has his own ideological fantasies he falls for that share in the same structure, only their immediate object may differ. For instance, he may know and even pride himself on the knowledge of all possible corporate abuse, but still continue shopping and reproducing the system on a daily basis (Kuldova 2018a). Effectively, he may disavow the fact that his behavior reflects the hopelessness of an individual vis-à-vis a system that cannot be changed by silly little adjustments to our consumer behavior. The object of the fantasy may be different, but in both cases, be it the support of outlaw motorcycle clubs or the perpetuation of the structures of exploitation, we are dealing with a defense mechanism against the powerlessness vis-à-vis the current regime of neoliberal individualism and ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009). The self-proclaimed supporter of the ‘criminals on wheels,’ who knows better, but still continues to adore and affiliate with the criminal Other, unashamedly reveals to us the perverse sources of pleasures within the current system. The same perverse pleasure that those who cast themselves as ‘enlightened’ hide behind a veil of moral superiority (Layton 2010). This perverse pleasure is inherent to a system where capitalism appears to have no alternative, where there is no vision of the outside to capitalism, and where hopes of progress have been replaced by apocalyptic scenarios. Even if nobody any longer believes that capitalism is the best system, it is still considered the only feasible one (Giroux 2004; Fisher 2009). The ‘potential transformative harms are condemned as absolute, intolerable and inevitable whilst the system’s everyday morbid harms are excused as relative, tolerable and contingent’ (Hall and Winlow 2018a: 108). After all, we could as easily ask, ‘how is it that, despite the utterly catastrophic consequences in which neo-liberal policies have resulted, they are increasingly operative, to the extent of pushing states and societies into ever graver political crises and social regression? How is it that such policies have been developed and radicalized for more than thirty years without encountering sufficient resistance to check them?’ (Dardot and Laval 2009: 10). The structure of ideology and the mechanisms of

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cultural pleasure can explain a great deal when it comes to the reproduction of existing socioeconomic structures, however, they do little to explain the particular forms this ideological fantasy may take. In particular, considering that while some cultural pleasures may be innocent and playful, and even culturally necessary, underlying all sort of positive cultural rituals, others are downright harmful and destructive both for the individuals and for the social body at large—and yet, their structure is identical. So far, we have posited that we shall be dealing here with an ideological fantasy that is resistant to knowledge, a fantasy that has a structure that appears universal—and can be a source of fairly innocent pleasures, such as reading a horoscope when we are sure it is bollocks, and equally a source of utterly perverse pleasure dependent on disavowal of all sorts of violence, harm, and exploitation. We have also posited that we are not dealing with people who are necessarily ignorant dupes. It is precisely here that we must ask the key question underlying this work: would just about any ideological fantasy that follows this structure do? And if not, what makes the populist fantasy of the powerful, organized, heroic, and violent outlaw so efficient for so many at this point in time? An ideological fantasy must be able to provide us with a certain cultural pleasure, or relief, in a given cultural and socioeconomic context. To say that we are dealing with an ideological fantasy does not mean that there is no material basis to it, precisely to the contrary. As materialism teaches us, it is in material practice and action that ideology is located (Althusser 2008). The fantasy would not be effective if there were no material and phantasmatic, but for that matter no less real, things on offer when one succumbs to it and derives pleasure from it. There are plenty of material, pragmatic, and phantasmatic incentives to team up with the outlaws. This book will attempt to reveal the ways in which the material structures the imaginary, and vice versa, offering insights into the complex reasons behind the rising support of outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations, as well as into the related rise of right-wing populism. * * *

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Much ink has been spilled on demonizing the outlaws, crafting policing strategies, and manufacturing public consent about this public enemy and internal security threat (Katz 2011). But it is time to ask the fundamental question: why are the outlaws becoming heroes to so many, how do they do that, and what enables them to succeed? Each chapter in this book provides a partial answer to the puzzle. The book does not claim to be exhaustive. Others may find additional reasons and driving forces. The task here is to open the question up for debate and further research. Chapter 1, Outlaws and Supporters, briefly introduces the phenomenon of outlaw motorcycle clubs, as well as the methodological tenets of the study. It argues that scholars have so far ignored the popular support for these organizations, focusing exclusively on outlaw motorcycle clubs and full-patch members, as if the clubs were self-enclosed independent entities existing in a socioeconomic and cultural void. And yet, it is precisely in understanding the context in which they proliferate that we can best grasp their nature. Setting the stage for the next chapters, it points the readers towards the collusion between the destructive effects of neoliberalism and the transnational expansion of the clubs. Chapter 2, Sublime and Power, focuses on the most immediate and obvious form of seduction exploited by the outlaw bikers: the aesthetics of power. It asks: How is the aesthetics of brutal force capable of mobilizing passions and directing affects of the supporters? The chapter explores the mythology of the outlaw and the idea of the American frontier, (re)produced by the clubs themselves, media, movies, men’s adventure magazines, and TV shows. And looks at how the phantasmatic becomes activated in the actual encounters between the admirers and the real one percenters. It argues that the key to understanding the seduction of the outlaw bikers lies in the intoxicating ‘sublime experience’ of an encounter with a powerful threat. Taking Edmund Burke’s investigation into the sublime as a point of departure, the chapter explores this form of power and the desire for participating in and taking on the empowering properties of the charismatic outlaws. However, sublime power, as the analysis shows, cannot be thought without considering the role of the human desire for ‘sovereignty,’ connected to violence, transgression, and the ultimate act of killing.

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Chapter 3, Sovereignty and the Political, moves toward a discussion of the desire for sovereignty in the context of the political. The chapter argues that outlaw motorcycle clubs have over the past decades evolved into organizations that uncannily mirror the state and embody the ideal of ‘sovereignty’ in different forms. They can even be said to have become parallel non-state actors engaged in governance ‘from below,’ catering to the same needs traditionally associated with the state: enforcement of justice, security, welfare, job creation. The clubs exploit the widespread anti-establishment resentment and the failure of the state to control the forces beyond the control of the individual, such as transnational capital. They claim to oppose the paternalistic state that, in their view, dictates how individuals should live their lives. Effectively, they contribute to the delegitimization of the state. In the process, they present themselves as a viable and legitimate alternative, as sovereign actors unwilling to sacrifice their freedoms. It is precisely this sovereignty that becomes desirable to their supporters, and which they, too, wish to possess. With Georges Bataille, we could say, the one percenters refuse to serve life and instead demand something from it. As such, they interpassively satisfy the desire for sovereignty on the part of their supporters and provide them with a sense of empowerment in an environment beyond their control. Chapter 4, Sacred Order and Symbolic Immortality, building on the explorations of the sublime and of sovereignty, turns to an investigation of the production of the sacred and of paths towards symbolic immortality. Drawing on the work of Ernest Becker, the chapter looks at how the outlaw bikers cater to the human desire for the sacred, for order and meaning, and for symbolic immortality in a confusing and complex world, where people struggle with a lack of control over their own lives, as much as with feelings of insignificance. It explores the ways in which the clubs sacralize their organizations, use sacred rituals and symbols to interpellate the members and supporters as subjects. It argues that understanding the capacity of the clubs to produce the sacred and the sacred order is essential if we are to account for their increasing popularity. Chapter 5, Solidarity and Sacrifice, investigates the often theoretically neglected interrelations between solidarity, gift-giving, sacrifice,

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and heroism. It looks at how the clubs manufacture solidarity, through charity and gift-giving, while using solidarity as a blackmail to demand (self-sacrifice) on the altar of the organization, thus reinforcing its own claims to heroism. The ability of these clubs to patronize through charity, provide networks of support and respect, and create the fuzzy heart-warming feeling of community attracts people to these organizations. It is especially seductive for those disoriented, aimless, and disrespected in a society that has no longer any use for them. But solidarity comes at a high price and with obligations; it requires a permanent readiness to sacrifice on behalf of the group, to prove one’s commitment, and to return the gift. The chapter shows how through the dynamics of charitable giving and sacrifice, often involving violent and criminal transgressions, the clubs not only manufacture solidarity but also emerge as heroes for their supporters, offering them material support, meaning, and a sense of greatness. In the Epilogue, I offer a brief diagnosis of the current cultural, political, and economic system in relation to the increased popularity of the outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations, be they vigilante groups, extreme right-wing organizations, or even radical anarchists. What possible futures lie ahead and can we imagine a progressive future in a postmodern world that has discarded all meta-narratives and where many people have lost hope for a better life of their children? Can we imagine a future beyond the threat of the economic and environmental apocalypse without sacrificing the idea of collective progress? Can we offer an alternative to those who seek to satisfy their desires for respect, recognition, stability, community, and meaning through escapism in groups such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs?

Note 1. See for instance: https://www.dw.com/en/bavaria-passes-controversial-law-expanding-police-powers/a-43799696, accessed June 10, 2018.

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References Althusser, L. (2008). On Ideology. London: Verso. Anker, E. (2012). Heroic Identifications: Or “You Can Love Me Too, I Am So Like the State”. Theory & Event, 15(1), 1–14. Azarian, B. (2016). The Psychology Behind Donald Trump’s Unwavering Support. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ mind-in-the-machine/201609/the-psychology-behind-donald-trumps-unwavering-support. Accessed July 3, 2018. Barker, T. (2010). Biker Gangs and Organized Crime. Newark, NJ: Elsevier Science. Barker, T. (2011). American Based Biker Gangs: International Organized Crime. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 36(3), 207–215. Brubaker, R. (2017). Why Populism? Theory and Society, 46(5), 357–385. Citton, Y. (2010). Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths. Open Cahiers, 20(1), 60–69. Cohen, A. (1955). Deliquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. New York: Free Press. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2009). The New Way of the World: On Neo-liberal Society. London: Verso. Duncombe, S. (2012). It Stands on Its Head: Commodity Fetishism, Consumer Activism, and the Strategic Use of Fantasy. Culture and Organization, 18(5), 359–375. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books. Freud, S. (1959). Collected Papers, Vol. 4. New York: Basic Books. Giroux, H. A. (2004). The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. London: Routledge. Hadfield, P., Lister, S., & Traynor, P. (2009). ‘This Town’s a Different Town Today’: Policing and Regulating the Night-Time Economy. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 9(4), 465–485. Hall, S. (2012). Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018a). Big Trouble or Little Evils: The Ideological Struggle Over the Concept of Harm. In J. Kotzé & A. Boukli (Eds.),

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Zemiology: Critical Criminological Perspectives (pp. 107–126). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018b). Ultra-Realism. In W. S. Dekeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology (pp. 43–56). London: Routledge. Jupskås, A. R. (2017). Ekstreme Europa: Ideologi, Årsaker Og Konsekvenser. Oslo: Cappelen Damm. Kapstein, E. B. (1994). Governing the Global Economy: International Finance and the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, K. (2011). The Enemy Within: The Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Moral Panic. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 36(3), 231–249. Klein, R. (1993). Cigarettes Are Sublime. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Koetsenruijter, W., & Burger, P. (2018). Men with a Hobby: Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs, News Media and Image Politics. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 123–144). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T. (2016). Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique. London: Bloomsbury. Kuldova, T. (2018a). The “Ethical Sell” in the Indian Luxury Fashion Business. In V. Pouillard & R. Blaczczyk (Eds.), European Fashion: The Creation of a Global Industry (pp. 263–282). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kuldova, T. (2018b). Outlaw Bikers Between Identity Politics and Civil Rights. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 175–203). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T. (2018c). When Elites and Outlaws Do Philanthropy: On the Limits of Private Vices for Public Benefit. Trends in Organized Crime, 21(3), 295–309. Kuldova, T., & Quinn, J. (2018). Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Struggles over Legitimization. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 145–173). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T., & Sánchez-Jankowski, M. (2018). Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Layton, L. (2010). Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Perversion of Truth. Subjectivity, 3(3), 303–322.

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Lea, J., & Stenson, K. (2007). Security, Sovereignty, and Non-state Governance ‘from Below’. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 22(2), 9–27. Lordon, F. (2014). Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza & Marx on Desire. London: Verso. Mannoni, O. (2003). I Know Well, but All the Same… In M. A. Rothenberg & D. Foster (Eds.), Perversion and the Social Relation (pp. 68–92). Durham: Duke University Press. McGuire, P. (1986). Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs: Organized Crime on Wheels. National Sheriff, 37(2), 68–75. Mills, C. W. (2000). Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Nordstrom, C. (2008). Global Outlaws: Crime, Money and Power in Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pfaller, R. (2005). Where Is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory. In G. Boucher, J. Glynos & M. Sharpe (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek (pp. 105–124). Cornwall: Ashgate. Pfaller, R. (2009). Sublimation and ‘Schweinerei’: Theoretical Place and Cultural-Critical Function of Psychoanalytic Concept. Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 29(2), 11–48. Pfaller, R. (2014). On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. London: Verso. Schelhorn, L., & Heitmüller, U. (2016). Jagd Auf Die Rocker: Die Kriminalisierung Von Motorradklubs Surch Staat Und Medien in Deutschland. Mannheim: Huber Verlag. Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Atheneum. Thompson, H. S. (2012). Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books. Vaishnav, M. (2017). When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics. Yale: Yale University Press. Veno, A., & Gannon, E. (2004). The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press. Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). The Rise of the Right: The English Defense League and the Transformation of Working Class Politics. Bristol: Polity Press. Young, J. (2011). Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

1 Outlaws and Supporters

From Wild One (1953) starring Marlon Brando, via Hunter S. Thompson’s book Hells Angels (Thompson 2012) to crime shows such as Gangland or TV series such as Sons of Anarchy, outlaw motorcycle clubs have become an iconic element of Western popular culture (Austin et al. 2010). They inhabit a space between the real and the imaginary, where life often tries to live up to the fiction. They are a force of the underworld, as much as a force of imagination; they are unafraid to act, to leave a trace behind in the world, and make sure their reputation precedes them. Law enforcement agencies worldwide treat outlaw motorcycle clubs as transnational criminal organizations and an increasing threat to security. And with good reasons: Members of outlaw motorcycle clubs across the world have been charged with murder, extortion, violence, trafficking in humans, drugs, weapons, money laundering, corruption, illegal prostitution, and white-collar crime. Media indulge in spectacular reports on the crimes of the most notorious of them—be it the Hells Angels MC that sees itself as the ‘elite of the elite’ of outlaw biker clubs, or its archenemies—the Bandidos MC, Outlaws MC, Mongols MC, Gremium MC, and others. The clubs themselves often claim that they are misrepresented and unjustly criminalized, insisting they are just a bunch of ‘men with a hobby’ joined together by © The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2_1

1

2     T. Kuldova

the love of motorcycles and riding, and that few bad apples are bound to appear in any organization (Koetsenruijter and Burger 2018). Outlaw motorcycle clubs repulse people as much as they attract them. On the route from the rebellious American postwar biker clubs to transnational criminal empires, the outlaws have made not only a great deal of enemies, but also many friends. The number of friends and supporters of the outlaws increased dramatically over the last three decades. The big outlaw motorcycle clubs have today their own organized support clubs, such as the Red & White Warriors and AK81 support crews of the Hells Angels, Black & White Crew for Outlaws, or Mexican Teamwork and X-team for Bandidos—and many others. Thousands of supporters across the globe are keen to affiliate with them, display admiration and commitment, dress in support merchandize, and cheer the bikers both online and offline. The clubs, be it in reality or imagination, fill a certain lack many people experience in their lives today. Lack and absence are considered here as productive forces, constitutive of desire—be it lack or absence of solidarity, sovereignty, sacred, power, control, equality, justice, purpose, hope, values, security, or order. Outlaw motorcycle clubs have successfully managed to produce an alternative transnational culture that attempts to fill these fundamental lacks, feeding off their proliferation and intensification under neoliberalism. The clubs can be imagined as cultural alternatives or parallel alternative social orders to the unsatisfying consumer culture with its endless manufacturing of new desires and oppressive socio-symbolic competition and aggression (Hall et al. 2012), and to what many see as the weakening state unable to control the economic forces beyond the control of the individual, obsessed instead with curbing of individual freedoms, paternalism, and securitization. This alternative adaptive cultural and social function of the clubs has remained unnoticed and ignored in existing research that favors narrow perspectives on the crimes committed by the clubs. This book, while in no way denying the crimes and harms associated with the outlaw biker milieu, attempts to take a step back and look at these larger cultural and social functions of the clubs, considering them as a response to the fundamental lacks and desires that people experience.

1  Outlaws and Supporters     3

Grounded in a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, ‘netnography’ (Kozinets 2010), analysis of popular culture and close reading of relevant literature and media, this book seeks to understand what the outlaws have, or are imagined to have, that is so appealing to certain people at this moment in history. What makes people display such love beyond reason as this lifelong supporter of Hells Angels, who when he finally met Sonny Barger (Barger 2001, 2005), the famous father figure and founding member of the Oakland Hells Angels, told me the following: I have loved him as a father since I was a teenager. 81 is the only true and loyal family. I support everything Sonny and the club stands for. I am proud to have been a loyal supporter most of my life.1

We will try to understand this vicarious enjoyment and participation in the outlaw biker lifestyle, including its illegal deeds (Duncan 1991). Mostly, outlaw bikers are far from being ‘noble bandits’ (Hobsbawm 1969), and yet the supporters put a great deal of effort into perceiving them in a favorable light. What they see in them are precisely those cultural and social qualities and goods that theorists have been far too often quick to dismiss and neglect. The supporters project their desires and longings onto the outlaws and attempt to fill the lacks they struggle with in their lives, be it through both vicarious enjoyment of the outlaw Other, real acts of mutual support or identification. Before we turn to the analysis that spans across this book, let us remind ourselves of some basics about these clubs and sketch the method and limitations of the text that follows.

Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs: From Rebels to Entrepreneurs There is a number of popular books and academic accounts of the history of the outlaw bikers, and I refer the readers to some of these, as this book is not one of history (Reynolds 2000; Nichols 2007, 2012; McGuire 1986; Hopper and Moore 1983; Hayes 2015, 2016b;

4     T. Kuldova

Harris 1985; Dulaney 2005; Barker 2011; Bain and Lauchs 2017). Nonetheless, a brief historical note is in order. There is possibly no better account of the beginnings of the subculture than Maz Harris’ Bikers: Birth of Modern Day Outlaw (Harris 1985). Maz Harris was a member and spokesperson of the Hells Angels in England, who received his PhD in sociology with a thesis on the biker subculture from the University of Warwick in 1986 (Harris 1986).2 In his book, he sums up the origins as follows: The outlaw bike culture was born at the end of the Second World War. It grew in the rundown quarters of Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and the many grey urban sprawls dotted along the Pacific Coast. California’s golden dream did not reach far into the ghetto. Life there had progressively worsened during the immediate post-war years. Thousands of rural workers, weary of decades of trying to scratch a living from unproductive land, flocked to the towns in search of a piece of America’s massive industrial expansion. The already seething mass of human misery was swollen to unbearable proportions by this influx. They constituted a massive new workforce to be ruthlessly exploited in factories and sweatshops… Families were split up and traditional ties of mutual support and dependence severed… This first generation of poor-white slum dwellers was quite unlike its much more experienced and culturally better adapted black and Mexican counterparts. It had yet to realize that there was no room for the sober, decent, individualistic human being in the new cutthroat world. The parents were anxious to maintain a sense of decency and clung to the values of their rural forefathers. Not so their offspring who, brought up in the ghetto, quickly learned to adopt the methods of defense and resistance of their black contemporaries… They fully realized the hopelessness of the situation they were in and understood only too well the gulf between their parents’ aspirations and material reality… What emerged, as one form of ‘solution’ to the problems faced by these disaffected first-generation white immigrants, was the arrival on the American scene of what was probably the first national post-war ‘delinquent’ subculture: the world of the motorcycle outlaw. Here was a way of life distinct and different from both the black culture of the ghetto and the parents’ working-class culture. It was a way of life which owed nothing to the straight world of Middle-America, yet it transcended the tenements and warehouses of downtown Oakland. (Harris 1985: 12–14)

1  Outlaws and Supporters     5

From the very beginning, the phenomenon of outlaw bikers was linked to difficult material and socioeconomic realities and to the search for an ‘alternative solution’ or at least ‘relief ’ from the existing conditions. And while the subculture has dramatically changed since the postwar era—it has internationalized, consolidated, bureaucratized, and channeled its rebellion into entrepreneurialism in both legal and illegal markets—many of the reasons for its appeal still have to do with existing, and worsening, socioeconomic realities. And while one can today find men of different classes, backgrounds, and educational levels among the members, the clubs being far from distinctly working class as people often tend to imagine, the supporters are more often than not recruited from among the lower classes and those fearing being declassed. The clubs thrive, grow, and feed off the insecurities, inequalities, and existential angsts that contemporary neoliberal societies produce in abundance. A German supporter of one of the big outlaw motorcycle clubs expressed the widespread sentiment as follows: The government does not care for people like me. I have been in and out of manual jobs, mostly badly paid. My son is disabled and needs constant care… I cannot afford a Harley, only an old Honda… Whenever there is an open event in the local biker club, I go there with my family. You can call us supporters, yes, but we consider ourselves part of the family. Few years ago, my son needed an operation, we needed extra money to cover the cost, the state did not care, it never does. But the one percenters had our back, they organized a charity concert and collected enough money. And it is not just us, that is what they do, anything for family.3

The term one percenter throws us back to the history of the clubs. Outlaw motorcycle clubs worldwide share the same myth of origin and wear a 1% patch. This patch refers back to the infamous Hollister riot in 1947, on the Fourth July weekend, during the Annual Gypsy Tour motorcycle rally organized by the American Motorcycle Association. Back then, thousands of bikers descended on the small town, and as they got progressively drunk, some became wilder than others, throwing bottles around and damaging property. Life Magazine blew the event out of proportion, even though eyewitnesses often described the event

6     T. Kuldova

as ordinary (Schubert 2012). Few years later, the story was turned into the aforementioned cult movie, The Wild One. But it was the alleged public statement of the American Motorcyclists Association (AMA) following these events, namely, that the trouble was caused by the one percent of the motorcyclists, who were deviant, whereas the ninety-nine percent were law-abiding citizens, that accounts for the label outlaw motorcycle clubs have proudly embraced (Reynolds 2000). AMA claims to never have issued such an official statement, labeling it ‘apocryphal’ (Dulaney 2005). Since then, outlaw bikers have established themselves as iconic rebels, as a wild counterculture, embodying everything that was contrary to the small-town middle-class values of dignity and proper manners. Or as Yates put it, ‘the over-the-top gesture, the ultimate fuck-you to the straight arrows and suck-ups of the day was that mother-humper Harley from hell’ (Yates 2007: loc. 203). Outlaw bikers have become living mythological creatures on which both the fears and repressed desires of the middle classes could be projected. This myth of rebellion and freedom on two wheels has enchanted thousands of people across the world ever since (Reynolds 2000). Indeed, helped by the icon of American design, Harley Davidson, which went from being the material supplier of war efforts to seducing not only veterans, but also ordinary men and women into hobby riding (Stanfield 1992; Joans 2001; Bourne 2006). But only few of those enchanted by riding and by the myth of freedom have chosen the actual life of the one percenter. The majority is still satisfied with living out the fantasy during sunny weekends. The global brotherhood of those who chose the outlaw path has been taking shape since the late 60s, when the big American outlaw motorcycle clubs began taking foothold in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, establishing new charters and expanding territorially, often patching over already existing biker clubs that have been inspired by the American outlaws. The Hells Angels MC established their first chapter in Europe on July 30, 1969 in London, followed by chapters in Zurich 1970 and the Austrian Vorarlberg in 1975. From then on, new chapters have mushroomed across the world, showing a rapid growth since the 2000s. Today, Hells Angels MC can be found on all continents, and even in countries such as Chile, South Africa, Russia, Iceland, Japan,

1  Outlaws and Supporters     7

Namibia, or Thailand, and have more than 450 chapters in total.4 This is not including all the additional official support clubs, affiliated clubs, and the numbers of independent supporters which far exceed the numbers of the actual members. Other international outlaw motorcycle clubs, such as the Bandidos MC, have followed the same pattern of transnational expansion, having chapters today in places such as United Arab Emirates, Brunei, or Ukraine, and equally having thousands of supporters. Outlaw motorcycle clubs are a unique sociological creature—they are neither your usual gangs, a youth subculture, a mafia, a secret order, a brand, or a secular sect. And yet, they have been compared to and often mixed up with all of these, often with good reasons (Watson 1982; Harris 1986; Lauchs et al. 2015). Nonetheless, they are an organization in their own right. Members tend to be older than in any neighborhood gang, typically over twenty-five; they are part of the organization much longer as well, many for life, even if some progress through different clubs in their career.5 Club life is centered around motorcycle riding, club meetings, and events. Members are distinguished by wearing a three-piece patches consisting of a club logo, top rocker with the name of the club, bottom rocker with location. The clubs are not organized exclusively for the purpose of crime—they fulfill many other needs, as we shall see in this book; often, it is with the growth in size and power that the involvement in crime increases as the power can be turned into cash. This being said, not all outlaw biker clubs or even chapters of the same club are equally criminally involved; there are differences not only between the clubs, but also between individual chapters—not to mention national differences. For instance, in Germany, there are chapters of the same outlaw motorcycle club that have been prohibited due to involvement in organized crime next to chapters where no member ever faced criminal charges (indeed, at times keeping a few chapters ‘clean’ is also a matter of strategic importance for the clubs, as they often fight flat criminalization based on membership; this, however, is not always the case). Each outlaw motorcycle club is different, having its own personality or individual culture (Quinn and Koch 2003; Forsyth and Quinn 2009), but all share the same organizational structure and more

8     T. Kuldova

or less similar club laws and bylaws. And thus, while there is no doubt that the Hells Angels are not only the most famous of all OMCs and that they have been the trendsetters in the outlaw subculture—be it in terms of organization, branding, strategies of expansion, or dealing with publicity—they are not necessarily representative of all existing outlaw biker clubs. But they indeed do represent a certain ‘ideal type.’ What is shared by all outlaw biker clubs is the organizational design—militaristic, hierarchical, extremely effective and high on symbolism and display of insignia—now even appropriated by gangs and vigilante groups worldwide (Gilbert 2013; Veno and Gannon 2004; Montgomery 1976; McGuire 1986; Lauchs et al. 2015; Hopper and Moore 1983; Harris 1986; Dulaney 2005; Bain and Lauchs 2017). Each local chapter has its president, vice president, sergeant-at-arms, road captain, secretary, and of course other full-patch members, and often a couple of prospects and hang-arounds. Regular meetings, events, anniversaries, and runs structure the year with ritual precision. New members are carefully screened over a long period of time before they are initiated into the club. Not only individuals, whole club chapters can become prospects, and if successful during their probation time, patched over. In 1999, for instance, 16 out of 21 Bones MC chapters in Germany—one of the most powerful biker clubs in Germany, est. in 1968 originally created for US soldiers but later open to others—were patched over, becoming Hells Angels chapters. Bones club insignia, or for that matter anything with any club symbols, were burned and replaced with Hells Angels’ merchandize and logos (Detrois 2013). Often, patch-overs are a form of climbing up in the inter-club hierarchy. There are written and unwritten codes of conduct between the clubs, often pertaining to territorial claims. The clubs often claim that each chapter is self-organized and they pride themselves on being democratic—one man one vote, emphasizing that there is no national or international president, or any other form of top leadership. But there is indeed a far greater level of inter-chapter organization in the shadows, not to mention the line of command in relationship to smaller affiliated outlaw motorcycle clubs and support clubs, which the members typically refuse to speak about. Ever since the perception of the outlaw biker clubs changed—from the youthful rebels to organized crime on wheels—law enforcement

1  Outlaws and Supporters     9

agencies worldwide have been trying to prove the existence of these hierarchical structures and lines of command in order to more effectively push charges of organized crime (Geurtjens et al. 2018; Barker 2010, 2011). For more detailed information on the organizational aspects of the outlaw motorcycle subculture, I refer the readers here to William Dulaney’s PhD thesis on this topic (Dulaney 2006). For us, it is the similarities and sociologically significant general traits of outlaw clubs that will be more important than the nuances and differences between the clubs. We shall be more concerned with what the clubs represent to certain people than with their own self-perception. After all, as the golden rule of materialism suggests, one is not to ‘judge a given reality according to its self-understanding’ (Althusser 1993: 234). In respect to the history of the outlaw motorcycle clubs, two observations are crucial for us. Firstly, the clubs went through a relatively long period of formation and identity creation, when the internal laws, club structures, and rituals were solidified, and the notorious image of rebellion commodified. Secondly, this initial period was followed by a period of consolidation, bureaucratization, and transnational expansion of the clubs, which has seen a shift from more ‘purist’ biker and countercultural ideals to ‘entrepreneurial’ values fit to the era of neoliberalism and modeled upon the ideal of transnational corporations, and yet being distinct from them (Quinn and Koch 2003; Kuldova and Quinn 2018). The period of expansion, marked by professionalization and increased involvement in illegal activities, in particular of the past two decades, has placed the clubs under increased pressures from law enforcement agencies in many countries across the globe (Bain and Lauchs 2017; Kuldova and Sánchez-Jankowski 2018). This has in turn led to the need to legitimize their informal power and to seek more actively popular support from beyond the milieu. Many clubs have chosen the path of increased self-commodification, production of support merchandize, books, music, as well as increased social media presence, including the rise of social media ‘influencers’ from within the milieu. The effects of these efforts at legitimization have been ignored in current scholarship, as has been the increasing support for the outlaw bikers that solidifies their power and enables their further growth. So far, the clubs have been typically perceived as mysterious, secretive, and enclosed groups, as

10     T. Kuldova

islands onto themselves—an analytical attitude that has only increased their power mystique. The basic question of how these clubs fit into today’s society and under which conditions they grow and thrive has been ignored. And while the clubs certainly manage to create a world for themselves, this world does not exist in a vacuum—to the contrary, it is profoundly dependent on the outside.

What This Book Is Not About Books about outlaw motorcycle clubs, be they written by academics, journalists, true crime writers, undercover agents, or the outlaws and ex-outlaws, all typically focus on the clubs’ criminal enterprise and more or less spectacular rendering of the outlaw bikers’ criminal lifestyles. Most popular and journalistic accounts turn the one percenters into a source of thrill and entertainment. There is a great deal of memoirs on the market, be it those written by undercover agents infiltrating outlaw motorcycle clubs (Queen 2011; Dobyns 2010; Falco 2014) or by bikers themselves (Thompson 2013; Detrois 2013, 2014; Colnett 2004; Barger 2001, 2005; Maczollek and Hause 2013; Nichols 2007, 2012; Hayes 2015, 2016a); there are also journalistic accounts of organized biker crime (Marsden and Sher 2007; McNab 2013)—to name just a few. All these books serve as a great resource, even if they have to be read with a grain of salt. Especially valuable are those that provide us with a view at the desired self-presentation of the outlaw bikers. In this book, I use some of these texts as both raw material and to illustrate common attitudes among the outlaw bikers and their supporters. Criminological literature typically takes the sober path, considering the clubs as organized crime, grounding its research in police report, and appropriating the law enforcement label of outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs), a ‘gang’ label the clubs resent—and, which, sociologically speaking, is inaccurate, as they are simply something else than gangs (Kuldova and Sánchez-Jankowski 2018). Much of this literature consists of brief descriptions of the outlaw motorcycle clubs in question and their history, followed by listing of relevant crimes and assessment of the threat they pose, along with suggestions of how to combat these

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groups. While mostly coming out of the USA (Barker 2005, 2010, 2011, 2017; McGuire 1986; Hopper and Moore 1983; Quinn and Koch 2003; Quinn 2001; Smith 2002; Quinn and Forsyth 2012), new research on the topic has emerged from Scandinavia and Netherlands in particular (Rostami and Mondani 2017; Roks and Ruitenburg 2018; Geurtjens et al. 2018; Jahnsen 2018; Blokland et al. 2017; Klement and Kyvsgaard 2014; Klement 2016; Bjørgo 2017; Grundvall 2005, 2018), as well as Australia and New Zealand (Gilbert 2013; Monterosso 2018; Ayling 2011; Lauchs et al. 2015; Bain and Lauchs 2017), and Germany (Bley 2014; Baden 2011), where we also see a proliferation of journalistic accounts that assess the threat, too, only in more graphic detail (Schubert 2012; Diehl et al. 2013). These contributions to the study of outlaw motorcycle clubs are extremely valuable, and I refer the readers to these if they wish to know more about the crimes of the outlaws and the strategies of policing. However, focused on combatting crime, these studies, with few exceptions (Forsyth and Quinn 2009; Bain and Lauchs 2017), do not concern themselves with larger social and cultural analysis of the phenomenon. Instead, they typically perceive the clubs as a simply existing and rising threat, and if club culture is of interest, it is merely in respect to the readiness to use violence and engage in crime. Studies that deal with culture in relation to the outlaw bikers often tend to focus on the mediated and the fictional—on the way the outlaw biker ‘folk devil’ has been fueled by the media and commodified in popular culture, as well as on the subcultures of consumption and the ‘new bikers’ (Kuldova 2017, 2019; Osgerby 2003; Austin et al. 2010; Thompson 2008; Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Krier and Swart 2016; Cohen 1972; Katz 2011; Andersen and Krumsvik 2017). These studies—and some of my own work fits roughly into this genre—offer a valuable insight into the dynamics between the fictional construction of the outlaws and the ways in which reality often tries to live up to the mediated image. Ethnographies of outlaw motorcycle clubs are rare, but there have been a few by now. Most notably The Rebels by Daniel Wolf, a study of a Canadian one percenter club that later became Hells Angels (Wolf 1999) and the more popular book about Australian one percenters, The Brotherhoods, by Arthur Veno (Veno and Gannon 2004). Both offer an inside look at the club culture and everyday club life and

12     T. Kuldova

both are written by men who are also bikers, but not club members. Then there are sociological studies written by club members, one by the aforementioned Maz Harris and another by William L. Dulaney (Dulaney 2006; Harris 1986). These studies offer an inside look at the clubs’ values, symbolism, rituals, organization, and crimes, and while they are grounded in particular locations and times, they still tell us a great deal in general about the subculture and are an essential reading. This book has been inspired by all this literature, however, it does not attempt to replicate the same, merely for another ‘case.’ Instead, it asks a very different set of questions—both broader, more fundamental and theoretical. This book is not an ethnography of outlaw motorcycle clubs per se, or of any specific club for that matter, neither is it an ethnography of supporter clubs and supporters—even if ethnographic method has been used to obtain insight into the milieu. Nor is this a criminological study attempting to measure the levels of crime among the club members and the threat they pose and to propose any solutions. Or a study of bikers in popular culture. Instead, it is a book that uses a great deal of criminological and sociological imagination (Young 2011; Mills 2000) combined with ultra-realist criminology (Hall and Winlow 2013, 2018b; Winlow et al. 2017; Hall et al. 2012) to break away from these established ways in which we have been writing about outlaw motorcycle clubs. It attempts to enrich the social and cultural analysis of the one percenter phenomena by investigating it from a new and unfamiliar angle—by looking at the desires and hopes that people project onto the outlaws, and the lacks the clubs appear to fill, set in the larger socioeconomic context which has been typically neglected.

Feminine Advantage: A Digression on Method Only very few female academics have written on the one percenters. There is an endless prejudice, which is itself part of the mythology as much as academic work, that outlaw bikers are terribly sexist and demeaning to women, either viewing women as sex toys or a source of income for the club (Moore and Hopper 1990). Thus, one can read that

1  Outlaws and Supporters     13

most OMCGs have held the view that women are sexual objects who are there for the primary purpose of sexually pleasuring the members, but have little value otherwise… When the views of the OMCGs did change, they saw the women as a tool in an instrumental enterprise, turning the women out and into a source of income for the club. (Robinson and Bain 2017: 35)

I cannot count the times I was asked at conferences: ‘but how can you talk to these men, are they not just disgusting sexists and racists?’ (This happens surprisingly often when one’s research subjects do not lend themselves to be seen as ‘noble savages.’) And yet, even if many outlaw bikers run businesses in the sex industry, I have yet to meet an outlaw biker that sees a woman in this one-dimensional light—one-dimensional characters are precisely the stuff of fiction, and I am afraid that even there where people try to live up to this form of fiction, they tend to fail. Researching for this project, I took part in over thirty events, often spanning over the weekends, organized by outlaw biker clubs across Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, and Slovakia—from small open house events and grilling parties, via anniversary parties, memorial runs, charity runs and concerts, book launches, and demonstrations to large-scale events such as tattoo conventions. I have visited several largescale Harley Davidson events, where outlaw motorcycle clubs would show their presence and sell their support merchandize. During this multi-sited fieldwork (Nadai and Maeder 2005; Marcus 1995; Kurotani 2004; Falzon 2009), I have focused on events that were open to supporters, even if some of the events were more intimate than others. Over the two years, I have spoken to hundreds of bikers and supporters from different countries. I have also conducted more in-depth informal interviews with bikers who have become key informants recruited both from the outlaw scene and from the ranks of ordinary H.O.G. members. This allowed me to truly grasp the international nature of these gatherings and the subculture—and the impossibility of studying this phenomenon as if locked within national boundaries. I have always been open and upfront about being a researcher. And since I neither look like a ‘biker chick’ nor ride a Harley, and the only speed-race I participated in was 200 meters in my old Mercedes, I have always stood

14     T. Kuldova

out as a curious stranger—which, paradoxically, was to my advantage. And since I was neither a journalist, nor an undercover agent, or did I pretend to be what I am not, and, also, was a woman, the vast majority of men would speak to me easily, not feeling threatened. In respect to these subcultures, researchers often note the tremendous difficulty of gaining access. I have nothing of this kind to report. I was even invited to present my research project at the club meeting in order to get an ‘official’ approval from the outlaw biker club. But for the most part, I would just show up at open events and talk to people and just get invited to the next events. Since I was neither interested in doing an ethnography of the ‘inside’ life of one particular outlaw club, or of one locality in particular, this was the best way to go about it. Some people I would encounter again and again, as they traveled from one event to another, across borders. Others, I would only see once or few times, typically those bound to one locality due to financial limitations, but the more dreaming of being part of or affiliated with an international brotherhood. We would discuss mostly politics, personal problems, everyday struggles, life stories, but also fun party stories, while they would often be trying to ‘educate’ me about the biker culture. Being an outsider proved to be paradoxically easier than trying to fit in (and forever look like an impostor). Outlaw bikers would treat me with respect; indeed, they made sure to leave a good impression—often acting individually in a way that would not tarnish the image of the club as a whole. If I ever got the occasional slap on the butt, it was from the weekend hobby riders, desperate to impersonate their own wild fantasy of the ‘outlaw biker.’ Here we may dispel another assumption, one that has dominated ethnography at large and feminist anthropology in particular. Namely, that the value of ethnographies by female writers often resides in female researcher’s ability to easily gain access to other women and to somehow intuitively understand other women based on their shared womanhood—or else, in their ability to understand women the way men are imagined to be unable to, and to tell stories that have been often previously neglected due to men dominating research. Similarly, it has often been assumed that some topics are best left to men to study, such as violent street gangs, bouncers, mafia, or criminal organizations,

1  Outlaws and Supporters     15

where studies done by women remain rare. Instead, I have experienced the exact opposite, something one could call a ‘feminine advantage’ in some respects. There is no doubt that my femininity provided me with an easier access to the men, I was not perceived as a threat, and thus had an overall ‘easier time’ compared to male colleagues researching outlaw motorcycle clubs, who have been treated more like hang-arounds or prospects. But it also allowed me to gain knowledge which remains otherwise hidden to male researchers, as men would share things with me they would not share with other men (or for that matter women they were romantically interested in). These interactions, however, also challenged the assumption, grounded in the naïve idea of gender solidarity, that women somehow understand better and gain access easier to other women than men do. In certain contexts, other women can present a serious obstacle in conducting fieldwork and even become a violent threat to the female researcher when triggered by jealousy or envy. And while I have spoken to a number of women, the majority of them remained largely inaccessible, even though regularly physically present. Not only was I often seen as competition, but class and educational difference clearly played a crucial role as well. My ‘higher status’ was often perceived as a positive asset and a potential resource by the men in the milieu, while to the women it appeared threatening unless they felt secure in their relationships and own position. Research in this context cannot be limited to ethnographic methods, which can only be used to a limited degree. Hence, I have also conducted extensive ‘netnography’ (Kozinets 2010; Miller et al. 2016; Murthy 2008), and ‘virtual shadowing,’ monitoring the publicly available Web sites, blogs, and social media accounts of the same groups I have engaged with in the real life. Outlaw motorcycle clubs have understood the power of social media and today, and their role in gaining supporters and mobilizing for their causes, some of the members even becoming ‘micro-celebrities’ (Khamis et al. 2016). Moreover, much of this support exists largely in the virtual realm, yet with profound implications for the real. Additionally, I have collected and analyzed an archive of both European and American biker magazines, and diverse literature and media (especially films, documentaries, and talk shows)—fact and fiction—about and by bikers themselves, as well as of

16     T. Kuldova

law enforcement and governmental reports. Using these diverse materials, relating the field experience to materials collected online, as well as to the analysis of popular media, meant that I have eventually come to distill that which was shared and repetitive, despite the boundaries of locality, or local culture. And while a great deal could be said about the differences, and there are indeed many, between clubs, support groups, fans, and supporters—each having their unique story, culture, and personality—there are nonetheless things that they all appear to share, beyond the idiosyncratic guises. It is these fundamental driving forces that this book looks at—at the cost of erasing some of the nuance and detail, and some of the local context. Another book could be written focusing on difference based on the same material, but it is when we look at that which is shared that we can gain a valuable understanding of the forces that drive social life. And indeed, despite the local differences and the nuances, the majority of conversations I have had with the outlaw bikers and their supporters all circled around the fundamental issues—economy, culture, and politics—or, more specifically, increasing socioeconomic inequality, lack of future, deteriorating health and educational offer, austerity politics, flexibilization of labor and feelings of insecurity and the life framed by forces not of one’s own making. Before we proceed further to the substantial chapters, let me emphasize some of the crucial sentiments that arose in these discussions—as all that follows in this book needs to be read while keeping this fundamental layer in mind. The outlaws do not gain their supporters and new members in a vacuum, instead, they appear as a viable alternative precisely due to these larger socioeconomic conditions.

Lack and the Criminogenic Features of Neoliberalism Since the 1970s, European and other populations have been hit by neoliberal economic policies, divisive neoliberal identity politics, and austerity politics, accompanied by the retreat of the welfare state. The social, environmental, and psychological harms associated with neoliberalism are now well-documented (Winlow et al. 2017; Hall et al.

1  Outlaws and Supporters     17

2012; Klare 2012; Smith 2014; Crank and Jacoby 2014; Comaroff et al. 2001; Piketty 2014; Fraser 2014; Swyngedouw 2018; Giroux 2004). And yet, one has been too shy to relate these criminogenic harms directly to the rise and rapid growth of groups such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs over the last three decades. This is striking, especially considering that most stories I have collected in the field about support for the clubs or about the desire to join were framed in one way or another by narratives of de-politicization, deindustrialization, loss and outsourcing of jobs, loss of credibility of the elites, stagnation of wages, rise of inequality, privatization of public property, deterioration and privatization of healthcare and education, and accumulation of capital in the hands of few individuals and multinationals (Winlow et al. 2017). As a result of this broad restructuring and loosening of checks and balances on big business, today, according to a recent Oxfam report, eight individuals own the same amount of wealth as half of the world’s population (Oxfam 2017). Even in developed countries such as Germany, one in five children grows up in poverty. Since the financial crisis, the number of working poor in the EU has risen dramatically—one in ten workers in the EU live under the poverty line. According to Financial Times, even in Germany, the number of workers at risk of poverty has risen to 9.1% in 2017, doubling since 2005, as low paying jobs proliferate and trade unions disintegrate (Romei 2018). For the same time period, and this correlation is not accidental, EUROPOL remarks that ‘since 2005, there has been steady growth in the membership of such gangs worldwide. In Europe, the number of clubs has more than doubled.’6 The sense of insecurity, instability, and lack of future prospects has been mixed with a sense of general disorientation and widespread frustration. This frustration and anger at the system that keeps people powerless was most pronounced among many of my informants from the ranks of the outlaw biker supporters. It was clear that they did not only look to the organized outlaw biker clubs for sources of extra financial support, be it a legal job or an illegal gig, but also in order to gain a sense of orientation and purpose, and no less a means to ‘earn respect’ where the mainstream society no longer provides any realistic possibility of earning it. Or as an Austrian supporter put it,

18     T. Kuldova

…billionaires, slaves, corrupt politicians, sheep shopping and stuffing their faces, police playing cops and robbers for the media, distracting the sheep from real criminals in suits, that’s the mess we are in; most people are all just getting fucked over, so why not fuck it, or fuck back. It will be a civil war someday soon, well, maybe, if the stupid sheep ever wake up… Either way, it’s gonna end bad. … We all here see through the bullshit, I guess that is our problem. And that is why the system tries to fight us, cause we don’t buy that crap they try to sell us. It is what we stand for that bothers them, not a bunch of drugs.

There is no doubt that the neoliberal reforms have created perfect criminogenic conditions (Hall 2012) as well as a sense of disillusionment, loss and rootlessness among increasing amounts of the population (Winlow et al. 2017). Or as Rawlinson put it, Organized crime flourishes because it is constantly able to feed from the growing pile of human and social debris left by global capitalism. Its bloated belly shows no signs of shrinking despite the best efforts of policy makers and policing institutions. This is because the real war is against the dominant ethos of the day… For it is those very characteristics attributed to organized crime – monolithic, anti-democratic, tyrannical and globally disastrous – which are the defining attributes and ultimate consequences of global capitalism. (Rawlinson 2002: 304)

Unsurprisingly then, we see a systematic gangsterization of the global economy and the rise of organized crime (Woodiwiss 2005; Hall et al. 2012) paralleled by counter-atomization, the rise of ‘tribalism,’ hardened identities (Young 2009), and populism. Coupled with the consumerist culture favoring competitive individualism, feeding citizens the illusion of meritocracy, this has led to a widespread disillusionment, resentment of the establishment, and search for powerful, typically masculine, heroes, and saviors, capable of shaking up the deteriorating state of the affairs—be it the vulgar Donald Trump, or outlaw bikers. To a large degree, this is a result of the neglect—both political and theoretical—of the everyday experiential harms of those suffering the economic and cultural effects of neoliberalism—to which spontaneous

1  Outlaws and Supporters     19

movements such as the ‘yellow vests’ in France in 2018 only testify. The de-legitimization of the state incapable of regulating the economy and of the elites in bed with corporate capital has led to an emergence of what can be legitimately labeled as a power vacuum in certain localities, or else into perfect breeding grounds for different interest groups to insert themselves into governance. Criminologists and political scientists made this point in relation to criminal organizations, militias, guerrilla groups, warlords, mafias, and other non-state armed actors (Paoli 2008; Kupatadze 2012; Skaperdas 2001; Davies 2009). Here we return to our initial point: in many respects, we must consider absence and lack as causative—be it the absence of state, employment, sovereignty, politics, or solidarity, or the lack of hope, future, social recognition, and orientation. Or as Steve Hall and Simon Winlow sharply observe, and no one has possibly put it better, …the stable and just community exists only as a vague and melancholic memory of unfinished projects and a fundamental fantasy of the general lost object. Such a fundamental absence constantly creates desire for love and stable community, which supplies immense libidinal energy to the corporate political, media and advertising complex that serves the circulation of today’s symbol-rich commodities. Relentless socio-economic disruption and competitive individualism structure reality whilst the market fails to deliver enough in real terms to maintain the credibility of its fantasy. In such a stream of constant failure, diverse replacement fantasies of lost collectivism – volkish nationalist groups, fundamentalist religious sects, roots ethnic groups, neo-tribes, bourgeois cosmopolitan networks, street gangs, organized crime families and so on – structure politics and culture in the post-social milieu. (Hall and Winlow 2018a: 110–111, emphasis in original)

The chapters that follow analyze in depth the different ways in which the replacement fantasy of lost collectivism, here manifest in the shape and form of the outlaw motorcycle clubs, attempts to fill the fundamental lacks that proliferate in the post-social neoliberal milieu. In particular, we shall see how the clubs offer the experience of the sublime, of the sovereign, of the sacred and last but not least, of solidarity.

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Notes 1. From a conversation at the 60th Anniversary of Oakland chapter in Paris, May 2016. 2. The thesis can be downloaded here: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/106994/ 1/WRAP_Theses_Harris_1986.pdf, accessed November 10, 2018. 3. From an interview during an open club event in Germany, close to the Czech border, April 2018. 4. The Hells Angels official site features an overview of the historical developments, https://hells-angels.com/world/charter-list/, accessed November 10, 2018. 5. Former members of street gangs, or even extreme right-wing groups, are known to have openly regretted their youthful follies and instead joined or even created their own outlaw motorcycle clubs which they saw as sign of their own maturity, such as was the case of the Schwarze Schar MC in Wismar, Germany, composed of former Neo Nazis that have distanced themselves from their past—the club has been prohibited based on organized crime charges in 2013, and the former president abandoned the criminal career. 6. https://www.europol.europa.eu/crime-areas-and-trends/crime-areas/outlaw-motorcycle-gangs, accessed November 25, 2018.

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Grundvall, S. (2018). Inside the Brotherhood: Some Theoretical Aspects of Groups Dynamics in Biker Clubs. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legitimacy, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 205–223). New York: Palgrave Mamillan. Hall, S. (2012). Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2013). Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? London: Sage. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018a). Big Trouble or Little Evils: The Ideological Struggle Over the Concept of Harm. In J. Kotzé & A. Boukli (Eds.), Zemiology: Critical Criminological Perspectives (pp. 107–126). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018b). Ultra-Realism. In W. S. Dekeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology (pp. 43–56). London: Routledge. Hall, S., Winlow, S., & Ancrum, C. (2012). Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism. New York: Routledge. Harris, I. R. (1986). Myth and Reality in the Motorcycle Subculture (PhD thesis). Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. Harris, M. (1985). Bikers: Birth of Modern Day Outlaw. London: Faber and Faber. Hayes, B. (2015). The One Percenter Encyclopedia: The World of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs from Abyss Ghosts to Zombies Elite. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Hayes, B. (2016a). Greatest One-Percenter Myths, Mysteries and Rumours Revealed. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Hayes, B. (2016b). Hell on Wheels: An Illustrated History of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Hobsbawm, E. (1969). Bandits. London: Liedenfeld and Nicholson. Hopper, C. B., & Moore, J. (1983). Hell on Wheels: The Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Journal of American Culture, 6(2), 58–64. Jahnsen, S. Ø. (2018, April). Scandinavian Approaches to Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, 564, 1–15. Joans, B. (2001). Bike Lust: Harleys, Women and American Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Katz, K. (2011). The Enemy Within: The Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Moral Panic. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 36(3), 231–249.

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Khamis, S., Ang, L., & Wellig, R. (2016). Self-Branding, ‘Micro-Celebrity’ and the Rise of Social Media Influencers. Celebrity Studies, 8(2), 191–208. Klare, M. (2012). The Race for What’s Left. New York: Picador. Klement, C. (2016). Crime Prevalence and Frequency Among Danish Outlaw Bikers. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 17(2), 131–149. Klement, C., & Kyvsgaard, B. (2014). Flowet I Rocker/Bandemiljøerne. Report: Justisministeriets Forskningskontor. Koetsenruijter, W., & Burger, P. (2018). Men with a Hobby: Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs, News Media and Image Politics. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 123–144). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: Sage. Krier, D., & Swart, W. J. (2016). The Commodification of Spectacle: Spectators, Sponsors and the Outlaw Biker Diegesis at Sturgis. Critical Sociology, 42(1), 11–32. Kuldova, T. (2017). The Sublime Splendour of Intimidation: On the Outlaw Biker Aesthetics of Power. Visual Anthropology, 30(5), 379–402. Kuldova, T. (2019). Popular Culture, Populism and the Figure of the ‘Criminal’: On the Rising Popular Support of Outlaw Bikers and Antiestablishment Resentment. In A. Antoniou & D. Akrivos (Eds.), Crime, Deviance and Pop Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T., & Quinn, J. (2018). Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Struggles Over Legitimization. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 145–173). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T., & Sánchez-Jankowski, M. (2018). Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kupatadze, A. (2012). Organized Crime, Political Transitions and State Formation in Post-Soviet Eurasia. New York: Springer. Kurotani, S. (2004). Multi-sited Transnational Ethnography and Shifting Construction of Fieldwork. In L. Hume & J. Mulcock (Eds.), Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation (pp. 201–215). New York: Columbia University Press. Lauchs, M., Bain, A., Robertson, J., & Ball, P. (2015). Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs: A Theoretical Perspective. London: Palgrave Pivot.

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Maczollek, P., & Hause, L. (2013). Ziemlich Böse Freunde: Wie Wir Die Bandidos in Deutschland Gründeten. München: Riva Verlag. Marcus, G. E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. Marsden, W., & Sher, J. (2007). Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire. London: Hodder. McGuire, P. (1986). Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs: Organized Crime on Wheels. National Sheriff, 37(2), 68–75. McNab, D. (2013). Outlaw Bikers in Australia: The Men, the Myths, the Mayhem. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., et al. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. London: UCL Press. Mills, C. W. (2000). Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Monterosso, S. (2018). From Bikers to Savvy Criminals. Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in Australia: Implications for Legislators and Law Enforcement. Crime, Law and Social Change, 69(5), 681–701. Montgomery, R. (1976). The Outlaw Motorcycle Subculture. The Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections, 18(4), 332–342. Moore, J., & Hopper, C. B. (1990). Women in Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 18(4), 363–387. Murthy, D. (2008). Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research. Sociology, 42(5), 837–855. Nadai, E., & Maeder, C. (2005). Fuzzy Fields: Multi-sited Ethnography in Sociological Research. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 6(3), 1–16. Nichols, D. (2007). One Percenter: The Legend of the Outlaw Biker. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Nichols, D. (2012). The One Percenter Code: How to Be an Outlaw in a World Gone Soft. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Osgerby, B. (2003). Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, ‘Otherness’, and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31(3), 98–108. Oxfam. (2017). An Economy for the 99% (Report by Oxfam International). https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/ bp-economy-for-99-percent-160117-en.pdf. Paoli, L. (2008). Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style. London: Oxford University Press. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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Queen, W. (2011). Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who Infiltrated America’s Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Quinn, J. (2001). Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Pagans: The Evolution of Organized Crime Among the Big Four 1% Motorcycle Clubs. Deviant Behavior, 22(4), 379–399. Quinn, J., & Forsyth, C. J. (2012). Coordinated Chaos: The Psychology and Structure of Organized Crime Among One Percent Bikers. In T. Barker (Ed.), North American Criminal Gangs (pp. 174–187). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Quinn, J., & Koch, D. S. (2003). The Nature of Criminality Within OnePercenter Motorcycle Clubs. Deviant Behavior, 24(3), 281–305. Rawlinson, P. (2002). Capitalists, Criminals and Oligarchs—Sutherland and the New ‘Robber Barons’. Crime, Law and Social Change, 37(3), 293–307. Reynolds, T. (2000). Wild Ride: How Outlaw Motorcycle Myth Conquered America. New York: TV Books. Robinson, A. D., & Bain, A. (2017). Bikes, Bros, and Hoes: Sex and the Omcg. In A. Bain & M. Lauchs (Eds.), Understanding the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs: International Perspectives (pp. 29–45). Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Roks, R. A., & Ruitenburg, T. V. (2018). Dutch Gang Talk: A Reflection on the Use of the Gang Label in the Netherlands. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 69–91). New York: Palgrave. Romei, V. (2018, December 27). The Rise of Poverty Among EU Workers Since the Financial Crisis—In Charts. Financial Times. Rostami, A., & Mondani, H. (2017). Organizing on Two Wheels: Uncovering the Organizational Patterns of Hells Angels MC in Sweden. Trends in Organized Crime, 1–17 [Online First]. Schouten, J. W., & McAlexander, J. H. (1995). Subcultures of Consumption: An Ethnography of the New Bikers. Journal of Consumer Research, 22(1), 43–61. Schubert, S. (2012). Wie Die Hells Angels Deutschlands Unterwelt Eroberten: Wie Die Gefürchteten Rocker Deutschlands Unterwelt Eroberten. Berlin: Riva Verlag. Skaperdas, S. (2001). The Political Economy of Organized Crime: Providing Protection When the State Does Not. Economics of Governance, 2(3), 173–202.

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Smith, O. (2014). Contemporary Adulthood and the Night-Time Economy. London: Palgrave. Smith, R. C. (2002). Dangerous Motorcycle Gangs: A Facet of Organized Crime in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Journal of Gang Research, 9(4), 33–44. Stanfield, P. (1992). Heritage Design: The Harley-Davidson Motor Company. Journal of Design History, 5(2), 141–155. Swyngedouw, E. (2018). Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Postpolitical Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, H. S. (2012). Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books. Thompson, T. (2013). Outlaws: One Man’s Rise Through the Savage World of Renegade Bikers, Hells Angels and Global Crime. London: Penguin Books. Thompson, W. E. (2008). Pseudo-Deviance and the ‘New Biker’ Subculture: Hogs, Blogs, Leathers, and Lattes. Deviant Behavior, 30(1), 89–114. Veno, A., & Gannon, E. (2004). The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Watson, M. J. (1982). Righteousness on Two Wheels: Bikers as a Secular Sect. Sociological Spectrum: Mid-South Sociological Association, 2(3–4), 333–349. Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). The Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics. Bristol: Policy Press. Wolf, D. R. (1999). The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Woodiwiss, M. (2005). Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime. London: Constable. Yates, B. (2007). First Contact. In A. Veno & K. Sims (Eds.), The Mammoth Book of Bikers. London: Robinson [Kindle]. Young, J. (2009). The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage. Young, J. (2011). Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.

2 Sublime and Power

The iconic movie Born Losers (dir. Frank 1968) confronts us with a cliché, but nonetheless (or precisely because of it) an effective one—a spectacle of bikers terrorizing the population of a small beach town by the name of Big Rock. Unruly, wild, violent, disobedient, brutal, bloodthirsty, psychopathic, delinquent, vulgar, and dirty, the Born to Lose Motorcycle Club storms the town, performing the usual biker mayhem. Riding on their roaring devilish Harleys, circling wildly around their terrified victims amidst clouds of dust and exhaust fumes, laughing and mocking them, and enjoying the victims’ fear, the bikers perfectly perform their cast as social outcasts. The bikers revel in their own social abjection. At the same time, they reassure the small-town folk of their morality and normality. They exaggerate; their performance is thoroughly excessive. They behave as if with the following line in mind: ‘you thought we were bad, but we show you that we are far worse than you could have ever imagined!’ Here, we must remark, with Robert Pfaller, that ‘most primitives, seen from the perspective of psychoanalysis, are objects of transference of their observers, meaning that they enact for the observers every primitivity they believe the observers would like to see’ (Pfaller 2011: 54). Their rage and fury appear senseless, irrational, meaningless, excessive, and thus © The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2_2

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incomprehensible, their potential to terrorize unimaginable; pure terror for the sake of terror; pure intimidation for the sake of intimidation; pure threat for the sake of threat, all without any goal, purpose or gain in mind. Just the here and now of terror. The famous scene in The Wild One (dir. Benedek 1953) captures this trope of the senselessness of the outlaw biker rebellion: Johnny (Marlon Brando), the president of an outlaw motorcycle club is asked—‘Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’, he answers with a sneer, ‘Whadda you got?’ In a recent B-movie Devil Riders (dir. Higgins 2012), an outlaw biker remarks in a similar vein that ‘real men don’t need to know why, why is for weak men.’ But the bikers’ power to terrorize and to intimidate arouses not only fear in the spectators, but also desire. Or more precisely, it arouses a secret wish to participate and feed off the barbarous and animalistic power of the bikers. It awakens the longing to have the guts to break rules, or at least, to look as if one dared to transgress the small-town moralities. At the beginning of Born Losers, a bunch of virginal teen girls in bikinis (another classical trope of excessive purity in opposition to excessive barbarity) observe the bikers storming the town from the top of their cabriolet, from a safe distance. Their conversation captures the ambiguity of fear and attraction they experience at that moment: Don’t they just give you the creeps? I think they are kind of cute. I wonder if what you hear about them is really true. … Oh, wouldn’t it be neat to meet them just for once? (dir. Frank 1968)

Later in the movie, these girls decide to hang out with the bikers. Alas, the bikers immediately pursue the ‘initiation’ of the poor little teens into becoming their ‘mammas’ (women shared by all club members), all of them consecutively raping them. Toward the end of the movie, it turns out that one of the girls was not raped, but instead took it as an opportunity to rebel against her mother: Oh, come on dear, you don’t hate us! (mother) – Oh yes, I do. It is those evil losers I don’t hate very much. … I liked it, I liked it, I liked it! Because they are everything you hate! (girl)

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She thus pointed to the liberating potential of the abject Other through whom one can transgress the middle-class morality, even if temporarily. However, the other girls were traumatized as a result of the terror and rape they experienced: One is depicted as lying on a sofa, suckling her thumb, and holding a teddy bear, unable to speak; the other moves around speechless, and fearful, unable to act and bring the bikers to justice. The stark aesthetic representation of their trauma is reminiscent of the recent cases of real trauma, of the ‘resignation syndrome’ among the refugee children in Sweden reported by the New Yorker (Aviv 2017). There is certainly nothing sublime about experiencing real terror. This cinematic vignette can help us think through the question that does not directly pertain to the cinematic and to visual culture but one that cannot be thought without it, namely what kind of experience inspires the support for the real outlaw motorcycle clubs, such as the notorious Hells Angels, and mobilizes the affects of the supporters? In this chapter, we shall deliberately bracket the diverse rational motivations, such as access to criminal markets or business and networks of solidarity, which we shall explore later on. Instead, our aim here is to interrogate the highly affective and intense experiences or else the ‘adrenalin kicks’ that the supporters, hang-arounds, and diverse admirers of the outlaw bikers describe and experience when in proximity of the real outlaws—be it during ‘open house’ events, parties, or runs for which they are willing to travel far and wide. This chapter argues that the key to the understanding of the seduction the outlaw bikers lies in the intoxicating ‘sublime experience’ that emerges in the encounter with a powerful threat. Taking Edmund Burke’s investigation into the sublime as a point of departure, the chapter investigates this form of power and the desire for participating in and taking on the empowering properties of the charismatic outlaws. This question also opens a larger inquiry into the nature and aesthetics of power of these clubs and their attraction. But before we proceed to these questions, let us return to Born Losers and the lessons we can take away from this movie.

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No Sublime Experience Without ‘Safe’ Distance The difference between the way in which the teens experienced the bikers at a distance versus up close is possibly the most striking and crucial for our inquiry. Following Edmund Burke’s classical definition of the sublime, the experience at a distance can be labeled as a sublime experience. The experience up close, on the other hand, is an experience of immediate terror, merely capable of inducing fear and pain in the victim, but incapable of producing the sublime. It is the former, the sublime experience, that will concern us here. This sublime experience is indispensable to the attraction some feel toward the outlaw bikers and to their aesthetics of power. While the actual use of violence is necessary to establish one’s reputation (Gambetta 2009), it is the aesthetics and street-wise performance of threat and intimidation that reproduces their power on everyday basis and not the actual use of violence. Threat and intimidation are not effective solely because they threaten, but rather because they attract and invite respect as much as admiration. Edmund Burke famously argued in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that terror is the ‘common stock of everything that is sublime’ (Burke 1914: 47). Or, as Robert Pfaller puts it, ‘the fascinating sublime is such, which perceived in another light always displays a negative quality’ (Pfaller 2011: 17). In a similar vein, biker movies have relied on an ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ and ‘a spectacle of the sensational, the forbidden, and the monstrous’ (Osgerby 2003: 103), which, from the safety of our couches, appear so appealing. In other words, terror can be a source of a sublime experience only under the condition of us being able to keep it at a distance. As Burke remarks, when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful … terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely. (Burke 1914: 21–28)

Terror, when kept at a safe distance, not directly threatening our self-preservation, produces a sense of awe, astonishment, admiration,

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wonder, attraction, and ultimately pleasure and delight. The emphasis should be placed here on self-preservation in face of the fear of death. The destructive potential becomes at the same time a source of our delight as we raise above this fear and attempt to incorporate the threatening Other within ourselves (Canguilhem 1962). Burke offers here also a theory of a certain form of power when he remarks that he knows ‘of nothing sublime, which is not some modification of power’ (Burke 1914: 47). While the sublime has been traditionally linked to spectacular nature, natural catastrophes, and recently to human-inflicted catastrophes and sacralized traumatic events, such as the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or September 11 (Ray 2005, 2009), it can also be considered more generally as an operating force inherent to certain, but not all, forms of power. Burke not only remarks that ‘power is undoubtedly a capital source of the sublime’ (Burke 1914: 54), but also argues that this form of power may appear seductive and attractive to the young or inexperienced: the power which arises from institution in kings and commanders, has the same connection with terror. Sovereigns are frequently addressed with the title of dread majesty. And it may be observed, that young persons, little acquainted with the world, and who have not been used to approach men in power, are commonly struck with an awe which takes away the free use of their faculties. (Burke 1914: 50)

One of the enthusiastic supporters of the Hells Angels, alas without an ambition to ever become a member, has once recounted a story from his childhood to me, when he witnessed a senseless beating up of an old man who refused to offer fire, because he had none, to a bunch of local bikers playing outlaws in a small town in Germany in the mid70s. This event stuck in his mind, along with the feeling of thrill, which he called ‘addictive.’ Since then, he has enjoyed watching, from a relatively safe distance, and expressing his support by purchasing Support 81 merchandize.1 Two things follow: (1) The sublime experience can take place only at a safe distance from the source of terror, and (2) the sublime can under certain conditions operate as a specific form of power, or an enhancement to power, that is wondrous, awe-inspiring, and relying on the

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invisible and the unknown. Regarding the invisible and the unknown, it suffices to remind ourselves that outlaw bikers have been across popular culture constructed as unintelligible, senseless, irrational, and consequently as mysterious. Not to mention their notorious secretiveness about their brotherhoods’ inner workings and business. Even here Edmund Burke’s remark seems appropriate, or as he puts it: a great clearness helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever … It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions’. (Burke 1914: 44)

George Bataille once remarked, along similar lines, that ‘the most terrifying things are those that elude us’ (Bataille 1991: 15). At the same time, we could also argue in the opposite direction. While ignorance may certainly be conducive to arousing our passions, knowledge does not necessarily have to be an obstacle either! And maybe even here we are dealing with the pleasurable tension between knowledge and ignorance in the form of disavowal. The sublime, as a mode of power, is nothing but a form of ideology. And, as Robert Pfaller brilliantly analyzed in his book On the Pleasure Principle in Culture (Pfaller 2014), expanding on the theory of the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, we may know quite well, but still we act as if we did not know. It is precisely here, in this cynical distancing, that extreme affective investment can emerge. In other words, knowledge has very limited power to unsettle ideology or to use the Althusserian point, ‘an ideological formation co-exists simultaneously with the science that breaks with it’ (Pfaller 2005: 110). It is in this formula that cultural pleasure resides. In order for an ideology to be effective, a certain cynical distance toward this ideology is necessary, a distance which makes us fall for it—the same distance that is necessary for the sublime experience to emerge. Distance is fundamental to an experience of pleasure and of the sublime. Or as a woman attending a biker party once told me, I know that they are just ordinary, normal guys behind all the tattoos and patched vests, there is really nothing special about them once you get to

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know them. But still, when you see them, there is a thrill, there is something; it is exciting to be around.2

Before proceeding further, we must establish certain crucial distinctions—especially since the sublime and its theory has become an ever-expansive and fashionable category, including anything from gothic, romantic, oceanic, urban, religious, military, artificial, moral, poetic to Marxist sublime, and so on (Holmqvist and Płuciennik 2002). Another distinction is more pertinent. The sublime has been thought of at times as existing out there, within the sublime objects themselves, at others as a cognitive category, as an aesthetic category, as an experience, as a discourse, or even a form of writing. Without going into too much detail, let us posit a distinction crucial to our argument, namely the distinction between the sublime experience, sublime discourse or representation, and the talk about the sublime (Sircello 1993). Our object of study is the sublime experience, while what this chapter engages in is the talk about the sublime; the pop cultural representation of the outlaw bikers, as we know it from the B-movies or men’s adventure magazines from the 60s and 70s, falls under the label of sublime discourse, even if not as refined as that of Homer. While some would argue that watching horror movies or reading gothic novels can provide us with a sublime experience, in my view, sublime experience is something that occurs only when faced with a real threat from a position of a safe distance and not a mediated threat. It presupposes us actually feeling small and insignificant in face of the threat and yet safe. But this is not enough. Imagination is indispensable for sublime experience to take place at all. There is no doubt that our imagination feeds of the sublime discourse and enhances the sublime experience (Cochrane 2012). Burke himself remarked that the sublime finds its source in anything that excites the ideas of pain and terror. In this sense, the sublime experience has a similar structure to that of a threat. As Mladen Dolar notes, ‘the paradox is in the fact that the potentiality as such already works, it is actual while remaining a pure potentiality’ (Dolar 2004: 3). Faced with a real outlaw biker, it is rarely him that we feel directly threatened by. Most often, he is after all a nice chap, and yet we cannot remain uninfluenced by biker movies, crime shows, and media reports we have consumed and that

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stuck in our minds. Imagination amplifies the feeling of threat and thus also our sublime experience (Cochrane 2012). Or as Terrence des Pres put it, ‘the sublime is the drama or agon played out between the mind and that which terrifies it’ (Des Pres 1983: 142). Only in this sense can the mediated discourse produce the sublime experience—by expanding our fantasy. The drawings from men’s adventure magazines also testify to this seductive power of threat just moments before its execution, i.e., prior to the moment when it ceases to be a threat. Typical drawings in men’s adventure magazines do not depict actual violent acts of torture described in the texts; instead, most images carefully fix the moment of horror prior to the execution of the threat—a raised hand ready to slap, a knife approaching the neck of a virginal beauty, a horde of bikers riding in the direction of a desperate woman trying to escape, and so on. It is precisely this intimidating moment of threat that provides the readers with pleasure.

On the Fantasy of Savage Bikers as Sovereign ‘Sacred Monsters’ The threatening figure of the outlaw biker is a product of both fact and fiction. Factual accounts draw heavily on the fictional, while real outlaw bikers themselves actively contribute to the creation of the myth of their own bestiality. They commodify this myth and utilize in order to expand their brotherhoods into ever new territories and acquire new supporters. Men’s adventure magazines from the 50s typically featured two types of stories: features and fiction (Pentagreli 2014, 2015, 2016). Features were based on factual events, such as the Hollister biker riot, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Nazi rule, the dictatorial rule of Juan Vicente Goméz in Venezuela, and so on, but these ‘factual’ stories were always embellished with fictional elements, mythologizing the violence of the perpetrators. Stories about outlaw bikers, be they in serious media or on the screen, very often emulate the logic of these features—including the stories the bikers themselves tell about themselves. In order to increase its authenticity and appeal, even the Sons of Anarchy (Sutter 2008–2014) TV series featured several real Hells Angels

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in support acts. David Labrava, a member of the iconic Oakland Hells Angels, not only acted in the series but also served as an advisor on the culture of the one percenters. In May 2017, I found myself in Paris at a Hells Angels anniversary party, a celebration of the 60 years of the Oakland charter. David Labrava was there, as well as Sonny Barger, the aging iconic father figure of the outlaw motorcycle club subculture, a biker legend. Barger was signing for hours on end his new photo book as hundreds of members and supporters lined up. Barger is the very embodiment of the blurred superimpositions of fact, fiction, and popular culture—a president of an infamous charter of the worldwide outlaw motorcycle club, but also a man who has been actively engaged in turning the club into an icon of popular culture. Barger could be seen next to Jack Nicholson in Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), a movie for which he served also as a ‘cultural advisor,’ or most recently in a couple of episodes of Sons of Anarchy (2008–2014); he has written books about himself (Barger 2001, 2005), produced movies about the club life, such as Dead in Five Heartbeats (2003), and been popular with the tabloid news and TV shows. Realities and fictions are possibly nowhere harder to tell apart than when it comes to countercultures actively engaged in their own self-commodification (Heath and Potter 2005; Frank 1998; Kuldova 2017a) and transformation into pop cultural icons. But while the clubs themselves actively contribute to the mythologization (Barthes 1993; Citton 2010a, b) of outlaw life, they at the same time insist that we, the audience, should not believe what we see on the screen or even read in the news. Posturing as eternally misunderstood and misrepresented has in itself become a part of the biker subculture—especially on social media, where such sentiments are used to arouse affects and passions and mobilize these into narratives directed against the state, police, and media (Citton 2010b; Kuldova 2018), as we shall discuss in the next chapter. Such messages coming from the members of the outlaw biker subculture are especially powerful and influential. They capitalize on the already well-established antiestablishment pop mythology associated with the bikers (Kuldova 2017b; Osgerby 2003; Austin et al. 2010). The phantasmatic derived from popular culture is used to legitimize and empower the anti-establishment

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narratives, endowing them with particular force and ability to glamour or enchant. The aesthetics of power grounded in the ability to produce the sublime can thus be utilized in the real life. Outlaw bikers often blame the media for falling for the very same pop cultural fictions about the ‘counterculture’ they themselves actively help to shape in search of profit, recognition, and fame (Kuldova and Quinn 2018; Kuldova 2017b, 2018), accusing journalists of the inability to separate fact from fiction.3 And yet, the tabloid media lives precisely out of the spectacularization of the ordinary, out of bringing the reality closer to the fiction, rather than further apart (Gilman-Opalsky 2011; Debord 2006). However, beyond this uncanny effect of blurring reality and fiction, there is another trouble that emerges, namely the ever-returning question of what is really the effect of these repetitive tropes of outlaw, anti-establishment lifestyles that challenge middle-class moralities as well as law and order? Be it the effect on the members of these countercultures themselves or on the audiences with no real-life experience of the same. Over the course of this research, I have seen about any movie, documentary, and TV show out there and read whatever book written by outlaw bikers and ex-outlaw bikers I could get my hands on, only to come to a slow realization that only very few bikers who actually live the lifestyle have seen or read even a fragment of the same. Initially, I have acted upon the assumption of the importance of sharing these, what I saw as natural or even automatic, references. Until I got into a conversation with a European Hells Angel at the aforementioned event in Paris—when suddenly David Labrava, the relatively famous member of the Oakland charter who starred as ‘Happy’ in the Sons of Anarchy series, passed by. Excited, I pinched the Angel next to me, saying, ‘look, there is Happy, let’s get a picture with him,’ only to receive a puzzled look. First, I thought that he is mocking me, pretending not to know who the guy is, only to see his confusion progressively increase. Jokingly, I explained, while still thinking that he is pulling my leg. Eventually, it turned out that he really did not know, stating, convincingly, I heard the show is pretty bad, I do not watch crap on telly, especially not about bikers, they have no bloody clue, it is just fantasy. If my brother

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can make money with it, I am happy for him, but honestly, I could not care less about whatever runs in the idiot box.

This brief encounter made me question my naïve assumption that these bikers would for some reason obviously have seen all this. From then on, I was determined to test the knowledge of my informants about the outlaw biker popular culture, eventually realizing that it differed greatly, with some never even having seen the Easy Rider (1969), and yet casually sharing online iconic images from the movie. These experiences made me question the degree to which popular culture exerts any straightforward influence on people’s choices, opinions, and behaviors. While we may be familiar with stories of people like the former Hells Angel Chuck Zito, who became fascinated and inspired by the movie Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) to ride a motorcycle when he was only thirteen,4 such stories of direct influence of popular culture on people’s choices are not as common. Eventually, as Zito himself noted, Hells Angels opened the door to Hollywood for him— from acting, being a stunt man and a bodyguard to people like Sylvester Stallone, Pamela Anderson, Mickey Rourke, and so on. Zito ended up on the very screen that seduced him into the lifestyle in the first place. However, today, we must rethink the role of popular culture and perceive its role through the lens of ‘media convergence’ (Jenkins 2004) or ‘polymedia,’ recognizing ‘our inability to understand any one platform in isolation’ (Miller et al. 2016: x). The role of social media is especially crucial for us here, as it is precisely there where contents playing with pop cultural clichés are shared, reinterpreted, and reinserted into new contexts—such as the figure of the criminal outlaw biker, as yet another version of the Robin Hood (Hahn 2000), suddenly placed into the context of the recent European refugee crisis. It is on social media platforms that we see most acutely this convergence between the pop cultural imaginary of the transgressive outlaw, the real bikers, and the acute social problems that trouble them, as well as their supporters and the pool of people from which they are most likely to recruit new members. The pop cultural icon of the outlaw biker hero is embodied by the real bikers, who, even if they disavow this stereotypical image, still craft their personas based on recognizable clichés and use it strategically to

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make their claims more convincing and authentic. Real bikers play with spirit of transgression associated with the righteous outlaw bikers on the screen who rebel against the bourgeois moralities and do not shy away from violence or crime when faced with injustice (or not). Real bikers become imagined as those who dare to show the middle finger to the ‘system’ and say out loud ‘what people have been thinking all along but were too afraid to voice openly.’ In the eyes of their supporters, they become the protectors of free speech fighting for the ‘little man’ and in the name of ‘common sense.’ We must also consider to what degree the selection and viral circulation of screenshots, scenes, and one-liners matters more than in-depth knowledge when creating and reproducing narratives of belonging (Robards and Bennett 2011). Lack of depth enables people to project whatever desires, hopes, and fantasies onto the shared content as much as onto the public biker personas and fictitious bikers. Often, the same people who have never seen these movies repeatedly share online images and memes featuring iconic scenes from these movies—the same images that may also be used on T-shirts and other products that visually signify belonging and chosen identity. The practice of sharing here is of a ritualistic nature, creating an online community or strengthening and expanding the existing community. The fact that the subculture is rich in symbolism and pop cultural references therefore does not necessarily also mean that people know the origin of these symbols. Instead of speaking of knowledge, we are better served if we think here in terms of familiarity, where familiarity emerges through being and acting within a certain coded aesthetic field without necessarily knowing. Familiarity may even on purpose disavow detail and complexity; in particular, across social media we can see this form of familiarity take precedence over knowledge, often because of its effectiveness in mobilizing and directing affects of people susceptible to the message (Citton 2010b). The familiar is at once ‘ignorant’ while at the same time reproductive of the key symbols, the familiar is where nuance is lost, but also where that which matters is preserved in a form flexible enough to allow new re-­interpretations by placing the iconic tropes into changing social, political, and economic contexts. Or to use Hegel’s maxim, favorite with Henri Lefebvre, ‘the familiar is not necessarily the known’ (Gardiner 2002: 1).5

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This is significant since the lack of nuance and context contributes to the sublime experience and reduces the outlaw bikers to a mysterious singularity. Despite the bikers’ recurrent protests, which in the end may only contribute to the reproduction of a reductionist image, they have become a singularity. Or else, they have been widely cast as a singular, carefully bounded evil, radically set apart from the majority society of good citizens. The stories in men’s adventure magazines are possibly the most explicit in the depiction of the outlaw bikers as singularly bloodthirsty, violent, and incomprehensibly evil savages; it is also these stories from these magazines that have served as scripts for biker exploitation and sexploitation B-movies. This anti-realist construction of the bikers as a singularity, as incomprehensible evil, as barbarians and savages on wheels who do not fear death fuels the attraction toward them and reinforces their charisma. The problem with singularity is that it aestheticizes violence, terror, and trauma, while systematically casting it as incomprehensible. John Sanbonmatsu, using the case of Holocaust, argued that the discourse of singularity ‘obscures rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make’ such ‘practices inevitable’ (Sanbonmatsu 2009: 102) and thus prevents us from taking a realist approach—as for instance that of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, where violence can be better comprehended as residing in the everyday, in petty unimaginative actions of bureaucrats who have given up on critical thinking (Arendt 1965), or the approach of the German sociologist Harald Welzer, who analyzed the stunning normality of the Nazi criminals focusing on the social and situational contexts that can turn even the most normal and ordinary of us into serial killers merely doing a job like any other (Welzer 2006). Such sobering analysis does not only go in face of anti-realist accounts, but also does not lend itself to the feel-good spectacularization of the monstrous Other that not only provides us with a certain perverse pleasure but also relieves us from imagining of what we could have been capable of under certain circumstances. ‘Singularities are totems of such radical disjuncture that they open an impassable chasm between the Event and what we take to be life as such’ (Sanbonmatsu 2009: 104); this chasm between life as such and stories of incomprehensible evil as they appear in the men’s

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adventure magazines is constitutive of the production of the ‘evil bikers’ as a singularity. As Sanbonmatsu points out, in invoking a particular aesthetic dimension in our encounter with past atrocities – a Kantian sublime – representations of singularity disadvantage forms of understanding and perceiving that might in fact offer us a more productive engagement. (Sanbonmatsu 2009: 105)

Sublime depictions and anti-realist discourses of singularity together reinforce the power mystique and charisma of groups such as the outlaw bikers. Moreover, focus on singularity naturalizes everyday structures of violence, such as labor exploitation, as ordinary and uninteresting. They become overshadowed by the absolute evil that needs to be defeated at all cost, thus preventing an emergence of politics that would focus on structural changes and address the underlying issues driving people into joining such milieus. Or as Sanbonmatsu puts it, ‘to the extent that singularity is the extraordinary, we may unconsciously come to feel a kind of indifference toward, or even contempt for, the ordinary’ (Sanbonmatsu 2009: 110, emphasis in original). Politics that spectacularizes a certain violent group not only enhances the group’s charisma, and with it also its power and ability to attract new members, but also prevents any politics that would address structural issues and thus also effectively disempower such groups and diminish their attractiveness. A realist analysis is thus suppressed in favor of sacralizing an unpleasant group as a villainous singularity. One needs to ask—what and whose interests does this sacralization serve, in particular when stemming from law enforcement agencies themselves that unabashedly reproduce the stories better served in pulp fiction? The bikers are represented as extraordinary, which provides them with a sublime aura or a form of distributed ‘mana-personality’ (Becker 1973: 128). They are beyond the law, beyond the everyday and the ordinary. As we shall see in the next chapter, this also endows them with the appearance of being sovereign. They are imagined as transgressing the everyday household economy by not serving the reproduction of bare life, but instead appearing to act from a position of sovereignty over life, only confirmed by their violent senseless rage. To the outsiders, they

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appear as subjects who enjoy as if there were no tomorrow. As such, they become the phantasmatic embodiment of the ever-elusive sovereignty that many seek. They are no longer human, but are instead turned into ‘sacred monsters’ (Bataille 1991). They are the wild men, the barbarians, the very ‘devices for distinguishing the civilized from a degenerate monstrous other’ (Devetak 2005: 632). This ascribed monstrosity separates them further from ‘us,’ pushing them into the incomprehensible. They are monsters that unsettle our social norms, spread terror, and fear, troubling our understanding of what it means to be human (Wright 2013). As socially abject, they haunt us. They ‘can never be entirely banished or obliterated’; they always hover ‘at the edges of subject’s existence, threatening its unity and identity with disruption and possible dissolution’ (Devetak 2005: 633). In the idea of the monster, we stumble again upon the sublime, the sublime that threatens to destroy us, that arouses feelings of self-negation. As Foucault noted, the ‘human monster’ is the limit, it ‘combines the impossible and the forbidden’ (Foucault 2003: 56). Monstrosity, barbarity and pure evil are tropes that have been repeated ad nauseam in men’s adventure magazines, as well as biker movies. A collection of the MAM’s cover art featuring biker gangs, Barbarians on Bikes (Deis and Doyle 2016), reveals these tropes at first sight, as do also movies such as Werewolves on Wheels (dir. Levesque 1971), I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (Campbell 1990), or Frankenstein Created Bikers (dir. Bickert 2016). All these pop cultural productions can be said to follow the logic of the Gothic sublime; they are often patched together out of Burkean terrors (monsters, madmen, moans, sighs, roars, terror, tyranny, etc.), much like ‘some unusually artless Gothic novels’ (Morris 1985: 301). Even here, ‘crime escalates into villainy; innocence is never merely virtuous but immaculate and virginal’ (Morris 1985: 302)—like the girls that fall victim to the barbarians on bikes. The key notion here is excess, an excess of violence imbued with an appearance of sovereignty. One of the iconic movies that set the stage for those that followed was The Wild Angels (dir. Corman 1966); it not only exploited ‘the shock value of the outlaw biker,’ but also staged ‘a mischievous pageant of excess’ (Osgerby 2003: 102) of senseless biker mayhem. Similar excess of violence fascinated Georges Bataille, who once wrote of the appearance of

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the monstrous criminal as a sovereign in his The Trial of Gilles de Rais. There he remarks that, we would misunderstand the monster whose violence will soon be unleashed if we did not notice in him this apparent insensitivity, this nonchalant indifference, which to begin with places him well above the feelings of the average man (…) The accumulation of blood, the violence of a wild animal! — it links blood to the truth and violence to the sovereign monstrosity of Rais, whose grandeur tramples those who confront him, who now and then naively laughs at seeing the jolts and contortions of children, their throats cut. (Bataille 1991: 37)

In the minds of the admirers, the bikers become the very embodiment of the experience of freedom that proudly shits on the fear of death; they are the indifferent ones, the rebels without a cause. Bataille hints at the sublime appearance of the Gilles de Rais, the legendary ‘sacred monster,’ as he calls him, who went down in history for killing small children and masturbating on their dead bodies, when he notes that, generally the grandeur and, above all, the monstrosity of our character is imposing. There is a sort of majesty in his ease, one that he keeps even during the tears of confession. There is in the evidence of monstrosity a sovereign grandeur which does not contradict the humility of the wretched man proclaiming the horror of crime. (Bataille 1991: 73–74)

Even today, serial killers fascinate and enjoy cult following. Just think of Charles Manson, the well-known serial killer, who has enjoyed attention and commodification beyond any other criminal making him a useful example of the importance of mythical qualities over the gruesome … also central to his brand is the cross and later, swastika, that he carved into his forehead. His willingness to evoke countercultural imagery has played a large part in his success as a rebellious brand. (Denham 2016: 235)

Not unlike Manson, outlaw bikers have become and even turned themselves into commodified countercultural symbols. They have built up their

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reputation for and been repetitively cast as transgressive—even the members themselves speak of a ‘life commitment to violations of decency.’6 Any transgression requires something malign, which can be under certain circumstances transformed into something sublime and under certain light perceived as something great (Pfaller 2011). If there is any ‘cultural achievement’ to the men’s adventure magazines of the 50s and 60s, it is precisely their ability to transform the acts of the Nazis, dictators, rapists, biker gangs, and so on into something sublime, which provides the reader with cultural and at times even erotic pleasure. As we have seen, this cultural pleasure often prevents a realist analysis of the spectacularized crimes, but that is just the way pleasure works. But the bikers are not only not afraid to die, they also have something, namely an intense passion—for each other and for their ‘sacred patch,’ their club logo protected by trademark, intimidation, and violence, for which they are willing not only to die, but also to kill (Kuldova 2017a). This is the essence of libertinage of the likes of Marquis de Sade, namely the ability to cultivate one’s passions to such a degree that one is willing to be hanged for them (Lacan 1989). The literature by bikers about bikers, too, indulges in the reproduction of the seductive mythical nature of the subculture with its valorization of barbarity set against that which is perceived as a scared mainstream society that calls for rules, regulations, and security in an attempt to reproduce its bare life. The fearless barbarians on the contrary offer freedom under the motto: FTW! (fuck the world). Their indifference is iconic. Just consider the introduction to a book on biker myths by Bill Hayes: It’s a secretive subculture with a spell of worldwide seduction. The few who can commit to it discover a fiery path toward a pure power and freedom that eludes virtually everyone else. That commitment, however, is anything but easy. It’s tough, macho, dangerous, mysterious and heavily loaded with anti-hero hedonism; it’s the perfect cryptic combination to hook imaginations … it’s not modern and it’s not civilized … it bleeds with myths, mysteries, rumors and lurid lore. (Hayes 2016: loc. 144)

Given this, as Hayes notes, these clubs never really have a problem of expanding and seducing new members and followers; ‘a decaying

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attrition has never been a danger in this lifestyle of hyper-attraction and attention’ (Hayes 2016: loc. 164). He even tries to show that the real is far worse than any imaginable fiction: ‘real one-percenters, outlaws, pioneers, outcasts, and some very legitimate loose cannons have led an existence that flattens fiction like roadkill’ (Hayes 2016: loc. 174).

The Sublime Experience of Self-Negation In 2016, back at the public book launch of Jagd auf die Rocker (Schelhorn and Heitmüller 2016) in Leipzig,7 I strike a conversation with a young working-class woman, an enthusiastic fan of biker erotica. Having read pretty much every available erotic novel featuring bikers—and there are more than one would imagine—she came to see the real bikers for the first time in her life, spending all her money on the trip from Berlin to Leipzig. She observed the bikers from a distance, eyes wide open. Shortly after midnight, it became clear that the night will not be as wild as she anticipated and me and my colleague tried to convince some of the Hells Angels to let her sleep over in the clubhouse, but all the beds were already taken. She stared at us talking to the mysterious men and whispered: ‘I don’t think you should be talking to them,’ as if they were, there only to be gazed at from a distance. One of them did his best to find her a cheap lodging, calling around he found a place for 30 EUR a night in the neighborhood, but she could not afford even that, having only a return train ticket home; she would not let us pay either. In the end, she spent her night in the train station. And yet, she described it as the most exciting trip of her life. She got to experience the thrill of being around. The memory of gazing at the men with strong tattooed arms with a mixture of fear and pleasure stuck in her mind. Even if the threat was more a virtue of her own imagination, it would not be possible without the embodied outlaw biker aesthetics. People enjoy the aura of danger (Ray 2009) and outlaw bikers know that the power to intimidate and to threaten can be seductive—something they enjoy. Once in Berkeley, I set up an afternoon meeting with two of the Oakland Hells Angels; they kept politely postponing about every hour,

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eventually showing up at ten in the evening. An old black car with matte varnish stopped at the red light on a crossroad. They got out of the car, walking stiff with their patches toward me. I smiled politely and stretched out my hand. Only a dark sneer came in return, followed by an order: ‘get in the car.’ I got in the car, and we drove off; I was not sure where we were headed. They pulled over at a Turkish diner, and we spent several hours pleasantly chatting over some food. Toward the end of our conversation, one of them suddenly asked me: ‘so, did you enjoy the experience?’ I was not sure what he meant, which showed on my face, so he elaborated: ‘the “get in the car” part?’ I nodded laughing; for some reason, he felt like explaining, ‘that’s what people expect from us, the experience, after all, we are an iconic American brand, so we must live up to that.’ One thing is for sure, the experience really does stick in one’s mind, even against one’s better knowledge, and it would not be possible without the biker mythology as much as the carefully cultivated intimidating looks of the Hells Angels. There is something to experiencing intimidation from a position of relative safety, staring in the face of the threat to self-preservation. As Terrence des Pres argued: mind must do something which allows it to look upon its own possible destruction while at the same time being certain that its own self-preservation is assured…self-preservation in the face of terror is the strongest emotion the mind can entertain – and that this emotion generates the power of sublime moments. (Des Pres 1983: 138–139)

Erotic biker novels are revealing in this respect as well, since they typically capitalize on the seductive power of the terrifying bikers. In a short erotic novel, with a fitting title Ride Me Hard, a sweet young waitress is both terribly attracted to and terribly scared by a big, strong, tattooed, and very intimidating biker. At one point, she finds herself thinking: ‘he is every bad decision I have ever made all rolled up into one terrifying package’ (Slade 2015: loc. 84–85). She knows quite well, but still she cannot resist the attraction she enjoys, even if it repetitively threatens her self-preservation. The experience of the sublime almost always includes feelings of self-negation, ‘perceiving the object makes us feel reduced and overwhelmed’ (Cochrane 2012: 129). Self-negation

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captures the ‘sense of being violently impacted upon and a sense of self-dislocation’ (Cochrane 2012: 128), ‘a sense of how physically insignificant, or utterly contingent we are in comparison to the object’ (Cochrane 2012: 130). These erotic novels capitalize precisely on this sense of self-negation vis-à-vis the terrifying and yet seductive and sublime bikers. Indeed, intimidation also aims to inflict precisely this feeling of utter insignificance, even of dissolution of the human image, in the victims. The imagined possibility of self-destruction excites when faced with intimidation—at a distance. But there is more to the idea of the outlaw biker than self-negation. Outlaw bikers do not only inflict the fear of death in the spectators, but are also themselves often represented as self-destructive. In the aforementioned erotic novel, for instance, when confronted with the fairly obvious even if ambiguous desire of the waitress to be not only taken by him, but destroyed by him, the biker remarks: ‘Whatever you are running from? I am not a way out. I am a fucking self-destruct button’—‘This is exactly what I want,’ she responds (Slade 2015: loc. 352). In every outlaw biker, at least the phantasmatic, there seems to be some of the tragic ‘unbearable splendor’ of Antigone, as Lacan named the fascination her character has aroused over the centuries, as she is headed for self-destruction, it is Antigone herself who fascinates us, Antigone in her unbearable splendor. She has a quality that both attracts us and startles us, in the sense of intimidates us; this terrible, self-willed victim disturbs us. (Lacan 1992: 247)

We could be tempted to approximate the sublime experience to a feeling of anxiety. Søren Kierkegaard once remarked that anxiety is in fact a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power that seizes the individual, and yet one cannot break free of it, and one does not want to – because one fears. But what one fears is what one desires. (Kierkegaard 2013: 235)

However, Kierkegaard also remarks that anxiety makes one powerless. Unlike the sublime experience, which makes us often both weak and

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empowered at the same time. Weak by reminding us of our insignificance, and strong by virtue of the transformative experience of identification with the sublime object and its incorporation into the self.

Identification and Transformation At the end of my night out with the Hells Angels in Berkeley, we were headed back to the car. Throughout my whole stay in Berkeley, I never jaywalked, pretty much only because it is fined with around 200 USD—a very foreign concept for someone coming from Norway, where streets can be crossed not only anywhere, but also on red light, provided no cars are approaching. While I have found the rule fairly silly and mostly annoying, I sucked it up and obeyed. Then I crossed the road from the restaurant straight to the car in between the two Angels with their intimidating looks, a silly little transgression indeed, but how wonderful all the same! I felt like a human again in this over-policed and overregulated space overfilled with constant prohibitions and manufactured threats; no longer serving the household economy infused in me a feeling of power and sovereignty; suddenly, one walks a little bit taller, noticing that one unconsciously appropriates the very aesthetic and embodied attitude of the bikers. This is the same feeling that the supporters describe and crave; the proximity of the outlaw biker, who is known for not caring, is not necessarily only threatening, but can also be empowering. We are perfectly capable of holding contradictory notions and feelings at the same time. Often our enjoyment stems precisely from this contradiction. The proximity to the outlaws not only belittles us, makes us feel vulnerable and small, but paradoxically also empowers us; by imitating the (self )-destructive drives of the other, we feel empowered and alive. Tom Cochrane has rightly pointed out that we imaginatively identify with the properties of the sublime object. The basic idea is that closely attending to properties of the sublime object encourages one to subtly take on the properties analogous to those perceived… it is pleasurable to vicariously experience the qualities of power or magnitude. (Cochrane 2012: 140–141)

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This also drives the sales of outlaw motorcycle clubs’ support merchandize and accessories (Kuldova 2017a). Many outlaw motorcycle clubs worldwide (e.g., Outlaws MC, Bandidos MC, Gremium MC, Pagans MC‚ etc.) have followed the organizational and commercial strategies of the iconic Hells Angels, who trademarked their ‘death head’ logo already in 1972, and consequently also a range of other logos, such as Support 81 and many more, in order to protect their logos, reputation, and power and capitalize on the mythology, turning it into both an income for the club and a means of recruitment of new members and active supporters. Clothing, jewelry, patches, memorabilia, calendars, and all sorts of other items are produced, designed, and sold by the clubs at different biker events, but also tattoo conventions.8 They provide supporters not only with a feeling of imaginary, if not real, belonging to a transnational, powerful, and feared group and thus with a sense of power. By purchasing such items, these individuals wish to participate in the ‘power mystique’ (Cohen 1976) of the notorious clubs, to ‘be a little bad’ and to display their alliance without taking it upon themselves to become committed members—as a supporter at Hells Angels weekend event remarked. Supporters like to observe from a certain distance, enjoying the thrill and the ambiguous feelings of being ‘a pussy compared to those guys,’ while feeling ‘like a man again.’9 Another guy at the same event dressed in a Support 81 T-shirt suddenly decided to leave the party around ten in the evening; he pointed to a big Slovenian Hells Angel and said: ‘you see him, this guy is a bouncer, or so I heard, a violent guy, you piss him off, for no reason he will destroy you. I enjoy being around, it gives me a kick, but I know when to leave.’ Most visitors enjoying the thrill at a safe distance followed his example; only a bunch of more loyal and organized supporters remained until the morning hours. While sublime experience on its own can make the supporters identify with the outlaws and have a transformative effect, even if often only temporary—as they act more sovereign, feel powerful, and so on, the logic of identification and transformation is enhanced by the use of symbols, by appropriating the aesthetics, and by dressing and adorning oneself in things that have come in touch with the outlaw bikers. The logic of magic comes here into play, further facilitating the

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identification with those who intimidate us in order to acquire at least a fraction of their intimidating power, which can then be used intimidate others. In 2011, when the German local football team SV Gremberg dressed up in T-shirts reading ‘Red Army 81 Cologne,’ Leverkusen, its opponents, felt immediately intimidated and threatened.10 At work, here is sympathetic magic, or else imitative magic, identified already by James George Frazer (Frazer 1894). Through imitation and consumption of objects that have come in touch with the Angels, the supporters take on certain desirable properties associated with the outlaw bikers, such as intimidation power, a sense of freedom and rebellion. The desire for outlaw biker support merchandize can be read alongside the desire for so-called murderabilia (Denham 2016)—objects that belonged to or came in contact with famous, often serial, killers, or even their bodily pieces, such as nails or hair. These objects are imagined to transmit the spirit of the mythologized killer, who is turned into a brand-like creature whose essence can then be ‘magically’ appropriated by the collector and incorporated into his self. This often results in a perverse sense of empowerment—a transformation from weakness to strength, from victimhood to heroism, from cowardice to bravery, from being average to having a tremendous sex-appeal, and from being a sissy to being a man. Such identification and transformation have been the wet dream of advertisers and branding experts for decades now (Kuldova 2016). Harley Davidson has come close to achieving this; after all, there is a certain sublime experience on offer inherent to the machine itself— with its iconic potato-potato-potato roar, with the danger of biking to self-preservation, and with its inevitable connection to the outlaw bikers—it is a sublime object par excellence (Bourne 2006). And yet, no matter how much brands promise transformation through their products, theirs is rarely as effective as the one dependent on a sublime experience, on the transformation through a form of terror that truly threatens self-preservation. It is through the sublime experience that people often feel as if they are acquiring superior powers, by identifying with the source of their terror—this was the key strategy of Gothic novels where pacts with the devil were prevalent. Outlaw bikers, as much as their Harleys, can be perceived as a source of terror that ‘provokes the dissolution or disappearance of human image’ only to then transform

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the observer ‘into a participant through a psychic process of identification that, in turn, allows the beholder-participant to transcend terror by partaking of its power’ (Des Pres 1983: 145–146). That which in one light appears as self-destructing can in another appear as utterly sublime and even as the most sovereign act. Erotic biker novels teach us this, if nothing else. But what they also show rather well, often on the case of shy young women desiring their own destruction by the potent and violent biker, is that the beholder identifies with terror to such a degree ‘that it seems his own idea’ (Des Pres 1983: 143); ‘terror has been incorporated and transcended by a very thoroughgoing dynamic of identification’ (Des Pres 1983: 144). * * * Outlaw bikers intimidate as much as they enchant (Lee 2011). This mixture is at the heart of their power—reproduced through myths, ‘features,’ cinematic and photographic footage, material culture, objects, and commodities that they themselves manufacture; through insignia, awards, memorabilia, logos, and designs that can be hanged on walls, worn on bodies, displayed on cars and motorcycles, and so on. Without this material and visual culture, without the aesthetic, their power and reputation would be severely limited. Their power is firmly grounded in an idea of terrifying aesthetic spectacles of excess dependent on the stimulation of fantasy, on the arousal of imagination. Theirs is an aesthetic rule by the sublime, by terror and intimidation that enchants. Their power grounded in an ‘ideology of charisma’ (Murphy 1998: 564)—hardly a form of power unknown to anthropologists. William P. Murphy uncovered a very similar logic of the aesthetics of power relying on the sublime among the Mende in Sierra Leone. Even here, power is centered around ‘features’ that oscillate between fact and fiction, as much as around spectacular, secretive, and extraordinary events. Outlaw motorcycle clubs rely on their ‘charismatic authority,’ even if not exclusively, within a larger system regulated by legal authority (Weber 1985). This sets them apart from the ordinary, placing them into the realm of the superhuman, even if in this case, the monstrous rather than the divine—but nonetheless sacred. The reverence of the outlaws is intensified by the mystique of invisibility and secretiveness—from the closed club meetings, closed events, secret deals, to their foot in the illegal

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businesses and crime, carefully kept under the honor code of silence, akin to ‘omertà’ of the Italian mafia and not unlike the ‘political culture of hidden strategizing and an aesthetics of secrecy’ among Mende (Murphy 1998: 564). Even Edmund Burke observed that invisibility enhances the power of the sublime, those despotic governments, which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. (Burke 1914: 41)

The allure of secrecy further intensifies the idea of the mystery surrounding these clubs. Combined with the sublime experience, one they increasingly commodify and feed their supporters and admirers, the power of the outlaws is enhanced. Their aesthetics of power depends on the sublime and produces a ‘strategic order of wonder and surprise’ unlike the aesthetics of power dependent on the underlying notions of beauty, e.g., of the modern state and legal authority, which produces a ‘normative order of harmony and regularity’ (Murphy 1998: 574). Sublime power relies on the visibility of threat, on its periodic spectacular staging. This distinguishes sublime power from the form of power embraced by the modern state (at least vis-à-vis its citizens) that pushes threat into invisibility, relying on disciplining its subjects, interpellating them through the law. There are diverse pragmatic reasons why people decide to actively support the outlaw motorcycle clubs, which deserve a separate treatment, but what attracts many in the first place and rarely ceases to fascinate is the charisma of the bikers. The outlaw biker aesthetics of power—unlike the power and authority of the state—can be directly imitated, appropriated, and utilized in ambiguous projects of self-empowerment through transgression and exclusion of the self from the mainstream. The sublime splendor of intimidation drives the affects of the supporters, makes them act collectively, and makes them commit, beyond reason, and against their better knowledge. However, this form of aesthetic power would not be sufficient if it were not for other desires

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that the one percenters, often vicariously, satisfy. In the next chapter, we explore in more depth the ways in which outlaw bikers embody the ideal of sovereignty and how this relates to the political field and the current proliferation of anti-establishment resentment.

Notes 1. From a conversation with a Hells Angels supporter in Leipzig, Germany, March 2016. ‘81’ stands for the ‘H’ and ‘A’ in the alphabet and is a trademarked fashion and accessories label manufactured and sold by the Hells Angels club charters across the world, each typically having their own design modifications, as well as often selling T-shirts to support brothers in prison, who need to raise funds for lawyers as well as popular support. 2. From a conversation at the event Harley & Snow, Ridnaun, Italy, March 11, 2017. 3. As an example, the popular Facebook page Regierung gegen Rocker nicht mit uns (Government against outlaw bikers, not with us) may serve as a good example. Every week a denouncement of a media article appears on the page, arguing that the journalists are ‘duped’ by popular culture, believing the police whose only interest, so it is claimed, is to produce an easy and visible enemy to keep themselves in the business, while reminding the reader of the corruption and other scandals within the police itself. 4. See interview with Chuck Zito here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pTM8-4lRAAU, accessed March 29, 2018. 5. The idea that you must be it, in order to understand, is also challenged by this maxim—one that we should be keeping in mind especially in these times when claims to knowledge grounded in mere ‘identity’ are quick to replace research and knowledge production. Identity may result in a certain familiarity; however, this familiarity must be distinguished from knowledge at all cost. 6. From an interview with a prospect of the Hells Angels, April 8, 2017. 7. A book dealing with the criminalization of motorcycle clubs by media, police, and politics co-edited by the Stuttgart Hells Angel Lutz Schelhorn, which took place in the Hells Angels clubhouse in Leipzig

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and was part of the Leipzig book fair (see Prologue for the discussion of the event). 8. The first physical Hells Angels store with support merchandize was opened in 2016, not without controversy. 9. From a conversation with a member of Harley Davidson Owners Group, at the event ‘Ride with the Angels,’ July 2, 2016, Carinthia, Austria. 10. http://www.express.de/koeln/sv-gremberg-kreisliga-mannschaft-wirbt-fuer-hells-angels-3643774, accessed April 10, 2016.

References Arendt, H. (1965). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Austin, D. M., Gagne, P., & Orend, A. (2010). Commodification and Popular Imagery of the Biker in American Culture. The Journal of Popular Culture, 43(5), 942–963. Aviv, R. (2017). The Trauma of Facing Deportation. New Yorker. New York. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/the-trauma-of-facing-deportation. Accessed April 3, 2017. Barger, R. S. (2001). Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club. London: Fourth Estate. Barger, R. S. (2005). Freedom: Credos from the Road. New York: William Morrow. Barthes, R. (1993). Mythologies. London: Vintage. Bataille, G. (1991). The Trial of Gilles de Rais. Monroe, OR: Amok. Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press. Benedek, L. (1953). The Wild One. United States: Columbia Pictures. 79. Bickert, J. (2016). Frankenstein Created Bikers. United States. 125. Bourne, C. (2006). From Spare Part to High Art: The Aesthetics of Motorcycles. In B. R. Rollin, C. M. Gray, K. Mommer, & C. Pineo (Eds.), Harley-Davidson and Philosophy: Full Throttle Aristotle (pp. 101–118). Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. Burke, E. (1914). A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son Company. Campbell, D. (1990). I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle. United States. 101.

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Canguilhem, G. (1962). Monstrosity and the Monstrous. Diogenes, 10(40), 27–42. Citton, Y. (2010a). Mythocratie: Storytelling Et Imaginaire De Gauche. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. Citton, Y. (2010b). Populism and the Empowering Circulation of Myths. Open Cahiers, 20(1), 60–69. Cochrane, T. (2012). The Emotional Experience of the Sublime. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 42(2), 125–148. Cohen, A. (1976). Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Corman, R. (1966). The Wild Angels. USA: American International Pictures. 93. Debord, G. (2006). Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press. Deis, R., & Doyle, W. (2016). Barbarians on Bikes: Bikers and Motorcycle Gangs. New York: New Texture. Denham, J. (2016). The Commodification of the Criminal Corpse: ‘Selective Memory’ in Posthumous Representations. Mortality, 21(3), 229–245. Des Pres, T. (1983). Terror and the Sublime. Human Rights Quarterly, 5(2), 135–146. Devetak, R. (2005). The Gothic Scene of International Relations: Ghosts, Monsters, Terror and the Sublime After September 11. Review of International Studies, 31(4), 621–643. Dolar, M. (2004). The Power of the Invisible. Problemi. 1–2. https://www. scribd.com/document/128154570/Power-of-the-Invisible-by-Mladen-Dolar. Foucault, M. (2003). Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975. London: Verso. Frank, T. (1998). The Conquest of Cool: Business, Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frank, T. C. (1968). Born Losers. United States: American International Pictures. 113. Frazer, J. G. (1894). The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. London: Macmillan. Gambetta, D. (2009). Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gardiner, M. (2002). Critiques of Everyday Life: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Gilman-Opalsky, R. (2011). Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy. New York: Minor Compositions.

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Hahn, T. (2000). Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression and Justice. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Hayes, B. (2016). Greatest One-Percenter Myths, Mysteries and Rumours Revealed. Minneapolis: Motorbooks. Heath, J., & Potter, A. (2005). The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. West Sussex: Capstone Publishing. Higgins, J. (2012). Devil Riders. United Kingdom. 97. Holmqvist, K., & Płuciennik, J. (2002). A Short Guide to the Theory of the Sublime. Style, 36(4), 718–736. Jenkins, H. (2004). The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(1), 33–43. Kierkegaard, S. (2013). Kierkegaard’s Writings, VIII: The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kuldova, T. (2016). Directing Passions in New Delhi’s World of Fashion: On the Power of Ritual and ‘Illusions Without Owners’. Thesis Eleven, 133(1), 96–113. Kuldova, T. (2017a). Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation in Fashion Business: On the Fetishism of the Trademark Law. Journal of Design History, 30(4), 389–407. Kuldova, T. (2017b). The Sublime Splendour of Intimidation: On the Outlaw Biker Aesthetics of Power. Visual Anthropology, 30(5), 379–402. Kuldova, T. (2018). Outlaw Bikers Between Identity Politics and Civil Rights. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 175– 203). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuldova, T., & Quinn, J. (2018). Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Struggles Over Legitimization. In T. Kuldova & M. Sanchez-Jankowski (Eds.), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization (pp. 145–173). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lacan, J. (1989). Kant with Sade. October, 51(Winter), 55–75. Lacan, J. (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, Book VII. London: Routledge. Lee, H. (2011). The Charisma of Power and the Military Sublime. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70(2), 397–424. Levesque, M. (1971). Werewolves on Wheels. United States: Dark Sky Films. 85. Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., McDonald, T., Nicolescu, R., Sinanan, J., et al. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. London: UCL Press. Morris, D. B. (1985). Gothic Sublimity. New Literary History, 16(2), 299–319.

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Murphy, W. P. (1998). The Sublime Dance of Mende Politics: An African Aesthetic of Charismatic Power. American Ethnologist, 25(4), 563–582. Osgerby, B. (2003). Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, ‘Otherness’, and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 31(3), 98–108. Pentagreli, P. (2014). Soft Flesh and Orgies of Death: Fiction, Features and Art from Classical Men’s Magazines. New York: Deicide Press. Pentagreli, P. (2015). Soft Nudes for the Devil’s Butcher: Fiction, Features and Art from Classical Men’s Adventure Magazines. New York: Deicide Press. Pentagreli, P. (2016). Soft Blondes in the Claws of Torture Hell: Fiction, Features and Art from Classic Men’s Adventure Magazines. New York: Deicide Press. Pfaller, R. (2005). Where Is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory. In G. Boucher, J. Glynos, & M. Sharpe (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek (pp. 105–124). Cornwall: Ashgate. Pfaller, R. (2011). Wofür Es Sich Zu Leben Lohnt. Frankfurt am Main: FISCHER Taschenbuch. Pfaller, R. (2014). On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners. London: Verso. Ray, G. (2005). Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ray, G. (2009). History, the Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear. In L. White & C. Pajaczkowska (Eds.), The Sublime Now (pp. 133–154). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Robards, B., & Bennett, A. (2011). Mytribe: Post-subcultural Manifestations of Belonging on Social Network Sites. Sociology, 45(2), 303–317. Sanbonmatsu, J. (2009). The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation and the Violence of Everyday Life. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 68(1), 101–126. Schelhorn, L., & Heitmüller, U. (2016). Jagd Auf Die Rocker: Die Kriminalisierung Von Motorradklubs Surch Staat Und Medien in Deutschland. Mannheim: Huber Verlag. Sircello, G. (1993). How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51(4), 541–550. Slade, S. (2015). Ride Me Hard. Kindle Edition (self-published). Sutter, K. (2008–2014). Sons of Anarchy. United States: 20th Television.

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Weber, M. (1985). Die Drei Reinen Typen Der Legitimen Herrschaft. In J. Wincklemann (Ed.), Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsätze Zur Wissensschaftslehre (pp. 475–488). Tübingen: Mohr. Welzer, H. (2006). Täter: Wie Aus Ganz Normalen Menschen Massenmörder Werden. Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Wright, A. (2013). Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

3 Sovereignty and the Political

During a psychoanalytic seminar in Vienna, prior to the 2017 presidential election in France, a question that bothers many on the left was raised. Namely, why is it so easy for people to turn to the populist extreme right-wing parties? In light of my experience with those openly supporting the right, this naïve bourgeois premise of an easiness with which the lower-class ‘unenlightened’ Other is presumed to fall victim to right-wing propaganda struck me as particularly misleading. For most people, there is hardly anything easy about publicly declaring support for the far right. In most cases, the exact opposite is true. Hence, the proper question to ask would be: Why is it, when it is so hard to openly embrace the extreme right, that these people still do not (or do no longer) turn to the left? Or better still, as will be the subject proper of this chapter, what is it that the right wing offers that the left fails to compete with? What does the right offer in a moment when a promise of status derived from being a good liberal becomes too little of an incentive when faced with the fear and reality of being declassed, or when having nothing left to lose? What quality does it promise its voters in a neoliberal, globalized, and postmodern world where a peculiar mixture of austerity and identity politics produces victims and economic serfs at an accelerating speed? © The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2_3

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In this chapter, I shall argue that what the right offers is a particular vision of sovereignty. Outlaw motorcycle clubs, not unlike the right, embody and materialize sovereignty for their supporters—in their practice, way of life, and opinions. Sovereignty is what attracts people to the clubs, as much as to the right. In a world where sovereignty is becoming increasingly desirable owing to its perceived lack and scarcity (Lacan 2002; Anker 2012), as sources of sovereignty appear to diminish, both the right and the one percenters offer imaginary fillers to this ‘subjective lack.’ In this chapter, we investigate the real and imaginary sources of sovereignty that the one percenters offer their members and supporters. We shall relate these to the political field and the proliferating anti-establishment resentments. The political and socioeconomic forces intersect here with the personal, the subcultural, the criminal, the hidden, and the illegal. A dose of ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills 2000) will be required to put a finger on the underlying driving force of the desire for sovereignty. What follows is an exploration, necessarily limited and partial, into the different layers of the same phenomenon: the desire for sovereignty and the ways in which it can be quenched, at least temporarily, through specific cultural techniques. Populist and extreme right-wing support is of particular interest here in so far as it mirrors—in form, structure, and partly in content—the phenomenon of publicly proclaiming support of outlaw motorcycle clubs. One percenters and their supporters often, but not always and not necessarily, endorse populist right-wing anti-establishment ideologies and parties. Support of outlaw motorcycle clubs and support of right-wing populism are both used (1) to denounce political corruption, (2) to delegitimize the state and its collusion with global financial elites, (3) to condemn identity politics and politically correct sensitive language that does cover up the brutality of neoliberal restructuring (Pfaller 2017; Haider 2018; Winlow et al. 2017; Wrenn 2014), and (4) to oppose the ‘system’ these groups consider the ‘true’ embodiment of ‘real’ organized crime wherein the ‘ordinary man’ exists only to be exploited, kept insignificant and suffering in silence. Within this Robin Hood scenario, only another organized ‘dark force’ albeit one with ‘a heart in the right place’ can fight back on behalf of the little man or ‘the people’ (Hahn 2000). The renegade historian Thaddeus Russell

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argued that historically it has been criminals and other social outcasts who have fought for our freedoms and liberties (Russell 2010). Outlaw bikers today do not shy away from identifying with this liberating mission and writing themselves into this revisionist reading of history. They are keen to bring to life the outlaw myth of the frontier (Turner 1893; Slotkin 1992) and American libertarianism irrespective of where in the world they are (Nichols 2012). This ambition does not only recur in the statements of my informants, but is also common across discussion fora, news comment sections, and social media. A recent example illustrates this dynamic well. On March 16, 2017, the German government passed a revision of the existing Association Act (Vereinsgesetz §9 Kennzeichenverbot  ) which, formulated simply, prohibits public display of symbols of an association of which at least one local branch has been banned due to criminal charges. This legal change has been received by the biker community as yet another instance of pseudo-politics, of curbing individual freedom in the name of symbolic politics while doing nothing to actually combat organized crime—except pushing it into invisibility. But the bikers were not alone in their opposition; several legal experts deemed this change unconstitutional. And Ulla Jelpke, from the leftist party Die Linke, argued that only criminal law should be used against biker crime rather than restrictions on the rights of non-criminal members of biker clubs (Kuldova 2018a). To protest this amendment of the Association Act—which potentially impacts any citizen organized in an association, but which was made actionable to fight outlaw motorcycle clubs (see Chapter 4)—the Hell Angels Nomads Germany organized on September 8, 2018, the second annual demonstration in Berlin, Freedom Is Our Religion. In reaction to the announcement of the demonstration, the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany ) politician Tom Schreiber criticized the planned demonstration of the Hells Angels ‘motorcycle gang’ remarking that, … it is a joke of the history that precisely those who call themselves outlaws, now wish to use their right to demonstrate. The Hells Angels are partly hardcore criminals, who do not shy away from murders and killings. They are a massive danger for our democracy.1

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A storm of reactions in response to this statement on the pro-biker social media followed. As one of the commentators put it, expressing his anti-establishment resentment: ‘any Angel would be better suited to rule the country than the real criminals in suits.’ Another angry response from the ranks of the Hells Angels read as follows, If we were murderers, we would be in jail; we are free citizens protesting against an amendment of the Association Act, which concerns any citizen who is a member of an association.

Further comments, resonating like an echo chamber, were all structured along the following lines, to quote some of the most popular: The massive danger for our democracy is the current government, the banks that rip us off (Zockerbanken ), and corporations. And the clubs of the rich, that plan and wage wars in order to steal resources. They are the modern plague. …the only real criminals in our country are our politicians …what democracy??? It no longer exists in our country. I prefer any outlaw biker in cuts and colors to any politician in suit, all bikers have more honor and loyalty than these folks! The greatest joke in history are current politicians, FTS [fuck the system ]. Always think about this: we are demonstrating against the Association Act and the unjust treatment – for all citizens of our country, regardless of skin color and religion, peacefully and without rioting or incitement to hatred. I’d prefer a Bundestag [German federal parliament] full of Angels, to just one Angela [Merkel] shit-face. An important issue! First, they ban the big associations, and then slowly those that do not suit the government, one after another. This is called a state doctrine – shortly, dictatorship, where there is no space for freedom!2

Organized resistance, such as a demonstration, to what these groups deem pseudo-political legal changes targeted at specific groups with the intention to harass individuals in the name of security, transforms the

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Angels and other one percenters into anti-establishment heroes of ‘the people.’ This has to be considered again within the context of rising inequality, poverty, and job insecurity. When Frank Hanebuth, one of the most famous German Hells Angels, a former boxer, brothel owner and local celebrity in Hannover, with thousands of followers on social media, released his 2018 New Year greeting to the German people, criticizing the failures of the German government, he received a great deal of support and new admirers. His message resonated, especially the following, when he criticized ‘the incredible statement of Mrs. Merkel: “Germany has never done so well as today”’ as ‘a slap in the face of the 10 million people living below the poverty line’ (Kuldova 2019). One of the responses, representative of many and expressive of the search for a new sovereign, reads as follows: The one percenters have a sense of honor, something that the political bunch around Merkel lacks! … it is a reversed world: the one percenters protecting the rule of law (if we ignore the Turkish Islamists), while the system is destroying it! … Discussions are no longer effective. One cannot trust the police anymore. Law has prostituted itself into total corruption. The moral of the church is a turd of gold ducats. [responding to another comment] ‘The Hells Angels are an international criminal organization’ (Dirk) Yes, right! But precisely for this reason these appeals acquire a very special meaning vis-à-vis the stupid and conscientious public (87%) and the criminal wannabe elite consisting of theater and sociology dropouts under the aegis of a propaganda physicist! Even for the criminals, the current remainder of the rule of law is no longer enough – that is the statement! Besides, if there is an armed conflict, do you want to call the pastor of the Protestant community or the police? I think it is good that these one percenters go patrolling the neighborhoods with a martial appearance!3

In the previous chapter, we have accounted for the role of sublime aesthetics in recruiting new members and attracting and mobilizing the supporters’ passions. But it takes more than being enchanted by the sublime to openly profess one’s support for either the far right or outlaw bikers. In the following, we shall look at another underlying reason for the admiration of outlaw motorcycle clubs. Namely,

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the desire for sovereignty that emerges in an environment marked by what Bourdieu once labeled ‘policies of depoliticization’ (Bourdieu 2002), in which politics proper retreats and the state appears unable to control financial capital and other forces beyond the individual. At that moment, operative space for such groups as the one percenters expands. The fact that the same state then invests more and more into securitization, curbing of individual freedoms, and infantilizing the citizens (Pfaller 2017) is instrumentalized by these groups to further delegitimize the state. These sentiments, widespread among the outlaw bikers and their supporters as well as among the right, but also certain fractions of the left, are nicely summed up in the title of Harsanyi’s book—written in the popular genre of libertarian attacks on pseudo-politics and paternalistic states, and a book that was recommended to me by a bartender in a biker bar in Oakland, California— Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooder, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America into a Nation of Children (Harsanyi 2007). Populist calls for sovereignty embody at their core not only the desire for collective politics proper, but also a desire for transgression, autonomy, and self-determination. They embody a desire for a sovereign life beyond the servile household economy of pragmatism captured by the idea of the ‘nanny state’ and practiced through the politics of austerity, both of which are keeping us small and oppressed, treating us as children at best, and as slaves at worst, making us serve life rather than forcing us to demand something from life (Bataille 1991, 1993). Much of this critique is underpinned by a desire for sovereignty vis-à-vis this proliferation of disempowering pseudo-politics, identity politics and concerns with ‘political correctness’ (Sparrow 2018) that have progressively replaced the politics of equality (Pfaller 2017; Dreher 2017) as the destructive effects of neoliberalism became tangible (Winlow et al. 2017). Even if the solutions on offer by these groups are reactionary, they stem from a critique and sentiments that are onto something and that should not be taken lightly. The resistance to pseudo-politics and the demand for individual liberty and sovereignty can be also read into the opening chapter of Harsanyi’s book, tilted ‘Well-Cared-For Slaves.’

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In 2006, the New York City Council was working overtime to protect its constituents from the myriad of dangers inherent in urban life. No, I’m not referring to overcrowding, crime, or failing schools. The council’s wide-ranging plan included proposed bans on trans fats, aluminum baseball bats, tobacco purchases by adults between the ages of eighteen and twenty, … new fastfood restaurants in poor neighborhoods, cell phones in upscale restaurants, … candy-flavored cigarettes… As you read this, countless do-gooders across the nation are rolling up their sleeves to do the vital work of getting your life straightened out for you. The leaders of this movement affix a higher value to safety, fairness, equality, sobriety, health, pets, other people’s children – just about any quixotic thought that you could conjure up – than they do to free will and liberty. … Some Americans (still too few) are beginning to wonder: When exactly did we lose our right to be unhealthy, unsafe, immoral, and politically incorrect? What if we want to be fat, drunk, immoral, and intolerably foolish? (Harsanyi 2007: 2–3, emphasis mine)

An expression of opposition to politics that cares for the little problems instead of addressing fundamental issues, this is at the same time also a demand for individual sovereignty. It echoes Mills’ conception of sovereignty, key to his liberalism: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’ (Mills 2001: 13). But it is at the same time a complaint over the brutality of the system that is being covered up with a blanket of dubious morality, associated with the ‘liberal left’ or what goes among the bikers under the derogatory label ‘cultural Marxists’ (Winlow et al. 2017). As a German informant of mine summed it up: they care these days more for looking all good and moral by making transgender toilets or what not than for job security and decent pay; isn’t it ironic that they shamelessly enslave people in one-euro jobs, while still looking moral?4

Sovereignty may be a quality that does not exist as such out there; it may be a fata morgana that we are bound to keep running after and never really reach (Bataille 1993). And yet, we notice clearly when

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a society comes to experience a lack of both individual and collective sources of sovereignty, or rather, when too many become excluded from accessing its sources—be they material or in the form of possible imaginary identifications. People have as deep-seated a need for control, for being in charge of their lives, as a need for transgression and for indulging in sovereign moments of excess—moments that are impossible if control is lacking in the first place. Sovereignty thus manifests equally in the desire for control and in the desire for letting go from a position that transgresses the household economy of utility; such transgression is only possible from within a fundamental position of control. This is also why ‘consumer sovereignty’ offered on the market is so deeply unsatisfying, as it typically only covers up over a fundamental insecurity and lack of control (Ellis et al. 2018). Or as another informant of mine put it: it is damn easy to be a victim, put the blame on others; it takes balls to fight the system, and take control; they want to prevent us from taking control, but we must organize, be in charge, have power over our lives, only then can you live life and die for something.5

Before we delve deeper into the desire for sovereignty and sovereign appearing leaders capable of instilling order and maintaining control in a chaotic world, be it one percenters, right-wingers, or characters like Trump, Bush, Putin, or Modi, or else, all those displaying in most brutal ways the sublime power of the sovereign (Anker 2012), let us return to the initial naïve presumption that openly proclaiming one’s support for that which the majority deems appalling, or downright evil, is easy.

‘It Sucks When They Shout “You Nazi!”, but Still…’ The fact that the assumption of easiness is simply wrong became clear to me yet another time when standing at the edges of a crowd gathered at the Biker für Deutschland (Bikers for Germany) demonstration in front of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin on May 20, 2018. I saw people who have been waiting for a few hours for the biker convoy to

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appear only so they could observe the event from a safe distance—even here the logic of the sublime was at play (see Chapter 2). When I casually chatted up a woman in her fifties who has been patiently waiting around two hours—watching the organizers erect the stage and hang up posters with messages such as: ‘Together for Germany. We demand responsibility: protection for our children, women, old, and weak. Our values – our homeland. Whoever does not believe this – should leave Germany’—she was clearly embarrassed. Eventually, after gaining a little bit of trust, she conspiratorially whispered: ‘there are things that are terribly wrong in Germany, there are forces, one should resist.’ She was one of the many shy supporters, those still too embarrassed to publicly proclaim what they really believe, those still ashamed and those still feeling they may have something to lose. The demonstrators have moved beyond this sense of shame. Instead, they have embraced their self-exclusion and turned it into a source of pride. Not unlike the Trump supporters who came to wear Hillary’s label of belonging to a ‘basket of deplorables’ as a badge of honor. Even a cursory personal acquaintance with the voters and supporters of the extreme right-wing parties reveals that publicly admitting their preference is a profoundly painful and distressing act of self-exclusion, of admitting to one’s possibly lifelong and irreversible social exclusion, of acknowledging one’s status as a socially abject ‘revolting subject’ (Tyler 2013), of admitting to the lack of economic and cultural capital, an act of setting oneself up as the hated, despicable, deplorable, and morally corrupt ‘fascist’ Other. Publicly admitting to voting extreme right can be in some instances understood as an expression and exteriorization of a diminished self-regard in a paradoxical move to regain recognition, purpose, and worth. It is analogous to tattooing on one’s forehead the word ‘loser,’ a form of self-harming but also an attempt to communicate. This self-injury is also a morbid form of self-help, a way to deal with distress, restore personal order, and reclaim a semblance of control over one’s life (Favazza 1987). It is a fall from dignity to a dubiously restorative sense of ‘honor,’ and often an unsatisfying (but at least some) sense of community. It is also an attempt to regain personal sovereignty. Here, Bataille’s formula, ‘the sovereign is he who is, as if death were not’

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(Bataille 1993: 222), could easily be replaced with: The sovereign is he who is, as if social death were not. Observing those thriving in the proximity of the outlaws and bikers, those supporting, submitting, and identifying with them can tell us something about what it is they desire, and maybe even what is the constitutive loss of their melancholia—a loss that we can identify as a result of an analysis, a loss often unknown to the melancholic subjects (Freud 1957). This imaginary loss is one of sovereignty, both personal and collective. It is not a coincidence that sovereignty forms the core promise of most right-wing populist movements, and that also is a quality outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations promise to restore and bring back into the globalized and chaotic world. It is not accidental that the demand for sovereignty was the very first point on the electoral program of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2017 (1.1. No democracy without the sovereignty of the people). Similarly, at the core of the program of the populist Sweden Democrats party, which has gained 18% in the Swedish election in 2018, is a demand to take citizenship seriously and reclaim national and popular sovereignty. The desire for sovereignty also goes a long way to explain the widespread admiration of Russia within the biker milieu, and of Putin’s rule that systematically emphasizes ‘national sovereignty’ in opposition to the globalist forces (Østbø 2017). Before we proceed to look more closely into the sources of sovereignty embodied by and projected onto the one percenters, let us make a small digression into the struggles within the current system.

Self-Harming and Melancholia Under Neoliberalism Once I have noticed old wounds, very regular and ordered traces of self-cutting, covered by tattoos, on the arms of a member of the Hells Angels. I asked him what was that all about—‘What? This? Everyone has done this shit.’ Keeping the surprise to myself, I said—‘oh sure, but why would you do that?’ The answer was brief: ‘to be whole, to regain control, …it made me feel better, kind of a therapy’—‘When did you

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stop?’—‘When I joined my brothers, now I am whole, I no longer give shit about the outside.’ After a moment of silence, he continued: …this society we live in, is no society no more, it’s all just this individual self-obsessed bullshit – work, consume and die – everyone just cares about their little miserable shit, everything is for sale, no values, no relations, no respect, no honor, it’s gonna end bad, there is no return, this is it, it’s only gonna get worse or just fucking explode.

I countered, saying that, well, the clubs at least claim to live differently, valuing community, honor, family, support and all that, and asked whether it does not give him hope, to which he responded: It’s just survival, we need respect, ain’t gonna get it out there, are we? – This ain’t no progressive shit, Doc, no hippie stuff, just survival, a man needs control and order, and some damn shit to die for.

The conversation continued with more critique of the ills of life under the dictate of neoliberalism, effectively linking self-harm to the structural and social transformations. It revealed that the suffering may have been individual—the sense of failure, the feelings of worthlessness, the depressions, lacking control, and the melancholia that has led to self-harming may have been personal, but its reasons were profoundly structural. David Smail argued to a similar effect in his wonderful book The Origins of Unhappiness, where he showed how personal distress results from destructive socioeconomic policies, while being often mistaken as a personal failure (Smail 2018). The one percenters have understood this, and in many respects, their organization can be understood as a parallel cultural and structural response to this distress. Joining a powerful transnational brotherhood with clear laws, values, and sources of honor and recognition, a fairly reliable organization for life, provided one behaved well, can indeed provide relief, a sense of wholeness, social worth, belonging, a sense of regained bodily (and communal) boundaries and strength. But also, and possibly more importantly, something to submit oneself to on the one hand, while acting out as a sovereign body (individual and collective) on the other.

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Self-harming in the milieu among and around the bikers is fairly frequent. Cuts on the arms, covered up with tattoos, are a common sight; the tattoo conventions closely linked to and often organized by people within the biker milieu, where many own a tattoo parlor, are particularly revealing. These are spaces where one can observe people undress, display their bodies, and their wounds. One also wonders to what degree even the excessive indulgence in tattoos, piercings, and other bodily modifications that hide under the label of ‘bodily art’ is motivated by the proclaimed desire to adorn oneself in a beautiful artwork, and to what degree and under what conditions they can serve a similar function as self-harming does. In particular, tattoos on face and hands effectively turn the subject into an ambiguous abject object of scorn, fear but also attraction thus also providing him with a boundary and assigned place (Kuldova 2017). Self-harming has been, rather unsurprisingly, on rise, becoming an ever more common occurrence (Millard 2015), possibly linked to the increasing feelings of individual failure, insecurity, and inability to control one’s life. But we should also not underestimate the degree to which self-harming is also a signaling strategy. As Gambetta argued, in his Codes of the Underworld, self-harming is a powerful way of signaling, saying to the opponent that there is nothing he can do to me which I cannot do to myself (Gambetta 2009). Psychoanalytically speaking, we should consider self-cutting as a symptom that can have many different causes rather than being an illness of its own.6 One of its functions, apart from providing distraction from painful feelings, reclaiming control or punishing oneself, is often to communicate distress to others. It is not unlike taking up the ‘Nazi’ label and wearing it as a badge of honor, even if one very likely is no Nazi. It is this message we should not ignore; it is bound up with a form of a more widespread melancholia and a sense of loss. A loss, as Freud wrote, where one feels justified in maintaining a belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. (Freud 1957: 245)

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But this melancholia, which I believe to be one of its underlying causes, is not of the kind that can be purely individualized, or treated by psychopharmaca. Of course, the causes of self-harming differ and may be deeply personal, resulting from traumatic childhood experiences, but we should not look away from the possibility of melancholia and self-harming as related to structural forces and socioeconomic status, as also the most recent studies on self-harm indicate (Page et al. 2014; McDermott and Roen 2016; Smail 2018). Instead, self-harming as a symptom, one that is on the rise and increasingly common also among older people, can be in many cases, even if not always, viewed as profoundly connected to the structural transformations of society and economy, to the emergence of the consumer society and to the destructive effects of neoliberalism. In this melancholic state, sovereignty is imagined as lost. Sovereignty being a quality we pursue with all means possible and search for in the miraculous moments that create its semblance, moments, in which we do not serve life, but life serves us (Bataille 1993; Zeiher 2018). With Slavoj Žižek, we could even twist the Freudian notion of melancholia and claim that what melancholy obfuscates is that the object is lacking from the very beginning, that its emergence coincides with the lack, that this object is nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself. (Žižek 2000: 660)

The conversation with the Hells Angel points us exactly toward this melancholic loss of the semblance of the ever-escaping sovereignty. But even if sovereignty as such may be unattainable, we must not underestimate the degree to which the feeling of sovereignty, the feeling of having one’s life under control, is real and can be lost. This is precisely the ambiguity that sovereignty presents us with, we are bound to live without it, and yet we cannot. The short conversation and my subsequent observations point us toward two interconnected matters: (1) to the crucial human need and desire for control and reinforcement of (bodily) boundaries, the

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need to have control over one’s life and demand something from life and (2) to the underlying melancholia, a mixture of a sense of loss of sovereignty and failure to control one’s life within a system not of one’s choosing, a system in which the melancholic struggles with a continual ‘fear of falling,’ an anxiety of decline and downward mobility (Ehrenreich 1990). This also suggests a link between a sense of individual sovereignty and a collective sovereignty. Namely, the ability to change and have impact in and on the world, to control the forces beyond oneself. These two are profoundly connected; this is also why any individualized treatment of self-harming, melancholia, and depression stemming from destructive structural effects inevitably fails. Such treatment is unable to transform the structural conditions that cause the psychic distress. At best, it can offer a relief, a substitute—precisely that which the outlaw biker community also offers, only without resorting to medication or the therapeutic system. Instead of providing an individualized solution, they offer a social and collective one. The following example is revealing in this respect. In his Bodies under Siege, Armando Favazza mentions a case from a Canadian correctional facility for girls, which has at some point experienced a massive epidemic of self-cutting among the inmates. The usual ‘therapeutic’ tricks like medication, solitary confinement, and threats did not work too well. But then it occurred to the staff that the girls self-cutting represented ‘the epitome of personal freedom by which they could reassure themselves that they had some mastery over their fate’ (Favazza 1987: 232), so the staff decided to try out an opposite strategy of giving the girls more freedom and autonomy; the self-cutting went drastically down. But now it was the staff that could not deal with their loss of control, and the program was terminated. Outlaw motorcycle clubs achieve the same thing; only they do so by enforcing discipline and order into the chaotic world, thus gaining a sense of mastery over their fates—and that too, even if they often in practice fall victim to unpredictable events and violent fates. Now, let us look closer at the sources of sovereignty the clubs offer.

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Transgression and Sovereignty For Georges Bataille, sovereign life and sovereign moments reside in a realm beyond utility, calculation, in a space of disregard of danger and death, of wastefulness, excess, violence, and irrationality; in the miraculous sensation of having the world one’s disposal (Bataille 1993). In this sense, within the political, sovereignty stands not only for the state of exception (Schmitt 2007), but first and foremost for the opposition to the pragmatic, technocratic managerial order that manifests itself in for instance in austerity policies. Or, as Bataille himself put it, sovereignty has many forms; it is only rarely condensed into a person and even then it is diffuse. The environment of the sovereign partakes of sovereignty, but sovereignty is essentially the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have us respect in order to ensure, in a general way, the laboriously peaceful life of individuals. Killing is not the only way to regain sovereign life, but sovereignty is always linked to a denial of the sentiments that death controls. Sovereignty requires the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs define. It also calls for the risk of death. Sovereignty always demands the liquidation, through strength of character, of all the failings that are connected with death, and the control of one’s deep tremors. If the sovereign, or sacred, world that stands against the world of practice is indeed the domain of death, it is not that of faintheartedness. From the viewpoint of the sovereign man, faintheartedness and the fearful representation of death belong to the world of practice, that is, of subordination. In fact, subordination is always rooted in necessity; subordination is always grounded in the alleged need to avoid death. The sovereign world does have an odor of death, but this is for the subordinate man; for the sovereign man, it is the world of practice that smells bad; if it does not smell of death, it smells of anguish; its crowds sweat from the anguish provoked by shadows; death exists in it in a contained state, but fills it up. (Bataille 1993: 221–222)

Bataille’s vision of sovereignty resonates with the world of the outlaws—a world marked by regular violent excesses, killings, territorial wars, and a world always already located within the realm of

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transgression. The outlaws exist at the boundary of the legal and the illegal, no matter what they do. Even if they attempt to act as citizens and organize for a demonstration, this itself is perceived as a transgression; after all, they are assumed to be and expected to play the role of the outcasts. But the one percenters themselves contribute to this. Outlaw bikers define themselves in opposition to what they see as the bourgeois ‘sheeple’—to them, ‘sheeple’ are those always doing everything right, always caving to the system, and never raising their head high, always obeying and never daring to fight for their freedom or whatever they may believe in. The discourse that posits a distinction between the outlaws and the ‘sheeple’ or ‘citizens’ is prominent across the outlaw biker milieu—and it attracts supporters. It posits a distinction between those who go blindly through the world, consuming and ‘amusing themselves to death’ (Postman 2006), not seeing the world for what it is—a brutal, merciless, exploitative place where one needs to fight for survival and one’s freedom—and those who know better, the outlaws, and by extension their supporters. This casts the outlaws and those around them as particularly knowledgeable; they imagine themselves to share a ‘secret knowledge’ hidden from the masses of duped consumers. This mirrors the logic of and seduction inherent to conspiracy theories (Spark 2000; Fenster 1999)—that are also widely shared in the milieu. The notion that one percenters both have a special insight and possess the spirit of rebellion means that they often cast themselves as future saviors. Hidden knowledge, violent potential, rebellious spirit and refusal to cave in and obey turns them into sovereign heroes for many. Or as Dave Nichols put it in his outlaw biker memoir, In every age, culture and society there is a need for the rebel. It is the nonconformist who dares to ask the hard questions and push humankind forward. It has always been so, and now we need new thoughts and ideas more than ever before…It will take the one percenter mentality to push change forward if our children and their children are to survive…But in a nation of bleating sheep, we must call forth the wolves once more. It is time for the wild ones to pave the way yet again, and this time, nothing less than our survival on this planet is at stake. (Nichols 2012: loc. 3448–3487)

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In the next chapter, we explore this drive toward immortality through rebellious heroism in more detail (Becker 1973, 1975). For now, let us explore the key elements of the subculture where sovereignty manifests itself.

Riding and (the Threat of) Death The first and most immediate observation that we can make in this respect is the passion for riding a motorcycle, and the danger that comes with it. Deaths as a result of motorcycle accidents are common, in fact 28 times more likely than deaths in a car, and so are disabilities. And yet, without the threat of death, riding would not be the same. Or as Nichols puts it in his self-help book guiding men through the outlaw code, ‘having ridden with death on his shoulders each time he throws a leg over a motorcycle, he lives life to the fullest because this is all there is … breathe, life, freedom!’ (Nichols 2012: 55). At this point, we can recall the biker resistance to helmet laws in the USA and the motorcyclist’s advocacy groups that have been repeatedly successful at repealing state helmet laws. They did so in the name of individual liberties, against the paternalist state and despite the overwhelming evidence that helmet laws reduce both fatalities and injuries, or else, despite knowing better (Jones and Bayer 2007). Again, we can see the formula ‘I know quite well, but still…’ at work (Mannoni 2003), and again it is connected to both danger and cultural pleasure that emerges at a precise moment of one’s unwillingness to succumb to the rule of pragmatic reasons, such as safety. The biker lobby groups and the formation of a loose ideology of libertarian beliefs about helmet laws, customized vehicles, and related issues emerged in the 1970s—and have spread worldwide since then. The oldest of these groups is ABATE. Rather tellingly, this acronym initially stood for ‘A Brotherhood Against Totalitarian Enactments.’ Today, it is interpreted in different US states as ‘American Bikers for Awareness, Training and Education’ or ‘American Bikers Aimed Toward Education,’ and has broadened its focus to include discrimination against bikers and their symbols (ranging from Harley

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logos to colors), as well as—paradoxically—safety and education issues (Kuldova and Quinn 2018). Rejecting helmets, however, is not only a matter of resisting the security state and reclaiming sovereignty, but also a matter of honor. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers recently made a direct link between sovereignty and honor when arguing that the problem with current society is that it lives without honor. Echoing the one percenter sentiments, he writes, I believe you can draw a direct link between bike helmets and the drug war, police militarization, mass incarceration, drone warfare, and the Syrian refugee ban…The massive increases in helmet-wearing regulations, standards, and norms are indicative of ever-increasing risk aversion in society, a phenomenon with devastating moral and practical consequences… hyper risk-averse attitudes are possible only in a society that has rejected honor. (Sommers 2018: loc. 591)

In September 2018, BMW released a video of a ‘self-driving’ prototype developed in order to improve and create new safety features that could be built into future models. The comments on this video are instructive with respect to our discussion of sovereignty. While some were appreciative of these technological developments, most were either angry or mocking of the idea of a self-driving motorcycle. The most pronounced reason being that it would rob the riders of all the fun and freedom stemming from controlling the machine themselves. These bikers were unwilling to sacrifice their sovereignty, their freedom, and that which defines them as human—including weakness and poor judgement—in the name of security and features that remove their power to act, to be in control in critical moments and to be held responsible. They feared a life not worth living more than death (Pfaller 2011); facing the risk was key to the pleasures of riding. If riding were safe, the fun would be gone. The very reason, for instance, why outlaw bikers initially favored jeans cuts instead of leather was because leather clothing was considered ‘protective.’ Or as Michael Ahlsdorf once wrote in the Bikers News, ‘an outlaw biker that does not fear death, seen with protectors, is thinkable only as a laughing number’; after all, in line with the idea of the subculture being both an expression of and desire for sovereignty, ‘the style

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elements of the biker scene must be understood as a protest against the practical reason.’7 Within the milieu, the same logic is at play in the resistance to the security state that threatens to destroy individual freedoms. There is no doubt that the security state, driven by an expansion of its coercive and surveillance measures, is progressively replacing the liberal welfare state. This shift away from a liberal welfare state to a security state obsessed with questions of safety and driven by a ‘culture of fear’ (Furedi 2002) also means that the state ceased to view social problems, including crime, as something that could be managed by extending social welfare, reducing inequality and removing poverty. Instead, it views social problems as risks and threats that have to be fought through coercive measures that often erode civil liberties in the name of security (Hallsworth and Lea 2011), criminalize poverty (Wacquant 2009), produce ever more suspect populations (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009) and blur policing and military functions of the state (McCulloh 2007). Or as the Comaroffs put it, Citizenship these days, it seems, is framed less in terms of a social contract founded on liberty and the good life than with reference to the imperatives of safety, security, and righteous self-enrichment, which are seen to be imperiled from all sides: by the uncouth, the undocumented, and the undeserving, by the irresponsible and the unemployed, by criminals, itinerant migrants, terrorists, bent business(wo)men, states(wo)men, police(wo)men, and soldiers. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2016: 9)

The fact that this resistance to the logic of securitization is not only a matter of claiming personal liberty, but also a resistance against the paranoia that increasingly appears to define current cultural climate in the West, is often ignored. The key feature of paranoia is that everything is reduced to a singular principle, to which everything has to be sacrificed—and in the name of which even the principle itself is often undermined. When we sacrifice everything in the name of security, we tend to sacrifice security itself, and security quickly flips into its opposite.

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It is not a coincidence that in the era of securitization, more and more people engage in extreme sports, risk-taking and other forms of ‘edgework’ (Lyng 1990, 2008), all of which also happen to be ways to reclaim personal sovereignty vis-à-vis a system of technocratic pragmatism. A ‘risk society’ where every potential threat is micromanaged, where even ‘micro-aggressions’ are treated as threats to personal integrity and where people call for a management of such micro-offenses (Campbell and Manning 2014; Sparrow 2018), paradoxically creates demand for sources of risk. The risk-takers often engage in such activities on purpose. They do so in order to feel emotionally engaged, while seeking to restore control (Lupton and Tulloch 2002), and fill a lack that can be said to be an effect of the socioeconomic system. The market also offers endless sources of pleasure and ‘consumer sovereignty,’ such as excessive consumption, drinking, luxury holidays or drugs. However, these prove time and again unsatisfying, unable to fill the lack, and the desire, dependent on this lack, for true moments of sovereignty. Where the security state with its austerity and paternalist policies curbs individual liberties, while unable to act as a sovereign vis-à-vis the financial markets and corporate power, the marketplace offers ‘consumer sovereignty’ and possessive individualism in its place. However, as criminological research shows (Ellis et al. 2018), ‘consumer sovereignty’ is a scam, it does not satisfy the desire for sovereignty as it is bound to continually reproduce the very lack from which it profits. The following premise is at the center of the consumer sovereignty paradigm: There is no choice but to choose, no alternative other than to conform in what the symbolic order provides (Ellis et al. 2018: 16). Outlaw bikers have realized this long ago. Their vision of sovereignty stands in direct juxtaposition to the semblance of ‘consumer sovereignty’ offered on the market. They attempt to fill the same void as the market does. The only difference is that they see their offer as an offer of authentic sovereignty, as opposed to the fake market alternative. We shall discuss the role of authenticity in the next chapters in more detail, however, for now it suffices to say that those belonging to the one percenter subculture view themselves in a radical opposition to ordinary Harley riders. One percenters see themselves as ‘authentic’—in distinction to the law-abiding bikers whom they often view as products of a

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perverse consumer culture that commodified the ‘original outlaw.’ Even though they themselves engage in self-commodification and branding, they do so with almost missionary overtones. This subtle distinction is most visible during events such as the notorious European Bike Week in Faaker See, Austria; a massive yearly event, organized by Harley Davidson and sponsored by brands like Jeep, Bacardi or Michelin. With hundreds of exhibitors spread across many square kilometers around the idyllic lake, the bike week is a pure consumer spectacle. Thousands arrive yearly to check out the latest bikes, gadgets, clothes, cars, and to shop till they drop while showing off their customized Harleys, taking obscene amounts of selfies and videos, eating and drinking and enjoying the concerts. Different chapters of Hells Angels have their own stands there, selling their support merchandize next to the notorious Jägermeister bar. And yet, the members and prospects who sell this support merchandize still denounce this consumer spectacle and think of themselves as being there to promote the true sacred and authentic subculture that has been profaned by consumption excesses; they reject having in favor of being. They act not unlike the international Christian biker clubs, such as the Ambassadors of Jesus MC or Holy Riders MC distributing their Biker Bibles in different languages and spreading the message of Jesus to the biker community, they profoundly resent the ‘desperate consumers.’ Both resent those who desecrate the subculture and its lived values through excessive profane consumption. Nichols echoes this sentiment in his popular book, One Percenter Code, when he says that, we have become a nation addicted to fast food and gasoline, striving for a whiter smile while our freedoms are taken away day by day. Most Americans would never dream of fighting the system they helped put in power, because if they did, they’d be thrown in jail, lose their jobs, lose their friends, lose their spouses, but most importantly, they’d lose their stuff. One percenters don’t give a shit about stuff. (Nichols 2012: 63)

This may be a highly idealized vision of the one percenter ethos— granted that many join the brotherhood in order to gain access to criminal networks and thus afford luxurious lifestyles. Nonetheless, it is a

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vision constitutive to the self-understanding of the clubs. Consumerism is mocked and when it becomes excessive among certain members of the club, it is often looked down upon and perceived as a corruption of the club’s ideals, and something to be dealt with.

Riding in a Pack, Killing and Sovereign Manhood Outlaw motorcycle clubs also offer other sources of sovereignty to those feeling disempowered, small, disposable, underappreciated and disrespected within current society. Their niche specialization is in restoring manhood and honor. They cater to men that feel emasculated by the disintegration of traditional patriarchal gender divisions, offended by notions such as ‘toxic masculinity’ (a notion that is unproductive and divisive—here they may have a point) and by what they view as a ‘a virus of cultural disrespect towards men and manhood spreading through society.’8 They seek to restore in these men what the popular self-help book, Sovereignty: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Men, labeled ‘sovereign manhood’ (Michler 2018). The cover blurb of this book summarizes the attitude of many men who join these clubs as much as those who look up to them in search of an example of how to lead their life. Every man is born with just one thing: his sovereignty – his power to respond to his environment and his circumstances. Unfortunately, most men have spent much of their lives giving away that sovereignty. Every time a man passes blame or shirks his responsibility, every time he makes excuses for his performance, and every time he trades his unlimited potential for a little perceived safety and security, he willingly submits himself to the mercy of others. Is it any wonder that men, in general, seem to have lost their way? You don’t have to look very far to recognize that men don’t seem to possess the same amount of vigor and purpose they once did. Take one sobering statistic – the rate of suicide in men – and you begin to see how damaging the effects of the voluntary subjugation of men to their families, their businesses, and their governments can be. (emphasis mine)

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This paragraph resonates with the feelings and attitudes of many men who have either joined the one percenter ranks or who look up to them. On the one hand, there is a sense in which these men feel victimized, unjustly and systematically punished for who they are, how they look and to which social strata they belong, while criminalized by the state and law enforcement (Kuldova 2018a; Schelhorn and Heitmüller 2016; Katz 2011). On the other hand, despite the fact that they may strategically mobilize the victimhood card, they reject and abhor the position of victimhood and helplessness (Kuldova 2018a). They resent what they see as current cultural valorization of victims, and the dominant language of the ‘therapeutic culture’ (Furedi 2004; Madsen 2014), ‘culture of offence’ (Fearon 2015) and ‘culture of victimhood’ (Campbell and Manning 2018). Sharing online content that mocks the so-called SJWs (social justice warriors), laughing at mediated accounts of ‘microaggressions,’ or other content popular with the alt-right (Nagle 2017), is prevalent among the one percenters and their sympathizers. They mock those who reach out to the police or other authority for protection when faced with the tiniest of problems as much as those who instrumentalize ever new sources of victimhood—what popular media labels ‘victimhood Olympics.’ Or as one of my informants, a German one percenter, put it: ‘these days they keep fighting over who is a bigger whining sissy, like there is some price to win if you are the most pathetic of them all.’9 Or as Michler puts it, ‘if you are to gain your Sovereignty, you must reject the idea that you are a victim’ (Michler 2018: 81). Campbell and Manning distinguish nicely between three ideal types of moral cultures—those based on honor, dignity and victimhood. Outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations, such as vigilante groups, attempt to resurrect an honor culture vis-à-vis the rise of the therapeutic culture—a backlash against the rise of the individualistic culture of victimhood and the failure of the bourgeois culture of dignity to establish a lasting hegemony (Campbell and Manning 2014). However, the key to restoring an honor society, according to the one percenters, lies in creating a powerful collective of sovereign men, who rely on each other and would sacrifice for each other and their shared values. It is a vision where the honor and reputation of a man derives from the honor

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and reputation of a group, and vice versa. It is a vision directly opposed to individualism, emotionalism, and one that materializes itself in the most common of practices of the motorcycle clubs—riding in a pack. Riding a Harley alone may provide a sense of empowerment, it may command respect and possess a degree of intimidation power, but riding in a pack, with a patch on your back, and side by side with your brothers, is a whole different story. It has not only a sublime quality, as discussed in the previous chapter, but it is also a powerful source of ‘miraculous moments of sovereignty’ (Bataille 1993). Unlike riding alone, it offers a collective sense of power, where manhood is collectively reinforced, men becoming even more manly in company of each other, producing a sense of excess of masculinity. This excess of masculinity that emerges in collective riding is exactly that which becomes commodified and concentrated as a fantasy in the derivative support and other merchandize. This merchandize is then, not unlike any other form of ‘sympathetic magic’ (Frazer 1894; Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011), imagined to virilize the consumer. Their vision of manhood is one where men strengthen and support other men, where men learn to be manly by following the lead of other men, where men are socialized into manhood through painful rites of passage and where strength resides in the brotherhood itself. It is a vision where traditional attributes associated with manhood reign supreme, and where that which society has increasingly learned to fear in the (pseudo)pacification process (Hall 2012) is considered are recast as positive qualities. Michler captures this widespread sentiment that is to be found among the bikers in his selfhelp book as follows: Truth be told, we, as men, are built to fight. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. When we remove the need for battle in our lives, we strip away all the qualities that make us men in the first place: anger, aggression, rage, violence, dominance, and strength. Unfortunately, we’ve been told those qualities are to be shunned and that we should be embarrassed of the desire to be this kind of man. So, in a misguided attempt to keep society safe and free from conflict, the warrior within us has been silenced. Silenced by our school systems, the government, the media, our friends and family, and, unfortunately, ourselves. (Michler 2018: 15)

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More interestingly, it is also a vision of masculinity that goes explicitly against the individualist society that is deemed corrupt and weak and where men are robbed of their power as they are forced into loneliness, instead of deriving their power from the pack. Michler here revealingly quotes from Rudyard Kipling’s The Law of the Jungle: ‘For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.’ And continues, We want to join the battle for life with our brothers in arms. Unfortunately, we bought into the idea that reaching out for guidance, direction, and brotherhood isn’t manly at all. We started to believe the notion of the ‘self-made’ man was the highest achievement any man could obtain. (Michler 2018: 20)

He scorns the individualist cultural heroes such as James Bond. The power that lies in men organizing at the boundary between the legal and the illegal, seeking strength in community and support networks, and refusing to be run through life as lonely wolfs is also one of the reasons why such groups, be they outlaw motorcycle clubs, wellorganized gangs, or boxing clubs such as the German Turkish nationalist Osmanen Germania BC, appear so threatening to the state and the ordinary citizens. What is immediately suspect to those living out the ideology of the individualistic society, even when keeping a cynical distance from it, is the bond between these men. Nichols sums up the bond as one ‘formed out of hard-earned respect for the other. It is that absolute knowing that your brother has your back no matter what happens. It is a safety net like no other’ (Nichols 2012: 40). It is not unlike the bond commonly formed in the military. To create this bond, the clubs strategically implement transgressive trials, often incorporating violence and crime, during the hang-around and prospect periods. They do so not only to test the suitability of the candidate, but also to create a bond of complicity and dependency. These tests are designed to inflict pain and suffering, on behalf of the group, to which the group presents itself as a solution. Shared suffering and dysphoric experiences have been shown to be far more effective at creating a strong bond to the group than euphoric experiences, even if euphoric experiences are,

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too, effective (Newson et al. 2016). Such intense and painful experiences have been shown to be so powerful that they create an ‘identity fusion,’ a sense of oneness between the self and the group where ‘one’s personal and social selves can “fuse” together resulting in an extraordinary pro-group mentality’ and lead ‘one to feel a unique responsibility to defend one’s psychological kin at any cost’ (Newson et al. 2016: 7), and encourage willingness to self-sacrifice, fight and die on behalf of a group. When outlaw motorcycle clubs put new prospects through distressing tests, they want to achieve primarily two things. First, they want one question answered, how far are you willing to go to stand up for and show the loyalty to your brothers? If you are not willing to go all the way, trusting we have your back covered, then you have no business in the club.10

Secondly, they use these intense experiences and tests to create the ‘extreme identity fusion’ necessary for the organization to dominate its members lives, grow and not become subverted from the inside. They have naturally found the solution to the puzzle social scientists have been wondering about: namely, how is it that people are willing to engage in individually costly pro-group behavior, to the point of self-sacrifice (Whitehouse et al. 2017; Whitehouse 2018). We shall discuss sacrifice, ritual and the production of the sacred among the one percenter is more detail in the next chapter. For now, it is important to note that ‘identity fusion’ grounded in shared experiences of suffering (in our case often suffering pertaining to one’s background and socioeconomic status, as well as suffering inflicted by the group), also commonly found among (ex-)military personnel, terrorist organizations, fraternities and so on, leads members of these groups to perceive ‘shared essential qualities with a group as well as a sense of reciprocal strength’ (Whitehouse et al. 2017). Reciprocal strength is crucial here as it further fosters notions of collective sovereignty. Shared experiences of collective sovereignty are crucially linked to the act of killing and murder, notoriously associated with the largest one percenter clubs, and with other forms of violence on behalf of the group among smaller and younger clubs. Only few months after the book

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launch organized by the Leipzig Hells Angels (see Prologue), on June 25, 2016, four members of the Leipzig Hells Angels have been involved in the murder of a member of United Tribuns,11 while leaving two others with life-threatening injuries. The Leipzig chapter officially ‘dissolved’ shortly after. The act of killing on behalf of a group, to defend its territorial claims and its honor, is the ultimate experience that leads to identity fusion; it both empowers and entraps. It is also an experience that endows the group with sovereignty, which, as Bataille repeatedly tells us, requires the strength to violate the prohibition on killing (Bataille 1993; Mbembé and Meintjes 2003). Or as an informant put it: ‘we have killed, so they know we cannot be fucked with, we take law into our hands; we decide who dies and who lives’12—Foucault’s definition of traditional sovereign power in a nutshell (Foucault 1978). Note that even though he himself has not killed anyone, and neither did anyone in his own chapter, in the spirit of ‘identity fusion,’ he uses the pronoun we. This serves a double function: He and other members feel empowered by belonging to an organization that can kill on behalf of its members, while the actual killer is relieved as guilt is distributed. As research into killing and the history of wars shows, the vast majority of people are not born killers—and the few psychopaths are highly unlikely to join these groups or be good members. The majority of people and, as Grossman notes in his famous book On Killing, even the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be ‘conscientious objectors’. (Grossman 1996: xv)

The majority of people have to be thoroughly ‘conditioned’ through techniques designed to enable killing in order to overcome their natural resistance toward killing. Some of the ‘seductive charm’ of the outlaw motorcycle clubs lies in that they have developed techniques to overcome this natural resistance. Many a member of the one percenter biker clubs have served in the military and have learned the tricks of the trade. However, the subculture has also effectively developed its own techniques. It is without doubt that we live in a society that is marked by a ‘simultaneous repression and obsession with violence’ (Grossman

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1996: xxviii); real death is pushed into invisibility, while the media overindulges in scenes of violence and killing. It may be a result of this pathological relation of simultaneous repression and obsession that there appear to be so many not merely satisfying their desire for adrenalin kick by indulging in mediated violence, but also those looking up to real killers and to subcultures with violent reputation—from obsessive collectors of murderabilia, via serial killer groupies, to devote one percenter supporters. All of them desire to vicariously experience the crimes and the lifeworld of their ‘heroes’ (Bonn 2014) in a hope that some of that quality shall transmit onto them. This fascinating quality is often that which appears as unlimited sovereignty, or as Bataille puts it when talking of the iconic serial killer Gilles de Rais, ‘only crime, that negation of every bridle, was to give him the unlimited sovereignty’ (Bataille 1991: 232).

Neoliberal State and the Appeal of Non-state Sovereign Actors One percenters do not only create for themselves and their audience fascinating sovereign moments of exception and excess, including decisions over life and death—while rarely showing any fear of punishment, instead of using jail time as valuable source of both individual and club reputation—they are also highly organized. In fact, they are organized to such a degree that we could consider, at least the largest outlaw motorcycle clubs, as transnational non-state sovereign actors. The more these clubs take on the diverse roles of the state—from providing security, jobs in both legal and illegal markets to social welfare (Kuldova 2018b)—the more they find themselves in competition with the state. And the more they manage to delegitimize the state in the eyes of their supporters, while placing themselves in its place, the more they appear as a legitimate alternative. The area of security is most revealing in this respect, as security is increasingly outsourced by the state to private companies. The state is thus perceived by many as undermining its own sovereignty and

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legitimacy. This is particularly problematic when the state outsources security to companies run and owned by the very same people it criminalizes, i.e., people who may have clean criminal record, which does not automatically translate into a lack of criminal activity, but who are affiliated with or members of OMCs and other organized crime milieus (Schreier and Caparini 2005). The demand for private security services has been, as Schreier and Caparini note, rising as a result of economic, demographic, and political changes, which are leading to a greater polarization in society. At the same time, the state and public authorities are shouldering a declining share of direct responsibility in ensuring public safety. (Schreier and Caparini 2005)

In 2004, as Born et al. reveal, ‘PSC staff outnumbered members of public police forces in most EU states and, on average, one out of every 500 European citizens was a private security employee’ (Born et al. 2007: 1). Outlaw motorcycle club members have been quick to tap into this market—or as the Web site of a security company that also offers consulting for hospitality industry (in particular bars, strip clubs and brothels) and is run by a member of the Hells Angels in Germany puts it, The need for qualified security forces is steadily rising and according to our professional judgment, is poorly covered by dubious security companies. DARI Consulting offers you different forms of security: from property to personal protection. We start where other security companies give up. Our service care is achieved first when a total sense of security is guaranteed. Our approach is precise and well thought out. Situations are professionally evaluated to create emergency plans. Our team is available to you as an external consultant around the clock. In the event of a crisis, your company will be surrounded by experts who react immediately. (transl. from German by author)13

This situation significantly challenges the founding idea of the modern legal state, namely, its monopoly on violence and creates a new normative order. Often, issues are raised publicly about the involvement of private military companies in wars abroad, but it is also the

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transformations in the perception of the state resulting from the internal use of private security companies that should not be ignored. The proliferation of private security has meant that, in a growing number of instances, private rather than collective decisions form the basis for the use of violence; legal rather than political considerations define their legitimacy; and accountability is shifted from parliaments and publics to private clients who buy between 70 and 80 percent of commercial security services. (Krahmann 2009: ii, emphasis mine)

In Germany, the migration crisis has since 2015 led to a rapid increase in demand for private security companies, with many newcomers to the market, but also older players from the environment around the outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations with high amount of ex-military men and men trained in martial arts, boxing etc., often with immigrant background.14 While there has been a slight furor in the media over the German government outsourcing security in refugee camps in Hessen to a company led until 2014 by a Hells Angels member, Fatih Aklan (Menkens and Leubecher 2016), the practice appears widespread as fights over security contracts have erupted in certain localities between different gangs, clans and organizations operating at the slippery border between the legal and the illegal. Indeed, this has also been enabled by the absence of strict regulations of private security companies. Or as Schreier and Caparini, again, put it, Most surprising is that in today’s world of regulations – where even what food we may eat or which cosmetics we may use is subject to strict regulation and monitoring by public authorities – the private military industry, so central to national and international security remains largely unregulated. Regulation of private security companies in domestic contexts is somewhat more developed but generally can hardly be said to be rigorous. To date, action to control PMCs and PSCs has been ad hoc and sporadic. (Schreier and Caparini 2005: 3)

Precisely there where states should be enforcing strict regulation, they systematically fail to do so. They fail to do so even when it is clear that

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the absence of adequate oversight and public control of private security companies poses ‘potential risks to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms’ (Born et al. 2007). This, combined with the massive proliferation of private security companies, results in further weakening of the perceived legitimacy of the state in the eyes of many and in emptying of the notion of state sovereignty. This is also a position that members and supporters of outlaw motorcycle clubs often openly endorse; or as one of them put it, if we are the supposed enemy, but at the same time we, and people like us, are the only ones capable of delivering security, the state is a joke.15

The neoliberal logic that robs the state both of its perceived sovereignty and legitimacy is at play also with respect to the financial markets (Davies 2017). And security and economy are precisely the two things largely beyond the control of the individual that people expect the state to be able to control on their behalf and in their interest. If the state is perceived as or actually is unable to do so, or appears weak, the most affected are likely to look elsewhere for alternatives—to the non-state sovereign actors. A couple of decades ago, we could not imagine the state going ‘bankrupt.’ For a simple reason—we did not use to think of the state as a business, as something that could ever go bankrupt (Zagrebelsky 2017; Davies 2017). This transformation is crucial. If the possibility of bankruptcy, of collapse, of self-implosion, threatens the state, the state’s credibility of its claim to sovereignty is inevitably lost. It makes it unable to control the very force people expect it to control; instead, it colludes with capital, uses its sovereign power to regulate in its favor and against itself, and submits itself to it. Such a state then overcompensates for its loss of sovereignty by over-regulating individual behaviors of its citizens in a desperate attempt at manifesting its power, as mentioned earlier, but this often has the opposite effect. Effectively, the state is emptied out of politics proper, and its democratic order remains a mere cherished form without any political content. Neoliberals, as Slobodian nicely shows in his book Globalists, have

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faced democracy as a problem. Democracy meant successive waves of clamoring demanding masses, always threatening to push the functioning market economy off its tracks. (Slobodian 2018: loc. 382)

In the neoliberal view, democracy and strong trade unions have been and still are the ‘threats’ that have to be fought. In order to achieve this neoliberal vision, politics proper is replaced by politics of submission, by technocratic and bureaucratic obedience to practical constraints, by austerity and by endless pragmatic negotiations with the very transnational interest groups that should be effectively controlled. Erik Swyngedouw offers in his latest book, devoted to the phenomenon, a useful definition of the current post-political moment, Post-politicization refers to the con-tested and uneven process by which consensual governance of contentious public affairs through the mobilization of techno-managerial dispositives sutures or colonizes the space of the political. Such depoliticizing gestures disavow the inherently heterogeneous and often antagonistic relations that cut through the social, and reduce the terrain of the political to the art or techné of public management. In other words, the political domain has been systematically narrowed over the past few decades to a techno-managerial apparatus of governance whereby fundamental choices are no longer possible or deemed reasonable. While problems and contentious issues of public concern (like environmental crises, urban revolts, terrorist threats, or economic conditions) are generally recognized, they are dealt with by means of consensual governance arrangements that do not ques-tion the wider social, ecological, and political-economic frame. Technologi-cal, institutional, and managerial ‘fixes’ are negotiated that leave the basic political-economic structure intact. Growing apathy from an increasingly disenfranchised public has paralleled this depoliticization, and resulted in a growing electoral appeal of antiestablishment and populist forces and political parties. (Swyngedouw 2018: xv–xvi)

The lack of power on the side of the people, the progressive dedemocratization (Brown 2006), coupled up with the inability of the state to act as a sovereign vis-à-vis global capital is a surefire way to produce resentment among the segments of the population most affected by this absence of politics proper.

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Even when it comes to control of the market, the one percenters effectively manufacture a semblance of sovereignty by controlling certain markets within their turf, be these businesses legal or illegal. They impose their own rules and regulations onto the market players within their turf, protecting their monopoly and limiting access to unwanted market actors and often also enforcing ‘security’ within their turf. They thus appear as actors who on the one hand have to formally submit to the regulatory forces of the state and play by the rules, but who at the same time enforce much stricter informal regulation within their turf, and thus appear as creators of jobs and opportunities as well as enforcers of street justice and ‘security.’ Media often contribute to this image, inadvertently helping to delegitimize the state, such as in the case of the notorious Hells Angel, social media ‘influencer’ and increasingly an anti-establishment populist Frank Hanebuth (Kuldova 2019). Hanebuth is regularly labeled in Spiegel TV and other media as ‘the king’ of the red-light district in Hannover, Steintorviertel. One reporter goes on to describe his rule in the Steintorviertel as follows, it is his rules that are enforced here; drug addicts and thieves must stay outside; under his rule, this run-down messy area has been transformed into a lucrative entertainment business. (emphasis mine)16

To many, this ability to enforce rules on a territory, in what appears to them as a far more effective manner than the state, is extremely seductive. The criminal boss, repeatedly charged for involvement in organized crime but never convicted, emerges here as the true sovereign king. The masses of supporters look up to him. His birthday, his wedding, his homecoming after remand at Mallorca for organized crime charges— all of these events have been publicly celebrated, reported on in the boulevard and biker media, and widely shared and commented upon on social media. One percenters thus often appear in the eyes of the supporters to be able to control what the state, indeed at a far larger territorial scale, fails to control. Crucially, they show that it is real actors who can create, challenge, and conspire against the system.

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Conspiracy Theories, Paranoia and the Search for Sovereignty The transformation of the modern state into a neoliberal security state resulted in sovereignty being on the one hand displaced from state to capital and, on the other, to the most unlikely non-state sovereign actors. As Zagrebelsky argued, the sovereignty of the state disappears in favor of a new, ghastly, nameless uncontrollable sovereignty: the sovereignty of the financial capital, which treats states as businesses. Public law will be replaced by the categories of commercial law, applied to those who used to be sovereign. (Zagrebelsky 2017: 14)

And yet, there is a peculiar problem with this vision of the ‘sovereignty’ of capital. This problem must be named if we are to understand the seduction of the anti-establishment right-wing populism and groups like the one percenters who benefit from becoming a mouthpiece of the same anti-establishment critique. Capital as the new sovereign is often imagined—especially by the left and the academic left in particular—as god-like, as penetrating every aspect of life on the globe, as uncontrollable and fluid, as an abstract omnipotent pseudo-entity. For instance, Wendy Brown in her analysis of the theological underpinnings of the idea of sovereignty and its capacity to ‘over-awe’ us, remarks that if global capital represents sovereignty without the sovereign, perhaps it is even more god-like than modern political sovereigns ever were insofar as it more closely approximates God’s power to make the world without deliberating about it. (Brown 2008: 263)

While the theological underpinnings of the idea of sovereignty itself cannot be doubted, we must ask: Why should we imagine capital or financial capital as some disembodied omnipotent force in the first place? Do we have to repeatedly talk as if there are no real interests, no real actors behind, no real power networks and players who could be

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controlled and could be forced to submit to laws imposed on certain territories in order to protect their population? Why this fetishization of capital, of the structural analysis itself? Could it be that the critique of capitalism by way of fetishization of structures is the only form of critique that is permissible within the current system? After all, we know what happens even to leftists who dare to name names and expose real interests and power networks: They are often labeled as conspiracy theorists. But we should maybe take the lead of authors like Woodiwiss, who in his book Gangster Capitalism (Woodiwiss 2005) resisted this fetishized talk about disembodied capital; after all fetish is precisely that which we create and that then takes power over us to which we submit, but there is no good reason why we should in the first place. This excessive fetishization of capital, so prevalent among the left, is also one of the reasons why the left has lost its appeal for many. At this point, we may ask again—what does the anti-establishment right-wing narrative offer as opposed to the left-wing idea of the god-like sovereignty of capital? At its most extreme—and also its most revealing—it offers conspiracy theories. As the visible sovereignty of the state retreats, and sovereignty is relocated into the invisible, hidden and secretive, conspiracy theories proliferate. As Simon Turner remarks, through conspiracy theories and rumors we look for the elusive kernel of sovereignty. Secrecy – located at the summit of forces – becomes the irreducible element of political ontology. Without secrecy we cannot assume the sovereign just as power could not maintain the illusion of its own sovereignty without the supplement of the secret. (Turner 2005: 38)

Conspiracy theories, as Frederic Jameson once remarked, can be understood as poor person’s mapping of the post-modern world… a degraded figure of the total logic of capital… a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer form and content. (Jameson 1988: 356)

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Again, we should not immediately assume here that people actually naively believe in these conspiracy theories. The opposite is often the case: The vast majority of people perceive them from a position of cynical distance, which, as we have learned earlier, may paradoxically make them fall for them even harder (Žižek 1989; Pfaller 2005; Mannoni 2003). Again, the question is not one of knowledge or ignorance, but of ideology, lack and desire. We should also insist that ‘conspiracy theories are important as collective delusions, delusions that nevertheless reflect real fears and real social problems, rather than as evidence of individual pathology’ (Bale 2007: 50). However, if we are mostly not dealing with naïve believers and if we are to take these theories seriously, we must ask what kind of function do conspiracy theories serve in this context and what do they offer? Conspiracy beliefs exhibit the structure of a ‘belief without believers’ and are, in my view, better understood as a form of fetish (an embodiment of this disavowal) that comforts, an embodiment of the lie that enables one to sustain the unbearable ‘truth’—the truth of one’s socioeconomic subordination and powerlessness. The one percenter subculture and its most vocal proponents, such as the clubs’ PR managers, have not only embraced the anti-establishment resentments, but also the rhetoric of ‘speaking truth to power from below’ which often takes the form of conspiracy theories circulated on the social media, discussion forums and hinted at and discussed in conversations over beer. Most popular of these conspiracy theories within the biker circles are those circling around the ‘new world order,’ ‘deep state’ (largely coinciding with Russian propaganda), ‘Kalergi plan,’ and to a certain degree ‘white genocide.’ Most of these theories can be said to be a refusal of the globalized world and its resulting transformation. At a first sight, it may appear paradoxical that transnational and global organizations, such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs, would be in the business of criticizing globalization from which they necessarily benefit. However, they see no contradiction here. The clubs themselves have, as we have seen, over the last decades transformed into a transnational reactionary response to this chaotic new world—conspiracy theories mirror this reactionary response. As Spark argued, ‘conspiracy theories seek totality and impose order, it may even seem that they are purpose-built for the contemporary world’ (Spark 2000: 47) that is

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chaotic, contingent, unpredictable, hard to navigate and marked by insecurity, individualization and flexibilization. The sudden appearance of the contingent therefore suggests a reason to account for the swift rise in popularity of conspiracy theories in the 1990s, namely as popular attempts to re-conjure a lost totality, and cope with the randomness which now seems to propel the world – and the one thing more frightening than thinking that all events are controlled, is thinking that none are. (Spark 2000: 57, emphasis mine)

Or as Bale put it, resonating greatly with the sentiments and motivations of the outlaw bikers and their sympathizers, belief in conspiracy theories helps people to make sense out of a confusing, inhospitable reality, rationalize their present difficulties and partially assuage their feelings of powerlessness. In this sense, it is no different than any number of religious, social or political beliefs, and is deserving of the same serious study. (Bale 2007: 51)

Again, we are dealing here with the same scenario in which people feel that matters are beyond their control and in which their prime desire is to restore a sense of order and thus control within the current ‘postpolitical technocratic order’ (Swyngedouw 2018). Or as Fenster put it, If fear of the loss of employment, personal control, and identity in a continually transforming economy and shrinking civil society saturates the lives of a considerable portion of the public, then conspiracy theory constitutes a profoundly satisfying politics. It not only explains the victory of seemingly demonological forces and the emptiness and inaccessibility of politics, but it also establishes a particular logic based on the interpretation of phenomena within an explanatory narrative form that is profoundly skeptical of dominant discourse. Continuity and balance, increasingly unsustainable at the personal level, re-emerge in the theory and practice of following conspiracy. (Fenster 1999: 72)

Conspiracy theories shared online by the outlaws and their supporters, do not only derive their popularity from the resistance to unfettered

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forces of globalization, but also from the parallel sense of loss of sovereignty that they respond to by proposing the existence of a very concrete but hidden sovereign power elite. Unlike the leftist vision of sovereign capital, the anti-establishment conspiracies name concrete rogue institutions, people, and groups that operate in the hidden, as a ‘hidden ­sovereign,’ pulling the strings—illegitimate, and unelected. Or as Spark puts it, Wherever the river has its source, in all the patriot/militia NWO scenarios one thing is made clear: the globalist forces are here already and are being actively assisted in their schemes to deprive Americans of their collective and individual sovereignty by a traitorous Federal government and its many agencies. (Spark 2000: 48)

The same goes for the different versions of the NWO theories across Europe, where the governments are increasingly seen as progressively robbing people of their civil rights, liberties, and constitutional freedoms, while enslaving them in exploitative working conditions. The constitutive fiction of all these popular conspiracy theories is a fiction of maximum control and power; it can be summed up the follows: there are people, in the hidden, who are truly sovereign. The members of this hidden elite circle are imagined, as Bale crucially observes, as not buffeted about by structural forces beyond their control and understanding, like everyone else, but are themselves capable of controlling events more or less at will. (Bale 2007: 53)

The electoral program brochure of AfD from 2017 sums up the same view as follows: The secret sovereign in Germany is a small, powerful political oligarchy that has formed itself within existing political parties. It is responsible for the failures of the last decades. A political class has emerged whose primary interest is its own power, status and material well-being. This oligarchy controls the state power, political education and the influence of information and media on the population. Only the people of the Federal Republic of Germany can end this illegal state by means of direct democracy.17

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Unlike the leftist idea of capital as the new sovereign, this conspiratorial vision of sovereignty offers hope and comfort. After all, if there is a hidden and illegitimate conspiracy, it is just a matter of taking those people down, of claiming sovereignty for oneself, of setting up the people and the power of the masses against the hidden elite, or, alternatively, of building one’s own secret power group, institutions and organizations to counteract the hidden ruling elite and to mobilize against the ‘deep state.’ Indeed, few really believe that the reality is that simple, but it is the comfort and hope this idea offers that counts. This becomes even more pertinent when considered in direct opposition to the leftist almost fatalist vision of the system that operates with an invisible godlike sovereign capital located at the same time everywhere and nowhere in particular, combined with politics preoccupied with the smallest of problems and resigned in respect of the ‘big issues.’ Instead, right-wing conspiracy theories point to real people with strategic interests pulling the strings behind closed doors. This is a simple, but profoundly satisfying and comforting narrative. It is not a coincidence that conspiracy theories take hold in milieus such as the one percenter subculture. For one thing, psychological research has shown that belief in conspiracy theories can be correlated with ‘anomia, lack of interpersonal trust and insecurity about employment’ (Goertzel 1994: 731). For another, people are ‘more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they thought they would be willing, personally, to participate in the alleged conspiracies,’ or else, ‘some people think “they conspired” because they think “I would conspire”’ (Douglas and Sutton 2011: 544). Organized crime is nothing else than a real conspiracy, operating in the shadows, hidden from the immediate sight, and members of outlaw motorcycle clubs already often participate in conspiracies themselves. Hence, they are also more likely to—if not believe—at least find these conspiracies satisfyingly plausible. One percenters are also a deeply paranoid subculture. This is fairly natural given the pressures from law enforcement and the governments—from persistent surveillance, attempted infiltrations by undercover officers, to police and bureaucratic harassment. Clubhouses are equipped with surveillance cameras, metal ports, alarm security systems; hang-arounds, prospects, and even supporters are screened, tested, and their accounts

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hacked into for fear of working for the other side; many a Facebook group is kept ‘closed,’ suspect profiles are removed, all profiles joining have to prove to the moderators that there is a real and trustworthy person behind, mostly to prevent law enforcement agents infiltrating online forums. ‘They are after us, they are everywhere, you have to be vigilant,’18 as one member of a support club put it. Of course, the question is to what degree it is paranoia when they are really after you, at the same time as we can ask—are they really that much after you? (Lee 2017). We dealing here with a profoundly paranoid subculture engaged in actual conspiring, and thus likely to exaggerate the degree to which others conspire against it (or in general). On the one hand, outlaw bikers appear as successful in conspiring in the hidden, like the Hells Angels who cast themselves as the ‘elite of the elite’ of the biker underworld. On the other hand, they also stand out as, to some, convincing victims of persecution by the political establishment—unjustly stigmatized and criminalized. This increases the credibility of their statements. Or else, the one percenters—in line with conspiracy theorists—are imagined to know something more about the world than the outsiders. And whoever aligns with them comes, too, in possession of this knowledge that sets him apart and makes him feel special—an incentive great enough to seduce many. Conspiracy theories reinforce this special position the outlaws assign to themselves. Or as Lee puts it, conspiracy theories also allow believers to mark themselves out as in some way special and more knowledgeable than their unenlightened peers as well as justifying more embedded prejudices and beliefs including innate mistrust of authority. (Lee 2017: 7)

They know how to break law and get away with it, play with the law to their advantage, and they also know that the powerful do exactly the same thing—only better and at a grand scale. In the view of their supporters, this places them again in a special position of credibility when attempting to delegitimize the state and the ‘system,’ and claim that they are sticking up for ‘the little man. Effectively, they manage to cast themselves as persecuted truth-tellers with a special access to a hidden

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reality. And, so they claim, because they are a visible subculture, they are also the first on the line: ‘they curb our freedoms now, but yours will be next’19—as an OMC member commented on the recent amendment of the German Association Act. This logic of outlaw rebels-turned-truth-tellers, whose freedoms are being denied, is as transnational as the clubs. Media and social media, where it is spread and embraced, care little for national borders and flatten out locally specific contexts. The view of the German one percenters can thus be best summed up by a 2018 episode of the RT signature TV show, A World According to Jesse, featuring Jesse Ventura, the inactive member ‘in good standing’ of the Mongols MC, a wrestler, actor, independent politician, author and the 38th Governor of Minnesota. The episode titled ‘RICO Act & Joe Yanni,’20 perfectly captured this widespread sentiment in the one percenter community and among the populist anti-establishment preachers. It discussed the ‘mass conspiracy charges by the Federal government’ or else, the notorious RICO Act (The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 1970) established to combat organized crime and mafia, now being used to prosecute and criminalize communities of color without having to prove that an actual crime has been committed by an individual, instead only proving one has conspired with others. Ventura calls this a dedicated globalist conspiracy that works ceaselessly to overthrow American liberties and raises the question of how one can be guilty by association? The discussion moves on to the unjust persecution of the Mongols MC. As Ventura goes on: The RICO law against the Mongols aims to strip them of their logos and badges. Does the First Amendment protect the Mongols here, what do you think? This is what they want to take of my body. On the back is Mongols, South Bay, and our emblem. There is a Harley Davidson patch, one of the greatest American companies that we have. American made Harley Davidson. On the front, when they take this from me, right here is the insignia of the United States Navy Seal Team, they are gonna take that away from me, too, I guess, a Vietnam veteran. Well, let me tell you something government, I took an oath, when I went into the United States Navy and became a navy seal to defend the constitution and the

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bill of rights against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The United States government is now a domestic enemy of the First Amendment. What right do they have to take that coat of me in public. … You may not like the Mongols, the Mongols may not stand for what you believe in, but they have every right, as any other citizen in this country, and they have the right to wear what they want. We are gonna allow the government to tell us what we can and cannot wear in public, yet, they allow Nazis to dress in full Nazi uniforms and march around their parades? That’s ok, but the Mongols jacket will be stripped of my body? I got news for you. I’ll die for the colors. So it’ll be interesting to see when they try to take them off me.

Again, like in Germany, where the OMCs organized biker demonstrations fighting for their constitutional rights in response to the governmental attack on the sacred club patches, even here the Mongols are portrayed as the outcasts, first to be targeted, but also first to fight back in the name of constitutional rights of all citizens. Outlaw bikers emerge here yet again as true anti-establishment sovereign heroes. They do not fear to die for their cause and their colors. But they fear bad life, and life not worth living, more than death. * * * The individual and political desire of most people is to transgress their servitude to the household economy, precisely that which contemporary politics has become. Their desire is to reject mere reproduction of the bare life, they wish to stop serving life and instead demand something from life, to experience the ability to act like a sovereign (Bataille 1993). This desire for sovereignty is also a desire for politics proper in a world that has been de-politicized (Bourdieu 2002), and that suffers from a democratic deficit (Brown 2008). Interpassively, the outlaws satisfy the desire for sovereignty on the part of their supporters. Through identification, outlaws provide the supporters with a sense of empowerment in an environment where they often become victims to structural forces beyond their control. They also satisfy people’s desire for a new master— popular characters like Frank Hanebuth are not unlike Putin or Trump; they only cater to a more immediate audience, taking on the role of the sovereign leader, protecting and punishing according to his (club’s) law.

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Moreover, qualities of these new masters are projected in a manner of transference from one to the other—Hanebuth is thus said to share qualities with either Putin or Trump, or both, depending on the supporter’s given worldview. Slavoj Žižek has brilliantly summarized this desire for the master in an interview in The Economist, when stating the following: I think that today’s populism reacts to the fact that experts are not really masters, that their expertise doesn’t work—again, just remember how the 2008 financial meltdown caught the experts unprepared. Against the background of this fiasco, the traditional authoritarian master is making a comeback, even if it is a clown. Whatever Trump is, he is not an expert. (…) A master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom. When we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we ‘alwaysalready’ wanted without knowing it). A master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly—for to gain this access, we have to be pushed from outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism; of what Alain Badiou called the ‘human animal.’ (…) The underlying paradox here is that the more we live as ‘free individuals with no master,’ the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities. We have to be pushed or disturbed into freedom by a master.21

The desire for sovereignty is a desire for politics proper—even there where it hides itself under a reactionary guise. And this comes as a shock to the pseudo-political technocratic order. This is a moment we should re-channel through a new and more satisfying politics instead of resisting through even more pseudo-politics that, with too much of ease, labels its opponents as ‘Nazis,’ thus feeding the populist machinery of resentment even further. While it is clear that the outlaws cannot really provide us with any image of a progressive sovereignty, and that their vision of sovereignty is deeply reactionary, it is also clear that we cannot get away from the desire and demand for sovereignty, essential for the re-emergence of the political. True sovereignty would mean not freedom of choice, but a freedom and ability to impose a new frame, a different frame to the current one—the reactionary sovereignty that emerges on the margins or the frontier, provides a relief, not unlike the conspiracy theories, but it is not a cure—it is merely a symptom

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of the current disease, even if a revealing one. One percenters offer a relief from melancholy; they offer not only a vision and practice of sovereignty, but also an alternative system of recognition, purpose in life, a cause to fight for, a code of honor, moral values, order and boundaries, routine and discipline, and so on. But they only exist within the current system as its ‘waste product.’ They depend—for their existence, and for the alternative they offer—on the social abjection this system produces. We cannot get away from the demand and desire for sovereignty, even if a melancholic one. The proliferation and increased attractiveness of non-state sovereign actors tell us precisely that. They become popular and grow in face of the state unable to provide protection, security, social welfare, respect or recognition, and most importantly, one unable to act in a sovereign manner on behalf of the population from which it ideally derives its sovereignty. Under such conditions, organizations that provide a semblance of what is imagined as completely lost, attract new supporters and members. Criminologists and political scientists have pointed toward the proliferation of non-state forms of governance under the conditions of economic decline, and weakening of the state. This is when it becomes increasingly easy for criminal organizations, militias, guerrilla groups, warlords, mafias, vigilante groups and other non-state armed actors to insert themselves into governance (Paoli 2008; Kupatadze 2012; Skaperdas 2001; Davies 2009), mirroring the ways in which multinational corporations have pursued the same goal (McGoey 2014; Hay and Muller 2014; Ostrower 1998, 2003; Nickel and Eikenberry 2009, 2010; Kapoor 2016; Odendahl 1990). This forces us to rethink the role of the state. The liberal-cosmopolitan fantasies grounded in the neoliberal notion that the nation-state is obsolete have prevented the left from developing a progressive view of national sovereignty. This too, precisely at the very moment when the working-classes as well as members of the middle-class fearing being declassed, turn to the nation-state in hope of a refuge from neoliberalism (Mitchell and Fazi 2017). Together with Mitchell and Fazi, we may ask if it is not necessary for the left to reclaim the state at this moment and offer a progressive vision of sovereignty. With Balibar, we could argue that a community need not be defined in nationalistic terms at all, it can simply be understood as ‘a “community of fate”, in which individuals and groups

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can neither separate nor get along at will ’ (Balibar 2009: loc. 3516), and that results purely and simply from the recognition by individuals and groups that they have been ‘thrown together’ by history, chance or ‘fate’ on the same territory or in the same ‘polity’. No spontaneous harmony can arise between their interests and allegiances, but an institutionalization of the conflicts between them can allow them to survive together. (Balibar 2009: loc. 3831)

Politics proper and the sovereignty can only emerge through acting in common, on behalf of a territorially defined community—politics without boundaries is impossible, irrespective of how much we would like to have such a politics. The only result of politics without boundaries is the very disappearance of politics—a fundamental depoliticization of life. The question we must ask is: How can we rethink boundaries in such a way that they remain closed to certain forms of capital and exploitation, while remaining open to the movement of people (i.e., the reverse of the current order) and while addressing the desire for sovereignty, one that will not go away. We should consider whether there is a progressive case that could be made for national sovereignty, and thus a case capable of redirecting the passions of the supporters away from the non-state actors toward a field of politics proper capable of taking control and acting in a sovereign manner.

Notes 1. https://www.bz-berlin.de/berlin/tom-schreiber-nennt-hells-angels-demo-witz-der-geschichte, accessed September 14, 2018. 2. Transl. from German by author. A selection from comments on the Facebook page Regierung gegen Rocker nicht mit uns (Government against bikers, not with us). 3. https://www.freiewelt.net/nachricht/chef-der-hells-angels-kritisiert-merkel-scharf-2017-war-ein-katastrophenjahr-10073288/?tx_ comments_pi1%5Bpage%5D= 1&cHash= 9baec06b9f1add1b444eaa226d6d5f29, accessed February 25, 2018.

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4. One-euro jobs policies were developed by the German government in 2005 to encourage long-term unemployed to reenter the workforce. ‘Those who work the one-euro jobs are typically paid by a government subsidy which ranges between 1 euro and 2 euros per hour ($1.06– $2.13) on top of their existing welfare benefits. Germany’s original one-euro job scheme has been frequently criticized in the past by labor unions, Federal Audit Office and others who argue the subsidized mini jobs replace regular jobs and do not lead to long-term employment.’ https://www.dw.com/en/one-euro-job-program-for-refugees-off-to-aslow-start-in-germany/a-36618371, accessed October 10, 2018. 5. Anonymized interview, Pasohlávky, Czech Republic, June 3, 2017. 6. Indeed, self-harming is prevalent across all socio-economic strata and among people with different backgrounds. The underlying causes may vary widely, including individual traumatic experiences, not necessarily related to the effects of socio-economic restructuring and neoliberalization of economy and social relations, and resulting increased inequality, insecurity, sense of worthlessness, dependency, and loss of control over one’s life. However, we may also imagine that in increasing amounts of such cases, the causes are precisely structural and yet the remedies that psychotherapy and even psychoanalysis offer are always individualized. It is hence no wonder that such therapies can often only treat the symptoms, but are unable to effect the underlying causes, hence only providing relief but not cure, much like the outlaw biker clubs, that often resemble a therapy group of sorts. 7. ‘Stilfragen’ by Michael Ahlsdorf, Bikers News, January 2005, p. 41. 8. Anonymized, informal interview, Carinthia, Austria, July 1, 2017. 9. Anonymized informal interview, Paris, May 25, 2017. 10. Anonymized informal interview with an OMC member and prospect present, Vienna, Austria, February 10, 2018. 11. United Tribuns is a group of bodybuilders, martial artists and bouncers, organized the same way as outlaw motorcycle clubs (with cuts and strict rules on membership and so on). Currently, they have chapters in three countries, with around 1700 members. 12. Anonymized, informal interview, Oslo, Norway, 2015. 13. http://dari-consulting.de/sicherheitsfragen, accessed September 2, 2018. 14. http://www.coess.org/newsroom.php?page= facts-and-figures, Germany, 2015, 5500 PSC, with a yearly turnover of 6.9 billion EUR.

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15. Anonymized, informal interview, Faaker, see Austria, September 7, 2017. 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvwYg3-n_k4&t=292s. Spiegel TV report, from minute 4:11, transl. from German by author, accessed October 15, 2016. 17. https://www.afd.de/wp-content/uploads/sites/111/2017/06/2017-0601_AfD-Bundestagswahlprogramm_Onlinefassung.pdf, p. 8, accessed September 20, 2017. 18. Anonymized, informal interview, Prague, Czech Republic, July 6, 2018. 19. Anonymized, informal interview, Ridnaun, South Tyrol, March 10, 2017. 20. https://www.rt.com/shows/the-world-according-to-jesse/434504-mongol-nation-motorcycle-club/, accessed July 28, 2018. 21. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/10/08/are-liberals-andpopulists-just-searching-for-a-new-master, accessed October 8, 2018.

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Nickel, P. M., & Eikenberry, A. M. (2009). A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(7), 974–989. Odendahl, T. (1990). Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite. New York: Basic Books. Østbø, J. (2017). Securitizing “Spiritual-Moral Values” in Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs, 33(3), 200–216. Ostrower, F. (1998). The Arts as Cultural Capital Among Elites: Bourdieu’s Theory Reconsidered. Poetics, 26(1), 43–53. Ostrower, F. (2003). Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Page, A., Lewis, G., Kidger, J., Heron, J., Chittleborough, C., Evans, J., et al. (2014). Parental Socio-Economic Position During Childhood as a Determinant of Self-Harm in Adolescence. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 49(2), 193–203. Pantazis, C., & Pemberton, S. (2009). From the “Old” to the “New” Suspect Community: Examining the Impact of Recent UK Counter-Terrorist Legislation. British Journal of Criminology, 49(5), 646–666. Paoli, L. (2008). Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style. London: Oxford University Press. Pfaller, R. (2005). Where Is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek’s Cultural Theory. In G. Boucher, J. Glynos, & M. Sharpe (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek (pp. 105–124). Cornwall: Ashgate. Pfaller, R. (2011). Wofür Es Sich Zu Leben Lohnt. Frankfurt am Main: FISCHER Taschenbuch. Pfaller, R. (2017). Erwachsenensprache: Über Ihr Verschwinden Aus Politik Und Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Postman, N. (2006). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. London: Penguin Books. Russell, T. (2010). A Renegade History of the United States. New York: Free Press. Schelhorn, L., & Heitmüller, U. (2016). Jagd Auf Die Rocker: Die Kriminalisierung Von Motorradklubs Surch Staat Und Medien in Deutschland. Mannheim: Huber Verlag. Schmitt, C. (2007). The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Schreier, F., & Caparini, M. (2005). Privatising Security: Law, Practice and Governance of Private Military and Security Companies (Occasional Paper No. 6). Geneva: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). Skaperdas, S. (2001). The Political Economy of Organized Crime: Providing Protection When the State Does Not. Economics of Governance, 2(3), 173–202. Slobodian, Q. (2018). Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. London: Harvard University Press. Slotkin, R. (1992). Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. New York: Atheneum. Smail, D. (2018). The Origins of Unhappiness. London: Routledge. Sommers, T. (2018). Why Honor Matters. New York: Basic Books. Spark, A. (2000). Conjuring Order: The New World Order and Conspiracy Theories of Globalization. The Sociological Review, 48(52), 46–62. Sparrow, J. (2018). Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. Minneapolis: Scribe Publications. Swyngedouw, E. (2018). Promises of the Political: Insurgent Cities in a Postpolitical Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner, F. J. (1893, July 12). The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Paper presented at the American Historical Association, Chicago. Turner, S. (2005). ‘The Tutsi Are Afraid We Will Discover Their Secrets’—On Secrecy and Sovereign Power in Burundi. Social Identities, 11(1), 37–54. Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London: Zero Books. Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press. Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41(1), 1–64. Whitehouse, H., Jong, J., Buhrmester, M., Gómez, Á., Bastian, B., Kavanagh, C. M., et al. (2017). The Evolution of Extreme Cooperation Via Shared Dysphoric Experiences. Nature Scientific Reports, 7, 1–10. Winlow, S., Hall, S., & Treadwell, J. (2017). The Rise of the Right: The English Defense League and the Transformation of Working Class Politics. Bristol: Polity Press. Woodiwiss, M. (2005). Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime. London: Constable.

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4 Sacred Order and Symbolic Immortality

It is early morning, and the party at the Hells Angels clubhouse1 is still in a full swing. Emotions run high. After all, this night of drinking was preceded by a memorial run for a brother who died three years ago in a motorcycle accident. The memorial run, a commemorative ritual, followed the established pattern. Members in their cuts, relatives of the deceased, supporters, family, and friends rode in a well-ordered pack of Harleys and cars from the clubhouse to the local cemetery and church. Everyone had their designated place in the convoy’s hierarchy. Traffic police ensured their smooth ride. When finally gathered at the cemetery, everyone paid their respects; few speeches were held, and a bottle of Jack Daniels was poured on the grave embellished with the ‘death head’ logo and an image of the deceased. Back at the clubhouse, everyone enjoyed an afternoon of grilling among the ‘family,’ followed by a party that went on until the next morning. Slideshows with images commemorating the deceased brother and others who passed away were being screened the whole day and night in loop on several TVs in the clubhouse, cultivating the affection for the brotherhood. As if this additional excess of nostalgia were necessary— after all, in the main room, a large permanent display cabinet stands © The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2_4

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filled with objects commemorating deceased brothers. It is crammed with images, engravings, and gifts—all embellished with the club’s death head logo, the notorious AFFA (Angels Forever, Forever Angels), or the taglines Angels never die, and Some are gone, but never forgotten. These objects tell us that being part of the club provides a route to imaginary immortality. Once in, one belongs to something larger than life. The official Hells Angels MC world Web site—or what could be termed the digital path to posthumous symbolic immortality (Meese et al. 2015; Lifton and Olson 1974)—has a page dedicated to the memory of lost brothers, listing over six hundred of them from across the world. YouTube lists numerous slideshows accompanied by the iconic song ‘Angels Never Die’ with millions of views. All anniversary events feature slideshows connecting the dead to the living, reinvigorating the cult again and again.2 The online and offline commemorative universe of the transnational brotherhood aligns with objects displayed prominently on the walls of the clubhouse: anniversary gifts from other chapters, support clubs and befriended clubs near and far, individual and group photographs from events such as international runs, weddings, and the notoriously spectacular funerals. All, again, branded with the death head logo and various inscriptions in the club’s typical typeface. Every clubhouse is a sacred temple to the brotherhood. Its walls display the history of the club and the wealth of its networks and relations to other chapters, friendly clubs and organizations. These walls are a reminder of the social and cultural effort put into building these relations. They also show the degree to which these relations are held dear by the members, a source of pride, honor, and value. The clubhouse reveals itself during this memorial run party as one huge sacralized commemorative site, a private museum to relations and memories. And the interactions within it become increasingly emotionally charged as the evening progresses. Here I stand, early in the morning, next to the club’s bar, in front of two Hells Angels. One of them has arms covered in tattoos of death heads accompanied by R.I.P. inscriptions, commemorating lost brothers, and others tattooed during and in memory of European and world runs—a living connection between death, ritual, and the sacred. They chat in a broken English, each from a different European country. In between, they hug, again and again. Jokingly, I remark: ‘oh come on,

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cut out this bro love, would you already?’ They laugh for a bit, only to turn deadly serious, locking their eyes. ‘I will always be there for you, brother, no matter what,’ says the first, holding the other in his embrace. ‘Same here, brother, I am ready to die for you any day.’ When they turn toward me, I can see tears in their eyes. ‘Oh no, now you are crying on me, too, come here,’ we all embrace. ‘This feels so good’ says the latter. I laugh, provoking their sudden urge to explain these tough men’s tears. ‘If you only knew what we have gone through together,’ says the former. ‘We were prospects at the same time; they gave us really hard time. Traumatic shit.’—‘Yeah, traumatic,’ nods the other. ‘But you gotta earn the patch,’ says the first. ‘You gotta give all, do all it takes. We would work our asses off together at international events and stuff like that. And we’d be treated like crap. But we were in it together. That’s how we’ve become so close.’ The other thinks for a bit, then goes on, That’s how you make bonds for life, we got our patch at the same time and we celebrated together. It was the best time of our lives. When you finally get that patch on your back, you turn from a nobody into a somebody. And you’d die for that patch and your brothers any day.

They went on, recollecting old memories, laughing, hugging again. Two years later, the latter died in an accident, in his mid-thirties. Now his image with a death head and the Angels never die inscription circulates online, posted by chapters across the world. Hundreds have by now typed R.I.P. under it, or, as one of them did, ‘ride in peace on ­thunderous clouds through eternity.’ Now he is a decoration in the memorial cabinet—a sacred relic of the brotherhood. * * * Over the course of this and the next chapter, we shall unpack two key moments of this brief ethnographic vignette: (1) the production of the sacred and the inalienable and of the sacred order in the one percenter subculture as a cultural route to symbolic immortality and the (2) quest for authenticity that underlies the willingness to sacrifice oneself on behalf of one’s brothers and the sacred, and the attraction this heroism holds for the supporters. In this chapter, we shall focus on the former, namely, the ability of the outlaw motorcycle clubs to ritually produce

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the ‘sacred’ for their members. This sacred is concentrated in the club colors, the insignia that share some structural features with items such as police badges (Librett 2008) or sacred national flags that, too, demand sacrifice (Marvin and Ingle 1996, 1999). Or as Nichols put it, pointing to the taboo that governs them, ‘member’s club colors are sacred and, like the flag of his country, must never touch the floor, even in a fight’ (Nichols 2007: loc. 1955). The only difference being, as we have seen in the previous chapters, that outlaw biker insignia often tend to increase in their powers of attraction precisely in times when national flags have lost some of their luster—in times when people search for alternative, but comparable, sources of significance. A German outlaw biker brought it to the point in his passing remark: The flag no longer means anything, the military is a joke, can anyone really imagine dying for Merkel or the EU? …The patch is all we got, and it keeps us going, we are our own army. The system is fucked, so fuck it, we have our own rules.3

One percenters have developed their own means to satisfy the human desire for transcendence in face of death—a desire intertwined with the desire for sovereignty we discussed earlier. While many have remarked that to the one percenters the patches are sacred, there is no analysis going beyond stating this statement. We can for instance read that, members wear their patches proudly as a sign to society – I’m a bikie. Don’t fuck with me. For the clubs, there’s nothing more sacred than the club colors or patches. (Veno and Gannon 2004: 33)

But nobody has paused to wonder about this remarkable feature of the counterculture. Nobody has asked, if it is so that one percenters truly produce their own form of sacred, what does it actually mean? Or, why is this form of sacred seductive for many, right now? So far, we have been left with general observations such as this: It is impossible to overstate the importance of patches to an MC member. They are his most prized possession and the loss of them under almost

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any circumstances is an unbearable disgrace. Patches are absolutely sacred and it is no exaggeration to say that MC members consider them worth fighting for and, if necessary, dying for. (Thompson 2013: loc. 155)

The patches are of course a result of a long and tedious hang-around and prospect time, during which the prospective members are tested; the route to finally getting a patch is paved with humiliation, exploitation, and mistreatment. The patch has to be earned. But it is during the initiation ritual that the patch is sacralized and invested with the power of the brotherhood—ritual creates the sacred rather than merely identifying it (Rappaport 1999). Initiation rituals vary between one percenter clubs and have also considerably transformed themselves over the course of the years. The classic rendering of the initiation ritual is by Hunter Thompson, who described how the new pair of Levi’s jeans and matching cut with the fresh death head logo is defiled by a bucket of dung and urine … collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer’s head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in. (Thompson 2003: 26)

A more recent account from Germany describes an initiation ritual, where the prospect has to prove himself by having sex with a prostitute in front of the whole charter, following which all the other members have sex with her, too (Detrois 2013). Two founding members of Bandidos MC in Germany, reflecting on the change in the subculture, of which they have been part since the 70s, sum the transformation of the ritual as follows in their memoir: The one percenter life today cannot be compared to the past – but it is the past that has massively influenced Les and me. Firstly, as a new member one had a proper patch baptism (Kuttentaufe ) back then. There were different rituals for that. Many clubs did a patch burn-out. The cuts would be placed in dirt, and then someone would do a proper burn-out with his machine. Others would place their new patched cuts in mud and then all members would ride of them on their machines, until they

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were almost unrecognizable. This does not exist today anymore. When I see how much money some of our members pay for their cuts – it has become a fashion accessory that can easily cost up to 1000EUR – then it is not surprising that one renounces some of these old customs. And then there is another essential objection: who pisses on their own colors? For us colors are symbolically invaluable. The most members have fought hard for their membership, and fagged themselves out for years in order to one day wear these colors on their backs. Then it is not surprising that he does not want to spoil them with beer, old oil, vomit, or piss – only to wear them unwashed for the rest of his club-life. These days are over. (Maczollek and Hause 2013: 37–38; transl. from German by author)

The classical initiation rituals of re-birth are ‘filthy rites’ (Greenblatt 1982) involving often disgusting and repulsive substances, from shit to semen. Such substances are especially well-suited to transform the patch into something sacred, and collective; something that both transgresses the individual and governs him. However, even contemporary, at times, but not always, more sanitized rituals—that mirror the general professionalization, consolidation, and bureaucratization of the clubs—still arouse the passions of the club members. These rituals—both those for the members and those staged for supporters and friends—result in what Émile Durkheim labeled ‘collective effervescence.’ Or else, in an alignment of the affective states that produce a sense of belonging in the participants, a social glue—a ‘fusion of particular sentiments into one common sentiment’ (Durkheim 1965: 262). But these passions, in order to be effective, have to be directed (Lordon 2014). Affects may push people to act, but the question always is in what direction (Kuldova 2016). Therefore, the passions aroused by the different rituals—be they initiations, anniversaries or memorial runs—must come with a set of values, laws, and rules of conduct, or else, a sacred order and mythology that directs them (Citton 2010). The sacred and the sacred order that the clubs manage to produce for themselves—and for vicarious consumption by their supporters—is no simple or negligible matter. To the contrary, it speaks to fundamental human desires for sources of significance, recognition, order, belonging, meaning, and most of all—symbolic immortality. Instead of glossing over what at first sight appears so obvious, we must dig deeper. In particular, because the clubs position themselves

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consciously against a world they deem profane, fake, inauthentic, and unoriginal, populated by mass-produced copies. And possibly even more so, because this sentiment of theirs resonates with many who are disillusioned by the current neoliberal order. Or as one outlaw biker put it in his cultural diagnosis: ‘the problem with the world today is that nothing is sacred to people anymore, everything is for sale.’4 This sentiment is not unique, especially in these times of widespread resentment vis-à-vis the elites. In fact, his statement can be read as an expression of a larger cultural desire for re-enchantment, for the inalienable and the authentic, an echo of what Marine Le Pen once said to Emmanuel Macron: You are the candidate of the power to buy … everything is for sale, everything can be bought, men can be bought and sold … you only see human relations in terms of what it brings in, in terms of the dividends that can be derived from that. That is not my vision, I believe in giving.’5

Instead of looking with much hope to political solutions, one percenters create their own sacred and brotherhood ethic in face of disenchantment and the loss of the inalienable in our culture. Theirs is also hardly an unfamiliar sentiment to the theorists of secularization and disenchantment in modernity who have insisted that the connection between the sacred and the social has been severed at the cost of pervasive nihilism, alienation, and anomie (Weber 2005; Durkheim 1965; Taylor 2007; Lasch 1991, 1996). One percenters are a counter-culture precisely in response to this process. Uncannily, in their practice, they materialize the theoretical position of the nowadays often forgotten conservative cultural theorist Philip Rieff, who argued that no culture or for that matter social order can exist without the sacred and that Western attempts to reorganize society without the sacred are simply vane. Or as he put it: ‘where there is nothing sacred, there is nothing’ (Rieff 2006: 12). To Rieff, every culture that tries to establish its social order without reference to a sacred order must be called an anti-culture. (Zondervan 2005: loc. 86; emphasis in original)

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Herein lies for both Rieff and the one percenters, beyond their obvious differences in respect to religion, the nature of the crisis of modernity and postmodern society. Both shun the therapeutic and the technocratic that have come to dominate the social and political life in the West (Rieff 1972; Lasch 1996; Smail 2018). In a similar vein, Rieff also argued that membership in and commitment to a community can serve as a form of cure, providing individuals with purpose and stability. Resonating further with the self-perception of the one percenters, Rieff also notes that within contemporary society preoccupied with the individual self, and looking down at any form of traditional authority, any commitment to a community is viewed not only as extreme but as pathological, suspicious, and deviant. Or as an Austrian supporter of an outlaw motorcycle club put it: The ‘citizens’ fear us because we stick together, not supposed to do that you see, … the most natural thing to do, and you are not supposed to do that! Three people hanging out together a gang! … they just fear people who stick together, they are shit-scared of people organizing. So, they call us criminals, white trash, deplorables, as Hilary called us, you name it.6

Any total commitment to a ‘greedy institution’ (Coser 1974) goes against the constitutive elements of a modern individualist society. Where man is meant to exist at the intersection of multiple social circles and to perform different roles, there any total devotion to an institution is not only seen as deviant but also as threatening. Greedy institutions that demand total loyalty, be they outlaw motorcycle clubs, religious orders, police force or military (Segal 1986; Coser 1974), promise to relieve the modern man from his fragmentary existence by providing a unifying sacred order. Or as Ernst Becker put it: We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans, elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church. And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so many sources, we are deeply anxious about the meaning of our lives. The reason is plain enough: none

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of these, nor all of them taken together, represents an integrated world conception into which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust. (Becker 1975: 71)

This ability of the outlaw motorcycle clubs to create an integrated world conception, a sacred order, is seductive to many today. To those who struggle with the experience of the social world around them as fragmentary, and chaotic, permissible of transgressions and enjoyments, but lacking in sources of guidance, one percenter clubs offer a resolute alternative with a powerful mythology. Already Nietzsche observed that faced with the fragmentation and disintegration of society, a need for new myths arises—specifically, culturally rejuvenating myths supplying life-affirming attitudes (Nietzsche 1967, 1983). Vis-à-vis the widespread devaluation of myth as an irrational fairy tale, the one percenters offer a diametrically opposed greedy institution that, fueled by myths, runs on the sacred; an institution that demands full commitment, defines codes of behavior, orders social world into transparent sets of allies and enemies, structures time and reinvigorates itself through rituals, effectively offering a path to immortality. This ability of the one percenters is the more remarkable given the fact that the clubs have used a route of vulgar self-commodification to, paradoxically, effectively produce the sacred, and instill the boundary between the sacred and the profane (Caillois 1959; Durkheim 1965). The fact that they manage to create something larger than life people are willing to die for—and at the same time market it, brand it, and sell it to supporters—accounts for a great deal of the seduction of the outlaws. It is thus essential to understand this ability of the clubs to produce, defend, and die for the sacred of their own making if we are to comprehend the increased support and growth of these organizations. The sacred and the fetishes made by man that take power over him (Pietz 1985) play an extraordinary role in the lives of the members as well as those who look up to the clubs. The sacred demands sacrifice and makes people act in ways they would not otherwise, thus providing an additional source of the feeling of self-transcendence. As Steve Weinberg told a New York Times reporter in 1999,

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with or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Or as Slavoj Žižek once put it: ‘behind every ethnic cleansing there is a poet’ (Žižek 2018), with his promise of symbolic immortality and transcendence. The fundamental question is: ‘why are men so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in chains?’ (Becker 1975: 50). The desire for the sacred is a desire for order stemming from the fear of chaos and insignificance, a fear strong enough to make us desperately and willingly bind ourselves in chains (Lordon 2014). With Christopher Lasch, whose cultural critique resonates with the sentiments of the one percenters, we could say that this desire for the sacred order increases in the current fragmented cultural and political climate dominated by ideas of pluralism and tolerance, a cultural world determined to respect everyone but that has forgotten that respect has to be earned (Lasch 1996). And these men certainly want to earn it. The clubs thus fill an existential need the current cultural order is increasingly unable to satisfy—the need for meaning, coherence, clear ethical commitments and a path to immortality, heroism and self-transcendence. In the next chapter, we will take the discussion a step further and investigate the consequences of cultivating this form of the sacred, or else, what does it make people do.

On the Desire for Sacred Order and the Function of the Sacred Patch Ernest Becker has in his work famously explored the struggle of the free and anxious human confronted with ‘the terror of the world and of his own death and decay’ (Becker 1973: 69) to transcend death through culture; a struggle to transcend and deny death through a ceaseless production of fantasies of heroism that would disguise and deny man’s true condition of mortality and create an illusion of immortality. As Becker argued in the Escape from Evil, what people dread the most in their lives is insignificance, or else,

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what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. (Becker 1975: 4)

The desire of the one percenters to become cultural icons, to be immortalized in cinema, TV shows, spectacular media headlines or even in their own memoirs, or on social media, is nothing else but a striving toward immortality; it is a resistance of death in insignificance. Or as a member of a one percenter club once put it, people like me were born to work, die and be forgotten, like my parents did, but nobody will forget us, our legacy will go on.7

In Becker’s view, not merely religion, but culture itself becomes sacred, thus unsettling the classical distinction between the profane and the sacred. Nevertheless, one could still argue that certain objects and illusions are culturally produced as more sacred than others in that they institute and defend the very boundary between the sacred and the profane in the first place (irrespective of the sacred elements of the profane an analysis may reveal) and thus also more capable than others of alleviating the anxiety of a death in insignificance. The sacred often plays a crucial role in the different hero systems that societies create to enable us to fall for the illusion that we can transcend death. Alas, even here we have to remind ourselves of the structure of disavowal, namely, ‘I know quite well, but still…’ that underlies this denial of death and thus often makes us fall even harder for the illusion (Pfaller 2014; Mannoni 2003). While the hero systems with their illusions may help us alleviate our anxiety of death, they simultaneously produce new forms of anxieties. Even when the heroic cultural projects initially set out to combat one evil or another, they may paradoxically result in bringing more evil into the world. Or as Becker puts it: Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of

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instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world that organisms could ever do by merely exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. (Becker 1975: 5)

Retrospectively, we see that the carefully cultivated illusions of sovereignty and transcendence of the household economy relate to this fundamental denial of death that underpins culture. But, these illusions are a double-edged sword: They can flip anytime into becoming a source of great evil and suffering. The enchanting sublime power rests much like sovereignty on transgression and transcendence; both also share a structural similarity to the sacred, the reverence of which is ‘composed equally of terror and confidence’ (Caillois 1959: 22). The sublime, the sovereign and the sacred belong to the same order of cultural phenomena. Thought together they explain some of the seductive power of the one percenters that goes beyond the material and financial gains. They tell us more about the attraction they hold for those in search of meaning, orientation, respect, self-esteem, significance, immortality, in a world of insecurity, inequality, and chaos; in a world, where every man is left to himself to create his own meaning, a world that is disinclined to offer them self-esteem, respect, and recognition, or for that matter any heroic image of themselves, instead, casting them as eternally meaningless and forgettable losers. While we know that ‘the experience of injustice can lead to further injustice’ (Young 2009: 172), we should also consider that deprivation and thus injustice in distribution of the sources of significance can drive people into a desperate and acute search for alternative forms of recognition and meaning, with potentially even more detrimental effects. Some are more excluded than others from partaking in certain cultural forms that would provide them with meaning, self-esteem, and recognition. But the cultural offer of illusions at large also differs across history and societies. And as it appears, we live today in a particularly deprived period at large. Rising individualism, consumerism, and inequality, a sense of disenchantment of the world, the omnipresent rhetoric of crisis

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and instability, the endless proliferation of competing but fragmentary sources of meaning and the overall nature of ‘the postmodern condition’ (Lyotard 1984), have all exacerbated the need for something sacred to hold onto, mirrored, among other things, in the rise and revival of nationalism (Lasch 1996). It has also made the quest for a satisfying illusion endlessly more difficult by displacing much of the earlier cultural techniques onto the market of commodities. This has only resulted in the harms of the relentless socio-symbolic competition, and a world where the only order that matters is the order created by the symbolic values of consumer items (Hall et al. 2012; Hall and Winlow 2013). We often imagine and encounter the common criminal of our times who desires the status goods that he is unable to legitimately acquire, a criminal in search of the ever unsatisfying and ever disappointing ‘consumer sovereignty,’ a criminal who, too, wants to have the fancy and excessive life of luxury of the elites and of the commercials with all the status symbols and power that come with it (Tudor 2018). Paradoxically, most one percenters, even when some among them are determined to use the club to build their business empires and to show off their luxury habits, shun this attitude toward status symbols and the commodity market. Instead, in response to the neoliberal and status impasse, the one percenters have developed cultural techniques and illusions that, while remaining profoundly dependent on the logic of the commodity and the underlying magic of branding, brought to life a fantasy of transcendence of consumerism as a way of ordering the world. Already in 1973, Becker observed the increasing difficulty that modern culture had with providing satisfying illusions: The quality of cultural play, of creative illusion, varies with each society and historical period. …If history is a succession of immortality ideologies, then the problems of men can be read directly against those ideologies – how embracing they are, how convincing, how easy they make it for men to be confident and secure in their personal heroism. What characterizes modern life is the failure of all traditional immortality ideologies to absorb and quicken man’s hunger for self-perpetuation and heroism. Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man… It begins to look as

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though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and ‘continuing’ revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. …Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes for absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions. (Becker 1973: 190; emphasis mine)

Once a prospect, when asked about why he wanted to join the club, remarked, as if evoking the last sentence in the aforementioned quote, that ‘women are known to leave, families to break, but the brotherhood is eternal.’8 He posited the superior nature of the illusion of the one percenter tribe to the poor illusions on offer in the profane world. The reason why he, like many others, perceived this illusion as superior to those that circulate in contemporary society at large is not only that it offers a unique source of respect, recognition, and self-aggrandizement in face of ‘status frustration’ (Cohen 1955), but also a particular form of the sacred. Or as Becker observed, ‘man needs self-esteem more than anything; he wants to be a cosmic hero’ (Becker 1975: 37). The disenchantment of the world that the bikers and their sympathizers sense and complain about is related to the diminishing valorization of heroes and heroism. In a similar vein, Johan Huizinga showed us that the heroic period is over, and that we live in times of an uncanny disappearance of play from mainstream contemporary culture, which to him equaled the loss of the ability to impart significance to life. But he also observed that the outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings. (Huizinga 1970: 12)

This play-element, as Huizinga showed, is crucial to the development of the sacred. It therefore comes as no surprise that we find a greater capacity to ritually and culturally produce the sacred precisely among groups such as the one percenters. After all, the honor culture that

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they cultivate, a culture where a tiniest remark and inappropriate gaze can set off a chain reaction of endless retaliations, enacts its games of honor with the ‘sacred seriousness’ of play Huizinga described so well (Huizinga 1970). Outlaw bikers are not only masters at such endless games of honor, but also at defending their sacred symbols for which they are willing to sacrifice themselves (Campbell and Manning 2014, 2018). It is no accident that it is precisely these groups that display some of the greatest discontent with the disappearance of clear hierarchies of value, watering down of the sacred and the overall increasing sense of ontological anxiety. Or as Becker again argued, it is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is hardly any way to get a sense of value except from the boss, the company dinner… Primitive society was a formal organization for the apotheosis of man. Our own everyday rituals seem shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only using one’s fellow man as a mirror to make one’s face shine, the primitive used the whole cosmos. (Becker 1975: 20)

What these groups yearn for is a sacred order akin to the cosmic order the so-called primitive man was able to create for himself—here we must note that there was nothing primitive about this primitive man, as already Wittgenstein argued in response to Frazer’s Golden Bough (Frazer 1894); the so-called primitive knew well the difference between magic and technique (Wittgenstein 1979), using each for what they were worth. The desire for sacred order is nothing else than a desire for one to have a place and significance within the larger scheme of things. When such order appears to be lacking, or one feels excluded from the society’s cultural fictions capable of providing such a sense of order and value, one tends to either isolate oneself sinking into depression, build alternative structures capable of providing similar cultural comforts or align oneself with those who bear the promise of building such structures. Or as Berger rightly observed, separation from society inflicts unbearable psychological tensions upon the individual, tensions that are grounded in the root anthropological fact of sociality. The ultimate danger of such separation, however, is the danger of

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meaninglessness. This danger is the nightmare par excellence, in which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness. Reality and identity are malignantly transformed into meaningless figures of horror. To be in society is to be ‘sane’ precisely in the sense of being shielded from the ultimate ‘insanity’ of such anomic terror. …existence within a nomic world may be sought at the cost of all sorts of sacrifice and suffering – and even at the cost of life itself, if the individual believes that this ultimate sacrifice has nomic significance. (Berger 2011: 36)

Since groups such as the one percenters are often perceived as the deviant and disorderly embodiment of anomy, senselessness, madness, and even horror, the degree to which they create a social/sacred order for themselves precisely in order to combat what they see as generalized societal anomy, senselessness, and feelings of insignificance, is often ignored. We too often close our eyes to this capacity groups like the one percenters display, their ability to organize, manage social relations, be it between groups or individuals, and create a sacred superstructure to the economic structures which they create and in which they are implicated. We ignore this precisely because of the all too familiar and often violent consequences of the commitment and devotion to the alternative sacred order, and because of the spectacular reports about their crimes that appear to many as nothing but senseless and outrageous madness. Moreover, the sacred order these organizations create for themselves does not only bring violence into the world—often in the name of the protection of the sacred and related reputation, but paradoxically, also at the same time reduces a great deal of chaotic violence in the milieu not related to business. The capacity of these organizations for creating alternative extra-legal governance institutions has been well-documented by Skarbek in his study on American prison gangs, The Social Order of the Underworld (Skarbek 2014). The sacred order, as Paden observed, is simultaneously 1) a set of objects imbued with transhuman power or significance and 2) a matrix of obligations which upholds the world of those objects. (Paden 2000: 208)

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Both of these are necessary and work together to keep the alternative order growing—and attractive. To the one percenters, their cuts with their patches, their colors, are the most sacred objects, ritually sacralized and woven into myth. Other objects, branded with the sacred club logo are reserved only to the select few and are sacralized by this logo. These objects, or rather the logo, display the mana model of sacrality with its totemic power (Durkheim 1965); they are objects empowered by the subculture to appear as sacred (Paden 2000). Through ritual, such as the aforementioned initiation with its dysphoric experiences designed to make one bond with the group (Whitehouse et al. 2017; Whitehouse 2013, 2018), these objects are sacralized. Ritual is thus to be understood not as ‘an expression of or a response to “the Sacred”; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual’ (Smith 1987: 105). It is after all, as Becker noted, by means of the techniques of ritual men imagined that they took firm control of the material world, and at the same time transcended that world by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural, raised them over and above material decay and death. (Becker 1975: 7)

The importance of ritual points us beyond the mana model of sacrality, toward the sacrality of the system itself. The sacrality of the system is revealed in that the sacred order must be upheld and defended at any cost against any violation (Caillois 1959). When it comes to the sacred of this order, the emphasis, as Paden pointed out, should be not merely on the orderly arrangement, as opposed to messiness, randomness and chaos – but on that which must be defended from violation… (it) describes a world of inalienable authority and the vigilant maintenance of its integrity. …One must keep the world ‘right’. (Paden 2000: 210–211)

It is the sacred order that is being defended when the sacred insignia are defended; the club logo represents that which is not only sacred but also inalienable. It is precisely this ability of the one percenter subculture

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to create the inalienable that must be defended by its members at all costs and from even the tiniest of insults—to which the popular biker memoirs, filled with stories of the tiniest provocations related to the club colors, only testify (Maczollek and Hause 2013; Nichols 2007; Schelhorn and Heitmüller 2016; Ahlsdorf 2017; Detrois 2013, 2014). Or as Roger Caillois puts it, ‘the sacred cannot be subdued, diluted or divided’ (Caillois 1959: 23). The sacred must be protected from dilution and desecration. Desecration here is to be understood as …the violation of the sacred. Where does the sacred lie for the victim? … around this body everything which gives it a name or identifies it – a cap, a badge, a form of dress, any kind of sign – will represent something that is felt to be sacred: all those elements which give a person social importance. Everything which removes marks of rank, deconstructs or defiles, even the name, strikes at this non-religious sense of sacredness which encloses the dignity of the individual in all cultures, and produces shame before suffering: a purely sociological pain. (Nahoum-Grappe 2002: 556)

It is no coincidence that the ‘death head’ of the Hells Angels and other one percenter clubs’ insignia are more often than not trademarked. After all, what else is a trademark than something that protects from both dilution and desecration by the profane, fake, and inauthentic? The one percenters defending their sacred patches have understood this magical quality of the brand, the fetishism of the brand protected by the intellectual property law itself (Assaf 2012; Kuldova 2017)—as well as the way trademarks protect this magic. We are stumbling upon the terrain of fetishism—both in the case of the sacred patch and in the case of the brand. With Marx, we could say that the manic object, or the fetish, is something that people create only to act as if that object has power over them (Marx 1977). With Becker, we could add—only so that they feel that they act in alignment with larger meaning and significance. The patch embodies this significance, values, and community of the bikers; it is the materialization of their brotherhood ideology and codes of honor. In a TV documentary, Outlaw Bikers, John Real, the former president of Hells Angels Maryland captured the transformatory power of the patch in the following manner:

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I was the talk of the town, one of the best guys, we were initiated as Hells Angels, best day of my life, as soon as I changed that patch I became this monster, from just the jacket I wore. I put that patch on and I paid the price. I eventually got arrested, I eventually got charged […] I eventually lost almost everything I owned, because of that patch, but I would do that again tomorrow. (Winterhalder et al. 2010)

Even a brief statement like this reveals that people are not unaware that they fall for cultural illusions of their own making, and yet, it may be precisely this knowledge that makes them fall even harder. One percenters are fully aware that the fetish they fall for is of their own making, they are aware of their own ‘social creativity’ in the process (Graeber 2005). We are thus not dealing with a question of mystification or false belief (Kuldova 2019), but with cultural production of powerful illusions where nobody is fooled about them being illusions, but this precisely makes them the more willing to defend them. These particular illusions, moreover, are not ‘poor illusions,’ but rather very powerful ones, capable of inducing a sense of empowerment and self-transformation and of pushing people into action in the world. Outlaw bikers do not naively believe that a piece of cloth possesses magical powers, and yet they are willing to fight, and even kill if anyone desecrates it. This is the essence of the sacred and of objects that have been effectively sacralized. An incident that took place in Germany shows us that they clearly know better: The football team SV Gremberg of the local division (Kreisliga C) was about to play against Leverkusen when it turned out that they are running around in ‘Support 81’ T-shirts with the text ‘Red Army 81 Cologne supports Hells Angels.’ Leverkusen felt intimidated, and even scared, refusing to play at first, others claimed that it was a scandal to let Hells Angels commercially endorse a club.9 The response of the Hells Angels across the social media was: ‘do these people seriously believe that a piece of cloth, a T-shirt, can intimidate anyone?’ Here again, it is precisely the cynical distance, the awareness of a patch being just a piece of cloth, that makes them fall for its power even harder. Again, we are dealing with ideology, and knowledge does not break with ideology. To the contrary, it makes it even more effective.

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We could say that people are willing to sacrifice themselves, precisely despite knowing better. After all, if they did not know better, their sacrifice would hardly count as a true sacrifice in the first place. Outlaws know very well that they follow the ‘sacred’ laws of their own making; they know things could play out differently, but precisely because of this knowledge, things must play out the way they must; the sacred order must be defended—beyond reason. Or as Sonny Barger put it: ‘you can’t pull the patch off of another chapter’s member’. Taking somebody’s patch is a dangerous symbolic gesture. It represents capitulation, defeat. … Any serious offense has to go to an officer’s meeting and go through proper channels. Just because a guy can beat me up doesn’t entitle him to take my patch. If somebody beats me up and takes my patch, I might kill him even if he’s a member. (Barger 2001: 46)

A member can be kicked out of the club if he loses his patch (Detrois 2013). Things could theoretically play out differently, but they typically will not; the maintenance of the sacred order is imperative. It is precisely this sacrifice on behalf of the sacred order that—in the eyes of the one percenters—distinguishes the members from the wannabees and supporters, who would like to participate in the transformatory power of the patch, but who do not want to or have the guts to sacrifice for it. Without sacrifice, there is no real power backing up the sacred.

On the Paradoxical Relation of the Sacred and the Commodified Let us now return for a moment to the 60th anniversary event of the Hells Angels Oakland charter at the end of May 2017 in Paris (see Chapter 2) and consider the peculiar ritual of a spectacular devouring of the sacred totem by the members of the tribe. Around twelve thousand Angels, supporters, and friends of the club from all across the world, from USA, Russia to Japan, came together to join in the festivities and transformed the Dock Eiffel fairground into a biker extravaganza. In both halls—already heavily decorated with club insignia—slideshows,

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in the now familiar commemorative spirit, with historical and recent images from Hells Angels parties, funerals, charity runs, and memorial runs from across the world were screened on TV screens and on the stage, playing in loop behind the performing music bands, burlesque dancers, and fire showgirls. Members and fans alike lined up in a long queue to get Sonny Barger’s signature onto their copy of the anniversary photo book Sonny: 60 Years Hells Angels, others shopped for even more Support 81 merchandize—anything from t-shirts, jackets, bags, stickers to belts and pins, members bought their must-have anniversary t-shirts; some spotted David Labrava, or else ‘Happy’ from the series Sons of Anarchy, a member of the Oakland charter, and bothered him for selfies, and some even managed to get a quick snap with Hollywood’s own action hero Mickey Rourke. But it was the event’s culmination that attracted the most attention: Sonny Barger giving a short speech on the stage in front of a several meters long cake executed to perfection in the Angels’ colors of red and white, and shaped as the Golden Gate Bridge meeting the Eiffel Tower and decorated with numerous ‘death heads.’ About everyone was gathered in the hall, watched the father figure-cum-celebrity speak, and recorded and took pictures on the phone, many kneeling in front of the massive cake to fit it into the same frame as Sonny Barger. When the cake was finally cut, the ‘death head’ logo could only be eaten by the members. In a snap of a knife piercing through the cake, the distinction between the insiders and outsiders, between the sacred and the profane, materialized. This only increased the desire of the outsiders to belong and partake in the power of the clan, the power in which they could participate only by virtue of ‘sympathetic magic’ (Frazer 1894), identification and transference. This anniversary, like many others, even though often smaller, organized yearly by clubs and their charters worldwide, functioned as a group-renewing ritual. It culminated in the devouring of the clan’s totem—an act that would be at normal times (or performed by outsiders) considered forbidden and sacrilegious. Sustaining a sacred order and a community is a hard work that requires great amounts of ritual labor (Bell 1992, 1997). Ritualized events such as parties, world runs, anniversary events, biker funerals and weddings, memorial runs, where the transnational community meets and exchanges gifts, arouse intense

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emotions, reproduce the powerful mythology of the club and enforce commitment of the members to the club (Durkheim 1965; Olaveson 2001; Turner 2011; Ehrenreich 2008). The material culture of the clubs—such as gifts exchanged between different charters decorating the walls of clubhouses around the world—only testifies to the enormous amount of labor that goes into sustaining strong social bonds, and cultivating trust, respect as well as brotherly and economic ties. Material culture is essential to ritual (re)production and rejuvenation of both the community and the boundary that sets it apart from the Other (Miller 2005; Keane 2005; Glørstad and Hedeager 2009; Dant 2005). There is material culture that is deemed sacred and inalienable, belonging to the clubs. And there are the derivative products created for the desiring outsider who likes to dream of being an insider and vicariously participate in the sublime, sacred and sovereign that the club embodies—with their transformatory promise. During such events, the club heritage is thus also sacralized and its mythology reinforced—hence the obsession with screening commemorative slideshows and the cult of remembrance, or rather, the cult of immortality through remembrance. Sacred beings, such as Sonny Barger, are, as Durkheim would put it, ‘set apart. What distinguishes them is a discontinuity between them and profane beings’ (Durkheim 1965: 303). But it is not only the club heritage that is solidified, and members reminded of their belonging, but larger cultural myths are invoked and transposed onto the ‘sacred brand.’ Most prominently, the American frontier myth (Slotkin 1992), which glorifies qualities such as bravery, courage, honesty, self-reliance, virility. A myth of heroism that cultivates the self-perception of the bikers as mythological and heroic creatures in their own right. They see themselves as ‘vessels through which the warrior outlaw spirit lives today’ (Nichols 2007: loc. 138); a modern incarnation of the spirit of the Vikings, Huns, Mongols, mercenary knights, pirates and American rebels of the frontier. Outlaw bikers often imagine themselves along the gunfighters and the frontier heroes. As Holt writes, the frontier produced the type of men that America relies on when the going gets tough, heroic men who can single-handedly change the course of events …. vigorous, plainspoken men who live by a personal

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code-of-honor hewn from living in lawless and dangerous place… reactionary populists who stand up for self-reliance and use their semibarbaric aptitude to take on ‘totalitarian’ modern institutions and ever more vigorous barbarian enemies. (Holt 2006: 364)

Museums even feed this mythology further. A report on a Viking exhibition in the British Museum was thus for instance titled: ‘Vikings were outlaws like Hells Angels: exhibition,’10 where the curator, Gareth Williams is quoted as stating, this has parallels with modern groups such as punks and Hell’s Angels, both of which combine a fierce visual image with a rejection of conventional social values.

Outlaw bikers are not the only ones who have successfully appropriated and commodified this myth. Famous brands such as Marlboro or Jack Daniels have done exactly the same thing (Holt 2006). We could even argue that clubs like Hells Angels, Bandidos or Mongols could be considered ‘iconic brands’ (Holt 2004). They certainly do see themselves as iconic American brands. Even their strategies of producing the inalienable can be compared to the attempts at sacralization by iconic luxury brands. This brief comparison also reveals the significant degree to which the sacred is in demand within contemporary culture: After all, that which is of utmost luxury is precisely something that is sold as unique, authentic and no less even sacred and inalienable, reserved for the select few. Luxury, too, we must not forget, is always branded as ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless,’ embodying tradition, heritage, and ultimately conservative and elitist values—the exact opposite of the omnipresent profane world of throwaway commodities—as such, luxury itself is a path toward transcendence and immortality (Becker 1975; Frank 2001; Berry 1994). The desire for luxury is nothing else than a desire to manifest the extent of one’s power. And power in turn, means power to increase oneself, to change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance. (Becker 1975: 81)

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Luxury brands have not unlike the one percenters recognized that people desire the most that which cannot be bought—the inalienable and the sacred. And so, luxury brands try hard to create a ‘sacred core’ to their luxury brand, by weaving together heritage and myths, and creating rituals and ritual spaces. They ‘nurture, maintain and protect their heritage’ (Dion and Borraz 2015: 77) and use strategies of sacralization—through myth, ritual and prohibitions—to produce the ‘inalienable’ for an extremely limited number of elite consumers. Like in the biker clubhouses, that open their doors to the supporters and friends during ‘open house’ events and on special ritual occasions, in heritage stores, some areas are not freely accessible to the public. Customers cannot penetrate the heart of the sacred place, that is, the haute-couture or high-jewelry workshops. At Chanel, this prohibition is reinforced by the presence of a guard who monitors access to the workshops and Coco Chanel’s apartment upstairs. (…) fundamentally, this prohibition has a very important symbolic significance: we cannot have access to sacred places and objects. (…) Prohibitions preserve the magic that surrounds sacred spaces. (Dion and Borraz 2015: 81)

Only during special days do the workshops open to the public; a sales and marketing manager is quoted as stating that behind the scenes, people dream because we take them to the heart of the magic, to the heart of creation … We do not show them secrets, but they really approach the heart. (Dion and Borraz 2015: 81)

Brands, and in particular luxury brands, cater to the same desire for the sacred as the one percenters. A desire, that is simultaneously impossible to satisfy in the marketplace—leading to a perpetual circle of consumption. Luxury brand managers these days even complain of the very same things as the one percenters: They argue that their clients are looking for authenticity, but that delivering authenticity has become increasingly difficult due to the progressive democratization of luxury, and to the mass manufacturers appropriating the language of luxury marketing for

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about any commodity, thus robbing luxury of its seductive power, luster and mysticism (Thomas 2008). Luxury companies have also found other methods to sacralize their brand and their heritage, and enhance their ‘iconic’ status in the eyes of the world (Holt 2004). They have learnt to exploit the power and authority of the museum, and the ability of the museum, as an institution with its own historical and cultural weight, to sacralize profane objects—which, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with the museum’s ability to desecrate sacred objects (Meyer and de Witte 2013; Grimes 1992). In particular, luxury fashion companies have been increasingly using institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA, and many others across the globe, to enhance the value of their brands, to authenticate their luxury products and their heritage and to manufacture an aura of the sacred around their brand by turning the objects on display into inalienable museum artifacts handled with care and in white gloves by the curators (Steele 2008; Pecorari 2014; Niessen 2003; Melchior and Svensson 2014; Kuldova 2014; Kim 1998). Luxury fashion brands, for instance, also use the museum space to argue the case that their products should be considered art—after all they are on display in museums—and thus as originals, made by the genius of the designer, occasionally further enhanced by the ‘authentic’ work of craftsmen. To the luxury brands, museums serve as vital spaces where authenticity can be manufactured, originality authenticated, and consumer products sacralized and artified (Shiner 2012; Shapiro and Heinich 2012; Kuldova 2015; Korolainen 2012). Even here the luxury brands are not alone in recognizing the power of the museum to afford value, legitimacy and support claims of authenticity (Bouquet 2012; Macdonald 1997). The one percenter clubs have, too, understood this power of museums to authenticate and legitimize. And no less, the power of the museum to immortalize and offer a path to transcendence—to protect a legacy, to conserve and preserve for the generations to come in the face of mortality (O’Neill 2012). Or as O’Neill put it, museums are ‘only effective instruments of power if they carry out the primary cultural task of creating meaning in the face of mortality’ (O’Neill 2012: 53).

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Even this research project originated during preparations for a museum exhibition about freedom, For the Love of Freedom, in the 200 years anniversary of the Norwegian constitution, curated at the Historical Museum in Oslo by my colleague Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty in 2014, and with which I helped out.11 An exhibition room was dedicated to the Hells Angels MC Norway, displaying images of the club by the photographer Marcel Leliënhof (Jenssen and Leliënhof 2014) and objects—such as aforementioned club memorabilia—which would normally hang on the walls of the clubhouse. It was here that I first understood the degree to which the members consider the club logos sacred, to be protected and defended at all costs. The exhibited objects were to be handled with extraordinary care. The news about the exhibition in the making sparked intense debate, and aroused intense emotions—in 2013, the Norwegian politician Anders B. Werp from the Conservative Party of Norway (Høyre ) even raised the issue with the Ministry of Education and Research, arguing that such an exhibition not only celebrates and promotes organized crime, but is also inappropriate for the occasion of the anniversary of the Norwegian constitution.12 In the end, he lost the argument and we went ahead with the exhibition. The public furor over the exhibition about outlaw bikers revealed not only the intense emotions the outlaws arouse, with everyone suddenly having an opinion, on whichever side, but it also revealed something about the institution of the museum. The museum was not primarily conceived as a space where reasoned public debate about society could take place, as the same people who were critical of the exhibition claim to see it, but instead, as an almost magical institution, endowing objects with disproportionate power and value. The museum was revealed primarily as an institution that sacralizes whatever it hoards and displays, and transforms the status of the objects on display. Only secondarily as a space of knowledge and reasoned debate. The magic of the civilized and enlightened could not be more blatant—the invisible authoritative powers of the museum, in the manner of ‘sympathetic magic,’ transfer like a contagion, onto anything that comes in contact with it (Frazer 1894). The museum was revealed as primarily an institution of enchantment, or rather, re-enchantment in a disenchanted world (Landy et al. 2009; Jenkins 2000). The luxury brands have recognized it as such, and

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so did the one percenters. Both of them yearn for the same result: the authoritative confirmation and public recognition of their sacred value, of their unique status beyond the profane. No public institution caters better than the museum to this desire to be on exhibit, to be visible, to be displayed, to be noticed, to be respected, to be afforded value and deemed worthy of being ‘curated’ (not coincidentally a popular buzzword of today), and to be remembered and immortalized. The opening of the exhibition was spectacular, attended by members from across the world, including those from the ‘mother chapter’ in California, and widely reported in the media and shared on the social media—or else, in another medium for symbolic immortality (Meese et al. 2015). The one percenters were happy they could use this as a chance to ‘educate the ignorant citizens about’ their ‘culture,’ as one of them put it. Some even suggested they should create their own traveling museum, so that they would be, finally, correctly represented. It was yet another confirmation that they have built an organization that matters, and yet another moment in the creation of their legacy. Michael Ahlsdorf, author, journalist and former editor-in-chief of the German Bikers News, who also holds a doctoral degree in philosophy for his work on Nietzsche, reports in one of his books on the bikers about the possibly most valuable of German biker cuts and patches stored in the Museum for Textile Techniques in Hamburg; cuts that belonged to Ralf, the president of Death Riders MC in Dortmund (est. 1978), and that—unlike the cuts of today—were covered in fragments of patches of clubs and groups that the Death Riders disbanded, cutting their patches into pieces and distributing them among the club members (Ahlsdorf 2017: 9–12). This practice has not survived; today, the captured patches of the opponents are more likely to be exhibited on club walls as trophies. Preserving these cuts in the museum afforded them not only special status, but also further sacralized them, authorized them as sacred, and as valuable cultural artifacts worth keeping for the next generations. And it made the biker community at large proud. But even other paraphernalia associated with the clubs have been exhibited in museums across the world. In the Danish Police Museum in Copenhagen, the machine gun that was fired 16 times by the Hells Angel Jørn ‘Jønke’ Nielsen into the neck, chest and back of the president of the Bullshit

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MC, Henning Norbert Knudsen on May 25, 1984, is now on exhibit. As the museum director Frederick Strand argued, this killing marked the power takeover by the Hells Angels in Denmark and the culmination and ending of the first biker war, foreplay to the great Nordic biker war (1994–1997) and the current situation.13 This exhibition turned the outlaw bikers into those who make history, and impact the worlds, in ways that ought not to be forgotten—a double-edged sword, in all these instances, as it inevitably feeds the clubs’ sublime power to simultaneously attract and repulse (see Chapter 2). Even despite the fact that the audience is meant to identify here with the opposite ‘gang’—the police, rather than with the criminal. At the same time, there are exhibitions that, while still effectively contributing to enhancing the sublime power and reputation of the clubs and building their pop-cultural image, are at the same time shunned by the bikers. These are spectacular exhibitions that commodify the biker phenomenon for the consumption of the masses; such exhibitions—as, for example, the one on show in Spring 2017 in the Mob Museum (National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement) in downtown Las Vegas, are said to not only misrepresent, but also desecrate the outlaw biker culture and its symbols. To the bikers they are unserious because they are intended to entertain and not to ‘educate.’ The Mob Museum is seen primarily as an entertainment institution. In other words, a profane institution; an institution that desecrates—because of its connection to the market, to the profit motive, and because it is directed at the masses rather than being an elitist institution capable of conferring authority and triggering reverence. To the one percenters, such a museum is not unlike TV shows like Gangland, or Sons of Anarchy—it spectacularizes, and attracts ‘the wrong crowd of idiots and losers.’14 It makes money from the image of the bikers, who hence see it as infringement. Most of all, it is considered inauthentic. The ex-outlaw biker Donald Charles Davis, who blogs extensively under the name Aging Rebel, had this to say about the exhibition in question, the exhibit features biker ‘artifacts’ including a Hells Angels belt buckle identified as ‘one of Dobyns’ belt buckles’ and ‘a leather vest worn

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by a member of the Pistoleros biker club.’ The cut once belonged to a Pistoleros vice-president named ‘Bird.’ Bird can visit his old cut if he travels to the Mob Museum at 300 Stewart Avenue in Las Vegas and pays the man who sells the tickets $23.95. If Bird is over 65 or a cop, a soldier or a teacher, he will only have to pay $17.95… Kerrie Droban, the poet and prosecutor who became a biker authority once said that her intention was to give daydreamers the ‘vicarious experience of being a Hells Angel.’ So, if you have heard of Kerrie Droban and you would like to read her books so you can have the vicarious experience of belonging to a motorcycle club but you are an illiterate moron, the Mob Museum might be just the thing for you.15

The particularly fascinating feature of the outlaw biker subculture is that it survived its own commodification, precisely through its insistence on different modes of sacralization and boundary maintenance. Unlike other subcultures such as the punks that pretty much dissolved in the world of commodity culture losing their countercultural force (Frank 1998; Heath and Potter 2005; Hebdige 1979), the outlaw bikers managed to exploit commodification to their own advantage, growing, territorially expanding and attracting new members. But as we have seen, it was not solely their ability to exploit commercial and popular culture or to become pop-cultural icons themselves that contributed to their transnational expansion. After all, they could have become a mere figment of pop-cultural imagination, reduced to the screen, comic book, or even the dustbin of countercultural and pop-cultural history. Their success lies in their ability to connect this pop-cultural aura to a sacred and inalienable core reserved for the carefully screened select few, one that they at the same time make desirable for outsiders left to consume the mere ‘promise of the sacred’—or else, within the logic of interpassivity, vicariously enjoy the outlaw Other (Goldstein and Hays 2011; Brown 2018; Pfaller 2017; Kuldova 2018a). One percenters have utilized the powers of luxury marketing to enhance the sacred embodied by the authentic patch. Being a clan culture, they have intuitively understood the overlap between the ‘brand’ and a ‘totem,’ as well as its magical power. But they have also understood that if the patch is to retain its power, it must remain the property of the club at all times (Barger 2001; Ahlsdorf 2017). The legitimate owner of the patch is never the

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member, but always the ‘greedy institution’ of the club (Coser 1974). The member may leave in good standing one day or be kicked out of the club in bad standing, and in that case may even have to remove all tattoos he may have with the club’s logo. This gives the institution an additional transcendental character—even if it is composed of members, it is always more than a mere sum of its members, and it is precisely in this excess that its power and its sacred resides. In a world saturated with consumer culture, artificial ‘brand communities’ and ‘branded subcultures’—the H.O.G. (the Harley Davidson Owners Group) being possibly the most successful (Stratton and Northcote 2014; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001; Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Thompson 2008)—outlaw biker clubs offer their members something beyond what any, even the most successful ‘brand community’ can offer: meaning and a reason to both live and die, something ‘sacred’ and almost religious (Watson 1982). The Aging Rebel once termed the H.O.G.s ‘not a motorcycle club but a mass market simulation.’16 The most ambitious brands aspire precisely to that which the outlaw motorcycle clubs offer to their members: They, too, want to be a ‘lovemark,’ or else a brand that taps into people’s dreams and aspirations and creates myths that inspire passion and commitment, a brand that is respected and loved beyond reason (Roberts 2004; Kuldova 2016). But irrespective of this talk about our occasional individual devotions to commodities, such as the iconic Apple computers, or even Harleys, and of ‘consumer religion’ and consumer ‘fetishes’ (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011; Belk et al. 1989; Belk 1998), no mass-produced commodity can ever achieve the same. Unlike groups that depend on a branded commodity, and are open to anyone who owns it, outlaw bikers depend on what Anette B. Weiner would call ‘inalienable possessions’ (Weiner 1992). Inalienable possessions are transcendent treasures, placed above exchange value and considered sacred, arousing powerful emotions and sentiments. They cannot be commodified or sold, only earned. This boundary between the sacred and the profane must be policed and maintained at all times through ritual, such as the different forms of sacralization we have encountered earlier, and through taboos. Allowing such a sacred symbol on the marketplace, to be exchanged, would equal a dissolution of a social identity and distinction (Harrison

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2002; Weiner 1992); the inalienable possession that contains the social power of the group within itself. As in any negative cult, such sacred things have to be ‘withdrawn from ordinary use’ (Durkheim 1965: 304). It is at this point that the parallel with the luxury brands exhausts itself. Even if, as we shall see later, to protect their brand the one percenters use the same trademark protections as luxury brands.

Defending the Sacred Against Dilution, Mockery, and Prohibitions The importance of the sacred for the one percenters is mirrored in the immense effort they dedicate to protecting and defending their sacred objects. They defend them from copying and copyright infringement, derogatory remarks and insults, and governmental efforts to prohibit the club colors and insignia. In these acts of protecting and defending the sacred against external threats of desecration, i.e., of stripping the sacred of its efficacy, the sacred itself is (re)created and the imaginary boundary between the sacred and the profane (re)produced. Or as Paden put it, the weight of inviolable order focused on holy objects lends mana to them, just as manic objects produce a circle of inviolateness around themselves. These two facets of sacrality – alterity and integrity – therefore compare to the textbook instance of that figure which can alternately be seen as a vase or as two facial profiles, depending on one’s configuring angle. (Paden 2000: 220)

One percenters have to make sure that no impostors are running around in counterfeited cuts, no wannabe bikers are able to tap into their power to intimidate. As in the case of luxury brands, familiar to all of us, so in the case of one percenters—the power of the brotherhood is concentrated in the logo, or, the patch. The patch that has been earned and sacralized. Fakes and wannabees arouse derision and scorn—not only because they dishonor the ‘real and authentic’ bikers who live by the rules, but even more so because they desecrate the sacred by copying

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it and infringing on its power. Or as a member of Knights MC from New Jersey put it: I’ve actually seen these jerks wearing those Sons of Anarchy colors. I’ve even stopped ’em and told ’em, maybe a bit too harshly, ‘Don’t you know how disrespectful that is to the 1%er?!’ And they have no clue what a 1%er is! Fuckin’ clueless! I’ve also seen those rock colors from Zack Wilde’s band. Another bad idea, and what the fuck, I seen a shirt from Sturgis made to look like a set of colors! Funny how everybody wants to be one of us: they want to play in our world, but they don’t want to live in our world! (Hayes 2015: loc. 2734)

To the paranoid one percenter set out to defend his sacred fetish, any outsider appears as hungry for some of its sublime power, for the mana embodied in the logo. The relationship to the supporters and admirers is hence by default ambiguous: On the one hand, they threaten to dilute the power of the sacred and even desecrate it, on the other hand, their admiration and desire contributes to the aura of the sacred. The supporters, too, are thus complicit in producing the fetish for which they eventually fall. Without them, it would not be what it is—but this realization, is all too often uncomfortable, and hence repressed. Following the established strategies of famous brands, in 1972, Hells Angels registered the notorious ‘death head’ logo and ‘Hells Angels MC’ as official trademarks in the USA; later they did the same in the EU and other parts of the world. This strategy was then copied by most international outlaw motorcycle clubs, such as Bandidos MC or Mongols MC and others. Today, most larger outlaw motorcycle clubs have registered their symbols and names, and legally pursue any counterfeitors (Kuldova 2017). During their consolidation and bureaucratization, the clubs have established themselves as legal entities, such as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation. They began to manufacture their own support merchandize, trademarking ever-increasing number of support logos, endowed with the derivative power of the sacred logo. And while there is some legal cash to be made from selling support merchandize, as most of these clubs do online and during club events and even larger Harley Davidson events or the tattoo conventions they organize

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(Kuldova and Quinn 2018), when it comes to protecting the symbols, it is mostly a losing business. And yet, it offers the clubs not only a way to exist as a legal entity with a legitimate income, beyond being an association, but also an aura of legitimacy. Members have to pay a yearly contribution to the trademark account to support the lawyers and their legal actions by the club against counterfeit producers and anyone tapping the image of any specific outlaw club for commercial purpose and cash. As a German member of Hells Angels Nomads put it in an interview with the Bikers News: BN: How much does the corporation earn? Fähnrich, HA Nomads: Nothing, to the contrary. It costs money. We give away money to protect the brand. The biggest cost factor are the lawyers, and the best they can achieve is that the production [of copies] is stopped. The corporation cares primarily about cases in the US that pay off. Django17: We are forced to do this, the one who does not protect one’s trademark will lose it. (transl. from German by author).18

Worldwide, one percenters have turned to commercial law to protect their sacred club symbols, and ensure that only the members can use these symbols and capitalize on the image associated with these symbols. Any Web site of any international outlaw motorcycle clubs will have a clause on every single page reiterating for instance that: 2016 HELLS ANGELS and the skull logo® are trademarks owned by Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation, registered in the USA and in many other countries. All logos and designs of Hells Angels are trademark-protected™ and protected according to international law. Copying and other use is not allowed.19

Or as the international, and largest outlaw motorcycle club in Germany, est. in 1972 in Mannheim, Gremium MC, puts it on its Web site: ©GREMIUM MC. The body-color, graphics, text, logos, wallpapers and photos on these pages are copyrighted by the GREMIUM Motorcycle

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Club and may not without the express written permission to modify or to be downloaded or otherwise used.

Over the years, the outlaw motorcycle clubs have sent out a stunning amount of cease and desist letters to anyone who has tried to profit from their image—be it financially by producing counterfeit patches, or by appropriating the power mystique of their sacred logos in products, or otherwise capitalizing on their image and reputation. Counterfeiting, as these instances reveal, is essentially about appropriating the ‘magical power’ associated with the original brand. This in turn amounts in some cases—such as of the trademarks of the outlaw motorcycle clubs or luxury brands—to desecration. Or as Becker observed, ‘we get the same feeling about counterfeitors today, that they are practicing an unspeakable usurpation of hallowed powers’ (Becker 1975: 79). I have written more in detail about the lawsuits and the fetishization of the trademark elsewhere (Kuldova 2016), but let us look at a few that have set the trend in the subculture. In 1992, the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation, a non-profit organization established in California in 1970 and represented by Fritz Clapp, sued for the first time for infringement. Marvel Comics created a comic book called Hell’s Angel about a superheroine; HAMC claimed that Marvel Comics was exploiting their image to increase sales and deceiving the public by making it believe the comic was endorsed by HAMC. Marvel Comics was accused of unfair competition and damaging ‘goodwill’ to which it claimed that Hells Angels have no ‘goodwill’ since their reputation is a bad reputation. However, the law does not judge the character of the reputation and goodwill at stake, as long as the reputation is undeniably a commercial asset. In the end, they settled. Marvel Comics changed the name of the comic book to Dark Angel and—in the spirit of Hells Angels’ PR—was also forced to donate $35,000 to a children’s charity. The lawsuit was supposed to educate the public about the fact that HAMC’s insignia are trademarked and not to be infringed upon. In 2010, the Hells Angels, again represented by Fritz Clapp, sued the famous fashion house Alexander McQueen,20 Saks Incorporated and Zappos Retail for trademark infringement, unfair competition and

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dilution of famous mark, i.e., for manufacturing, sourcing, marketing and selling jewelry, apparel and accessories that dilute HAMC marks of membership.21 In the lawsuit itself, one can read that: From decades of notoriety, the HAMC Marks have acquired very widespread public recognition, consequently they evoke strong and immediate reactions whenever used. The impact of these marks is virtually incomparable, as a result they have a great commercial value. Defendants seek to exploit that value for their own gain.22

But the dilution charge is also a charge of desecration and profanation of the sacred original, grounded in the belief that the power of the sacred can be weakened when appropriated by McQueen’s designs and turned into profit. The case was again settled, HAMC compensated with $140,00023 and the merchandize destroyed. This lawsuit brought to light the extent to which the self-proclaimed outlaws, who publicly pride themselves on disregarding the law, strategically utilize trademark law to protect their business interest, ‘reputation,’ brand equity, and intimidation power (Reilly 2009; Scassa 2013). In 2014, another lawsuit involving a fashion brand, this time of Young Jeezy, a popular American hip-hop artist from Atlanta, was settled outside the court.24 In this case, the ‘death head’ was used in his 8732 Apparel line. In this case, the jackets were potentially confusing to those only superficially familiar with the one percenter scene. 8732 Apparel design clearly imitated the classical 3-part patch aesthetics common to most outlaw motorcycle clubs. However, the bottom rocker, used by outlaw motorcycle club to indicate their country/region was instead decorated with the first two digits of 8732 Apparel. Also, the ‘MC’ patch was missing. Nonetheless, from a distance the jacket was potential confusing. Jeezy was accused of causing HAMC ‘irreparable harm for which money and other remedies are inadequate.’ This is yet again revealing of the fact that we are dealing with the sacred and inalienable rather than with a commercial asset, even when the commercial law applies. Hells Angels’ passion for suing infringers has become notorious and itself a part of their power mystique. As Fritz Clapp remarked, today

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the HAMC is so notorious for suing for infringement that he regularly receives letters inquiring if a certain use of a potentially confusing name would be fine with the club. Their notoriety for being easily provoked when infringed upon has even led to a rather comical intervention from the side of the police in Germany. In 2016, the German LKA (State Criminal Police Office) attempted to provoke HAMC into illegal action, a problematic practice, by creating their own undercover motorcycle club called Schnelles Helles MC (‘a quick light beer’), with a beer mug as a logo, and black and white inscription with the same typography as that of HAMC. This provocation did not work out very well for the police; HAMC only sent a warning to the police club through a local bartender saying that the inscription and the typography amount to ‘confusion’ and that as such it ‘dilutes’ their trademark, and that if they do not change their logo, they will receive a legal notice to cease and desist, or will be sued for copyright infringement.25 Protecting the sacred is itself a form of sacralization, of repeatedly setting the sacred apart from the profane and maintaining the boundary between the two (Thompson 1991). But we do not have to look into legal documents or for spectacular rituals to find this practice. We can find it even on social media, in the smallest of everyday acts. For instance, most chapters of the Hells Angels would share on their social media profiles and on the profiles of their support groups the following guidelines, printed in the club’s colors of red and white: 81 SUPPORTER SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDELINES NEVER – Post images of our Death Head! NEVER – Use the words “AFFA, HELLS ANGELS, HAMC, HA in any form including text on pictures. (and especially not after your name) NEVER – Use “81” or “EightyOne” by itself in any way or to describe yourself. (If you use “81”, it must be used as “81 Supporter” or “Support 81”) This INCLUDES also your “work place information” on your profile. NEVER – Use any term related to the Hells Angels that would cause a person to think you are attempting to pose as a member. Example: Joe Red & White = BAD /Joe Red & White Supporter = GOOD NEVER – Combine support 81 images with weapons of any kind. You are supporting a motorcycle club, not an organization of gun men!

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NEVER – Combine your support to Hells Angels with other clubs, street gangs or others if you are unaware of the relationship between those others and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club!! These guidelines have been in place for decades. Understand them and follow them. To not do so is considered a great sign of disrespect by Hells Angels Members and you will find yourself not welcome. These rules apply to everyone, INCLUDING: WIVES of Members, GIRLFRIENDS of Members, SONS & DAUGHTERS of Members, SISTERS of Members … EVERYONE!!! ***Please feel free to share this image in any way you like, and use it to help educate other supporters that are not aware.*** We appreciate your understanding, your enthusiasm & your support! --Hamc World Flesh HAMC Oakland – Andy HAMC Nth Lincs – Clyde HAMC Auckland – Gerald HAMC Paris – Jim HAMC South Bend – Hans HAMC Utrecht Support 81 Assistance Team

Issuing such guidelines is a way to impose sacred order, to protect the communal body of the club, to institute a boundary and demand certain behaviors from all the admirers eager to be mystified by the power of the outlaws. Circulating such authoritative guidelines pertaining to the use of symbols and club inscriptions, backed by members from across the world, and punishing anyone who disobeys them or shows disrespect, further sacralizes these symbols. But it also sets the terms under which the supporters can tap into the power by association. One percenters, like brand managers, have themselves discovered the common phenomenon psychologists have begun to be concerned with only recently, namely that even the most tenuous association with a powerful person can lead to what we refer to as ‘illusory power transference,’ the vicarious experience of power, which leads individuals to act as if they personally possess power even when they do not. (Goldstein and Hays 2011: 594)

Such guidelines, not unlike the trademark protections, are a way to set oneself apart from the rest as special, sacred and deserving of respect by

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virtue of belonging to the club. But they also threaten potential infringers, fake or disobedient supporters; they serve as a reminder that the words are not empty but are backed by violence and legal action. They are an attempt at legitimizing this violence and a way to position oneself as capable of administering both punishments and rewards. The penalty for breaking the rules of respectable conduct vis-à-vis the sacred symbols can be severe. While companies are sued, individuals who mock, imitate or otherwise desecrate the logo are dealt with violently. The case of the 44-year-old Cynthia Garcia from Mesa, Arizona, who was attacked in 2001 by three local Hells Angels after making fun of their jackets, and eventually murdered, only testifies to this—and to the willingness of the individuals defending the sacred to sacrifice their lives in the name of the club (Schubert 2012). An honor culture does not take jokes and offense lightly, it has too little room for self-irony (Campbell and Manning 2014). Paden’s observation that ‘humans gladly lay down their lives and take on martyrdom rather than betray matters of honor or subject their identities to dishonoring, profaning insult’ (Paden 2000: 219) rings true here. But it also shows that the sacred demands loyalty beyond reason, or in fact, that loyalty to one’s survival unit is in itself a form of sacrality (Paden 2000). The code of conduct in respect to the patch, however, has to be regulated not only vis-à-vis the outsiders but also vis-à-vis subcultural insiders. With every patch come territorial claims. No new MC club can establish itself in an area without seeking the permission of the locally most powerful club. While in the early days of the subculture one often found out the hard way when one trespassed, intentionally or not, on the territory claimed by another club, today all is more carefully regulated—and the landscape considerably more complex. For example, each issue of the German Bikers News magazine features several pages of announcements about new clubs across Germany, encouraging other clubs to get in touch within a certain deadline and raise their objections to either their presence or club logo, if they have any.26 This is to prevent that a new club is perceived as illegitimately established or infringing upon copyright or design of another club largely due to ignorance. Such media not only produce the news from the motorcycle scene, but more importantly transmit both the written and unwritten

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codes of honor and conduct. They reproduce the power mystique of the dominant clubs, not only by continuously reporting on their events and concerns which feature prominently on the front pages, but also by ‘educating’ the readers on how to treat the one percenters. And while magazines like Bikers News are sold to all members of the motorcycle and Harley Davidson subculture, of which the majority are ordinary hobby riders or members of H.O.Gs, the most prominent place in the magazine is still reserved to the one percenters—often to the discontent of some readers. The disproportionate attention to and space taken by this minority engaged in crime further reproduces the distinction between the sacred but violent core of the subculture and the profane ordinary riders. Conflict and the underlying threat of conflict, be it between newcomers and dominant clubs, one percenters and the state, or simply the subculture and the other, clearly sells. And it also reproduces the established social order and the boundaries and hierarchies of actors within the subculture. This maintenance of the boundary between the sacred core and the profane consumerist mainstream further ignites the desire to belong or at least come closer to the core. In the classic, The Functions of Social Conflict, Lewis Coser put forward the familiar argument that social conflict with outgroups and reciprocal antagonism strengthen group consciousness and internal cohesion, while preserving social divisions and reproducing the established social order (Coser 1964). As such, social conflicts can produce heat and solidarity on the inside and cold, indifference and hostility on the outside (Eriksen 2004). Turf wars over territory with competing clubs have also been shown to increase club solidarity (Hauck and Peterke 2010). Social conflict, however, does not only serve to reproduce social order, but can also protect and enhance the sacred. After all, lawsuits over infringement, use of violence to protect the logo, permanent fight against criminalization by the state, enhanced by repeated coverage of the same, are nothing but forms of social conflict that institute the social/sacred order and create one’s clear place within society— even if that place may be perceived as unwanted and deviant by the mainstream, it is still a place of power and significance; it is a place of visibility and reputation that transcends generations; it is, eventually, a place in history.

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Yet again, we stumble upon the desire for immortality and resistance toward death in insignificance. Reproduction of boundaries, one of the generative forces of the sacred and group solidarity, should thus not be imagined as driven solely by material interests. As Johan Huizinga in his analysis of the play-element in culture pointed out, the real motives are to be found less in the ‘necessities’ etc. of economic expansion, etc., than in pride and vainglory, the desire for prestige and all the pomps of superiority. (Huizinga 1970: 90)

Or else, precisely in the striving toward immortality and ‘heroic selfexpansion’ (Becker 1975). Even in the work of boundary maintenance through social conflict, we find a significant play-element. A revealing incident can illuminate this play-element. In 2015, at a biker event, a member of the Hells Angels showed me a video of a transsexual wearing the patch of the Hamburg president of Mongols MC,27 a traditional enemy of the Angels, saying on the camera ‘I love dicks.’28 He tried to fool me and convince me that there were actually transsexuals among the members of the Mongols—in line with the common ‘informant deceives the anthropologist’ stories from field (Nachman 1984). But of course, in reality, some Hells Angels got hold of Erkan Uzun’s patch and paid a transsexual for the recording as retaliation for members of Mongols MC who were trying to challenge Angel’s power in the Reeperbahn red-light district in Hamburg. The enemy was effectively humiliated. The patch was not only stolen and desecrated, but also emasculated; this provoked anger and the Mongols uploaded a video threatening the Hells Angels MC.29 The area was relatively quiet prior to this challenge of the newcomers, as Angels appeared to keep it calm and running for profit. The battle between the two clubs ran over many months and both over the fists and the social media, where the symbolic battle over the patches escalated, resulting in endless violent fights, fired shots, and police razzias. Meanwhile, the Mongols former boss sits in jail, and his charter was kicked out in bad standing of the Mongols transnational brotherhood, after all, most of its members did not even have motorcycles. Ridicule and humiliation, playful but deadly serious, not only increases social conflict, but also produces

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group cohesion and suppresses internal conflicts (Klein 1975), and preserves the sacred. The German government, too, has over the time understood the importance of the sacred patches for the outlaw bikers and decided to launch an assault on them. On March 16, 2017, the German government passed a revision of the existing Association Act (Vereinsgesetz §9 Kennzeichenverbot ),30 which, formulated simply, prohibits the symbols of an association of which at least one local branch has been prohibited due to criminal charges.31 This law was preceded by a more than a decades-long struggle to fight the rise of the outlaw motorcycle clubs through diverse prohibitions. First came the individual club charter prohibitions by local authorities, followed by prohibitions of public display of patches, the first of these prohibitions dating back to 1983, when the authorities prohibited the Hells Angels patch with Germany on the bottom rocker. In defiance, the local chapters began to use city names on bottom rockers instead. Prohibitions of Hells Angels chapters in Hamburg and Düsseldorf in 2002 followed. From then on, the history of these diverse bans and prohibitions is a messy one; legal actions proliferated on both sides and the clubs became more intent on protecting what they see as their civil right—to wear what they want in public. Recounting the history of these endless struggles would amount to a book of its own, but what is significant for us here is to emphasize the force and determination with which such prohibitions are fought. But not all prohibitions amount to the same level of arousal on the side of the one percenters; this in itself is revealing. Firstly, there are ‘club prohibitions’ of individual chapters for involvement in organized crime, such as for instance the prohibition of Hells Angels MC Concrete City and Clan 81 Germany for involvement in violent crimes, drugs, forced prostitution and illegal weapon’s trade on October 18, 2017. Such prohibitions are regularly reported on and fought in the criminal court, but they rarely amount to any intense reactions. Fights over criminal charges between authorities and one percenters fall within the realm of the profane everyday ‘club business,’ and as such into what could be deemed the clubs’ pragmatic household economy. Secondly, there are placebound and temporary prohibitions on wearing outlaw biker paraphernalia, including support merchandize, such as for instance the prohibition

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issued one day prior to the October carnival in Bremen in 2017, which banned entry to the fairground in clothing that could be brought into relation with selected outlaw biker clubs and support clubs, all at the cost of 200 EUR or one day in prison.32 These types of prohibitions are regularly reported on in diverse biker media and widely shared on social media. They are used to support the victimhood narrative of discrimination, stigmatization and scapegoating of the bikers as public enemy (Schelhorn and Heitmüller 2016; Kruse 2016; Kuldova 2018b; Katz 2011). However, despite the fact that these prohibitions arouse more passions than club prohibitions, they are not necessarily perceived as a direct attack on the sacred. After all, they are rather an attack on the intimidation power imagined to reside in outlaw biker attire at large, including support merchandize. It is the recent prohibitions on public display of the sacred colors of the biggest clubs in Germany through the revised Association Act, that applies to the most notorious outlaw motorcycle clubs,33 that have aroused the greatest passions, precisely because they represent a direct attack of the government on the sacred. Color prohibitions have been widely discussed across different media platforms, Bikers News featured lengthy monthly updates, typically at the most prominent spot in the magazine. Demonstrations have been organized by the bikers to protest the legal change of the Association Act which they deem unconstitutional. I have written about this fight in more detail elsewhere (Kuldova 2018b), but what is important for us here is to take seriously this passion with which the one percenters protect their colors against the government, and the degree to which they see them as central to their culture. What is significant here is that it is not a direct attack on material property and networks in the form of club prohibitions that arouses the most passions, but rather the attack on the symbolic and immaterial superstructure. They do complain less about any razzia and property damage, any criminal charges, any time spent in courts, than they do about this attack on the colors. No closing down of a clubhouse or destruction of material property by law enforcement has amounted to the level of media and legal fuss they created in response to the color prohibition. Both Bandidos MC and Hells Angels MC have been fighting in court the latest wave of color prohibitions since 2014 onwards, the

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Bandidos MC even won an acquittal in 2015 for wearing the symbols of the club in public during their prohibition. Back then, as Bikers News reported, two of its members entered on August 1, 2014 with full colors and place names ‘Bochum’ and ‘Unna’ along with their lawyers the police headquarters in Bochum. They turned themselves in order to start a lawsuit. On October 28, the district court in Bochum acquitted them.34

The case was then moved on the demand of the prosecutor to the federal court in Karlsruhe, which decided on July 9, 2015, that they did not make themselves punishable, because even though they used the symbol of the prohibited club, their bottom rocker with place name was different, and thus the colors could not be confused with the colors of the prohibited club. Moreover, it would have to be proven that the club with different bottom rocker follows the same criminal goals as the prohibited club. Nonetheless, eventually a flat ban was instituted. As a result of this color prohibition, Bandidos, Angels and others have simply begun wearing new symbols in club colors that make them recognizable, which was predictable from the very beginning. Moreover, the attack on the sacred patches has brought the clubs that otherwise see each other as enemies together, which, as the politician of the Left (Die Linke ) party Ulla Jelpke pointed out does more disservice to the federal government if its interest is to weaken the outlaw bikers, while noting that this measure does not fight crime, but instead represents a form of group punishment (Kuldova 2018b).35 To protect what is sacred to all clubs, a trans-club solidarity emerged, one that would hardly ever occur in any other instance; the clubs have shown that if something is truly sacred to them, they are willing to cooperate even with their enemy to fight for it.36 This move has gained wide popular support; it has displayed a coordinated resistance against the government and restored a sense of hope that if these enemies can come together to fight the government, then a larger opposition to the government can be built from people who would otherwise not come together. Several German supporters expressed the hope in our conversation that the Hells Angels would become more political and take a lead in this revolution.

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The response of the bikers to the amendment of the Association Act has notably taken two forms, in both cases showing their potential to mobilize people. Firstly, in the form of resistance through the slogan ‘nobody will destroy our culture.’ They have quickly produced merchandize for themselves and supporters—patches, t-shirts, stickers, and so on—and sold it at events and online. Secondly, in the form of a legal fight for equal rights of all citizens in front of the law and against discrimination and criminalization based on appearance, and for the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. They organized demonstrations and sent a series of complaints and petition to the government. I have written in more detail about this dynamic elsewhere (Kuldova 2018b), what is crucial here is to recognize the mobilization of passions in the name of the sacred. They have demonstrated that they, as a group, hold something sacred and are willing to use any means to fight for it. They even managed to cast this issue in terms of a concern for civil rights of anybody, as a fight for freedom from the oppression by the state—thus tapping into and further feeding the anti-establishment passions. But they have also shown that people fight and mobilize precisely when that which is sacred to them is attacked. There was another element of this prohibition that provoked a great deal—the fact that graves adorned in club symbols could be an object of issue, as police at some point noted that graves should be covered otherwise one risks a fine. Or as the Bikers News reported, graves are publicly visible, but mostly privately owned. Therefore, according to an MDR report from November 2015, there are still graves in German graveyards with the swastika – even though the symbol is prohibited. Moreover, the Article 103 of the constitution could also interfere with the authorities’ desire. It namely states that: ‘an act can only be punished, when the culpability was legally determined, prior to the act being committed.’ The same goes naturally also for tattoos.37

The suggestion that the symbols should be removed from graves provoked an outrage across social media. After all, it directly attacked not only the sacred symbol, but primarily the claim to symbolic immortality. * * *

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Through all these playful but deadly serious actions described across this chapter, the outlaw motorcycle clubs create a sacred for themselves, while also simultaneously imposing a form of order onto the social world. It is this order that is desired and perceived as lacking today by many. Those individuals weighted down by the prospect of total insignificance, by the lack of any satisfying means to achieve symbolic immortality, those who feel redundant, ignored and unwanted (Lasch 1996), easily see the outlaw bikers as offering a way out of their predicament—if only often vicariously. But the bikers offer not only an experience of the sacred, but also of the authentic— hence the endless struggle over the distinction between the original and the copy, the impostor and the authentic biker. Or as Lindholm put it, touching upon the widespread sentiment among both the bikers and supporters, the quest for the authentic grounding becomes increasingly pressing as certainty is eroded and the boundaries of the real lose their taken-forgranted validity… The search for a sense of authenticity is the most salient and pervasive consequence of the threats modernity makes to our ordinary reality and sense of significance… Like medieval monks, we all now must look for something sacred to hold on to, but without the possibility of gaining any exterior authentication; there is no certification of the really real anymore, and anything can be a forgery. … The sacred is where you find it. (Lindholm 2002: 337)

Some find it precisely among the outlaws. These people are far more likely to view the bikers as heroic, as an authentic form of resistance to the system that they feel oppresses them, they see them as men with values—often despite the knowledge of their crimes. They no longer trust the system, the state with its symbols. How intense is the desperation of the supporters that the crimes of the one percenters appear negligible to them in comparison with what they see as the crimes of the state and of the ruling elites? When the flag of the state loses its symbolic power, the biker patch becomes attractive, and so do any comparable non-state sovereign actors. And as we have seen earlier, it is no coincidence that the popularity of these parallel and alternative social orders increases

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precisely in times and there where the state is perceived as weak. The measures taken by the clubs to protect their sacred logos are symbolic of their larger ability to protect not only themselves but also those who side with them and thus replace some of the state’s functions.

Notes 1. Location, date and other details have been anonymized to protect the identity of concerned members, as it not relevant to the point being made. 2. For the song, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQOYv4178rM. For a list of dead members of HAMC, see https://hells-angels.com/ourclub/rip/#, accessed October 15, 2018. 3. From a conversation with a member of an outlaw motorcycle club, that is also a support club of the Hells Angels MC, May 2017, Germany. 4. From a conversation with an outlaw biker attending the 60th Anniversary of the Oakland chapter in Paris, 2017. 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH9uXWh3n-Y&t=6518s, accessed May 5, 2017, translation of the simultaneous translator. 6. From a conversation during the European Bike Week in Faaker See, Austria, 2017. 7. From a conversation with a member of a Czech outlaw motorcycle club, Slovakia, April 2017. 8. From a conversation with a Czech prospect in one of the one percenter motorcycle clubs, Prague, April 2017. 9. https://www.express.de/koeln/sv-gremberg-kreisliga-mannschaft-wirbt-fuer-hells-angels-3643774, accessed October 15, 2018. 10. https://www.thelocal.no/20140305/warfare-and-violence-central-to-vikings-says-new-exhibition, accessed October 10, 2018. 11. https://www.khm.uio.no/besok-oss/historisk-museum/utstillinger/skiftende/2014/ja-vi-elsker-frihet/index.html, accessed November 18, 2018. 12. https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/2rxBG/politiker-om-hells-angels-utstilling-kunnskapsloest-og-naivt, accessed November 18, 2018. 13. https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/joenkes-maskinpistol-fra-rockerdrab-paa-makrellen-er-endt-paa-museum, accessed November 6, 2018. 14. From a conversation with an American supporter of the Hells Angels, Oakland, 2015.

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15. http://www.agingrebel.com/14582, accessed September 12, 2017. 16. http://www.agingrebel.com/6487, accessed August 10, 2017. 17. German member of Hells Angels and press speaker, runs the www.hellsangelsmedia.com website and is well-known in media. 18. Bikers News 07/2017 ‘Unter Falscher Flagge’ (Under False Flag), pp. 18–21 (transl. from German by author). 19. This version is taken from the website of the Hells Angels in the Czech Republic: http://www.hells-angels.cz/, accessed November 20, 2018. 20. The fashion designer Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February 2010, and the case occurred after his death in October 2010, hence he was not personally involved. 21. Case No. CV10 8029 CBM[MANx]. 22. Case No. CV10 8029 CBM[MANx], p. 4. 23. Personal conversation with Fritz Clapp, the IPR lawyer of the Hells Angels, September 18, 2015, Pomona, California, USA. 24. Case 2:13-cv-02242-WBS-DAD. 25. ‘Ungewöhnliche Methode im Kampf gegen Rocker: “Schnelles Helles” - die Rocker-Gang des LKA’ https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rocker-ermittlungen-101.html, Tagesschau, March 31‚ 2016, accessed April 4, 2016. 26. The Bikers News website even features a thorough overview of all existing as well as past and dissolved clubs in Germany, listing over 500 of different charters, including their logo and date of origin.https://www. bikersnews.de/szene/clubverzeichnis/?set_his=0, accessed November 20, 2018. 27. Mongols MC is a transnational outlaw motorcycle club with a violent reputation, established in Montebello, California in 1969. The German Mongols MC were established first in Bremen in 2010 by a Lebanese immigrant crime syndicate. The Mongols MC in Germany are mostly only nominally an outlaw motorcycle club—unlike the Hells Angels MC they do not have motorcycles or even licenses. The charter in Hamburg has been dissolved in the meantime as several members are in prison. 28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qVp7_njtVo, accessed June 10, 2017. 29. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDSA4cJENgY&t=139s, accessed June 10, 2017. 30. https://dejure.org/gesetze/VereinsG/9.html, accessed October 10, 2017. 31. In 2018, the USA law enforcement authorities in Orange County, California, have suggested to do a similar thing, namely to seize the

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trademark of the Mongols MC, considered a criminal organization and one of the most violent OMCs in the US. Jesse Ventura came to the defense of the club of which he is still an ‘inactive’ member. See e.g. ‘How to Crush an Outlaw Biker Club? Seize Its…Logo?’ by Serge F. Kovaleski, New York Times, November 21, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/11/21/us/mongols-motorcycle-club-government.html, accessed November 22, 2018. 32. Here is the list of clubs in question: Bandidos MC, Born to be Wild MC, Division MC, Freeway Rider’s MC, Free Wheels MC, Gremium MC, Hells Angels MC, Mongols MC, No Surrender MC, Outlaws MC, Red Devils MC; but also patches of non-MC clubs similar in organizational structure to outlaw motorcycle clubs, such as Bloody Warriors, Legion Bremen, Osmanen Germania BC, United Tribuns, and Sturm 81. Support merchandize with logos AFFA, BFFB, DFFD, GFFG, MFFM, OFFO, TFFT, The Big Red Machine, Red Light Crew, Red and White Crew, Dequiallo, Filthy Few, Respect Few, Fear None, Expect no Mercy, and others, was prohibited as well. Reported in Bikers News, December 2017, p.10. 33. The color bad applies to the following clubs: Gremium MC, Hells Angels MC, and Bandidos MC, Chicanos MC, Diablos MC, Red Devils MC, Mongols MC, Schwarze Schar Wismar MC, Satudarah MC. 34. Bikers News, September 2015, pp. 22–29. 35. Bikers News, June 2017, pp. 10–11. 36. https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/hellsangels-kuttenverbot-101.html, accessed March 20, 2018. 37. Bikers News, May 2017, p. 23.

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Smith, J. Z. (1987). To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steele, V. (2008). Museum Quality: The Rise of the Fashion Exhibition. Fashion Theory, 12(1), 7–30. Stratton, G., and Northcote, J. (2014). When Totems Beget Clans: The Brand Symbol as the Defining Marker of Brand Communities. Journal of Consumer Culture, 16(2), 493–509. Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomas, D. (2008). Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. London: Penguin Press. Thompson, H. S. (2003). Hell’s Angels. London: Penguin Books. Thompson, K. (1991). Transgressing the Boundary Between the Sacred and the Secular/Profane: A Durkheimian Perspective on a Public Controversy. Sociology of Religion, 52(3), 277–291. Thompson, T. (2013). Outlaws: One Man’s Rise Through the Savage World of Renegade Bikers, Hells Angels and Global Crime. London: Penguin Books. Thompson, W. E. (2008). Pseudo-Deviance and the ‘New Biker’ Subculture: Hogs, Blogs, Leathers, and Lattes. Deviant Behavior, 30(1), 89–114. Tudor, K. (2018). Toxic Sovereignty: Understanding Fraud as the Expression of Special Liberty Within Late-Capitalism. Journal of Extreme Anthropology, 2(2), 1–15. Turner, V. (2011). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Veno, A., & Gannon, E. (2004). The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. Watson, M. J. (1982). Righteousness on Two Wheels: Bikers as a Secular Sect. Sociological Spectrum: Mid-South Sociological Association, 2(3–4), 333–349. Weber, M. (2005). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Weiner, A. B. (1992). Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-WhileGiving. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitehouse, H. (2013). Religion, Cohesion, Hostility. In S. Clarke, R. Powell, & J. Savulescu (Eds.), Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online. Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the Group: Towards a General Theory of Extreme Self-Sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41(1), 1–64. Whitehouse, H., Jong, J., Buhrmester, M., Gómez, Á., Bastian, B., Kavanagh, C. M., et al. (2017). The Evolution of Extreme Cooperation via Shared Dysphoric Experiences. Nature (Scientific Reports ), 7, 1–10.

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Winterhalder, E., Biggar, G., & Boyko, R. (2010). Outlaw Bikers. Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1979). Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nottingham: Brynmill Press Ltd. Young, J. (2009). The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage. Žižek, S. (2018). Slavoj Žižek on His Favourite Plays. (L. Thompson, Ed.). https://fivebooks.com/best-books/slavoj-zizek-favourite-plays/. Accessed November 20, 2018. Zondervan, A. A. W. (2005). Sociology and the Sacred: An Introduction to Philip Rieff’s Theory of Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (Kindle version).

5 Solidarity and Sacrifice

On October 8, 2009, Timur Akbulut, an MMA fighter and a prospect of the Hells Angels, shoots a member of the Bandidos MC, Rudi Heinz ‘Eschli’ Elten, right in front of the Bandidos clubhouse in the red-light district of Duisburg, Germany. The district court sentences Akbulut to eleven years in prison for manslaughter, stating that the Hells Angel killed Eschli rather than risking to lose his honor.1 In fact, neither of the two was willing to lose his face.2 Four and half years later, Akbulut gives an exclusive interview to Spiegel TV from the jail, showing no regret for his act. In the interview, he emphasizes his sacrifice of his time for his boys, for his club and states that jailtime is not always negative, of course it may be lost time, but one learns from it, one realizes on whom one can rely, how the people support you, one becomes smarter, you know. (transl. from German by author)3

In one breath, Akbulut links solidarity to sacrifice. In doing so, he reveals the very essence of social bonds. As Mary Douglas once remarked, solidarity is a mere gesture if there is no sacrifice to back it up. In her introduction to How Institutions Think, she argues that © The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2_5

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writing about cooperation and solidarity means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust… Solidarity involves individuals being ready to suffer on behalf of the larger group and their expecting other individual members to do as much for them. It is difficult to talk about these questions coolly. They touch on intimate feelings of loyalty and sacredness. Anyone who has accepted trust and demanded sacrifice or willingly given either knows the power of the social bond. Whether there is a commitment to authority or a hatred of tyranny or something between the extremes, the social bond itself is taken to be something above question. (Douglas 1986: 1)

Even in our case, the social bond is above question. And, even if this case may be extreme, it is in the extreme that we see the logic of the creation and reproduction of the social bond at its clearest. Violent events like this are common enough in the world of the big outlaw motorcycle clubs. Though one is often struck by the efforts the members put into prevention and de-escalation of conflicts (the surprising thing is rather that given the violent potential of many of the members not more happens). One could argue that these events, however, brutal, are socially necessary given the nature of the organization—there is no better way than an occasional killing to remind your enemies that your reputation has some bearing on reality. But they do more than that. Akbulut’s remark and his act point us toward the role of dysphoric experiences in (re)producing and reinvigorating group solidarity; it points us to ‘sacrifice,’ dying, killing, or doing time as something people do on behalf of a group and for each other, rather than on behalf of an ideal. The anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has repeatedly made this point, linking self-sacrifice and violent acts on behalf of the group to the phenomenon of ‘identity fusion,’ and dysphoric experiences such as ‘rites of terror’ (Whitehouse 1996; Whitehouse et al. 2017). In his view, when terrorists sacrifice themselves, they typically do so for each other, rather than for abstract values, even if those values are essential to the sacralization and legitimization of their acts (Whitehouse 2013, 2018; Whitehouse and Lanman 2014). Or as Whitehouse and Lanman put it,

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life-changing, emotionally intense (especially dysphoric) rituals produce identity fusion and a durable sense of psychological kinship with other group members. This psychological kinship motivates relatively extreme forms of altruism, especially when the group is threatened. (Whitehouse and Lanman 2014: 681)

The acts of killing or dying on behalf of the group are intimately linked to the, often intense, rites of passage we have discussed earlier and that often enable commitment beyond reason in the first place. Alternatively, they can in themselves be the very rites of passage, at times retroactively—even Akbulut was a prospect during the killing but appears as a member during the trial.4 Nothing marks better the process of exclusion from one social structure and inclusion into another—the symbolic death and rebirth (Turner 2011)—than an act of crime which makes one dependent on the group. Irrespective of how harmful and brutal, these acts serve important social functions on both individual and collective level. They provide the individual with a powerful dysphoric and transgressive experience that is not only deeply memorable, permanently reshuffling his self-understanding, but also an experience that appears to him as profoundly authentic. Here, we should not underestimate the increased desire for authenticity in today’s society (Potter 2010). Andrew Potter, in his fun and insightful book The Authenticity Hoax, rightly observes that the demand for the honest, the natural, the real – that is, the authentic – has become one of the most powerful moments in contemporary life. In reaction against the isolation, shallowness, and alienation of everyday life, people everywhere are demanding the exact opposite. (Potter 2010: 11)

This insight is confirmed even by a cursory look at the proliferating marketing literature, with titles such as Authenticity: What the Consumers Really Want (Gilmore and Pine 2007). In this sense, one could say, the outlaw motorcycle clubs satisfy a certain consumer demand, which the market time and again fails to satisfy, no matter how many ‘authentic’ experiences it tries to sell us (and that are always in the end revealed as inauthentic market gimmicks). Maybe

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authenticity itself is a hoax and maybe the obsessive quest for it is itself the reason for the current proliferation of inauthenticity. But this does not change the fact that it is a powerful ideal; people desire authenticity and keep running after it. To the outsiders, both the killer and his victim appear as having a certain aura of authenticity around them, especially amidst all the mediated spectacle. Or as one supporter, with excitement in his eyes, put it: ‘people die, that shit is real; what is more real than that?’5 Moreover, and possibly most importantly, such acts also trigger a series of post-event rituals and actions that further bind the group together and further intensify the sense of solidarity. Over the course of this book, we have seen how the clubs manage to produce a semblance of the sublime, of the sovereign, and of the sacred, all being ultimately different paths toward symbolic immortality—to recognition beyond death, to status, and most of all to significance in a world that appears endlessly chaotic and unjust. In this chapter, we shall look closer at solidarity and sacrifice. Manufacturing solidarity and sacrifice is essential for the survival and growth of any social group and for that matter any society. We shall see how the clubs (re)produce solidarity for themselves, how they theatrically display their solidarity for the consumption of the outsiders, and how they manage to attract supporters by offering a powerful vision of a transnational solidarity beyond death—of a real transnational family one can rely upon (often unlike one’s own family that has failed). Or as Sonny Barger put it, Joining a band of brothers together, a group with one common interest or mission, whether as a company, a team, or a motorcycle club, requires not only a commitment to loyalty but an understanding of self-preservation as well. You might ask why I do it. It was my choice to form an organization, and after I did so, it was my obligation to maintain it. A group only works if there is an established set of rules that all involved pledge to maintain. When you are a member of an organization, life isn’t only about you. As a part of a circle of people who depend on one another, you watch one another’s back and remain loyal to the concept of brotherhood… The bonding yields freedom, believe it or not. (Barger 2005: 4)

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How Violent Acts Create Heartwarming Feelings Solidarity is often conceived as an exclusively positive quality, as a force of common good. And indeed, it is the ability of the clubs to create a fuzzy heartwarming feeling of community or Gemeinschaft that attracts people to these organizations in the first place (Weber 1968). Within the current political and economic contexts, solidarity is particularly seductive—both in its heart-warming and in its potentially most brutal forms. The latter appears as still better than no solidarity; the absence of solidarity is productive. Solidarity beyond reason appeals to those disoriented, aimless and disrespected in an individualistic and consumerist society and a market economy that has no longer any use for them. Many of them see the world around as a cynical world, where solidarity is nothing but a buzzword used in the marketing of products or opinions but hardly a really existing feature of social life anymore. There is a desire not only for authenticity as such, but also for ‘authentic’ solidarity. This desire for an ‘authentic’ experience—in relation to solidarity— in a world that appears as populated by the fake and the inauthentic is crucial to understand, especially in terms of its consequences. The anthropologist Oskar Verkaaik convincingly argued that today’s terrorist acts of martyrdom are better explained through the lens of the modern quest for authenticity rather than through the appeal of religious traditions (Verkaaik 2004). Even in this case, the authentic experience that is sought in today’s world is possible only as an act of transgression. Or as Verkaaik argues, and this applies also to the sacrifice on behalf of the group in our case, the cultural model of martyrdom offers an experience of authentic individuality as it instigates believers to transgress the social and political through self-sacrificial violence. …today’s political martyrdom can best be interpreted in terms of a quest for an authentic self …this authentication of the self can only be brought about after a ritual process of separation. (Verkaaik 2004: 45)

Bringing this argument one step further, this quest for the authentic must be linked to the romantic quest for solidarity—the individual

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to the collective; they are inextricably related. But that which people experience as ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ solidarity, unlike its semblance that can be these days encountered on the social media or in the marketplace, comes at a high price. It comes with an obligation on behalf of the group. There is no solidarity without sacrifice and neither is there solidarity without obligation. No strong whole—and the word solidarity derives from the Latin solidare—‘to make firm, to combine parts to form a strong whole’ (Komter 2005: loc. 87)—can be formed without obligation. This is nothing new. The concept of solidarity as obligation dates back to the Roman legal concept—obligation in solidum, a principle of mutual responsibility between an individual and a society, where each individual vouches for the community and the community vouches for each individual. (Bayertz 1999: 3)

Or simply, no questions asked, unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno (one for all, all for one)—a motto widely appropriated by one percenters. The power contained in this simple formula is often hard to conceive for those unbound by any obligation on behalf of a group that demands total submission (promised as a paradoxical path to individual freedom). It is immense. Obligation in solidum establishes a rule of abstract law that not only regulates relations between both familiar and unfamiliar members of the community but also compels people to act on behalf of each other. It is part and parcel of the sacred order that we discussed in the previous chapter. Permanent readiness to sacrifice on behalf of the community is expected. In the case of outlaw motorcycle clubs, gangs, and similar organizations, it often requires an extreme form of sacrifice—a form of costly signaling of belonging—on behalf of the surrogate or substitute family. The club as a surrogate family often provides emotional, physical, and financial support, commitment, values, understanding, affirmation and affection that the real family too often failed to provide (Decker and van Winkle 2012), and the society at large failed to substitute. Without sacrifice, solidarity of this kind would not be possible. Solidarity is often a double-edged sword; it comes at a price. Or as a rational choice theorist of solidarity would put it, and there is some truth to this, group obligations

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are a tax that is imposed upon each member as a condition of access to the joint good. The more dependent a member is on the group (that is, the more costly it is to leave the group in terms of opportunities foregone), the greater the tax that the member will be prepared to bear for a given joint good. (Hechter 1988: 10)

The degree of solidarity of a group is often directly proportional to the extent of the influence of the group on its members. In milieus such as those around the one percenters, consequences of the obligation toward solidarity can be fatal. And yet, it is precisely this that attracts many to these ‘greedy organizations’ (Coser 1974)—the fact that something, often life itself, is at stake, holds an enormous power over the minds of people. Often, it also paradoxically serves as the proof that something of extreme value is located inside the brotherhoods given the extent of sacrifice its members are happily willing to offer. This being said, let us now return to the Akbulut’s act of killing and consider its effects and consequences for (1) the internal solidarity of the group, (2) for the solidarity of the enemy club, and (3) for the level of appeal to the supporters and admirers. This will further support the idea that such occasional acts are socially necessary for these groups, if they are to survive and grow, which is their stated goal. Let us first consider this event from the position of Akbulut and the Hells Angels, before we move toward considering the impact of the killing of Eschli for the Bandidos. Akbulut turns himself in the next day. But the killing is a war declaration. Exactly three weeks later,6 around sixty Hells Angels arrive at the scene in the Charlottenstraße in Duisburg, challenging roughly the same amount of Bandidos; the confrontation flares up, the groups attack each other with anything at hand. Police, in clear minority, call for reinforcement and special units. The brawls go until late in the morning and spread to several clubhouses in neighboring areas. The motto one for all, all for one, comes alive. But the confrontation is nothing but a mutual power demonstration of the clubs and a further escalation of the conflict that has been brewing over territorial, business, and protection claims in the red-light district for a considerable time prior to the act. A mediated spectacle ensues; Spiegel reports on the helplessness of the police

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vis-à-vis the one percenters,7 images of the event are swiftly shared on the social media, and supporters cheer for each their club. This is also a demonstration, on both sides, that only those who have the guts to live such a life are welcome in the club—a strategy to weed out the weak. This has its own appeal; it instantly confers value and power on those who are or even those who imagine themselves to be tough enough to be brothers—be it in the real life, the virtual worlds of support, or somewhere in between. A detailed account of these events can be found in German in the book Rockerkrieg co-written by several journalists (Diehl et al. 2013); it is not necessary to concern ourselves here with minute details. What is crucial is that the act triggers a sequence of displays of solidarity on each side—the respective solidarity with the killer and the victim, and the solidarity expressed by supporters. This strengthens the social bonds, as much as it strengthens the grudges of the enemy clubs— holding a grudge and swearing revenge are instrumental for the reproduction of these groups and for strengthening their inner social cohesion and identity. Maintaining the boundary between the competing clans is essential for the constitution of the ‘we’ among the one percenters (Barth 1969). This ‘we’ has to be constantly reproduced through different forms of ritual. The frequency of ritual and other socially reproductive and group reinvigorating actions increases especially in times when the clubs may face or feel threatened by individual members snitching or individual members switching sides. This has become an occasional occurrence especially in conflict-prone territories. In such moments, rituals and acts that stimulate the rejuvenation of group solidarity and serve as a reminder of the rules, obligations, and core values, become especially important. During the trial—as in any of these trials—elite and familiar members of both clubs attended the hearings and made sure to spectacularly stage the boundary and animosity between the clubs in the courtroom, and for the media, requiring constant presence of security personnel to keep the two groups apart. In this ritual spectacle, each group and the accused have their theatrical roles to play and assigned ways to behave. This spectacle not only serves to confirm the identity and solidarity of their own group, but also to project an image of solidarity and brotherhood via media to other groups as well as to the supporters. Any moment of crisis can be instrumentalized.

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But a moment of crisis is also a moment of risk. As the clubs know, they have to take good care of their brothers in the jail and of their families on the outside. They have to display relentless support and solidarity, else they risk a grudge that can potentially develop into snitching to authorities for personal gain, threatening the club as a whole. Hence, the clubs always make sure that members doing jail time not only get the best lawyers but are also always remembered, supported, and financially and emotionally taken care of; they receive letters, kind words, gifts, and material support. The Hells Angels for instance have a special support merchandize developed for the Big House Crew (members in jail), which often also features their names—from T-shirts and other clothing, to lighters and other trinkets sold in support stands during events or online. But it is not only individual clubs that create channels to support their members. Media plays a crucial role here. For instance, the German magazine Bikers News has a regular Jail Mail feature in each issue, where bikers in jail can for free print their greetings to their respective clubs, friends, family, and favorite members, while they can also use it as a venue to find women. One can also buy a patch to fund free issues for bikers doing time on the Bikers News Web site, or as the commercial that appears in each issue reads, Bikers support bikers. You can prove it with the jail mail patch. You know, behind bars, every reading material is in great demand, and our jailed brothers want to know what’s going on outside, in freedom. We do not squander the proceedings from the sale of the patches, but instead we finance free subscriptions for bikers in jail. The patch costs 10 euros and we sell it in our online shop. (transl. from German by author)

This brings us to another important element—the display of solidarity through material culture—and especially the display of solidarity through gifting in solidarity. Or as Komter put it, when arguing for bringing the theory of the gift together with the theory of solidarity, Gifting gifts is an act that creates and maintains social ties by making people feel mutually obliged to give in return. Similarly, social solidarity is regarded as the glue that keeps people together. (Komter 2005: loc. 94)

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For too long have solidarity and the gift been kept conceptually apart, the first being more of a concern for sociology, while the latter for anthropology (Komter 2005). However, in reality, they are intricately linked. As much as there is no solidarity without sacrifice, there is no solidarity without the gift. And today, media and social media play a central role in this gift-solidarity nexus. A case in point—as Akbulut talks to the Spiegel TV, the video goes viral among the bikers and supporters on social media. Around that time, his Facebook Page, where he lists himself as a ‘public figure,’ begins trending. He uses it to promote and sell Support 81 merchandize, including his own line Support Timo81 and Big House Crew, with proceedings going to him and other brothers in jail. By July 2018, when he is released, it reaches nine thousand seven hundred likes—it did help that he gets married inside the jail in 2014, again gaining media attention. In the meantime, Akbulut is decorated with the notorious Filthy Few patch reserved for those that have killed on behalf of the club. But Akbulut is not the only one who receives a new patch here. Eschli is posthumously decorated with the Expect No Mercy patch, a Bandidos version of the Angels’ Filthy Few patch, reserved for those who, as the Bandidos say, have shown ‘bravery in their fight against the enemy or the system’ and becomes an icon for the club members, who are endlessly proud of him and who build a temple for his Harley. Videos circulate on YouTube—images from the funeral overlaid with emotionally charged rock ballads, with thousands of views; the report on the funeral itself having almost half a million.8 Again, in both cases, these decorations remind us of the valorization of ‘heroism’ that mirrors military practices, and of the struggle for symbolic immortality that we discussed in the previous chapter. Or as Becker puts it, ‘the elaborate decorations of the warrior’ were aimed to show off his skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect… the ‘fruit salad’ on the chest of today’s military men is a direct descendant of this public announcement of ‘see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier’. (Becker 1975: 41–42)

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Even those who did not defy death are decorated and become immortal icons and heroes. Fifteen hundred Bandidos from all over the world gather for Eschli’s funeral in Gelsenkirchen, six hundred of them ride on their machines to the funeral, police take care of the traffic; many of them wear T-shirts that read ‘in memory of Eschli.’ The funeral is peaceful, but according to RP Online, the police deployment costs up to six hundred thousand of euros nonetheless, as there is fear of escalation of the conflict.9 The death creates solidarity and mobilizes support. There is nothing like a collective ritual of this kind—and we must not forget, again, mediated, and valorized, in a certain sense, by the excessive presence of the police—to produce not only ‘collective effervescence,’ but also ‘collective consciousness,’ as Durkheim would put it (Durkheim 1965). In their memoir, the two founding members of the Bandidos in Germany dedicate a whole chapter to Eschli, remembering his Sinti background, his earlier career among Schalke hooligans, his wild and often uncontrollable temperament, his repeated troubles from which they had to drag him time and again, his endless affairs with women—but foremost, they remember him as someone with ‘a heart in the right place’ (Maczollek and Hause 2013). ‘Heart in the right place’ is a phrase that reoccurs very often, as we shall see in a moment. But before we do so, let us briefly look at the lessons we can draw from this case. We have seen that violent actions can easily result in heartwarming feelings of solidarity—on both sides of the camp. From the support one receives in the prison from one’s brothers, the care displayed by supporters for an Angel in the jail, to the powerful and spectacular funeral ritual, online and offline support, and the memorial runs that inevitably follow, further binding the community together. As sociological research shows, following a tragedy, solidarity in a community or group hit by this tragedy is temporarily elevated, typically for several months (Hawdon et al. 2010). But we have also seen that rituals that follow such events serve as a reminder of the strict rules of the clubs. As such, they can often come in handy when individuals within the organization face doubts or attempt to pursue individualistic goals. Or else, when there is an internal tension between the communal and the individual (Grundvall 2018). At

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the same time, to the enthusiastic outsiders, be they supporters or admirers of the club and irrespective of the way in which they experience these rituals—be it in real or mediated form—the power demonstration of the clubs, on either side, appears as desirable. Again, this follows the logic of the seduction of the sublime (see Chapter 2). But it is not only the power demonstration that appeals to them, it is also the demonstration of solidarity, and the intensity and perceived ‘authenticity’ with which this solidarity is demonstrated. And finally, it is the demonstration of the strict, even brutal, rules of the club life. Seen from the outside, this strictness in itself has an appeal. And so, while people look to the clubs for the transference of the feeling of sovereignty (see Chapter 3), they also at the same time look for their own submission—a submission to a powerful group and to a powerful ideal that provides them with direction. Paradoxically, it is only through submission that they imagine their own empowerment. Iannaccone, focusing on the economics of religion, has put forward a rational choice theory argument in respect to the success of strict church organizations, which can be applied here as well, and be of value to consider here despite the obvious limitations of rational choice theory approaches to the social world. Iannaccone argued that strictness increases commitment, raises levels of participation, and enables a group to offer more benefits to current and potential members. It seems obvious that such groups enjoy a competitive advantage over their opposites (who suffer from less commitment, lower participation, and fewer perceived benefits). (Iannaccone 1994: 1181)

Such ‘churches’ have strict rules on membership, and organizations defined by absolutism, fanaticism, and conformity, they condemn deviance, shun dissenters, and repudiate the outside world. They frequently embrace ‘eccentric traits,’ such as distinctive diet, dress, or speech, that invite ridicule, isolation, and persecution. (Iannaccone 1994: 1182).

Deviance in our case would be breaking the code of silence or disobeying any other internal laws and taboos, such as the one that says that

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you cannot attack your own brother with any weapon, except for your own fists—that is, a prohibition on killing of one’s own (as long as they are still your own). Indeed, using Lewis Coser’s terminology, this strictness is essential to ‘greedy institutions’ (Coser 1974). Indeed, as Iannaccone writes, the crucial thing to consider here is the degree to which a group limits and thereby increases the cost of nongroup activities, such as socializing with members of other churches or pursuing ‘secular’ pastimes. (Iannaccone 1994: 1182)

Outlaw motorcycle clubs demand total submission to the club; the club, as a collective body, always comes first. It demands loyalty, but it also has to continually produce incentives encouraging such loyalty (Quinn and Koch 2003; Wolf 1999). This can be particularly difficult in the context of complex societies where the individual member is not only pushed by expectations from the side of the club, but also by expectation from the ‘outside’ society in which he still often participates despite his proclaimed (self-)exclusion.10 The organization must act aggressively toward the individual if it wishes to capture his finite libidinal energies for itself; others are in continual competition for attention and commitment as well—be it family or work. Hence, it is most effective if the members’ job becomes dependent on the club, and so does his family. This is often the case and gifts are even here instrumental to achieving this form of dependence—there is after all nothing like a gift to keep one in debt. Military is, too, an organization that faces a similar predicament, being equally demanding in respect to loyalty, commitment, and willingness to sacrifice (Segal 1986). These institutions are greedy insofar as they seek exclusive and undivided loyalty and… attempt to reduce the claims of competing roles and status positions on those they wish to encompass within their boundaries. Their demands on the person are omnivorous… Greedy institutions are characterized by the fact that they exercise pressures on component individuals to weaken their ties, or not to form any ties, with other institutions or persons that might make claims that conflict with their own demands. (Coser 1974: 6)

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Greedy institutions do not respect any competing obligations or allegiances; they ignore the contemporary normative order that protects individual autonomy and private life. To disoriented individuals, this is particularly appealing since the form of solidarity one percenters offer is perceived in direct contrast to both the widespread individual and societal sense of loss of trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships. We must not confuse greedy institutions Goffman’s ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1968), even if they share certain features. Greedy institutions must invest far more energy and creativity into enforcing loyalty and solidarity. Greedy institutions depend on creation and maintenance of symbolic boundaries in order to manufacture undivided commitment, unlike total institutions that rely on physical separation—from prisons, monasteries, asylums to military bases. Greedy institutions are thus far more dependent on making their lifestyle appear as highly desirable; the entry is always voluntary. They need to offer something special to their members that is worth the massive sacrifice on their part, preferably something that they feel they can no longer find elsewhere. Throughout this book, I have attempted to point the readers first and foremost toward the libidinal gains these organizations offer, beyond the promise of material rewards.

Symbolic Death and Rebirth: Therapy Culture to Honor Culture Rituals in the aftermath of the killing, on both sides of the conflict, serve not only to produce solidarity inside the respective groups and an ideal of solidarity for the consumption of the outsiders, but more specifically also to (re)produce a form of solidarity particular to an honor culture. They serve the same function as the initiation—and can be viewed as a form of continuation and revival of the movement of separation from and integration into inherent to the initiation, which is also a movement from a therapy/victimhood culture to an honor culture. We have briefly touched upon these ideas earlier, but let me elaborate here. First, we must sketch a distinction between three ideal types of culture that may be particularly helpful for our understanding of the ritual rebirth

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of a one percenter that is symbolically reenacted here; a symbolic death in a therapeutic culture and a rebirth in an honor culture. Campbell and Manning distinguish between three ideal types of cultures—a culture of honor, a culture of dignity, and a culture of victimhood, which correspond to different forms of social control (Campbell and Manning 2014). Cultures of honor cultivate bravery do not shy away from physical violence and place high value on one’s reputation. One’s honor depends on one’s reputation. In order to protect this reputation, one must respond even to the slightest provocations and offenses with direct and aggressive retaliation, in order not lose one’s face—as we have clearly seen in the case of Akbulut and Eschli. Or as Cooney put it, the hallmark of honor is a heightened sensitivity to insult coupled with belligerence in responding to it. (Cooney 1998: 110)

One percenters embody this ethos of an honor culture; when it comes to retaliation against an enemy club, the question is never if, but when; or else, in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so. (Cooney 1998: 110)

Moreover, because of their belief in the value of personal bravery and capability, people socialized into a culture of honor will often shun reliance on law or any other authority even when it is available, refusing to lower their standing by depending on another to handle their affairs. (Campbell and Manning 2014: 713)

Honor culture is a clan culture, where a disgrace of one member, is a disgrace of all—here too, our initial motto of ‘one for all, all for one,’ applies. Furthermore, it tends to be a belief culture, marked by a certain distance toward its own beliefs and its magic (Pfaller 2011‚ 2014). Cultures of dignity on the other hand, typical of Western bourgeois modernity, tend to be more often than not faith cultures, whose highest

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value is self-esteem (Pfaller 2014). They believe in an inherent dignity of all individuals and direct their attention toward self-control. Granted that everyone is imagined to possess this inherent dignity, struggles over reputation become less important. Insults do not arouse as passionate emotions as they do in an honor culture, and people generally shrug off insults. Police and justice apparatus are considered necessary only when a serious crime occurs. Minor differences are dealt without an interference of a third party; calling for police for every little thing is perceived as frivolous, while taking law into one’s hands is widely condemned. Cultures of victimhood or therapy culture, which we see proliferating today, are at odds with both honor and dignity cultures. Victimhood and therapy cultures rely excessively on third instances to solve the tiniest of offenses (Campbell and Manning 2018). While honor cultures are very sensitive to insults and provocations and could thus have a certain sympathy for microaggressions, unlike therapy cultures, they prefer direct retaliation without recourse to a third instance. Dignity cultures, on the other hand, would denounce appeals to a third party based on such minor offenses, preferring to ignore such provocations. Cultures of victimhood place emphasis on one’s marginalization, weakness, and oppression, turning these into a form of status and social capital, where only victims are considered as deserving of respect and help. Committees, boards, and programs designed to help these victims proliferate indefinitely. Frank Furedi captured this type of culture that celebrates the victim in his concept of ‘therapy culture’ and others have pointed to the ‘therapeutic turn’ and the progressive psychologization of society (Madsen 2014; Smail 2018). Furedi argued that the progressive institutionalization of therapy has led to a generalized cultivation of vulnerability, and a culture that treats people as unable to deal with their lives, permanently at risk, vulnerable, and victimized. This then in effect leads people toward being actually unable to take control over their lives (Furedi 2004)—the opposite of the self-help literature proclaims. This culture is marked by an obsessive concern with individual identity, contemporary identity politics being its most vocal expression with its quest to deliver recognition to all (instead of free education, decent standard of living, health care, and so on). It is precisely this victimhood culture and therapy culture, obsessed with the individual and emotions that

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perfectly accompanies the neoliberal brutalization of social relations and the destruction of the social (Pfaller 2017a). Individuals who find the outlaw biker brotherhoods particularly seductive are also those who resent the most the victimhood and therapy culture; they are either unable or unwilling to capitalize on it. Instead, in a reactionary move, they turn to honor culture. Therapy culture stands in the sharpest contrast to the culture of honor and its form of solidarity. The maxim of the therapy culture—what one feels and believes internally matters the most, one is entitled to behave in correspondence with these inner feelings (‘I don’t like you, why should I hide my feelings’)—is the opposite of what facilitates solidarity. Those living in an honor culture can be as intensely offended as those in a victimhood culture, but both the reasons and solutions differ; they pertain to safeguarding the clan’s honor and maintaining appearances. It is not important what an individual feels deep down at the bottom of his heart, after all, he personally may not want to take a revenge at all, but he is obliged to and hence he must. One could argue that there is a certain tension between the modern quest for authenticity underlying the one percenters’ forms of solidarity and the simultaneous cultivation of an honor culture. But this is not a fault of theory. Both are the case at the same time, and both emerge from the current socioeconomic and cultural environment in which the clubs exist. Life does not submit to neat theoretical categories, but this does not mean that these categories do not illuminate its most salient aspects. If there is one thing that the one percenters and their supporters show us, it is precisely that people can hold the most contradictory notions at the same time, with equal seriousness, without any problems. To the honor culture of the one percenters, appearances matter more than internal belief; what matters is that individual members act in accordance with the brotherhood ideology and materially reproduce this ideology. Whatever they internally believe, they should keep to themselves. And as we know by now, it is precisely in the material existence of ideas, in material acts, that ideology is reproduced and becomes most potently visible (Althusser 2008). As we have seen throughout this book, the sacred, the sovereign, as well as solidarity among the one percenters is something that has to be continually materially reenacted:

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Members hug each other excessively, cover their vests and motorcycles in the club symbols, patches and stickers that explicitly formulate the ideology of the brotherhood, produce an impressive amount of material culture and mutual gifts, engage in spectacular repetitive rituals and cover their bodies with tattoos symbolizing their alliance to the brotherhood. Unlike a therapy culture, where what matters are internal feelings and where one demands to be recognized as one is, honor culture depends on its materialization that reproduces the split between the internal and the external in favor of the external. Material representations and materialized ideas can act interpassively on behalf of the members (Pfaller 2017b); belief can be delegated onto the material objects that then believe on one’s behalf (Kuldova 2018a). Objectively, materially speaking, solidarity is expressed and recreated at all times through ritual and material practices. This situation is parallel to Slavoj Žižek’s example of the functioning of the Tibetan prayer wheel, where the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me – or, more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it is that in my psychological interior I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty an obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because – to use a good old Stalinist expression – whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying. (Žižek 1989: 34)

Rituals are often interpassive in their character, or as Pfaller put it, We do not have to believe, then, ourselves… but some anonymous other merely has to be made to believe that we believed. Thanks to an anonymous illusion we are therefore able to derive a lot of satisfaction from not believing. The anonymous belief that allows us not to believe is established through performing the ritual… Through rituals, individuals delegate their religious beliefs to interpassive media. (Pfaller 2017b: 60–61)

While therapy culture is marked by a lack of distance toward one’s own belief, an honor culture, indulging in excessive material demonstrations of its beliefs and in rituals, is able to maintain a certain inner distance

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toward belief—while at the same time, or precisely because of it, being deadly serious about it. Again, in line with Huizinga’s sacred seriousness of play (Huizinga 1970). This distance becomes obvious if one engages in talks with the bikers; they often personally think that for instance having a huge cake for a club anniversary party decorated with a club logo is indeed rather silly. After all, they are grown up men, but still, when the cake is lit, split, shared, and photographed along with collective selfies, they take great pleasure in the practice and objectively speaking, reproduce the brotherhood ideology that binds them in relations of solidarity. Or as Martín Sánchez-Jankowski nicely points out discussing street gangs in the USA, everyone that I talked to understood that the brotherhood ideology existed. They realized that members did not really look at one another as brothers, at least not with the intensity that the brotherhood ideology intended, but that the ideology nonetheless acted as a bonding agent. (Sanchez-Jankowski 1991: 87)

One percenters are more skilled and effective at (re)producing the brotherhood ideology through ritual, but this split of knowing and illusion is often at work as well. This is also why the brotherhood and brotherhood ideology must be ritually reinvigorated from time to time. In this respect, in particular the ‘uniform,’ the sacred patch, becomes most significant. The patch demands one behaves with respect to the code of honor and the laws of the group, irrespective of what one internally believes. Objectively, the patch, as a materialization of ideology and social organization, forces one to behave as a member of the clan, as a brother—and serves as a constant reminder of the obligation toward solidarity. As Pfaller notes, when objective belief is there (thanks to a ritual medium), the religious subject can go away. As a result of its interpassive dimension, the ritual frees the individual from subjectivisation. (Pfaller 2017b: 62)

This perspective slightly complicates the traditional sociological concern in regard to the submission of the individual to the collective. But it

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also affords the production of solidarity among these groups a playful character that cannot be emphasized enough. The fact that pleasure is derived from this form play is also crucial. Again, as Pfaller remarks, play’s culture-forming function seems to stem from… its ability to hold society together and its obvious trait of sparking off excessive happiness. This excessive happiness, which is the ‘sacred seriousness’ of play… is bound to the condition that the practicing persons are initiates who see through the illusion of the game. (Pfaller 2014: 90).

The power of (ritual) play to create social bonds reflects our initial point pertaining to the importance of a strong honor code, of a set of strict rules by which the members are obliged to play. Collective emotions and affects that emerge from play, where a group is bound together by strict rules and obligations, are far more effective in enforcing solidarity than in groups where strict rules are missing and where play is minimized.

Charitable Giving, Legitimization, and a ‘Heart in the Right Place’ Not only strictness, ritual play, and material culture are instrumental in the manufacturing of strong social bonds of solidarity, but also gift-giving, especially in the form of charity. Outlaw bikers have become notorious for their acts of charity; the Hells Angels in the USA have been organizing annual toy runs since the mid-70s. The European one percenters caught up with these displays of the bikers’ having ‘heart in the right place’ sometime during the 90s. They stepped up these efforts as they grew and as the pressure from law enforcement progressively increased and they sought to legitimize their informal power (Kuldova 2018b; Kuldova and Quinn 2018). Despite their distaste for victimization, in this case, the clubs have not shied away from employing this rhetoric. After all, the Angels motto: ‘when we do right, nobody remembers; when we do wrong, nobody forgets’ has an odor of victimization around it. But this is what it takes to legitimize one’s informal power and gain support. They manage to even turn their merchandize

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into a form of ‘ethical consumption’ when they organize charity events where they sell their support products for a good cause. There is possibly no better expression of ‘capitalism with a human face’—destruction and harm accompanied by a charade of ethical concern (Žižek 2009; Layton 2010; Walz et al. 2014). And yet, in this case, this mixture of readiness to be violent and readiness to be charitable stirs powerful feelings of solidarity. In my view, this is so because it is mixed with a dose of resentment against the current system (even where it perfectly mirrors its very nature) that inevitably runs through the veins of these events, creating an explosive mixture. Through charity, the one percenters manage to turn their merchandize into a branded display of solidarity with the weak—typically children, women, homeless people, veterans, and so on. Social media has only amplified this effect (Kuldova 2019). With the rise of social media, the charitable actions of the one percenters have become widely shared and have increased in frequency. They are used to mobilize support as they go viral within the biker networks. Often one encounters an image of a child circulating on the web, suffering of a disease for which the parents are unable to afford a cure, accompanied by poster for an upcoming charity event organized by one biker club or another, with proceedings going to the family. Or one watches a video about a child, a victim of bullying in the school, and the one percenters who step up, show themselves in front of the school as his friends and take him for a ride; they make him feel like a hero and intimidate the bullies. Or one sees the one percenters taking care of homeless people, donating to local charities. For example, during the Open House event of the Hells Angels in Hof City in June 2018 which I attended, Richard Brox, who has lived as a homeless in Germany for more than a decade, read from his recently published book (Brox 2017). This reading was attended not only by supporters and friends, but also by neighbors and local community. Brox touched not only upon his own life as a homeless, but on larger social and economic problems in Germany, finding a particular resonance in the audience on these points; he also accounted for the moments of support he received from the Hells Angels. The reading, which took place in the gym of the local clubhouse, led to a fairly long discussion, and questions of considerable depth have been aired, stirring

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both emotions and personal memories. Brox read the following passage from his book, which has found some of the most resonance in the audience, The Spiral of Violence The situation of the homeless, which has never been rosy, has become even more desperate following the introduction of the Hartz reforms. The majority of us did not even catch what they were discussing in 2004 and what was decided on the 24th of December under the title ‘The Fourth Law for Modern Services in the Labor Market,’ a cynical Christmas gift for the poor. Those who lived on the street and needed money from the social security office, and entered this office following the reform, immediately felt that suddenly everything has changed. Those who did not have certificate of registration, were rejected, those who could still somehow look straight, were sent into underpaid forced labor. Those who rejected this, were punished with a reduction or full removal of financial support; applicants were increasingly receiving vouchers instead of cash. The clerks, also earlier no angels, increasingly treated us as liars, and parasites refusing to work. With the concentrated power of the bureaucracy, the reality – that has made us what we were – was to be denied and we were to be turned into productive citizens. But many of us were just finished and broken, and fled these impositions, fell through all social networks and went through life without any government help. Following the introduction of the Hartz-IV reform, the streets have become even rougher, more brutal and merciless. (Brox 2017: loc. 1633–1644; transl. from German by author)

It may surprise some that events such as this would take place at a Hells Angels clubhouse. Even if the author is clearly friendly with and offers a short positive story about the Angels in his book, this does not take away from the resonance of his experiences and the disillusionment with the system to which he appeals. And it is this that underpins these acts of charity, making them furthermore appealing and providing them with an appearance of legitimacy and a sense of justice in the eyes of the supporters. Again, social media is instrumental. Even this event was shared and commented on by far more individuals than it has actually been attended by. Another case in point, that we have used in a chapter co-written with James Quinn, is representative of this trend, let me quote from our chapter,

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On the 8th of July 2017, a video appeared on the Facebook page of TuraMusic, belonging to the Munich based German-Turkish rapper Tura Cem, a supporter of the Hells Angels MC Munich Area Charter. The music video features members and supporters of the local Hells Angels MC and Red Devils MC, an affiliate and support club, gathered on their Harleys as a surprise for the 17th birthday of the physically impaired Andreas suffering from a chromosome defect. At the beginning of the video, soft rap music by Tura accompanies the tear-jerking slow-motion images of the muscular, tattooed bikers with their Harleys along with the disabled teenager and his mother. Towards the middle of the video, the biker convoy rides with the boy on the machines to the sound of When the Children Cry by White Lion. The clip then culminates in the boy receiving his very own patch from the Hells Angels, with an inscription Little Angel, and a helmet signed by the club members, to the sound of Mi Gna (feat. Spitakci Hyko) by the Armenian rapper, Super Sako. At the time of writing, this video has been viewed 476 348 times, has had more than 8300 likes and 3880 shares and more than 1200 comments expressing support and respect for the bikers, making it the most-viewed and popular video ever uploaded on this site, the page itself having only 8000 likes. The comments express appreciation for the act, and admiration for the honorable qualities of the bikers; they are mostly structured along the following lines: ‘respect 81’ or ‘support 81’, ‘the media only shows when bikers fight, but they never show when they do good’, ‘the bad boys have more honesty, heart, and understanding than everyone else’, ‘seeing this, I trust 81 more than police, those are the ones I really fear’, ‘you have displayed class, respect’, ‘another proof that they are not criminals as the government would like us to believe, but men with hearts in the right place’, ‘heartbreaking action, more of this please, made me cry’ and so on. (Kuldova and Quinn 2018: 145–146)

All these instances are staged to show that the one percenters care and support those who support them, that they act in solidarity. But they also always simultaneously point to the state failing to support these people (see Chapter 3). They thus skillfully use these events to both produce solidarity within the extended ‘kin-group’ of supporters, be they offline, online, or both, and in the same breath to further delegitimize the state.

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Even here, solidarity emerges in opposition to an enemy—this time, not an enemy club, but the state itself. The state is cast as lacking precisely in solidarity with the most vulnerable and is revealed as an uncaring, oppressive beast, curbing freedom, demanding taxes, but giving nothing in return. These anti-establishment narratives find an increasing resonance among people disillusioned with austerity politics, suffering from the different consequences of the excesses of neoliberalism— people who may not live like Brox but may nonetheless fear and identify with his narrative. The solidarity that the one percenters offer may require a sacrifice, but it is better than nothing. And it appears transparent; the rules are strict, but they are clear. And while these acts of support, and charity, can always be instrumentalized, this does not mean they are only cynical actions intended as a positive PR; many of those they are intended to help are those they care for: friends, supporters, or acquaintances; the causes are real, and sure often heartbreaking. And even if the safety net may come at a price, it is still a safety net. Both types of displays of solidarity appeal to the supporters—be it the actions following the killing or the actions of charity. The first display strength, the latter compassion. They are brutal, but in a perverse way, they restore a sense of justice. Again, justice is often perceived as lacking and the state as unable to deliver it (where it does not appear directly unjust itself ). There are hardly more powerful qualities arousing and directing individual and collective affects to come around. The strictness of the clubs, even their acts of brutality, is thus not a problem; they do not disempower the charitable act. To the contrary, it is precisely in the light of the strictness, of the honor code, that these acts of charity become seen as paradoxical forms of justice. A widespread perception of injustice increases the chances that some may look elsewhere to achieve ‘justice,’ most often to different forms of ‘self-help’ and ‘self-administered justice’ (Carlson 2012; Brookbanks 1999). Outlaw motorcycle clubs have been known to occasionally provide protection ‘services’ or to, at the least, allude to their ability to potentially do so— to form vigilante groups to protect local communities in the face of what they perceive as the failure of the police and the state to do so, something they conceive of as a form of charity in itself as well, and as a display of solidarity.11 But we must bear in mind that this positive

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perception and valorization of this type of solidarity is in a f­undamental sense enabled by the countless harms of the current socioeconomic ­system (Hall and Winlow 2018). In every instance, it is this context that shapes the vision—be it in respect to the desire for solidarity or for the sublime, the sovereign, or the sacred. * * * Solidarity among the one percenters and their supporters is manufactured equally through rituals following traumatic events such killings, and through the radically opposite acts of charity. Violent and criminal transgressions along with displays of one’s ‘heart in the right place’ manufacture not only solidarity but also turn the one percenters into heroes, role models, and saviors for their supporters. They are seen as those who can offer material support in times of need as much as meaning, rules for life, honor, and a sense of greatness. In his The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett is, on one hand, disquieted by the dangerous pronoun ‘we’ and its rise in reaction to the harmful effects of neoliberalism, but on the other hand, acknowledges the sense of loss of character, of lasting values. He points out that the current motto ‘No long term’ on which contemporary society operates, effectively destroys trust, reciprocity, mutual commitment, and loyalty (Sennett 1998). As he writes, character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. (Sennett 1998: 10)

It appears to me that when people search for solidarity today, they also search for character. And since character appears as a scarce resource in today’s society, often, even bad character becomes an option that provides relief from the existential angst. There is no doubt that outlaw bikers do to some degree restore a sense of ‘character’ in a person who is turned from a ‘nobody’ to a member of a powerful transnational brotherhood. Richard Sennett has a point when he writes that, one of the unintended consequences of modern capitalism is that it has strengthened the value of place, aroused a longing for community. All the emotional conditions… in the workplace animate that desire: the

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uncertainties of flexibility; the absence of deeply rooted trust and commitment; the superficiality of teamwork; most of all, the specter of failing to make something of oneself in the world, to ‘get a life’ through one’s work. All these conditions impel people to look for some other scene of attachment and depth… it is almost a universal law that ‘we’ can be used as a defense against confusion and dislocation. (Sennett 1998: 111)

The ‘we’ that the one percenters offer thrives under these conditions.

Notes 1. Some reports stated that the conflict had to do with the ex-girlfriend of Akbulut, who was now together with the victim. Others have pointed toward the conflict in the red-light district of Duisburg that has been brewing for a while, where both Hells Angels and Bandidos were running their business and to the increase in tensions prior to the act. It is also to be remarked that in the moment of killing, Akbulut is still a prospect, but during the court proceedings appears as a full member decorated with the Filthy Few patch; the killing thus could have been itself a rite of passage, even if possibly retroactively. 2. https://www.xtranews.de/2010/08/30/duisburg-es-wollte-keiner-seingesicht-verlieren-11-jahre-haft-fuer-den-hells-angels-timur-akbulut-id0827721.html, accessed September 20, 2018. 3. h t t p : / / w w w. s p i e g e l . d e / v i d e o / h e l l s - a n g e l s - t i m u r - a k b u lut-video-99010679.html, accessed September 20, 2018. 4. This does not mean the act was necessarily planned or intended, but rather that it was retroactively used as a proof of commitment and initiation. 5. From a conversation with a supporter in Germany shortly after a murder within the outlaw motorcycle milieu, July 2016. 6. Interestingly, in their memoir, Ziemlich böse Freunde, the authors and Bandidos founding members, Maczollek and Hause report on the confrontation as if it happened instantly, an hour after the killing (Maczollek, P.‚ and Hause, L. 2013. Ziemlich Böse Freunde: Wie Wir Die Bandidos in Deutschland Gründeten. München: Riva Verlag.) This does not align either with the media reports or the narrative in the Diehls, Heises, and Meyer-Heuer’s book Rockerkrieg, where the

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events are written up based on police reports (Diehl, J., Heise, T., and Meyer-Heuer, C. 2013. Rockerkrieg: Warum Hells Angels Und Bandidos Immer Gefährlicher Werden—Ein Spiegel-Buch. Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt). But it does suggest that the events of the night must be thought in the context of the killing. 7. http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/rockerkrieg-im-ruhrgebiethaltet-euch-da-raus-a-658720.html, accessed July 10, 2017. 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu6aPqmrzP0, accessed July 11, 2017. 9. https://rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/duisburg/rocker-begraebnis-kostet-600000-euro_aid-8732623, accessed July 10, 2017. 10. The degree of participation of individual members in the economy outside of the club structures varies significantly, some have jobs that depend on the club structures, where the respective business is dependent on relations between individual members within the club, or is even a direct club business (e.g., selling of club merchandize, security/ bouncer business), others have ordinary jobs in companies unrelated to the clubs. 11. A widely reported instance of a biker vigilante group (or Bürgerwehr ) was one established following the New Year celebration events in 2016 in Köln. While this group was widely portrayed as anti-immigrant, and the notion of vigilante groups connected to the idea of ‘white men,’ there are also other groups emerging. These imitate the organizational structure and aesthetics of outlaw bikers (albeit without the motorcycles), such as Germany’s Muslims, a vigilante group that aims to protect mosques and Muslims against expressions of ‘islamophobia.’

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Epilogue

The popularity of outlaw motorcycle clubs and similar organizations, be they vigilante groups, gangs, terrorist groups, or extreme right-wing organizations, has been on the rise within the current cultural, political, and economic system in the West. Increasing amounts of people are seduced by reactionary movements that promise solidarity, protection, and something to believe in and die for. Or else, groups and movements that promise a path to immortality where the neoliberal society only offers disposability, disregard, and obliviousness. We live in extreme times. Most of us experience and observe the rapid disintegration of social bonds under neoliberalism, and its effects, with anxiety. When social bonds disintegrate, as already Émile Durkheim argued, societies are headed toward individual and collective self-destruction (Durkheim 2006). What we are witnessing today is precisely this collective selfdestruction. The state of anomie is inherent to the unregulated capitalist economy (or rather, regulated in favor of the few on the top). And today, there is nothing that escapes the neoliberal market and its ideology, and that is not submitted to it. Religions have lost their power, governments and states likewise, submitting themselves to neoliberal forces they are unable to control. In the process, social bonds have been weakened. When social bonds have a certain strength to them, individuals © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2

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202     Epilogue

flourish. Or else, people can achieve a balance between communal solidarity and their individual goals. People within such societies acquire both a sense of individuality and a sense of being part of a group, of something larger than themselves. And hence, they can gain a sense of purpose and psychological protection from meaninglessness and the fear of death. Societies must achieve a certain equilibrium between the individual and the communal for people to thrive. Instead, under neoliberalism we are facing the shattering of these social bonds. Too many people are plunged into psychological distress and existential anxiety that leads them toward different paths of self-destruction. Durkheim would argue that such anomie, such as despair and hopelessness, precisely leads many to suicide. But as we have seen, the same anomie leads people toward the search for the radically opposite—but no less selfdestructive—forms of solidarity. It leads them to search for alternative sources of relief that promise the opposite, but that reveal themselves as merely the other side of the same coin. Anomie pushes people into the arms of greedy institutions, where the ultimate price for the social goods they offer can be one’s life, along with other forms of altruistic self-sacrifice for the group. The life choice on offer for many people today is thus one between two extremes: anomic self-destruction under the neoliberal conditions of social disintegration or altruistic self-destruction under the conditions of submission to a greedy organization. Unable to live and cope in the former, they chose the latter. But, we must insist, again, that they know quite well that the latter is far away from any healthy equilibrium. Nonetheless, they are knowingly willing to pay this price for the semblance of the social goods—solidarity, power, sovereignty, and sacred—even if they come in most extreme forms, and at most extreme price. They long for these social goods so much. These social goods cannot be bought on the market irrespective of how much the market tries to commodify and sell them to us. The products, wrapped in the allure of the social good, ultimately leave us with an even greater sense of emptiness. Organizations such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs do not grow and enjoy popularity by accident under the current conditions; they fill this emptiness. We may desperately try to punish, control, surveil, and target these groups with different policing measures, but the causes for

Epilogue     203

their appeal run far deeper. Securitization is not an answer to any of them. The fundamental question we must ask is thus what depth of political intervention is required to create the conditions in which harmful crime can be significantly reduced without reliance on securitisation? (Hall and Winlow 2016: 84)

But this means expanding our current political imagination. Can we imagine a progressive future in a postmodern world that has discarded all meta-narratives and where many people have lost hope for a better life of their children? Can we imagine a future beyond the threat of the economic and environmental apocalypse without sacrificing the idea of collective progress? Can we offer an alternative to those who seek to satisfy their desires for respect, recognition, stability, community, and meaning through escapism in groups such as the outlaw motorcycle clubs?

References Durkheim, E. (2006). On Suicide. London: Penguin Books. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2016). Realist Criminology and Its Discontents. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 5(3), 80–94.

Index

0-9

81-Support 2, 33, 50, 133, 135, 150, 151, 180, 193 A

abjection 29, 104 abject Other 31 accountability xiv, 90 admiration 2, 32, 34, 65, 70, 146, 193 aesthetics xxii, 31, 32, 38, 46, 50, 52, 53, 65, 149, 197 affect 37, 40, 53, 91, 92, 120, 190, 194 alienation 121, 173 allure xiv, 53, 202 American frontier xii, xxii, 136 American Motorcyclists Association (AMA) 6

anniversary 13, 20, 37, 116, 134, 135, 140, 160, 189 anti-establishment xii, xxiii, 37, 38, 54, 62, 64, 65, 93–96, 98, 101, 102, 158, 194 anti-social behavior xiii anxiety 48, 74, 125, 126, 129, 201, 202 attraction 30–33, 41, 46, 47, 72, 117, 118, 126 austerity 16, 61, 66, 75, 80, 92, 194 authenticity 36, 80, 117, 138, 139, 159, 173–175, 182, 187 autobiography xii B

Bandidos MC 1, 7, 50, 119, 146, 156, 162, 171, 196, 197 barbarian 41, 43, 45, 137

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 T. Kuldova, How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15206-2

205

206     Index

barbarity 30, 43, 45 Barger, Sonny 3, 10, 37, 134–136, 143, 174 Bataille, Georges xxiii, 34, 43, 44, 66, 67, 69, 73, 75, 84, 87, 88, 102 Becker, Ernest xxiii, 42, 77, 122– 125, 127–129, 131, 132, 137, 148, 154, 180 belief culture 185 Big House Crew 179, 180 biker lobby 77 boundaries 13, 16, 71, 73, 104, 105, 153, 154, 159, 183, 184 bourgeois xii, 19, 40, 61, 76, 83, 185 brand/branding xvii, 7, 8, 44, 47, 51, 81, 123, 127, 132, 136–139, 143, 144, 146–149, 151 brotherhood 6, 14, 34, 36, 71, 77, 81, 84, 85, 115–117, 119, 121, 128, 132, 145, 154, 174, 177, 178, 187–189, 195 Burke, Edmund xxii, 31–35, 53 C

capital 17, 33, 66, 69, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 105, 122, 186 capitalism xiii, xx, 18, 95, 191, 195 character 13, 44, 48, 68, 75, 102, 144, 148, 188, 190, 195 charisma 41, 42, 52, 53 charity xi, xvii, xxiv, 5, 13, 135, 148, 190–192, 194, 195 civil liberties xiii, 79 clubhouse xi, 46, 54, 99, 115, 116, 136, 138, 140, 156, 171, 177, 191, 192

collective effervescence 120, 181 comfort 96, 99, 129 commemoration 115, 116 commitment xxiv, 2, 45, 122–124, 130, 136, 144, 172–174, 176, 182–184, 195, 196 commodification xvii, 44, 143 community xiii, xxiv, 19, 40, 63, 65, 69, 71, 74, 81, 85, 101, 104, 105, 122, 132, 135, 136, 141, 144, 175, 176, 181, 191, 195, 203 conservative xii, 121, 137, 140 conspiracy theory 76, 95–100, 103 consumer culture 2, 81, 144 consumerism 82, 126, 127 consumer sovereignty 68, 80, 127 control xiii, xv, xvi, xxiii, 2, 66, 68–75, 78, 80, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 102, 105, 106, 131, 137, 185, 186, 201, 202 copying 145, 147 cosmic order 129 counterculture 6, 37, 38, 118 counterfeit/counterfeiting 147, 148 courage xv, 136, 180 credibility xvii, 17, 19, 91, 100 criminal capital xiv, 19 criminalization xi, xviii, 7, 54, 153, 158 criminal organization xii, xiv, xv, 1, 19, 65, 104, 162 criminogenic conditions xiv, 18 crisis 39, 89, 90, 122, 126, 178, 179 cultural Marxism 67 cultural pleasure xxi, 34, 45, 77 culture of dignity 83, 185 culture of honor 185, 187

Index     207

culture of victimhood 83, 185 cynical distance xviii, xix, 34, 85, 96, 133

distress 69, 71, 72, 74, 86, 202 drug trade xvii, 155 dysphoric experience 85, 131, 172

D

E

death 33, 41, 44, 48, 50, 69, 70, 75–78, 88, 102, 115–119, 124–126, 131, 132, 135, 146, 149, 150, 154, 161, 173, 174, 180, 181, 185, 202 de-democratization xiv, 92 deep state 96, 99 deindustrialization 17 delegitimization xiv, 62, 66, 88, 93, 100, 193 democracy 63, 64, 70, 92, 98 demonstrations xiii, xiv, 102, 156, 158, 188 de-politicization 17 desecration 132, 145, 148, 149 desire xxii, xxiii, 2, 3, 6, 10, 12, 16, 17, 19, 30, 31, 40, 48, 51, 53, 62, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 80, 84, 88, 96, 97, 102–105, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 135, 137, 138, 141, 146, 153, 154, 158, 159, 173–175, 195 deviance xvii, 182 dignity xv, 6, 69, 83, 132, 186 dilution 132, 149 disavowal xviii, xxi, 34, 96, 125 disenchantment 121, 126, 128 dishonor 145, 152 disillusionment 18, 192 disrespect 82, 151, 175 distance 19, 20, 32, 34, 46, 48, 50, 149, 185, 188, 189

edgework 80 elites xiv, 17, 19, 121, 127, 159 emasculation 82, 154 emotionalism 84 empowerment xv, xxiii, 51, 53, 84, 102, 133, 182 ethnography 12, 14 excess 43, 52, 75, 81, 84, 88, 115, 144, 194 exhibition 137, 140–142 existential angst 5, 195 extra-legal governance 130 extreme right xxiv, 20, 61, 62, 69, 201 F

failure xiii, xiv, xxiii, 19, 65, 71, 72, 74, 83, 95, 98, 127, 194 faith culture 185 fake 80, 121, 132, 145, 152, 175 familiarity 40, 54 family xi, xii, 3, 5, 71, 84, 115, 174, 176, 179, 183, 191 fantasy xix–xxi, 6, 14, 18, 19, 36, 38, 52, 84, 127 fear 6, 29, 30, 32, 33, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 53, 61, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79, 84, 88, 96, 97, 100, 102, 122, 124, 125, 162, 180, 181, 193, 194, 202

208     Index

feature 20, 36, 52, 78, 79, 116, 118, 142, 143, 152, 153, 156, 161, 175, 179, 184, 193 fetish 95, 96, 123, 132, 133, 144, 146 fetishism 132 fiction 1, 11–13, 15, 36–38, 42, 46, 52, 98, 129 film xi, 15 filthy rites 120 financial crisis 17 financial elites 62 fraud xiv freedom xii, 6, 44, 45, 51, 63, 64, 74, 76–78, 81, 91, 98, 101, 103, 140, 158, 174, 179, 194 funeral 116, 135, 180, 181 future xiii, xxiv, 16, 17, 19, 76, 78, 195, 203 G

gangs 7, 8, 10, 14, 17, 19, 20, 43, 45, 85, 90, 130, 151, 176, 189, 201 gift xxiii, xxiv, 116, 135, 136, 179, 180, 183, 188, 190, 192 greedy institutions 122, 183, 184, 202 Gremium MC 1, 50, 147, 162 H

Hall, Steve 2, 12, 16, 18, 19, 84, 127, 195 hang-around 8, 15, 31, 85, 99, 119 Harley Davidson 5, 6, 13, 29, 51, 55, 77, 81, 84, 101, 115, 144, 146, 153, 180, 193

harm xxi, 2, 16–18, 71, 73, 127, 149, 191, 195 Hartz-IV 192 Hells Angels MC 1, 6, 116, 140, 146, 154–156, 160–162, 193 helmet law 77 heritage 136–139 hero 39, 45, 65, 76, 85, 88, 102, 125, 128, 135, 136, 181, 191, 195 heroism xxiv, 51, 77, 117, 124, 127, 128, 136, 180 history 3, 5, 9, 10, 44, 63, 64, 87, 105, 116, 126, 127, 142, 143, 153, 155 Hollister riot (1947) 5, 36 honor 53, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 78, 82, 83, 87, 104, 116, 128, 129, 132, 137, 152, 153, 171, 185–190, 194, 195 honor culture 83, 184 hope 2, 12, 19, 40, 71, 88, 99, 104, 121, 157 hopelessness xx, 4, 202 horror 35, 36, 44, 130 human trafficking xvii, 1 humiliation 119, 154 I

iconic brand 137 identification xv, xvi, 3, 49–52, 68, 102, 135 identity fusion 86, 87, 172, 173 identity politics 16, 61, 62, 66, 186 ideological fantasy xviii, xix, xxi ideology xvi–xxi, 34, 52, 77, 85, 96, 132, 133, 187–189, 201 ignorance xviii, xix, 34, 96, 152

Index     209

illegal xii, 1, 3, 5, 9, 17, 52, 62, 76, 85, 88, 90, 93, 98, 150, 155 illusion 18, 95, 124–128, 133, 188–190 immortality xxiii, 77, 116, 123–127, 136, 137, 154, 201 impostor 14, 145, 159 inalienable possessions 144 inauthentic 121, 132, 142, 173, 175 individual freedom 2, 63, 66, 79, 176 individualism xviii–xx, 80, 84, 126 inequality xiv, 16, 17, 65, 79, 106, 126 informal power xii, 9, 190 infringement 142, 145, 148, 150, 153 initiation 30, 120, 131, 184, 196 initiation ritual 119, 120 injustice xiv, xvii, 40, 126, 194 insignia 8, 52, 101, 118, 131, 132, 134, 145, 148 insignificance xxiii, 48, 49, 124, 125, 130, 154, 159 institution 18, 33, 98, 99, 122, 123, 130, 137, 139–142, 144, 171, 183, 184 intellectual property 132 intimidation 30, 32, 45, 47, 48, 51–53, 84, 149, 156 J

jail 64, 81, 88, 154, 171, 179–181

knowledge xvii–xxi, 15, 34, 39, 40, 47, 53, 54, 76, 96, 100, 133, 134, 140, 159 L

label 6, 10, 19, 32, 35, 54, 66, 67, 69, 72, 82, 83, 93, 95, 103, 120 lack xxiii, 2, 3, 12, 15, 16, 16, 17, 19, 40, 41, 62, 65, 68, 69, 73, 80, 89, 92, 96, 99, 129, 159, 188 Lasch, Christopher 121, 122, 124, 127, 159 lawsuit 148, 149, 153, 157 legal xii, 5, 17, 52, 53, 63, 64, 76, 85, 88–90, 93, 130, 146, 147, 150, 152, 155, 156, 158, 176 legitimization xvi, xvii, xxiii, 9, 172, 190 liberal left xiv, 67 liberal welfare state 79 logo 7, 8, 45, 50, 52, 78, 101, 115, 116, 119, 131, 135, 140, 144–148, 150, 152, 153, 160–162, 189 longing 3, 30, 195 loss 17, 18, 70, 72–74, 91, 97, 98, 106, 118, 121, 128, 184, 195 lovemark 144 loyalty 64, 86, 122, 152, 172, 174, 183, 184, 195 luxury 80, 127, 137–139, 143 luxury brands 137–140, 145, 148

K

killing xxii, 44, 63, 75, 87, 88, 142, 172, 173, 177, 183, 184, 194–197

M

magic 50, 127, 129, 132, 133, 138, 140

210     Index

mana 131, 145, 146 manhood 82, 84 market 5, 10, 19, 31, 68, 80, 88–93, 123, 127, 142, 144, 173, 175, 192, 201, 202 masculinity 82, 84, 85 material culture 52, 136, 179, 188, 190 meaning xiv, xxiii, xxiv, 29, 65, 120, 122, 124–127, 132, 139, 144, 195, 203 media xi, xxii, 1, 3, 11, 14–18, 18, 19, 35, 36, 38, 39, 54, 83, 84, 88, 90, 93, 98, 101, 125, 141, 152, 156, 161, 178–180, 188, 193, 196 melancholia 70–74 memorial run 13, 115, 116, 120, 135, 181 men’s adventure magazines xxii, 35, 36, 41, 43, 45 method 3, 4, 12, 15, 139 micro-aggression 80, 83 micro-celebrity 15 middle-class 6, 31, 38, 104 military 35, 79, 85–87, 89, 90, 118, 122, 180, 183, 184 mockery 145 modernity 121, 122, 159, 185 monopoly on violence 89 monster 43, 44, 133 monstrosity 43, 44 monstrous Other 41, 43 morality 29, 31, 67 motorcycle xvii, xx–xxiv, 1, 2, 4–11, 11, 12, 12, 13, 13–17, 19, 20, 29–31, 37, 39, 43, 50, 52–54, 62, 63, 65, 70, 74, 77, 78,

82–91, 96, 99, 106, 115, 117, 122, 123, 143, 144, 146–156, 159–162, 172–174, 176, 183, 188, 194, 196, 197, 201–203 movie xi, 6, 29–32, 35, 37–41, 43 multi-sited ethnography 3 murder xvii, 1, 63, 64, 86, 87, 152, 196 museum 116, 137, 139–143 mythologization 37 mythology xxii, 12, 37, 47, 50, 120, 123, 136, 137 myths xviii, 45, 52, 123, 136, 138, 144 N

nanny state 66 need xvi, xvii, 5, 7, 9, 30, 42, 54, 68, 71, 73, 75, 76, 84, 89, 103, 104, 123, 124, 127, 128, 184, 192, 195 neoliberalism xvi, xxii, 2, 9, 16, 18, 66, 71, 73, 104, 194, 195, 201, 202 netnography 3, 15 non-state actors xii, xiii, xxiii, 105 O

obligation 130, 174, 176–178, 184, 189, 190 offence 83 one percenter 5, 6, 10–12, 37, 54, 62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86–88, 93, 94, 96, 99–101, 104, 117–119, 121–128, 130–134, 138,

Index     211

139, 141–143, 145–147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 176–178, 184, 185, 187, 189–191, 193–196 organizational structure 7, 162, 197 Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs (OMCs) 1, 3, 50, 62, 146, 162 P

paranoia 79, 100 paranoid subculture 99, 100 patch 5, 7, 8, 34, 43, 45, 47, 50, 84, 101, 102, 117–120, 131–134, 141, 143, 145, 148, 149, 152, 154, 155, 157–159, 162, 179, 180, 188, 189, 193, 196 patch-over 8 paternalism 2 perverse pleasure xix–xxi, 41 Pfaller, Robert xix, 29, 32, 34, 45, 62, 66, 78, 96, 125, 143, 185–190 phantasma 37, 43, 48 play 15, 18, 33, 36, 39, 40, 44, 50, 69, 76, 79, 91, 93, 100, 123, 125, 127–129, 133–135, 146, 154, 178–180, 189, 190 pleasure xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, 33, 34, 36, 45, 46, 78, 80, 189, 190 police/policing xiii, xv, xxii, 10, 11, 17, 18, 37, 54, 65, 78, 79, 83, 89, 99, 115, 118, 122, 141, 142, 144, 150, 154, 157, 158, 177, 181, 186, 193, 194, 197, 202 political correctness 66

pop culture/popular culture xii, 1, 3, 11, 12, 34, 37–40, 43, 54, 142, 143 popularity xii–xiv, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, 97, 159, 201, 202 popular support xxii, 9, 54, 157 populism xxi, 18, 62, 94, 103 postmodern 61, 122 postmodern condition 127 post-politicization 92 poverty 17, 65, 79 power 2, 7, 9, 15, 30–34, 36, 38, 42, 45–53, 68, 78, 80–82, 84, 85, 87, 91, 92, 94–96, 98, 99, 118, 119, 121–123, 126, 127, 130–135, 137, 139, 140, 142–146, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159, 172, 177, 178, 182, 190, 192 power mystique 10, 42, 50, 148, 149, 153 power vacuum 19 prejudice xvii, 12, 100 private security 89–91 profanation 149 profane 81, 121, 123, 125, 128, 132, 135–137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 153, 155 progress xiii, xx, xxiv, 7, 71, 92, 103–105, 116, 138, 186, 203 projection 6, 70, 103 propaganda xiii, xvii, xx, 61, 65, 96 prospect 8, 15, 17, 54, 81, 85, 86, 99, 106, 117, 119, 128, 159, 160, 171, 173, 196 prostitution xvii, 1, 155 pseudo-politics 63, 66, 103

212     Index

public 6, 15, 17, 40, 46, 53, 61–63, 65, 69, 89–94, 97, 102, 138, 140, 141, 148, 149, 155–158, 180 public image xvii punishment 88, 152, 157 purity 30

134–136, 138, 144, 150, 173–175, 178, 181, 182, 184, 188–190, 195 robbery 17, 18 rootlessness 18 S

R

rage xii, 29, 42, 84 reactionary xii, 66, 96, 103, 137, 187, 201 rebellion 5, 6, 9, 30, 51, 76 rebels xi, xii, 6, 8, 44, 101, 136 recognition xxiv, 19, 38, 69, 71, 104, 105, 120, 126, 128, 141, 149, 174, 186, 203 re-enchantment 121, 140 remembrance 136 reputation xii, 1, 32, 45, 50, 52, 83, 88, 130, 142, 148, 149, 153, 161, 172, 185, 186 resentment xii, xiii, xviii, xxiii, 18, 54, 62, 64, 92, 96, 103, 121, 191 resignation xiv, 31 respect xi, xii, xv, xxiv, 9, 14, 15, 17, 19, 32, 47, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 84, 85, 88, 91, 99, 104, 115, 122, 124, 126, 128, 136, 144, 151, 152, 162, 180, 182–184, 186, 189, 193, 195, 203 reward 152, 184 riding xi, 2, 6, 7, 29, 36, 77, 78, 84 risk society 80 rites of terror 172 ritual 8, 9, 12, 86, 115–117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 128, 129, 131,

sacralization 42, 137, 138, 143, 144, 150, 172 sacred 2, 19, 43–45, 52, 75, 81, 86, 102, 116–121, 123–132, 134– 139, 141, 143–147, 149–160, 174, 187, 189, 190, 195 sacred order xxiii, 117, 120, 122– 124, 129–131, 134, 135, 151, 176 sacred relic 117 sacrifice xxiii, xxiv, 78, 79, 83, 86, 117, 118, 123, 129, 130, 134, 152, 171, 172, 174–177, 180, 183, 184, 194, 202 safe distance 30, 32, 33, 35, 50, 69 safety 32, 47, 67, 77–79, 82, 85, 89, 194 scarcity 62 securitization xiii, 2, 66, 79, 80, 203 security 1, 2, 45, 64, 67, 78, 79, 82, 88–91, 93, 99, 104, 178, 192, 197 security state 78–80, 94 seduction xxii, 31, 45, 76, 94, 123, 182 self-commodification xvii, 9, 37, 81, 123 self-cutting 70, 72, 74 self-esteem 126, 128, 186 self-exclusion xiv, xv, 69 self-harming 69, 71–74

Index     213

self-help 69, 77, 82, 84, 186, 194 self-promotion xvii self-sacrifice 86, 172, 202 self-transcendence 123, 124 serial killer 41, 44, 88 shame 69, 132 significance 118, 120, 126, 128–130, 132, 138, 153, 159, 174 singularity 41, 42 social exclusion 69 social media 9, 15, 37, 39, 40, 63–65, 93, 96, 101, 125, 133, 141, 150, 154, 156, 158, 176, 178, 180, 191, 192 social welfare xii, 79, 88, 104 solidarity xxiii, xxiv, 2, 15, 19, 31, 153, 154, 157, 171, 172, 174–182, 184, 187–191, 193–195, 201, 202 sovereign manhood 82 sovereignty xxii, xxiii, 2, 19, 42, 43, 49, 54, 62, 66–70, 73–75, 77, 78, 80, 82–84, 86–88, 91, 93–95, 98, 99, 102–105, 118, 126, 182, 202 state xi–xiv, xxiii, 2, 5, 18, 18, 19, 37, 53, 62, 64, 66, 73, 75, 77, 79, 83, 85, 88–95, 98, 100, 103, 104, 120, 153, 158–160, 171, 177, 193, 194, 196, 201 status frustration 128 strength xv, 51, 71, 75, 84–87, 194, 201 strictness 182, 183, 194 subculture xvii, 4, 5, 7–9, 11–14, 37, 40, 45, 77, 78, 80, 81, 87, 88, 96, 99, 101, 117, 119, 131, 143, 144, 148, 152, 153 sublimation xv, xvi

sublime 19, 31–36, 38, 41–45, 47–53, 65, 68, 69, 84, 126, 136, 142, 146, 174, 182, 195 sublime experience xxii, 32, 35, 36, 51 submission 92, 176, 182, 183, 189, 202 suffering 18, 62, 71, 85, 86, 126, 130, 132, 191, 193, 194 support 2–4, 7–9, 15–17, 31, 33, 37, 53, 54, 61, 62, 65, 68, 71, 84, 85, 100, 116, 123, 133, 139, 147, 150, 151, 160, 171, 176–179, 181, 190–195 support merchandize 2, 9, 13, 50, 51, 55, 81, 146, 155, 156, 162, 179 surrogate family 176 surveillance 79, 99 symbolic immortality xxiii, 116, 117, 120, 124, 141, 158, 159, 174, 180 sympathetic magic 51, 84, 135, 140 T

terror 30–33, 35, 41, 43, 47, 51, 52, 124, 126, 130 therapeutic culture 83, 185 therapy 70, 106, 186–188 threat x–xiii, xxii, xxiv, 1, 15, 30–32, 35, 36, 46, 47, 49, 53, 74, 77, 79, 80, 92, 145, 153, 159, 203 totem 41, 134, 135, 143 trademark 45, 50, 54, 132, 145–151, 162 trademark infringement 148 transcendence 118, 124, 126–128, 137, 139

214     Index

transference 29, 103, 135, 151, 182 transformation xiii, 37, 50, 51, 71, 73, 90, 91, 94, 96, 119, 133 Trump, Donald xviii, 18, 68, 69, 102, 103 TV show 37, 38, 101, 125, 142

vigilante groups xxiv, 8, 83, 104, 194, 197, 201 vigilante justice xii violation 45, 131, 132 violence xxi, xxii, 1, 11, 32, 36, 40–45, 75, 84–88, 90, 130, 152, 153, 175, 185, 192 virility 136

U

ultra-realism 12 W V

vicarious enjoyment 3 victimhood 51, 83, 156, 184, 186, 187

wannabe 65, 134, 145 welfare state 16 white genocide 96 Winlow, Simon 12, 16–19, 62, 66, 67, 127, 195 working poor 17