Antiauthoritarian Social Movements

Abstract

After the smashing of the Niketown and Starbuck’s windows at the Seattle protests against the WTO in November 1999, the mainstream press marveled at the appearance of a seemingly new generation of “anarchist” protesters. Time Magazine journalist Michael Krantz (1999) wrote about “How Organized Anarchists Led Seattle into Chaos” to gripe about the young vandals and express his awe at how well-organized they seemed to be: “The anarchist movement today is a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine. Ironically, the groups are increasingly organized…” Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and various other mainstream newspapers and magazines later derided these same activists as young, violent, destructive, politically incoherent, and terrorist.