In The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James centers Black revolutionary agency in the Haitian Revolution, challenging European class-reductionist models of Marxism and demonstrating that race and colonialism fundamentally shape revolutionary struggle. Taking James’s intervention as a point of departure, this paper asks: What does it mean to invoke “Black Jacobins” in a contemporary U.S. punk scene? How do anti-capitalist musicians mobilize revolutionary history in the present? And how might ethnomusicology theorize the relationship between class struggle and identity-based politics?

I examine the song “Black Jacobins” and its music video by the Tallahassee-based punk band Degenerate State. Shifting between syncopated bass grooves and thrashing hardcore textures, the song references the Haitian Revolution before pivoting to the refrain, “Wake up, it’s a world revolution.” Drawing on participant observation in the Tallahassee punk/DIY scene—including shows, reading groups, protests, and mutual aid events—as well as interviews with band members, I situate the song within a local culture of Marxist-Leninist organizing.

Building on Barbara Foley’s theory of Intersectional Marxism (Foley 2019), I argue that Degenerate State’s work refuses the presumed opposition between class analysis and identity politics. All members of the band identify as Trans or Non-Binary, and their revolutionary aesthetics emerge within a regional political climate shaped by legislation such as Florida’s HB 1069. An intersectional Marxist lens, I suggest, allows ethnomusicology to theorize contemporary musical outrage as both structural critique and embodied survival.