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61.
RESURGENCE #12. Np., California: March 1967.
The final issue of the Resurgence Youth Movement’s magazine, edited (though not stated) by Jonathan Leake and Walter Caughey. 4to. Eight stapled mimeographed sheets of varying colour paper stock, most pages printed recto and verso. Illustrated.
Resurgence emerged following lectures given by Sam Dolgoff, Russ Blackwell and others at meetings of the Libertarian League in New York in the early 1960s attended by Jonathan Leake, then still a high school student, and Walter Caughey. Leake and Caughey billed their magazine as the organ of the Resurgence Youth Movement, said to be founded on August 10, 1964. It first appeared in September 1964 in New York, four months after the first issue of The Rebel Worker in Chicago, both publications proclaiming a new ‘World Revolution of Youth’. Later they were joined by Heatwave in London whose editor, Charles Radcliffe, had earlier connected the ideas of rock'n'roll and revolution in an article for Anarchy magazine in 1963 (‘Pop Goes the Beatle’).
All three journals called for a total revolution, fusing anarchist ideas with the gathering forces of youth revolt, though Resurgence went further, its apocalyptic tone verging on nihilism. Its first manifesto called for “revolutionary youth everywhere… to join us. Let there be explosions of subversive activity, ambushes on the State and its lackeys. Enemies of the State Unite!”; by the time of this twelfth and final issue they were claiming that “The new man is both nihilist and humanist, destroying the old world to build a new one… The anarchists, guerilla fighters in the world revolution of youth rise up to tear down Authority, Property, Family, all the gods of bourgeois civilization. We sing the death of god and destruction of the world as we know it.”
Near Fine.
