Bakunin's motto was, ''The urge to destroy is a creative urge.'' Unlike Marx, Bakunin did not justify his theory as science. He described anarchists as people who know what they are fighting against more than what they are fighting for.

Anarchism reached critical mass as a revolutionary movement only once, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. But it has long touched a political and cultural chord in the United States.

Henry David Thoreau was an exemplary anarchist, though he never called himself one. Emma Goldman, a Russian immigrant who advocated free love, women's rights and armed insurrection, was the best known of the immigrant anarchists who helped prompt a red scare around World War I. (She appears in E. L. Doctorow's novel ''Ragtime'' and in Warren Beatty's movie ''Reds.'') In 1927 the Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both avowed anarchists, were executed after being convicted of killing a paymaster and his guard at a shoe factory near Boston.

Anarchists consider themselves of the left, not the right. But antigovernment ideas that sound anarchist themes are common across the political spectrum. John Wayne, in many of his Westerns, and Mel Gibson, in ''The Patriot,'' play reluctant but violent American heroes called on to smash evil so they can return to a life of bucolic isolation. The quest for pure rebellion in some punk rock lyrics reflects the spread of anarchism, or perhaps nihilism -- anarchism without the utopian impulses -- among teenagers.

But nothing has revived anarchism like globalization. Anarchists are now battling what they see as a concentration of power in multinational corporations. Many oppose the spread of corporate investment across national boundaries, which, they say, lets companies like Nike and General Electric evade local labor and environmental laws. They have also attacked the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund because these are seen as superseding national governments.

''For the first time since the 1960's we are actually putting thought into action,'' said John Zerzan, a leading anarchist thinker who lives in Eugene, Ore. He distinguishes anarchists from traditional labor and environmental groups that oppose many of the same aspects of globalization, though he's not opposed to sharing the stage with them.