In each country where the New Left happened to flourish, the revived panic over a newly discovered, cleverly disguised, still flourishhng Nazism seemed to be confirmed by strictly local cirucumstances.

The crudest of those alternatives, the least imaginative, was simply to revert to the old-fashion sectarian Marxism of the nineteen-thirties and to go about fighting Nazism in exactly the way that people had done in the past, by organizing disciplined, Leninist structures based on obedience, dedication, and self sacrifice, the dream words of the Great Depression, and in this manner to sink into a sepia-toned memory of long ago....

And yet retro-Marxism was never New Leftism's main impulse.  A still larger number of people took up the second alternative, a Marxism that was distincly of the nineteen-sixties and seventies: The Marxism of Ho, Mao, Che and Fidel, mixed with a few doctrines of the Frankfurt School philosophers....

As for the New Leftism's third alternative, it was fundamentally anarchist--a libertarian impluse that sometimes drew on the nineteenth-century pamphlets of Bakunin and Kropotkin, sometimes on the early-twentieth-century writings of Anton Pannekoek and the Dutch councilists, and sometimes on the contemporary but equally obscure pamphlets of the autonomists in Italy and the Socialism or Barbarism group and the Situationists in France.  But most often the anarchist alternative drew on nothing at all, on a breeze blowing through the university neighborhoods and on rumors from the California counterculture.