U.S. ANARCHISM the I.W.W. (1). Worse, most forms of subversive cultural and social behavior not clearly linked to changes in the mode of production are discounted: sectors of the population not easily subsumable under the heading 'proletarian' are frequently ignored. The result is that we are now hard put to explain the recent revival of anarchist activity and thought in the U.S. save as a concomitant of economic depression or the death spasms of retrograde segments of society (hippies, professional students, small farmers and businessmen, unreconstructed buccaneer capitalists). In short, anarchism is often equaten with populism in the U.S. Left-wing lexicon. One contemporary movement which gives at least partial credence to the claims of the vulgar Marxists and ouvriéristes is that which styles itself variously as 'Right-wing anarchist' or 'Libertarian'. To begin with, the movement's (essentially a congeries of groupuscules on the U.S. Eeast and West Coasts) origins are highly suspect, composed as it mainly is of veterans of the 1969 split in the Republican party's reactionary youth branch, the Young Americans for Freedom (Y.A.F.). Early disclples of the free market philosopher Ayn Rand (2) and followers of Arizona Senator and Presidential aspirant Barry Goldwater (3), the faction had broken with the Y.A.F. over its breaches of classical conservative doctrine, i.e., acceptance of massive State intrusion into the private lives of its citizens in order to prosecute the Vietnam war. In all probablllty, the dispute was more deep-rooted. During the 1960's, conservative U.S. youth groups, under .pressure from a resurgent Le:rt, had rallied to a more or Iess frankly Statist position, partly out of fear and partly out of a desire to achieve the aims of U.S. capitalism in the foreign arena. This had not set well with the Randite and Goldwater purists. They saw these compromises as definitive, not tactical, as a knuckling-under to the Behemoth, most dramatlcally in regard to lnvoluntary servitude (conscription) and arbitrary confiscation of property (income (1) On the I.W.W. and it.s recent hlstorians, see my review of Melvin Dubofsky's study in the number 27 (1973) of the CIRA Bulletin. (2) Rand, a post-1917 Russian emlgré, attracted conslderable attention among dlsaffected bourgeois youth in the U.S. in the 1950's w!th her books on the fate of 'genius' at the hands of State and corpora.te power. Bee, for example, The Fountalnhead. (3) Goldwater told a University of Arizona audience in 1964 tha.t he had 'much in commun with the ana.rchist wing of SD.S!'. By this, one presumes be meant S.D.S.'s 'participa.tory democracy' faction. 53
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