Prolekult

Rave Culture and the Anti-Capitalist Euphoria of the 1980s and 1990s
As Thatcherism and Reaganomics tightened their grip on the global economy, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the emergence of rave culture. Born in warehouses and fields, away from the prying eyes of authorities, rave culture offered a utopian escape from the alienation of neoliberalism. The pulsing beats of techno, house, and acid were more than a soundtrack; they were a communal heartbeat, uniting dancers in an ephemeral, boundary-less space.

Rave culture’s anarchistic nature lay in its decentralisation. Events were often organised through underground networks, bypassing commercial venues and state regulations. The embrace of substances like MDMA fuelled feelings of collective euphoria, breaking down social barriers and creating a sense of unity rarely found in capitalist societies. Predictably, the state responded with hostility, introducing draconian laws like the UK’s Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which explicitly targeted unlicensed gatherings featuring "repetitive beats." The repression underscored the establishment's fear of a youth culture that rejected commodification and embraced spontaneous, self-organised joy.

The State’s Response: Fear and Repression
Across these movements, a pattern emerged. The state and capital, wary of losing their grip on a generation, resorted to a mix of cultural co-optation and outright repression. Countercultural symbols were commodified, stripping them of their radical edge, while organisers and participants faced surveillance, arrests, and brutal crackdowns. These responses were not merely about maintaining order but about quelling the possibility of systemic change. An energised, anti-establishment youth represented a direct threat to the hegemony of capital and state control.

A Legacy of Resistance
Despite the repression, the legacy of these musical revolutions endures. They demonstrated that culture could be a battleground, where the ideals of anarchism, communism and socialism could flourish, however briefly. Each movement left behind a cultural and ideological imprint, inspiring future generations to challenge the status quo.

In the end, these musical revolutions were not just about sound, they were about solidarity, resistance, and the dream of a world free from exploitation. Whether in the peaceful communes of the hippies, the unity of ska, the raw defiance of punk, or the ecstatic collectivism of rave culture, music gave voice to a vision of humanity unshackled from the chains of capital and state control. It is a reminder that even in the face of repression, the beat of rebellion can never be fully silenced.

Quality label but sloppy pressings. Lots of Prolekult vinyls have that symmetric fault; so the needle goes too much from left to right which causes wining sound. The music is like topnotch 90's sound and lots of tracks are repressings from other high quality labels. Classic Label - Classic Trax - Great Artwork labels and sleeves !

Couldn't give less of a damn what picture is on the record, the tunes are always kickass! Razor's Edge sneaked in here!? Baby Doc! Super label, get all of them, i intend too :)

Quality label with quality music from quality producers. No idea why the stupid left-wing politics for their label, though - but that's their choice.

Great label with great music, and the fact that its ideology trolls dumb right wing bootlickers so much that they make accounts just to write in rage how "communism killed billions of people" makes it even more legendary.

Pictures of iconic political figures; Che Guevara, Lenin, Trotsky, left wing punk band The Clash, gay rights activist Harvey Milk, Anti poll tax rioters, zero difference fuck the vote...one can only think the folks in the Prolekult stable are lefties!! The music they released was ground breaking back then and mixed so well with the other prog/house/trance labels of the time such as hooj, technogold, fluid and in 2016 is still cheap as chips. The label brought us legendary producers such as jones and stephenson, wippenberg, kinki roland, thomas heckmann, dj randy to name a few...would Marx of approved of the profit made by these producers over the years? does beg the question :)

What can be said about this label , a great deal even thou all the tracks were licensed from others they knew what they were doing. Setting a bar well above the rest ( even thou hooj tunes was equally as impressive ) a lot of these tracks are still timeless for the harder 90's trance techno sound and long may they continue to be appreciated we definately do and wore out many copies DJing over the years too :D

The Prolekult label released/licensed some of the biggest techno/NRG/hard-trance tunes in the mid-90's UK club scene. Heckmann's Amphetamine, Wippenberg's Neurodancer, Jones & Stephenson's The First Rebirth, Kinki Roland's remix of The Mighty Machine... these were all huuuge tunes (no pun intended, these were all a bit too hard to be released on the parent label Hooj Tunes), Neurodancer and The First Rebirth in particular were regularly dropped at 5:55am in a club as the final tune of the night thus reducing me to a quivering elated heap by six. :)

Here's a handy summary of the label, presumably written by Red Jerry himself, quoted from the booklet that came with the Prolekulture albums (which are well worth tracking down as an introduction to the classic early releases on Prolekult).

"We started Prolekult up in the spring of '93 as a harder alternative to the more commercial-oriented house we'd been involved with up until then. There was never much of a gameplan involved, just a bunch of preferences and prejudices: a liking for hard, having-it, often Euro-flavoured trance and total indifference to the up-its-own-arse electronic doodling that characterised the UK techno scene at the time.

Sourmash's Pilgrimage To Paradise was a good tune to kick it all off with, emanating as it did from the UK, but packing the punch of a Beltram / F. De Wulf / Orlando Voorn record. Getting off to a start like that, we'd hoped to overcome our sense of musical Europhilia and carry on signing banging home-grown material, but it wasn't to be. Of the twelve tracks included here [on the CD], three quarters were licensed from European labels, reflecting the failure on our part to consistently find the kind of material we were after here in the UK. We're not sure what that says about us, or the UK, or both ...or neither, but we like the vibe surrounding the very up-for-it free party scene that's developed over the past few years and the producers that are now emerging from this sector of the underground are kicking arse. Proper UK acid business.

When it came to adopting a name, logo, etc, for the label, as unreconstructed lefties, we turned to socialist political history for inspiration. "Prolekult" is an adaptation of the Russian word "Proletkult" which was a workers cultural organisation set up in 1907 by the socialist exiles Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky. The theory went, in simple terms, that at a time when Russia's Tsarist dynasty was at the weakest and most vicious stage in its squalid history, the Bolshevik party was to lead the political opposition, the unions to lead the economic opposition and the Proletkult the cultural opposition. Perhaps the best known work to come out of the Proletkult was the post-revolutionary films of Eisenstein (Strike, Battleship Potemkin), but within a year of his rise to power in 1921 Stalin had effectively stripped the Proletkult of any autonomy, vibrancy or relevance, turning it, as he did all other genuine bases of working class expression, into just another instrument of state power.

Obviously, none of this has much direct relevance to the records we put out as the lack of vocals involved makes overt political statement difficult ("you gotta have house" repeated a few times on Neurodancers' Wippenburg [sic] - the only vocal on the twelve tracks - isn't exactly "Blowing in the Wind" is it?) but it made a change from the cod-futurism to be found on the sleeves and logos of so many techno/trance labels and, in terms of lefty icons over the last two hundred years, we knew we had an extensive reserve of imagery to draw upon. There was also the quiet hope on our part that by using pictures of long-forgotten working class heroes we'd be making our own tiny contribution to the rehabilitation of these political giants who have effectively been written out of our history. We thought that even if the odd person here and there asked "who's that?" then the labels and imagery would have transcended their original role as mere packaging and taken on a higher role as potential consciousness-raisers (man). Unfortunately it soon became apparent that no one gave a toss about which old trot we wheeled out next and after three years and seventeen releases I can safely say that we could put Donald Duck on our next release and no one would bat an eyelid."