"There is No Authority but Yourself": The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk

In the literature on the genesis of British punk (from which anarcho-punk is routinely excluded) 5 much attention has focused on the politics that informed the work of the Sex Pistols. 6 In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus famously argued that the Anarchy in the UK rehearsed, in "crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society" that had earlier been articulated by the Situationist International, and the surrealist and dadaist movements before that. 7 These radical phenomena, Marcus insisted, shared the principles of "negation, rebellion, destruction and detournement" in the collective efforts to overwhelm the social order they were confronted by. 8 His contention has been dismissed by other authors, who see Marcus as attempting to ascribe a conscious political strategy to the Pistols' work where none existed, and to