The Sixties in the City: Avant-gardes and Urban Rebels in New York, London, and West Berlin

This essay examines a heretofore under-studied aspect of the sixties revolution: the interplay between avant-garde artists and countercultural anarchists in the spaces of the city. Arguing that the focus on student organizations and the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist Third Worldism with which they were often associated obscures as much as it reveals about the radicalism of the 1960s, the essay examines the revival of anarchist ideas, examining how these dovetailed with the activist conceptions of artistic-political avant-gardes and the counterculture with which they were linked. Comparative in focus, the essay focuses on radical groupings in three key cities of the global 1960s: Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfucker in New York City; King Mob and the Angry Brigade in London; and the Hash Rebels/Blues in West Berlin. Transnational in orientation, the essay shows how countercultural and anarchist publications and networks (e.g., the Rebel Worker group, the Situationist International) helped synergize local rebellions inspired by the intersection of the arts, anarchism, and the counterculture, thereby opening a new perspective on the rebellion of the 1960s.