Image posted to Instagram on 24 Dec 2025
by $teve Jone$ @jonesysjukebox
I.
Marx famously predicted that within modern capitalism all values would be reduced not to zero, but resolved into one final, fatal value; i.e., commercial or exchange value.
Thus it is that bourgeois society does not efface old structures and insititutions - including punk rock bands - but subsumes them. Old modes do not die; they get recuperated into the marketplace, take on price tags, become commodities.
And so it is we witness three ex-Pistols and a grinning wannabe Johnny Rotten hawking their merchandise via social media even on Christmas eve. This includes a 'God Save the Queen' seasonal jumper which they model in the above photos [1].
II.
This shouldn't surprise anyone: Malcolm - in collaboration with Jamie Reid and Julien Temple - warned what would happen in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980) and the grim reality of the fate that awaited the band was made explicit in the album titles Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols (1979) and Flogging a Dead Horse (1980).
And I have written several posts on this subject; see, for example, the post dated 12 June, 2015 in which I discuss the issuing of a Sex Pistols credit card on Virgin Money (in two designs): click here.
But, even so, I still find it sad and depressing to see the Sex Pistols - now a punk rock brand - selling Never Mind the Bollocks Christmas baubles (at £18 each) [2].
And it makes me despise an economic system which, on the one hand, equalises and makes everything the same, whilst, on the other hand, encouraging all modes of conduct and permitting all manner of thinking, providing they are economically viable and turn a nice profit.
I am not a Marxist: but, in as much as capitalism leaves no other nexus between people than naked self-interest and cash payment [3] - and in as much as it infects every sphere of activity (including the arts) with the same greed and vulgarity - I do find myself experiencing (à la Ursula Brangwen) a feeling of "harsh and ugly disillusion" [4].
And so, I'm almost tempted this Christmas to invoke that exterminating angel dreamed of by Deleuze and Guattari; the one who will consummate capitalism by fucking the rich up the arse and transmitting "the decoded flows of desire" [5].
Notes
[1] Readers can purchase this synthetic knitted jumper (it's only 8% wool), priced £60, from the Sex Pistols official website store: click here.
[2] Again, head to the official Sex Pistols website shop: click here.
[3] I am paraphrasing from memory what Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto (1848).
[4] D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 403.
[5] Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 35.
Xmas bonus: Julien Temple's hour-long documentary Christmas with the Sex Pistols (2013), featuring footage from their last UK concert on Christmas Day, 1977: click here. It was first shown on BBC Four on Boxing Day 2013.
