I'd never even considered the propaganda rivalry in musical context.
For instance, I was initially skeptical of this idea that anarchist musicians really provided a proselytizing option to authoritarian socialism. Due to the perception of the latter already being dead (interest-wise) with Marxists (and generic collectivists) in the US and the rest of the Anglophone world, by the era of the New Left and especially by the applicable late 1970s...
- Music as a Weapon: "...the punk underground was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of anarchism. Were it not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the world might still be choosing between stale brands of authoritarian socialism."
One celebrity example (of surely many) conflicting with "being stuck with brand _X_ " ... is Pete Seeger. Though he supported the Soviet version early on, even he had become disillusioned with it by the 1950s.
- Banjo guy: However, with the ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Socialism. He left the CPUSA in 1949, but remained friends with some who did not leave it, although he argued with them about it.
[...] In 1982, Seeger performed at a benefit concert for the 1982 demonstrations in Poland against the Polish government. His biographer David Dunaway considers this the first public manifestation of Seeger's decades-long personal dislike of socialism in its Soviet form. In the late 1980s, Seeger also expressed disapproval of violent revolutions, remarking to an interviewer that he was really in favor of incremental change
[...] In a 1995 interview, however, he insisted that "I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it"...
But I did temporarily forget about that Maoist ripple (in US history) which encroached upon a fraction of the New Left during the '60s and '70s. And since the precursors of anarcho-punk were around even in the 1960s, the two sides arguably did have crossover during that time period. However, the concerned parties were so small in number compared to the overall activist community, that this proposed "Oh, you mean there's something else...?" savior status of anarcho-punk (and its garage band prototypes) still seems kind of trivial.
Of course, the roots of the rival dichotomy (like transitional state socialism versus "no government from the start") are typically conceived as going back to the primordial rift between Marx and Bakunin...
- Mikhail Bakunin (excerpt): Bakunin clashed with Marx over worker governance and revolutionary change. Bakunin argued that even the best revolutionary placed on the Russian throne would become worse than Czar Alexander. Bakunin wrote that socialist workers in power would become ex-workers who govern by their own pretensions, not representing the people.
Bakunin did not believe in transitional dictatorship serving any purpose other than to perpetuate itself, saying that "liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality". Bakunin disagreed with Marx that the state would wither away under worker ownership and that worker conquest and changes in production conditions would inherently kill the state. Bakunin promoted spontaneous worker actions over Marx's suggested organization of a working-class party.
While Bakunin believed that science and specialists could be useful in enlightening communities, he did not believe in government by experts or letting any privileged minority rule over a majority or any presumed intelligence rule over a presumed stupidity.
Bakunin wrote of referring to the "authority to the bootmaker" on boots and to savants for their specialties, and listening to them freely in respect for their expertise, but not allowing the bootmaker or the savant to impose this authority and not letting them be beyond criticism or censure. Bakunin believed that authority should be in continual voluntary exchange rather than a constant subordination.
The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin Conflict (excerpts): However, their most profound point of disagreement centered on their conflicting analyses of the State. Most importantly, while Marx envisioned a transitional stage between capitalism and a fully mature communist society, which included a state in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a workers’ state), Bakunin adamantly rejected the establishment of any kind of state, including a workers’ state. In fact, this rejection is the defining principle of the school of anarchism, a term that literally translates as “no government”.
[...] We see, therefore, that Marx and Bakunin have developed two dramatically divergent visions of humanity. Bakunin adopted a static version of human nature, identifying it with what is physically natural while Marx posited a humanity that was undergoing maturation, leaving behind a more animal-like existence as it achieved ever higher levels of rationality and self-consciousness.
[...] Marx’s notion of freedom also involves a paradigm shift in relation to Bakunin and the empiricist school of the Enlightenment. There are two pivotal turns that Marx executed in departing from this tradition and in both cases he was following Hegel’s analysis.
[...] The differences between Marx’s and Bakunin’s definitions of freedom, in the final analysis, stem directly from their opposed philosophical presuppositions. For Bakunin, since humans are a natural species, it only makes sense to define freedom as acting naturally. But for Marx, since he regards humanity as in the process of lifting itself above nature, freedom is identified with collective, rational action...
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), there are certain pressing matters to grapple with. I find social hierarchies and stratification abominable and find the entire notion of "rights" (beyond those conceived by the Greeks) deeply problematic, but...