Anarchism and the American Counter-Culture
NINE YEARS AGO GEORGE WOOD SURVEYED THE ‘GHOST OF THE historical anarchist movement’ and concluded that there was ‘no reasonable likelihood of a renaissance’. History showed that ‘the movements which fail to take the chances it offers them are never born again’. Seven years later, when identifiably anarchist tendencies re-emerged in the youth movements in England and Holland, Woodcock wondered ‘whether I had been rash in so officiously burying the historic anarchist movement’. He decided. that he had not been rash because of the differences between the new anarchists and the old. The new anarchists represented no ‘knock in the coffin’ but ‘a new manifestation of the [anarchist] idea’.Woodcock described the new anarchists as ‘militant pacifists’ who had ‘forgotten Spain and had no use for the old romanticism of the dinamitero and the petroleuse’. He pointed to the difference between the old days when one ‘joined’ an anarchist party and the current situation in which the young ‘became’ anarchists. Finally, Woodcock discerned no obvious signs of an anarchist revival in the United States.