him to a Rancid concert. He became a vegetarian around age twelve after driving through stockyards on a family trip. Marten recalls that his father, an attorney, often complained about how flawed the justice system was. His father also gave him Edward Abbey’s fictionalized account of eco-saboteurs, The Monkey Wrench Gang, when he was a teenager. At college, Marten met “freegans” while dumpstering, was involved with the campus vegetarian/vegan society and Students Against Sweatshops, and read anarcho-syndicalist works and the writings of anarcho-primitivist writers John Zerzan and Kevin Tucker.93 For Marten, all of these experiences validated “turning it all down as an appropriate response.”94
The new anarchism that attracted Marten was built on classical anarchism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but was also influenced by a host of other factors, including radical feminism and the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico in 1994. Classical anarchism began to take shape as a coherent political philosophy within “the left wing of socialism,” according to Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin.95 The anarchist slogan “No gods, no masters” expressed the view that socialism was not critical enough of the state and institutional power. Classical anarchists like Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) were concerned with capitalism and the suffering caused by the Industrial Revolution. From the 1880s through the Red Scare of the 1920s and the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s, large numbers of anarchists were politically active in the United States and Europe. Anarchist thought and practice spread from the United States to South America and Africa. It was expressed through a variety of experiments, including communal living, federations, free schools, workers councils, local currencies, and mutual aid societies.96
Repression in the United States and by Communist governments in other countries, not to mention the rise of Nazism in Germany, resulted in most anarchist leaders being killed or disappearing by the 1940s. For these reasons anarchism became “a ghost of itself,” according to anarchist writer Cindy Milstein.97 In the United States during World War II some anarchist ideas were “resuscitated” and influenced the Beat movement of the 1950s, expressed through the poetry of Alan Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, and other Beat poets.98
The reemergence of anarchism in the United States came about through the 1960s counterculture and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also shaped by the following: radical feminism and gay rights movements; the Situationists (1962–1972) who advocated playful disruptions of the everyday; social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s (1921–2006) writings linking social and ecological crises; the West German Autonomen’s creation of communal free spaces and a masked black bloc in demonstrations in the 1980s; and the Zapatista rebellion in 1994.99 Anarchist thought and practice played a role in various movements that developed after the 1960s, including radical feminism and gay rights, but especially the antinuclear movement.
In addition to anarchism, divergent forms of feminism, including anarcha-feminism, ecofeminism, and feminist spirituality, were important factors in shaping the direct action antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s.100 In addition to North American protests, women played an important role in the United Kingdom, especially at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a protest against nuclear weapons at a site in Berkshire, England, that ran for nineteen years.101 In many ways, the feminist movement was at the center of 1970s radicalism and was instrumental in creating a set of self-empowerment organizations and practices, such as health collectives and rape crisis centers run by women. Feminist activists also founded women’s studies programs at colleges and universities that would influence generations of young women and other participants in the antinuclear movement and environmentalism.102
The nonviolent direct action movement that coalesced around antinuclear activism in the 1970s and 1980s is the most direct link between the countercultural and protest movements of the 1960s and radical eco-activism of the 1990s. The antinuclear movement specialized in road blockades as well as other forms of protest and drew together feminism, anarchism, environmentalism, nonviolent direct action, theatrical protest elements, and in some instances, both Christian and contemporary Pagan spiritual currents. In the antinuclear movement, Quaker consensus decision making converged with anarchist organizing tactics such as affinity groups.103 These practices, spread nationally by the antinuclear movement, carried on through twenty-first-century anticapitalist, environmental, and animal rights protests.
The Clamshell Alliance was the most influential expression of anarchist, environmentalist, and feminist countercultural tendencies in the 1970s. Clamshell was formed in 1976 to protest the construction of a nuclear power plant near Seabrook, New Hampshire. Clamshell was founded by Quakers and antiwar activists, some of whom had been involved in the civil rights movement. It picked up on anarchist countercultural tendencies from the 1960s, as well as Gandhian nonviolence from the civil rights movement, and Quaker commitments to consensus and community building.104 Clamshell’s commitment to feminism encouraged women to take on leadership roles more than earlier movements had done.105
The antinuclear movement in New England, Northern California, and elsewhere was often composed of “radical countercultural activists.”106 They had been politically active in the 1960s, but moved to rural areas by the early 1970s, as part of the back-to-the-land movement. They spread ideas and practices about small-scale communities, grassroots democracy, nonhierarchical decision making, pacifism, and anarchism. Clamshell and other antinuclear groups brought together this older generation of former antiwar activists and participants in the 1960s counterculture with young urban activists. Although Clamshell was short lived, it served as a powerful model for later direct action campaigns. In the couple years of its existence, Clamshell trained thousands of activists in consensus decision making and nonviolent direct action, practices that spread across the country to other antinuclear struggles.107
On the opposite coast from Clamshell, Abalone Alliance was one of the largest and most successful antinuclear campaigns. Abalone was formed in 1976 to protest the opening of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant near San Luis Obispo, California. Like Clamshell, Abalone was composed of former peace activists as well as “radically ecologically oriented activists” from Northern California who had been part of the 1960s counterculture. Although Clamshell included prominent women leaders and a commitment to feminism and egalitarianism, Abalone was shaped by even stronger strains of feminism, environmentalism, and anarchism. “Anarcha-feminism,” inspired by the work of anarchist writer Murray Bookchin and his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism, was particularly important in Abalone’s development. The anarcha-feminists developed a movement culture that was very much like the culture of radical environmentalist gatherings of the 1990s and 2000s. They insisted that any anarchist revolutionary politics must also be feminist and sometimes referred to themselves as “ecowarriors.” Abalone also promoted leaderless resistance, a characteristic of radical environmental activism in the 2000s.108
Like Abalone, twenty-first-century Food Not Bombs, infoshops, barter networks, tool lending libraries, community gardens, the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement, and hardcore punk rock have been anarchist at heart. They have tended to be organized horizontally rather than vertically and have stressed grassroots communities and mutual aid. These anarchist expressions have perpetuated the stream of anarchist thought and practice running from the 1960s antiwar movement through the 1970s women’s movement and the nonviolent direct action antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
Radical environmentalists in Earth First! were part of this mix and some of them were significantly influenced by the anarchist Wobblies (International Workers of the World).109 Activist Panagioti Tsolkas claims that the journal Green Anarchy (2001–2008) “reshaped” Earth First!: “The GA movement and its magazine contributed significantly to developing the theory that surrounded EF!’s basic tenets.” The green anarchy movement was one of many “frequent crossovers” between Earth First! and the anarchist movement that led to young activists moving beyond the tactics of mainstream environmental groups.110 For all these reasons, by the end of the 1990s, anarchism had become the most influential political view among radical activists
