Have you ever pulled up on your Harley to a biker-friendly watering hole, bellied up to the bar, and just as you start quenching your thirst, found yourself engaged in episodes of intense, mildly menacing eye-locking stares with a fellow biker? In this real life version of the childhood game of who blinks first, you offer a nod of recognition which may be acknowledged in return. This subtle initial power struggle is over; you have assumed a subservient position in this social interaction with your newfound drinking buddy.
Such struggles for power or recognition, both subtle and less subtle, and the resulting social tensions among bikers repeat themselves on many different levels in the biker subculture. Consider some other examples: (1) you just finish wrenching and polishing your 1965 Electra Glide and drive one hundred miles to compete in an antique meet only to be showed up by the guy who trailers his machine with a pit and polishing crew in tow to the event. Does that raise your hackles or elicit any resentment? Have you ever attended a swap meet and found yourself cursing the parasitic profiteers responsible for displacing the ubiquitous tables of authentic used and new oldstock Harley parts with parts and accessories made in Taiwan or China, boutique biker leathers, mass-produced tee-shirts, and garish jewelry? How about the boutique-outfitted biker dude who is better dressed than you were on your wedding day? How often has the compulsion to ask him if he owns a Harley or just a tee-shirt overwhelmed you? Have you ever winced with disdain at a biker scantily clad in shorts and sneakers riding a crotch rocket and passing you at ninety miles per hour? I bet you didn’t offer a hand gesture of recognition as he passed. You may have preferred an alternative hand signal, but being on your best behavior you refrained. You may also be guilty of snubbing a fellow passing Harley rider just because he is wearing a helmet. Yet, you fought hard for his freedom to choose whether to wear a helmet or not. Does the conspicuous consumption of top-end Harleys and customized machines by Yuppies and movie stars tarnish your cherished image of the Harley-Davidson tradition?
These divisions—between those who uphold traditional Harley culture and those who have redefined it, those who wrench and ride versus those who trailer and ride the last mile, between the rich urban bikers (RUBs) with their spiffy new rides and the working class heroes who mortgage their home to eat, sleep, and drink Harley-Davidson, between helmeted and non-helmeted riders, riceburner riders versus riders of culturally correct machines, and between one-percenters and the rest of us—are but a small subset of evolving divisions between bikers. Given that it takes two to tango, it doesn’t matter on which side of these splits you reside. Such divisions can have disturbing consequences for both sides.
Were bikers always so divided? Most old-time bikers would probably tell you no. Prior to the era of mass-marketed motorcycles, the main struggles were between bikers and nonbikers. While these conflicts still exist today with lifestyle-regulating decisions such as helmet laws lying in the balance, bikers have diverted their attention from protecting their lifestyle from outside attacks by turning on themselves. The resulting disharmony has weakened the survival of this subculture.
The evolution of social divisions among bikers and their contradictory consequences should be of interest to any motorcyclist intent on preserving the Harley tradition. I maintain that such an understanding is best discerned with the aid of the conceptual approaches of two nineteenth-century German philosophers: Karl Marx (1818–1893) and Georg Hegel (1770–1831).
For the uninitiated, Karl Marx is usually vilified as the father of communism much as AMF was blamed for the mid-1970s decline of Harley-Davidson. Hegel is a philosopher whose obscurity has grown with time just as stories about leaking, “mark your spot Harleys” have faded from the biker vernacular. Yet, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, Marx and Hegel were seminal thinkers. They were the first great social system modelers who focused on the evolution of human history. Their innovative theories shared a common philosophy: all aspects of society are contradictorily composed of different pushes and pulls resulting in tensions that resolve themselves through ever-changing contradictory social interactions between individuals. These interactions act as the motor of history through their impact on the political, economic, and cultural aspects of society. For both Marx and Hegel, change was understood through the use of an important concept that should be organically understood by Harley riders: the dialectic. Keep in mind that contradiction lies at the heart of the dialectic.
Hegel’s dialectic was quite simple, while Marx’s was more complex. Hegel’s dialectic consists of a confrontation between a thesis, its antithesis (opposite), and the resulting working-out of contradictions called the synthesis. Here, synthesis need not imply a compromise or a blending of thesis and antithesis. The outcome could range from a new set of contradictory relations to a new harmonious set of interactions. For example, you and your newfound drinking buddy could resolve any tensions by fighting or going for a long ride together.
While the dialectic sounds like a complex idea, Harley riders have a leg up on grasping this notion because typically their lives are walking contradictions. The social stigma that citizens and the media have attached to the Harley culture underlies the fine contradictory line that many bikers walk between the biker universe and the real world. Yet, having a conflict-ridden life is only halfway to grasping the dialectic. The other half involves becoming conscious of how the contradictory social relations encountered in these two worlds work themselves out and impact not only one’s life but also change the different environments in which an individual coexists. Most Harley riders are acutely aware of the conflicts that result from their choice to straddle two cultures. One site of conflict is a Harley rider’s work life. Others are marital or cohabitating relations, political interactions, and relations with relatives, the law, and other bikers.
For example, consider the day that I arrived at my new job as a college professor at a conservative liberal-arts college riding my 1958 Pan Head. Never has the contradictory nature of my life choices been so evident. My professional greeting was tepid, to say the least. It was not long before I was derided for my dress, personal appearance, choice of friends, fraternization with students, student field trips to biker bars, and choice of language. Sound familiar? I was acutely aware that my promotion decision would be a political one, rather than one solely based on merit. My research on motorcycle helmet effectiveness, despite its sound basis and technical merits, was not well received. The scheduling of biker research interviews at the same time and place as a campus-hosted regional art festival for tourists and yuppies resulted in further clashes of unyielding interests. As a result, an adversarial relationship between the college administration and me emerged and exists to this very day.
Yet on that same first day, I rode down the hill to town and randomly parked my bike on Main Street. Being in a foreign place, I threaded a lock and chain through the front wheel. Well, it wasn’t long before the old Pan and its anchor, as one old timer referred to my unusually large chain, drew a crowd. Upon my return, I was welcomed by a group of local bikers who became an undying support network and an introduction to a rich biker lifestyle in an unfamiliar place. The contradictory pushes and pulls between these two universes acting as if two gravitational forces were colliding and competing can be used to understand my evolution in and between each of these two worlds. If I were to bore you with the details, it would be an application of Hegel’s dialectical method and it would explain contradictory outcomes: my earning tenure, battling the college administration on benefit issues, performing interesting helmet research, joining the biker’s rights movement, and so forth. Alternatively, we can learn more about the relevance of the dialectic for Harley riders from Marx and Hegel’s theories of human history.
How did Hegel apply his dialectic? Hegel embraced the ideals of the French Revolution (liberty, equality, and fraternity). He believed that such a civil society embodied the notion of universal recognition—equitable treatment for all citizens via the eradication of relations of domination and subservience. Hegel believed that the master plan for civil society was developed by God and that God directed the evolution of human history through implanting the Absolute Idea—an innate desire to be recognized—in the mind and will of individuals. This served as the catalyst for contradictory social interactions and resulting social change.
For Hegel, change is the result of the dialectical interaction between individuals engaged in relationships of dominance and subservience. Hegel employs his simple dialectic where a thesis (Absolute Idea or innate desire to be recognized) confronts an antithesis (lack of recognition in a real world situation) and results in a synthesis-change (a change in relations of dominance). For Hegel, change was always uni-directional; a movement closer to universal recognition. Eventually, society evolves to the Prussian state, which Hegel embraced as the realization of universal recognition. Hegel declares that history has ended with the Prussian state—the motor of future change, lack of recognition, had run out of fuel. This conclusion was convenient for Hegel, who was a high-level functionary in the Prussian state eager to preserve his privileged position.
Thus Hegel, a status quo guy, would likely not have ridden a Harley. He would never jeopardize his privileged position by adopting cultural practices outside of the norm. Despite this, Hegel’s dialectic is relevant for understanding divisions among bikers. The desire or will to be recognized, whether innate or acquired, in dialectical fashion both attracts and repels bikers of all stripes. Freedom-seeking riders overcome the alienation of restrictive regulation of their lifestyle by uniting, while subsets of bikers are left to struggle with injustices imposed by politically dominant groups within the bikers right movement and more generally by traditional culture purists.
Marx would likely have embraced Harley culture. In contrast to Hegel, Marx’s dialectic was complex. To him, contradiction was multidimensional, moving beyond a simple confrontation between thesis and antithesis. He considered a complexity of social interactions comprising any aspect of society. Returning to my autobiographical example, the Harley rider-professor dichotomy would be extended to include my upbringing in a working-class community, first-generation college graduate status, participation in the civil rights, antiwar, and student rights movements, and other aspects of my life to better understand the complexity and multitude of contradictory pushes and pulls that underlie my behavior.
Marx’s approach was inspired by his observation of the disorderly social conflict based on class antagonisms and political coalitions between social classes in the period following the bourgeois-capitalist revolutions in Europe.1 Where Hegel saw harmony and stability emerging out of the French Revolution, Marx saw chaos and contradiction.
For Marx, the main motor of history was the antagonism among a complex set of social interactions that goes well beyond the stereotypical struggle between workers and capitalists. More specifically, Marx analyzed the intensely competitive process (an interaction between different types of capitalists) in the market economy, and a matrix of interactions between capitalists, laborers, bankers, landowners, foreign capitalists, and a series of institutions. He focused not only on how these interactions affected the distribution of income and its impact on the work, consumption, and investment activities of society’s inhabitants, but also on class interests and social activities in the political, economic, and cultural spheres of society. Marx used this analysis to locate contradictory elements of capitalist development such as the occurrence of periodic recessions, unemployment as a norm, poverty and the need for a welfare state, the evolution of large corporations, economic injustice, and a dependency on foreign trade.
The relevance of Marx’s dialectic for understanding biker social relations and the resultant threats to the preservation of the Harley culture is that contradictory social relations can be complex and can transcend the place where they originate. Thus, the resolution of economic contradictions, in good dialectical fashion, may have dire contradictory consequences for cultural activities including Harley culture.
Marx was a proponent of the working class, particularly under the injustices and subservience that it experienced under capitalism. As such, he would have been supportive of working-class culture and thus would have analyzed and identified with trends in Harley culture. He was also a radical thinker who liked making a statement. Thus, he may have even ridden a Harley with a flame paint job. Although Marx, who lived a life of near-poverty, probably could not have afforded the admission price.
Enough of the philosophy lesson. You get the basic point: power relations are prevalent and are ever-changing with potential spillover effects from their source to other aspects of life. Let’s get back to social divisions among bikers.
Despite the varied socioeconomic backgrounds of bikers, social divisions among bikers were minimal throughout the 1960 to mid-1970s period and most likely during earlier eras.2 Bikers included World War II and Vietnam vets; they hailed from working-class backgrounds; they were country boys raised on dirt bikes and hill climbers and counterculture enthusiasts keen on experiencing alternative lifestyles. The common thread between these groups was that they were motorcycle enthusiasts, adventurers, and freedom seekers. Bikers during this period formed a brotherhood. Symbolic of this fraternal or co-respective relationship was the way riders greeted each other on the road. The preferred greeting was a clenched fist symbolizing solidarity among riders. In this era, it was less important what you rode (Honda 350s and 450s, Kawasaki Avengers and Mach II’s, and Italian-made Harley Sprints included), and more pertinent that you rode. In Hegelian terms, this situation was a form of universal recognition and freedom (of the road), but unlike Hegel’s idealized world of everlasting mutual respect, this one would be short-lived.
Biker social relations soon changed from being fraternal to involving fraternal rivalry. This change mirrors a transition in the competitive environment between motorcycle manufactures (a social interaction that Marx would have analyzed) from fraternal/co-respective competition to fratricidal competition. Prior to 1970, motorcycle producers were primarily enthusiasts and riders producing machines for a limited market of like-minded enthusiasts. Despite the large number of companies during the first few decades of motorcycle production, the limited demand, and the eventual demise of all U.S. manufactures with the exception of Harley-Davidson, competition between manufacturers was restrained. Price competition was limited and competitive advances were primarily made through successes on the track, winning of war contracts, branding, model development, and advertising.
This early competitive phase is replaced by intense price competition initiated by Japanese manufactures exploiting advanced technology to produce new models that directly competed with the larger displacement machines produced by Harley and others. Additionally, the Japanese firms were adept at mass marketing their rides, thus overcoming earlier limits to demand3 (for example, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda”). The mass marketing of the motorcycle occurred in two phases: the Japanese invasion of Harley territory in the 1969–1985 period and the revival and riding of the demographic wave by Harley-Davidson after 1985.
In this first phase, the commodification of the motorcycle takes place. No longer are motorcycles for enthusiasts and adventurers, they become simple commodities for purchase by anyone irrespective of their skill, training, or adventurous spirit. As I will argue below, the commodification of the motorcycle leads to major divisions among bikers. Yet, the dominant role of the commodity in market economies can easily lead a casual observer to overlook such divisions. After all, if motorcycles are a common commodity, we are all bikers now. A false sense of biker unity could be perceived. Marx issued a methodological warning about how surface perceptions concerning market activities could be misleading with respect to discerning key social interactions, which he called commodity fetishism. Here, a fetish is not the coddling of your Harley through excessive polishing till the chrome wears thin, nor is it the use of handlebars, foot pegs, sissy bars, and the like for unnatural acts. It refers to the misperception that market relations between buyers and sellers are the be all and end all of social interactions in capitalism. There are more important under-the-surface social interactions useful for understanding, in our case, cultural developments.
As first recognized by Marx, the competitive process, a key social interaction, is a dialectical one with both desirable and unwanted economic effects and potentially contradictory spillover effects to other aspects of society. It can be argued that the competitive onslaught against Harley-Davidson, while improving the quality of bikes, directly attacked Harley culture at its core. Of course, as commodity fetishism suggests, the linkage is not a direct one, but this does not imply it is not a crucial one.
The first phase of mass marketing brought a diverse group of riders to motorcycling with dramatically different motivations and with far less commitment to the survival of the sport. Many of the road brands potentially sounded the competitive death knell of Harley-Davidson. This threat was exacerbated by Harley-Davidson’s failed strategic response to the competition.4 As a result of the Japanese invasion and Harley’s response, the Harley culture was threatened and a significant split between motorcyclists occurred. The clenched fist, symbolic of a united brotherhood, gave way to the more traditional hand wave brought along from the nonmotorcycling experiences of new riders. As resentment mounted, the hand wave was replaced by the selective hand wave or snub. A once tight brotherhood was divided.
At the same time, civil society became less civil. Liberal elements decided that it was necessary to protect other elements from themselves. Universal recognition became selective, particularly in the form of mandatory helmet use legislation. The response was the formation of biker rights organizations. Their origin is directly associated with the core Harley culture. In dialectical fashion, this movement was aided by the very forces that threatened to make such groups fail, the commodification of the motorcycle. As bikes became ordinary household items, their perception as the toys or weapons of hard-core deviants was softened, but not by enough to stem the tide of states adopting helmet laws. The ultimate solution required a representative membership in biker rights groups and thus some uneasy alliances between originators and mass-market riders. This typically takes the form of open membership and open events, but tight control of decision-making by core enthusiasts. This scenario reproduced tensions between the groups, but also maintained some equilibrium. Symbolic of these biker social relations is the change in the translation of the ABATE acronym to a more palatable form from All Brothers Against Totalitarian Enactments to American Bikers Aimed Toward Education.
The second phase of the competitive process and mass marketing, characterized by a mid-course correction made by Harley-Davidson in time to exploit the baby boomers’ spending of discretionary income, also changed the course of biker social relations. The Willie G. era of improved quality and more highly stylized machines, many with nostalgic themes, successfully tapped this ready source of leisure consumption funds. This phase added two more groups of bikers to the mix: yuppies and working-class stiffs who missed out on the early years of the Harley revolution because they could not afford to pay the price of admission. While the late working-class bloomers have more readily assimilated into the core Harley culture, the yuppie-RUB boomers have had a rougher ride. Their leisure-class mentality deeply divides them from core Harley riders.
Competition is a dynamic process. The newfound popularity of Harley-Davidson has led to the Japanese copycat cruiser and full dresser models. This trend has created a more sophisticated type of Jap bike rider who, while more palatable to Harley riders, has not been fully accepted. In addition, these faux-Harley riders also have distanced themselves from crotch rocket riders. On balance, it’s difficult to say whether bikers are more or less unified as a result of this copycat phenomenon.
An additional element of the Harley-Davidson strategy was to market authorized clothing and accessories. This competitive response not only brands the company, but acts as an additional source of revenue. The success of this sideline has resulted in a Harley fashion trend which is antithetical to original Harley culture. In addition, it has spawned alternative profiteers merchandising knockoffs and generic biker accessories. The success of Harley-Davidson’s marketing campaign has further divided the biking community into well-coiffed bikers and traditionally dressed riders and has created a class of parasitic profiteers that has invaded swap meets and other events at the expense of more traditional activities. Furthermore the pop-culture status of the brand has generated a class of wannabes who have both embraced and diluted the culture, creating antagonisms between established culture and pop-culture practitioners.
The extension of the traditional culture to include the pop culture has set off the Hegelian desire to be recognized. Pop culturists vie for recognition and gain some acceptance through the biker-rights movement and auxiliary groups affiliated with motorcycle clubs. Despite these superficial acknowledgements, these groups remain second-class citizens in the class structure of the culture. The end result is another source of both support and tension within the ranks of the biker world.
Finally, we can never forget that at the core of the dominant biker culture is the autonomous individual. The biker culture was founded by and for free-willed individuals seeking freedom and adventure. Yet, this autonomous foundation, while uniting bikers, also tears them apart. Hegel’s free-willed individuals will pursue positions of dominance and to that end create a class of subservient riders. The playing-out of this dialectic at the level of individual bikers is another source of division and may be the most difficult to overcome. Thus, the fledging relationship between our biker buddies at the bar may never get beyond the individualistic desires to be free, and this may be the biggest obstacle to preserving a culture through biker unity.
The dialectic in its Hegelian and Marxian forms tells us that activities are contradictorily composed of competing and possibly opposite forces. In addition, Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism implies that some things may not be what they appear to be on the surface. Using these concepts, we have examined evolving social divisions between bikers. My analysis reveals that within the seeds of these divisions are the seeds of unity and that the primary source of these divisions is not deep-seated differences between riders, but rather is the result of the unfolding of other social interactions, particularly the competition between motorcycle manufactures in the economic sphere. Motorcycle riders are caught up in a whirlwind of competitive forces beyond their control. These tendencies have created divisions far deeper than justified because bikers have incorrectly interpreted differences on a personal level rather than on a societal or economic level. Thus animosities are disproportionate to their basis.
This same analysis makes it evident that Harley riders cannot rely on the Harley-Davidson Motor Co. to preserve the traditional Harley culture. When the company was entrusted with that task in the past, it barely survived, and when it did succeed, it ultimately weakened the culture’s own foundation making it teeter on implosion through the creation of further divisions. As Marx would clearly tell us, the main task of Harley-Davidson is to make profits so that it can defend itself against future competitive onslaughts. This objective is not necessarily constrained by the preservation of the core Harley culture.
The best chance for the survival of Harley culture lies within its boundaries. Until bikers recognize that the sources of their differences are shallow and that the commonalities between them are of a higher order of magnitude, they will continue to be sitting ducks for external and internal forces that will conquer their subculture.
While Hegel’s free-willed individuals will always remain an obstacle in either a divided or united biker world, the containment of such autonomous individual tendencies through peer pressure is a small price to pay for survival.5
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1 Marx observed the struggles between the three great classes of the time: fledgling capitalists, the previously powerful landed aristocracy weakened by the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the growing working class made more populous by the transition from the agricultural countryside to industrial cities. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of social turmoil that saw the previously powerful landed aristocracy attempt to reassert power/control over the new social system and a growing working class demanding reforms of the new socioeconomic system. Various coalitions between these classes were formed over the period. Ultimately with the defeat of the Revolutions of 1848, the fledgling capitalist class more firmly secured its dominant position.
2 Although, there had always been a rivalry between Indian and Harley riders.
3 This process was aided by the first oil crisis and environmental regulations that forced Japanese manufactures to switch to the production of more desirable four-stroke models.
4 Harley fell into the hands of a bowling pin manufacturer in order to provide the corporate clout necessary to compete internationally. AMF marketed and packaged Harleys in an innovative way, but at the same time its inability to maintain and improve quality undermined its strategy and threatened the survival of the brand.
5 The author is grateful to Michael S. Morris and Ernie Canelli for many years of shared hard-driven miles and for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.