ABSTRACT
Discourses in and around the punk movement, including its underground subculture, imply that, in order to be saying anything, one has to be saying something new. With good reason, indeed, punk has been described as something of a modernist movement. From a Derridean perspective, this is problematic because the roles of trace and supplementarity mean that, on the one hand, all repetitions involve something supplementary to the earlier trace whilst, on the other hand, no pure originary trace exists. In the post-war years, and increasingly since the 1960s it seems, Marxism has often been considered to be neither new nor interesting to the greater mass of people in the UK and elsewhere. Since the 1970s traditions of punk have brought forth various subsequent new-sense micro-scenes. The problem, a Marxist might quite reasonably point out, is that CEOs of multinational corporations tend not to lose sleep at night in fear of a population of punks being true to themselves.
