Principles of Sociology/Traveling Kids

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Deviant Subcultures – Negotiating Retreatism and Rebellion among “Travelers” - an essay by Alex Goldman, M.A. (Alexevasion), PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Florida, and primary architect of this module

When I first arrived at the University of Florida, I was mesmerized by the sight of these very strange looking young people that showed up in Gainesville during the springtime. People called them “traveling kids” and my group of friends tended to allow them to interact with us on a personal basis, occasionally allowing them to get too close. Some of these folks people had serious problems, but you don't really discover those details until you've already established a relationship with them. I really liked the ideals of their lifestyle: freedom, ethics, opposition, and adventure. Looking back on it all, I must turn to a deeper sort of analysis to make sense of exactly how they fit into the concept of deviance and my personal ambitions in life.

Traveling kids are most often young white males in their late teens to late 20s. Although many claim to be from lower or working class backgrounds, I have no means of verifying these claims. I also cannot estimate their numbers nationwide. There has been very little study of this subculture over the years, though the lifestyle has been around for quite a while. Many see themselves fitting into the annals of hobo history and tradition that began with displaced farmers hopping freight trains after the civil war and culminated in the mass tramping caused by the Great Depression. What research that has been done looks at this group through the preventative lens of criminology. While traveling kids do indeed engage in criminal activities, they don't fit into the larger conceptual scope of this theoretical model. This is a mostly transitory deviant subculture that represents the extreme wing of a particular ideology. Their criminal behaviors are mild anyway, since although they do shoplift things, they are of a petty nature compared with other acts of violent grand theft. Traveling kids almost never want to pay for anything. They intentionally remain homeless and unemployed in any mainstream occupation fitting their social background credentials. To make their lifestyle work, they turn to strategies like hitchhiking and train hopping for transportation, shoplifting and dumpster diving for food and essential commodities, and squatting or trespassing to find shelter. These supremely deviant behaviors are the staples of their subcultural identity.

What distinguishes traveling kids from the homeless population at large is the dimension of choice. Traveling kids have obvious social advantages in their race, age, and gender characteristics. Combined with a far lesser degree of mental and physical handicaps (including substance abuse), they would stand a much better chance of reintegration into “mainstream” society should they desire such a transition. The key here is that they do not desire this, at least not for the time being. In fact, they do things to make this potential reimmersion all the more difficult. This begins with strange fashion (dirty, ripped, patched clothes), audacious hairstyles (i.e. tri-colored reverse mullets), and progresses towards non-mainstream body modification (homemade tattoos and multiple facial piercing). My friends used to have a saying, once you get a facial tattoo, you've pretty much painted “the rest of society can bite me” on your face. Unlike the rest of the homeless population at large, they largely refuse to compromise their freedom to be catered and tracked by social welfare systems. However, some do make use of public services intended for the truly indigent when it is convenient for them, like shelters or food stamps.

The problem with understanding traveling kids is that they resist easy labeling. Although they all look and act in ways that most of us would label deviant and likely respond to with significant stigma, their appearance, attitudes, and specific behavior patterns may vary widely. While it is important to recognize how the structure of our society allows such a subculture to exist, the nature of their behavior can be better understood through an analysis of their common ideology. The traveling subculture was spawned out of the larger punk subculture. The important thing to understand about punk music is that it is uniquely political. There is a very long tradition of social criticism in the genre that remains evident today, though more mainstream manifestations emerging out of an increasingly fractured punk scene have perhaps dulled this edge. The other important point is that this criticism has overwhelmingly been from a left-wing point of view. Punk lyrics have traditionally stood opposed to most mainstream American traditions: free market capitalism, working towards upward social mobility, the education system, Judeo-Christian religion, two-party politics, the military, fashion, cleanliness, static gender roles, racism, prescribed sexuality, etc.

However, some punk subcultures have taken this even further. You see, they aren't really pushing communist or socialist politics because the historical results of those political systems can't really be reconciled with the punk emphasis on personal freedom of expression. They despise the fact that our society constrains our behavior to the extent that it does. In response, they take quickly to breaking maximum numbers of norms and mores. What has emerged as a response to these ideological dispositions is an embrace of individual liberty and anarchist political philosophy. While you may associate anarchism with bomb-throwing terrorists trying to induce societal chaos (and in some situations that might be the appropriate association), anarchist political theory has a complex historical tradition and in reality does not differ so much from what you might know as libertarianism. Both abhor the power of centralized governments, but the key difference is that libertarians believe free association in capitalist markets is the best organizing force for societies while anarchists believe in the power of uncoerced collective association.

So, if you see a dirty looking youth walking around town with a big hiking backpack on during the next couple of months, chances are good that they identify with both the punk subculture and anarchist ideals. They might not be able to describe their reasons for these affinities for you very eloquently, but this inarticulateness is key to understanding the nature of deviant subcultures. People who act in such ways likely don't see themselves or the world around them in the same ways that you do. This doesn't mean they don't have a coherent, or even sociological outlook on their life. You don't have to be stupid to act differently from everybody else. However, when people commit to a particularly deviant life narrative, they will probably utilize some overly romanticized, less than rational explanation as to why it is the right choice for them and if the idea is grand enough, the rest of the world as well. This is certainly the case when examining the traveling kid subculture. Allow me to break down what I reason to be their dominant rationalization strategies and ideological dispositions to the best of my ability, given my somewhat limited history of interaction with these types of individuals (perhaps a few dozen over a few years).

Traveling kids see the world as a dismal place for most people in it, including themselves. They tend to focus on the billions suffering abroad from the exploitation of our multinational corporations and military interventions when engaged in political debate, but if engaged in a discourse about lifestyle politics, they will turn attention to the vast majority of Americans they see as uniquely foolhardy. The focus will always remain on the cultural contradictions. They will tell you how strange it is to live in the wealthiest and most powerful country on Earth, but to see your family and fellow citizens constantly beset by a multitude of problems stemming from the inherent contradictions of our society. We value freedom, but we have the largest police presence, surveillance systems, and prison populations in the world. We work regularly scheduled overtime at jobs we don't enjoy just to be able to shop away our despair. Americans are consumer robots glad to be distracted from the core problems at hand and instead are happy about racking up an unprecedented level of debt that will keep us chained to those unfulfilling jobs until the last few moments when we could have done something meaningful in our lives. They will tell you about how a conspiracy led by the power elite and the Religious Right has rigged our already distorted political system to strip away more of our civil liberties and eventually transform the US into a historical force even more despicable than Hitler's Germany. They will tell you that we are pushing humankind closer and closer to destruction at its own hands by the ravages of nuclear war or impending ecological collapse (or both). They will certainly tell you these things and more, some of which will seem like more or less well reasoned liberal/radical critiques, and some of which will be crackpot conspiracy theories. The important part is that in conclusion, they will justify their presence before you, looking and acting as they do, as what they see to be the only real solution: drop out and try to find or create something better for themselves and like minded others.

Many different individuals in many different cities come to these same types of conclusions. So, they go traveling to search out answers for themselves. This isn't a particularly new response for alienated youth. These kinds of pilgrimages have been going on since the idea of an extended pre-adulthood period came about after WWII (largely due to increasing college attendance rates). However, most probably don't realize the extent to which these perceptions and behaviors are not novel. If they did, it might destroy the potential mystique of the lifestyle. With no means to form a more complete picture of the subculture than what they might hear or read in a few anecdotal accounts, they go out in search of it themselves. What they fail to see is how social structure constrains even their dreams. The traveling kid lifestyle is based on the notion of independence through parasitism. They want to represent the flea on the back of the beast they call “the system”, sucking resources but contributing as little as possible. If the lifestyle is played up to its ethical ideals, they can do a pretty decent job of this.

This is something I admire because I admire efficiency. If they don't want to work, fine, one more job for someone who needs it. If they can live off of our waste and generosity, fine, more power to them! The problem is that though their behavior is sustainable in the economic and ecological sense, it isn't sustainable as a long-term lifestyle because parasitism alone (at least the way they carry it out) does not provide the kinds of things that they want: meaningful community, social change, a better way of life. There are certain things that they want that cannot adequately and reliably be produced utilizing “do it yourself” (DIY) strategies. In decades worth of attempts by thousands of individuals, they cannot seem to produce (or reproduce) the kind of life their ideals call for. This is why traveling kids have remained just that: wandering individuals part of a highly marginalized deviant subculture, not a growing trend or coherent social movement by any stretch of the imagination. If it was truly compelling in its present form, it would have been taken up by many more people by now… there is still plenty of food going to waste, plenty of cars and trains not yet filled to capacity, and lots more abandoned building available to squat. Worse still, the lifestyle has been completely ignored by the oppressed minority populations in the US that most traveling kids believe are ripe for this sort of lifestyle rebellion. Instead, these behavior patterns remain the province of relatively privileged white kids who have the most freedom to act in deviance. Black and Hispanic youth continue to embrace mainstream values through ethnic subcultures (see hip hop).

Some travelers do make something of their journeys and experiences. I would venture to say that a good proportion found the like minded others they were looking for and integrated themselves into some sort of lifestyle community. There are lots of strange little farming communes out there and grassroots social service/political organizations in the worst inner cities. And there's always another protest to attend, especially these days. However, all traveling kids must give up the subculture eventually, because it is simply too difficult to maintain over the long run without sufficient social supports in place catering to that lifestyle. You can tell how friendly a certain city is for traveling kids simply by noticing how many are around. They establish hubs in these places ( Gainesville was one of them a few years back) once they know where to find the right dumpsters and squats. Eventually, things go to shit… maybe the police crack down… or maybe one traveling kid stabs another for no particular reason. This subculture attracts social misfits and people with particular mental problems that push them towards marginalized groups. Also, due to the overemphasis on individual freedom (often due to a misunderstanding of anarchist philosophy), a state of anomie (normlessness) prevails. You cannot have already unstable people living around others without well established and enforced rules about proper and improper social conduct. The problem is only compounded when you enter alcohol abuse into the occasion. These problems have spawned healthy debate and soul searching among the left-leaning progressive populations they tend to gravitate towards, who can't quite decide whether they represent a liability or an asset. Some traveling kids grow up to be generic bums: delusional substance abusers that can't seem to ever fit in again. However, this subculture isn't generally a part of an extended pathological career that characterizes many homeless people. Most traveling kids probably just get older, get jobs, and live a lot like the rest of us, though I don't know enough about these cases to speculate on how they manage the effects of cognitive dissonance from the ideology they must set aside.

While the traveling ascetic activist is certainly compelling as a romanticized ideal, it seems to have little pragmatic effect as a revolutionary lifestyle format. It has been utilized for different reasons at different historical time periods, but has been found to be lacking in all. For example, the radical labor organizers associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW–“wobblies”) used it in the first quarter of last century while hippies in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to revitalize it as “free living”. There are also certain sects of Buddhism that encourage their monks to embrace a wandering lifestyle of charity with total freedom from money or possessions. Perhaps the most fundamentally deviant part of these lifestyles is the emphasis on being nomadic, which is so completely opposed to the core notion of our civilization, which is historically based on sedentary horticulturists and their stable settlements. The idea that one cannot have stable social networks and purpose is likely prominent in most people's consideration of this lifestyle, but it does seem as though some traditional societies outside the hunter-gatherer persuasion such as the gypsies or the Bedouin nomads, have been able to survive for thousands of years. Still, these societies are especially been marginalized and are only becoming more so as the modern world rolls over them. At least they still have community and tradition to cling to, while traveling kids today have only small and fragmented social bonds with few sources of subcultural motivation outside often misplaced enthusiasm for simplified radical politics and romantic distortions of past movements.

In conclusion, the deviance of traveling kids has something to offer us in understanding the deviance in general. Those who we would label deviant are folks who are looking for a way to 1) fit into a social group somewhere 2) change the world so they can fit into it somewhere. Deviance is fundamentally an ideological exercise. While individuals with handicaps and disorders are more likely to fall into these ranks, it is much more common that a deviant group is the result of a belief system that failed to reconcile the two above needs and could not seem to alter their beliefs and behaviors in any way that could. Instead of finding a way to translate their needs into constructive action, the beliefs become increasingly distorted in a counterproductively narcissistic and/or nihilistic fashion. The only thing that can free up this contradiction is a novel behavior strategy or a new action possibility brought about by a changing world. Below is a critique written about the lifestyle by a leading member of an organization that had previously published and distributed many books and “zines” on traveling kids.

DISPATCH FROM CRIMETHINC. CENTRAL FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: ALL TRAVELER KIDS PURGED FROM CRIMETHINC. MEMBERSHIP

(see webpage www.crimethinc.com)

Quitting your job was about having more time to do what needs doing, not just isolating yourself from the rest of humanity—wasn't it?

If one makes propaganda extolling what is revolutionary about shoplifting, one is not necessarily trying to get would-be revolutionaries to shoplift so they can be “more revolutionary” [obviously a stupid approach if there ever was one—although exploring the tactical benefits of shoplifting for a class of people looking to do less buying might make sense]—one might instead be trying to identify for shoplifters what is already insurrectionary in their actions, so they can broaden their analysis of their own lives.

Crimethought is not any ideology or value system or lifestyle, but rather a way of challenging all ideologies and value systems and lifestyles—and, for the advanced agent, a way of making all ideologies, value systems, and lifestyles challenging. It is not crimethought just to survive without a job by dumpstering, squatting, and hitchhiking; it is crimethought to realize that this lifestyle provides resources that can be used to revolutionize demonstration activism, or underground literature. It is not crimethought simply to distribute propaganda attacking the monotony and limited options of traditional employment; it is crimethought to create situations in which both workers and ex-workers benefit from each others' different experiences, and consequently discover new options and new adventures that were previously obscured.

The Stalinists, Surrealists, Situationists, and even Southern Baptists all had their bloody purges and internal dissensions, so why can't we, too? Having no membership should be no obstacle: we can still hold exclusions from time to time, just to be sure everyone remembers. These are festive occasions for us weathered politicos, analogous to the subtextual backbiting at the dinner parties of the bourgeoisie or the witch trials in the Salem , Massachusetts of old. But first, before we get into the fiery self-righteousness of the thing, some background.

It's been nearly a year now since I went through my entire proofing copy of the Evasion book in the dark back seat of a Greyhound traveling by night, with only my trendy activist headlamp for light. Even then, we knew already what the greatest drawback of publishing it in book form would be: all the general ideas in Days of War, Nights of Love , the inspirations and analyses and especially the rhetoric calculated to encourage revolt, would now be summed up in some minds by the specific formula spelled out by the stories in this new book. Even though Evasion is not a work of political theory, or a prescription of tactics, but clearly a personal account, a memoir—even though we've maintained from the beginning that there is no single strategy for insurgency, but that everyone must invent and reinvent their own—it was inevitable that we would be misunderstood by some, and we accepted that in publishing the book.

In publishing it, we wanted—to articulate this for the thousandth and last time—to introduce an account (one of many) of work-free living to a wider readership, and thus challenge conventional notions about the sanctity of property and the misery of material poverty. With this cultural warfare, we hoped to do our part to expand the anticapitalist movement. Sharing particular scams, extolling the lifestyle of the scam artist, these were secondary goals at best. The ‘zine had already been produced and distributed on as massive a scale as the infrastructure of our d.i.y. underground allowed, to the demographics who would be most likely to utilize its scams and emulate the author's life choices; we printed the book version to see if this narrative of refusal and adventure could sow other seeds outside its native environment. Some of the feedback we've received from beyond the existing activist and anarchist communities suggests that it has; but now it's time to shake off whatever success we've achieved, as one must always do to make space for new attempts.

And to speak, for the last time as well, of how our efforts, with this book and other projects, have been misunderstood. There is a certain kind of reader who, though you do your best to bring out the subtleties and ironies, will always focus on the most superficial, controversial terms in your works, and interpret your complex critiques as simple dismissals and endorsements (“paying=bad,” “shoplifting=good”—or, far worse, “=anticapitalist”). Whether he professes to be your adversary or accomplice, it is best to avoid him altogether, for he will lower the level of dialogue on any issue to his own low denominator—and at that elevation, little of value can be discussed or achieved. Perhaps we can be blamed, in part, for creating some of these readers, by producing material that was too simplistic or too complex; perhaps this kind of reader is simply too rampant today to be altogether avoided by even the nimblest of propagandist's pens. One certainly can't say enough, though, that nothing in the world is one-dimensional.

So while this, too, has been said a million times, perhaps it will do some good to say it again in this context: the traveler kid lifestyle is not in itself at all revolutionary. It may surprise some to hear this from us—that shows how little they've been listening all along. Shoplifting, hitchhiking, scamming, unemployment—separated from a program of life- and world-transformation, all these are merely alternative tools for survival, a survival which makes do with and ultimately accepts the status quo. Yes, it is better, however infinitesimally, to steal products than to give money to our executioners—but it's not enough! Three millennia of shoplifting now, and the exchange economy is still thriving. If it's life we're after, not mere survival, as the old dichotomy goes, we can't just sit tight now in our squats and punkhouses, eating dumpstered bagels and selling our shoplifted wares on e-bay; we have to keep on risking everything to challenge the system that denies us the rest of the world, if for nothing else at least to continue challenging ourselves.

For the record, and to briskly repudiate every imbecile who has used “CrimethInc.” as a synonym for scamming and freeloading, we've never been interested in being or being seen as partisans of any lifestyle; we've always insisted that being radical involves subverting all possible lifestyle choices, all traditional strategies and identities. Revolution occurs when some part of the social equation changes: when apolitical workers initiate a wildcat strike, when middle-aged mothers start to show up in the black bloc beside their sons and daughters, when vagabond dropouts integrate themselves into local struggles for affordable housing. The letters we receive from adult secretaries who have used CrimethInc. literature to inspire themselves to change their lives are infinitely more encouraging to me than the scores of teenagers reading Harbinger as they set out on the hitchhiking excursions young folks always have. Not that there is anything wrong with being a hitchhiking teenager—but to be a dangerous hitchhiking teenager, you must do something more than simply hitchhike, and interpreting anticapitalist texts as glorifications of your hitchhiking doesn't count.

I hopped my very first train just a few weeks ago, after nearly eight straight years of unemployment and anticapitalist agitation. For most of that time, I was never much of a hitch-hiking, train-hopping, scam-pulling traveler kid, and neither were most of the individuals I collaborated with—there are, believe it or not, a wide variety of other lifestyles that are equally conducive to such endeavors. The historical intersection of the latest wave of youth nomadism with the propaganda groups like ours have been spreading is, in some ways, unfortunate; it has had some good effects, but it has also made it easier for people to dismiss some radical ideas as the alibis of a new youth trend—or, worse, to believe that they are being radical simply by joining such a trend!

The creation of subcultural ghettos, the reinterpretation of subversive acts as promotions of some alternative lifestyle—these are processes by which opposition and subversion have been repeatedly neutralized over the past four decades, if not centuries. Yes, it is critical that we build new communities, with new cultural values and approaches, and that we not belittle these as “mere subcultures” when they do arise—for it is in these communities that we can develop and sustain a resistance, and create a context in which to lead free lives. It is also critical that we keep challenging these communities, that they do not become stagnant or self-satisfied: for as long as we are all under the great thumb, freedom is always for all or none.

CrimethInc., and for that matter (and far more important) crimethink, are not membership organizations, anyway. Subverting is not something you are , it's something you do , and must find new ways to do in every attempt. Let's not rest at expelling the traveler kids—hell, we're all expelled, time-tested CrimethInc. agents first and foremost! Even the most experienced of us insurrectionists must start from scratch every morning to foment insurrection, shaking off the inertia of the past to see anew what the current context calls for. When we succeed in doing this, we can change the world, for it is inertia above all that keeps the wheels spinning as they do. If we cannot, we are done for—we will be more anachronists than anarchists, and our activism mere retroactivism.

And so now we turn away from the past, from all explanations and justifications and apologies, to face the future and the experiments we have in store for it. Doubtless, they will occasion comparable storms of controversy and misconception, if we are ambitious enough to keep pushing our own limits and hazarding schemes crazy enough to work. So, all would-be crimethinkers are hereby expelled from CrimethInc.—whoever can discover the strategies for the next offensive, set the terms for the next infectious revolts and heated debates and social upheavals, let them claim it for themselves! Expect our next book, or one of them, to be a liberation manual for middle-aged mothers, not another youth's chronicle of willful indigence. In the meantime, let's us traveler kids stop congratulating ourselves on how free we are and start using that word, free , as a verb, not an adjective.