Author: Empty Hands

Empty Hands History is written by Spencer Beswick, a historian of anarchism and the left who hopes to offer inspiration and lessons for today's movements.

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism: A Revolutionary Tradition [Syllabus]

The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to live.’

The Invisible Committee

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Raoul Vaneigem

What is communism? Can it mean anything beyond either a future mode of production or a repressive ideology disproved by history? What might it look like to pursue a communist politics and communist “form-of-life” today? This course traces a revolutionary communist orientation through a broad history of subversive European thought and practice. Putting classic Marxist and anarchist texts in conversation with contemporary revolutionary theory, we will follow a line from the medieval commune’s “passionate intensity of life” to the present-day call from the Invisible Committee to “spread anarchy, live communism.” Particular attention will be paid to the concept of alienation, the daily practice of radicals, and what became known as the “revolution of everyday life.” The first half of the course offers a grounding in classical anti-capitalist thought and practice, from Marx and Kropotkin to Lenin, with inflection points in the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. The remainder of the semester explores the post-WWII revolutionary praxis of the Situationists, Autonomist Marxism, and what we might call a rhizomatic Deleuzian communism. Authors include Marx, Kropotkin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Benjamin, Debord, Vaneigem, Deleuze, Guattari, Bifo, Federici, Hardt, Negri, Ross, Agamben, Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, and more.

Unit One: Historical Groundings: A Medieval Commune/ism?

Week 1: The Passionate Intensity of Medieval Life and the Use of History

  • Johan Huizinga, “The Passionate Intensity of Life” from The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919)
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, short excerpt from the Introduction to Rabelais and His World (1965)
  • Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City” from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
  • CrimethInc., “The Brethren of the Free Spirt” from Days of War, Nights of Love (2001)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, short excerpt from “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Considerations (1874)

Week 2: Modernity and the Capitalist Counterrevolution

  • Silvia Federici, “All the World Needs a Jolt” and “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” from Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998)
  • Stephen Toulmin, excerpt from “What Is the Problem About Modernity?” from Cosmopolis (1990)

Unit 2: Marxism and Anarchism: The Communist Imaginary

Week 3: Marxism

  • Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)
  • Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)

Week 4: Anarchist Communism

  • Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892)
  • An alternative vision: Sergey Nechayev, “Catechism of a Revolutionary” (1869)

Week 5: The Paris Commune

  • Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2016)

Week 6: What Is to Be Done? Two Answers

  • Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner, “Introduction” to Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (1989)
  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “Ch 4: Second Marriage; xvi: Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” from What Is to Be Done? (1863)
  • Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

Unit 3: The Russian Revolution and Beyond: the Leninist Vision

Week 7: The Russian Revolution and the Leninist Vision of Communism

  • Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
  • Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics” from The Modern Prince & Other Writings (1957)

Week 8: Marxist Alternatives to Lenin?

  • Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike” (1906)
  • Leon Trotsky, “Results and Prospects” (1906)

Week 9: Selected Insights from The Frankfurt School

  • Gyorgy Lukács, excerpt from “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness (1923)
  • Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942)

Unit 4: The Situationists and Autonomism: The Revolution of Everyday Life

Week 10: The Situationists and May ‘68

  • Guy Debord, chapters 1-4 and 8-9 from The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
  • Raoul Vaneigem, Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 12-25 from The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

Week 11: Autonomist Marxism

  • Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
  • Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Labor and Alienation in the Philosophy of the 60s” from The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009)

Week 12: Italian Autonomia and German Autonome

  • George Katsiaficas, “From 1968 to Autonomy,” “Italian Autonomia,” “Sources of Spontaneous Politics in Germany,” and excerpts from “The (Anti)Politics of Autonomy” and “The Theory of Autonomy” from The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (2006)
  • Geronimo, “Appendix: ‘Autonomous Theses 1981’” from Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement (2012)

Unit 5: Rhizomatic Communism: The Communist Form-of-Life

Week 13: The Rhizome and the Nomadic War Machine

  • Michel Foucault, “Method” and excerpt from “Right of Death and Power over Life” from History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)
  • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome” and excerpt from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—the War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
  • Aragorn Eloff, “Children of the new Earth – Deleuze, Guattari and anarchism” (2015)

Week 14: Communists Like Us

  • Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance (1990)

Week 15: Empire and Multitude

  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, introduction to Empire (2000) and “Democracy of the Multitude” from Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

Week 16: A Communist “Form-of-Life”?

  • Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000)
  • Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (2010)

Week 17: Spread Anarchy, Live Communism

  • The Invisible Committee, “Spread Anarchy, Live Communism” (2011)
  • The Invisible Committee, “Get Going!” “Find Each Other,” “Get Organized,” and “Insurrection,” from The Coming Insurrection (2007)
  • The Invisible Committee, chapters 2 and 5-8 from To Our Friends (2014)
  • The Invisible Committee, chapters 2-4 and 7 from Now (2017)

New Publication: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)”

My first peer reviewed journal article was recently published in the Anarchist Studies journal: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).”

Here is the abstract:

After almost a century of Marxist predominance, how did anarchism develop from a marginal phenomenon into a force at the centre of the anti-globalisation movement? This article explores how anarchism was reborn in a counter-revolutionary age. Part one investigates how the New Right’s post-1960s counterrevolution defeated the New Left and remade US society, including by recuperating potentially liberatory elements of social movements. Part two examines how a new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and popularised the anarchist analysis and principles that provided the foundation for the anti-globalisation movement. The article discusses five examples of the development of anarchist theory and practice: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, eco-anarchism, punk anarchism, and revolutionary social anarchism. Ultimately, the article argues that anarchism was revitalised in the late twentieth century because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the neoliberal counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism.

Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting: Women’s Liberation, Reproductive Care, and Dual Power

This week I published a new piece on the history of abortion struggles in Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.

“At recent pro-choice demonstrations, we have been told that the only way to protect abortion is to vote for Democrats in November. Yet the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate. The Democrats appear more interested in fundraising off of Roe and attacking grassroots activists than they do fighting the right-wing assault on abortion. But reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them. The historical experiences of feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies for building power and transforming society.”

Read the full piece here: Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting: Women’s Liberation, Reproductive Care, and Dual Power

I also recorded an audio version that I uploaded to YouTube, which you can listen to here: Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting.

Prefiguration or Dual Power? Infoshops and Revolutionary Anarchism in the 1990s

I recorded my recent talk at the Anarchist Studies Conference and uploaded it to youtube, check it out!

“Spencer Beswick gives a short overview of the anarchist infoshop movement, including its historical roots in West German squats and rapid growth in the US in the 1990s. He also addresses critiques of the model, particularly from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which argued that infoshops should be subordinated to the task of building a revolutionary movement and dual power structures. Love and Rage was inspired by the Zapatistas in Mexico, who they saw as a model and a vision of the future. Ultimately, the debates over infoshops reflected very real differences in revolutionary strategy and tactics that are relevant for today’s movements.

This talk was originally presented at the Anarchist Studies Network Conference in August 2022 on a panel called ‘Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions.'”

Rhizomes and Anarchist Infoshops: Deleuze & Guattari in Practice?

I’m writing a piece on infoshops in the 1990s, which led me to revisit an earlier essay I wrote on our Antidote Infoshop and Food Not Bombs in Ithaca in 2018. I wrote it as I read Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which helped me think through the rhizomatic forms of anarchist organization. I don’t necessarily agree with much or all of the piece anymore, and it is notable that the Ithaca anarchist groups it highlights each fell apart within a year… But I still think it is interesting. Here is a brief excerpt from the middle of the piece:

Alternative infrastructure and anarchist organizations more broadly should be organized in fluid rhizomatic networks to resist state control. Here, anarchists can benefit from Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the possibilities of non-hierarchical rhizomatic networks of organization.[1] Counter to all efforts to develop hierarchies and centralize control, we should fight for decentralization and fractal organization; as the Curious George Brigade argues, “fractalized resistance cannot be adequately met by predesigned management and crowd control strategies.”[2]

Against a hierarchical, arborescent organization of thought and practice, Deleuze and Guattari pose another mode of organization: the rhizome. Anarchist infrastructure and organization are largely structured as rhizomes already, but this principle should continue to be embraced more consciously.

Rhizomes have six main characteristics. The first two are principles of connection and heterogeneity. That is to say, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”[3]

Third is the principle of multiplicity, which treats the multiple “as a substantive, ‘multiplicity’ […] Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.”[4]

Fourth, the principle of asignifying rupture, holds that rhizomes can be broken at any spot but continually reform along new lines. “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.”[5] In this principle, Deleuze and Guattari provide a strategy for how to practice rhizomatic expansion by following deterritorializing flows.[6]

Finally, the fifth and sixth principles are of cartography and decalcomania. Against the “tree logic” of “tracing and reproduction,” D&G argue that “the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.”[7] This experimentation in concrete projects is core to the anarchist approach.

Networks of anarchist infrastructure should turn a potential weakness—the fluid and often ephemeral nature of autonomous spaces—into a strength by organizing rhizomatically. Each node within the network should make as many connections as possible to other spaces and draw lines to connect them. The network should embrace its ever-shifting quality and constantly reconfigure itself, moving fluidly around shifting nodes. And finally, anarchists should continually experiment with new organizations and institutions, never falling back on tracings of previous efforts.

This relates as well to the common anarchist organizational form of the affinity group. Affinity groups are small collectives of people (usually around five to ten) who naturally share certain affinities regarding political practice and ideology. They often begin as or become close friends. As the members share common affinities, the goal is to operate as a unit and thus be more effective politically. Deleuze and Guattari write of the multiplicity of the wolf pack in a manner reminiscent of an affinity group.

among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles. […] The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it.[8]

Rather than attempt to organize more traditionally in formal structures, anarchists embrace the small, shifting multiplicities of affinity groups that come together for specific actions and projects before dispersing again to new areas and pursuits.

[1] Indeed, as I plan to argue in subsequent academic work, one can trace a genealogy relatively directly from Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the 1970s to contemporary anarchist practice in the United States, via Italian Autonomia and the West German Autonomen.

[2] The Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, 45.

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8-9.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.

[6] “Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later . . . you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.’” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33.

Marxism, Anarchism, and Anti-Colonialism Syllabus

The George Floyd Rebellion of Summer 2020 transformed the terrain of contemporary social struggle. In Fall 2020 I taught an intro class on “Marxism, Anarchism, and Anti-Colonialism” as an attempt to provide a theoretical and historical grounding for students involved in the movement. Here is the syllabus, with links/PDFs for all readings.

Course Description:

The US president tweets about “ugly anarchists” and pundits warn of a communist conspiracy to destroy America; meanwhile, abolitionists in Black Lives Matter offer a vision of a society without police, prisons, and capitalism. In a broad historical analysis of the contemporary political moment, this course asks: what do Marxists and anarchists really believe? This writing seminar will explore the theory and practice of Marxism and anarchism with particular focus on race, imperialism, and anti-colonialism. Students will write a persuasive political essay, a film analysis, papers exploring anti-capitalist theory, and historical reflections on national liberation movements. Readings will include Marx, Lenin, Kropotkin, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon, Mao, Mariátegui, the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, and more.

Note that the Marx readings all come from Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (1978). Here is a PDF.

Course Schedule

Week One: Introduction to Class

Unit One: Marxism

Week Two: The Communist Manifesto

  • Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”(1848) [p. 472-500]
  • Karl Marx, excerpt from “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” [Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (1859) [p. 4-5]

Week Three: Wage Labor and Alienation

  • Karl Marx, excerpt from Wage Labor and Capital (1847) [p. 203-206]
  • Karl Marx, excerpt from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) [p. 70-84]

Week Four: Marx and Colonialism

Week Five: Marxism-Leninism

Unit Two: Anarchism

Week Six: Introduction to Anarchism

Week Seven: Case Study: Mutual Aid and Coronavirus

Week Eight: Anarchism and Anti-Colonialism

Unit Three: National Liberation and Indigeneity

Week Nine: “Stretching Marxism” with Fanon

Week Ten: Marxism and Indigeneity

Week Eleven: Case Study: The Zapatistas

Unit Four: The Black Freedom Struggle

Week Twelve: Resistance, Marronage, and National Liberation

Week Thirteen: Black Power and Anti-Colonialism

Week Fourteen: Black Feminism and Abolition

Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack

I just published an article in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory called “Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack.”

This article combines historical insights from the Autonomen with theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make several related arguments. First, the commune form creates alternative worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against alienation takes place. Second, communes operate according to a unique spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory.

Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future) economic system. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this in daily life. Finally, revolutionary practice entails networks of autonomous communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territories that function as bases from which to attack capitalist state power.

You can read the article for free online at Perspectives on Anarchist Theory!

American Anarchism Syllabus

A few years ago, I taught my first class: a first-year writing seminar called “American Anarchism.” Here is the syllabus, which may be useful to folks looking for a grounding in the history of anarchism in the United States!

“Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…”

-Emma Goldman

“If it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands… You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Course description:

Anarchists are notorious for bomb-throwing “propaganda of the deed,” but they have historically been far more likely to reach for a pen than a stick of dynamite. What do anarchists have to offer us as writers? This course explores the history of American anarchism through historical analysis paired with literature and manifestos. We will study the rebellious writing of anarchists like Emma Goldman, David Graeber, and CrimethInc in order to refine our own techniques. Students will write historical essays, artistic and literary analysis, a persuasive political essay, and a manifesto. We will take inspiration from Ursula Le Guin’s affirmation that “writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.”

Course Schedule

Unit 1: Introduction to American Anarchism

Week 1: A Beginning

Tue., Jan. 21: Introduction to Class
Thu., Jan. 23: “Are You An Anarchist?”

Week 2: Classical Anarchism
Tue., Jan. 28: Anarchist Communism


Thu., Jan. 30: Anarchy in the US

Week 3: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and Resistance
Tue., Feb. 4: Settler Colonialism and Resistance


Thu., Feb. 6: Slavery and Resistance

Unit 2: Classical American Anarchism (late 19th/early 20th century)

Week 4: Early American Anarchism
Tue., Feb. 11: Utopian Socialism and Individualist Mutualism

Thu., Feb. 13: Immigrant Anarchism and Haymarket

Week 5: Anarchist Apogee and Decline

Tue., Feb. 18: Syndicalism and the Anarchist Apogee


Thurs., Feb. 20: Propaganda of the Deed and Insurrectionism

  • Lucy Parsons “A Word to Tramps”
  • Luigi Galleani, excerpt from “Propaganda of the Deed,” from The End of Anarchism? (1925)
  • Andrew Cornell, short excerpts from “The Red and Black Scare, 1917-1924” and “A Movement of Defense, of Emergency, 1920-1929,” in Unruly Equality (2016)

Week 6: From the Depression to the 1950s
Tue., Feb. 25: February Break, No Class

Thu., Feb. 27: Depression, Spanish Revolution, and WWII

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “The Unpopular Front, 1930-1939” and “Anarchism and Revolutionary Nonviolence, 1940-1948” from Unruly Equality (2016)

Unit 3: Anarchism in the Long 1960s

Week 7: Long 1960s Part 1: From Civil Rights to the New Left
Tue., Mar. 3: The Avant-Garde and the Civil Rights Movement

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “Anarchism and the Avant-Garde, 1942-1956” and “Anarchism and the Black Freedom Movement, 1955-1964,” from Unruly Equality


Thu., Mar. 5: Anarchism and the New Left

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “The New Left and Countercultural Anarchism, 1960-1972,” from Unruly Equality (2016) (240-279)
  • Murray Bookchin, “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” (1967/68)

Week 8: Long 1960s Part 2: Counterculture and the Rebirth of Anarchism
Tue., Mar. 10: Counterculture


Thu., Mar. 12: Anarchism “Reborn”

Unit 4: New Anarchisms: Anarcha-Feminism, Black Anarchism, and Environmentalism

Week 9: Anarcha-Feminism and Black Feminism
Tue., Mar. 17: Anarcha-Feminism


Thu., Mar. 19: Black Feminism and Anarchism

Week 10: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism and Radical Environmentalism
Tue., Mar. 24: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism


Thu., Mar. 26: Ecology, Primitivism, Earth Liberation

Week 11: Spring Break
Tue., Mar. 31: No Class (Spring Break)
Thu., Apr. 2: No Class (Spring Break)

Unit 5: Punk and Anarchism

Week 12: Punk, Anarchism, and Manifestos
Tue., Apr. 7: Punk and Manifestos


Thu., Apr. 9: Riot Grrrl and Zines

Week 13: Love & Rage, T.A.Z., and the Infoshop Movement


Tue., Apr. 14: Love & Rage (Revolutionary Anarchist Federation)


Thu., Apr. 16: Temporary and Permanent Autonomous Zones

Unit 6: Contemporary Anarchism

Week 14: Anti-Globalization Movement


Tue., Apr. 21: Anti-Globalization/Global Justice Movement


Thu., Apr. 23: 21st Century Anarchism, Earth & Animal Liberation, and the Green Scare

Week 15: Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter
Tue., Apr. 28: Occupy Wall Street


Thu., Apr. 30: Anarchist People of Color and Black Lives Matter

***Friday, May 1: Mayday, International Workers Day***

Week 16: Endings and new beginnings
Tue., May. 5: Whither Anarchism?

Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League

In the late 1980s, the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) theorized and practiced what they called “revolutionary anarchism” and helped build an organized anarchist movement across North America. In “Bowling for Beginners: An Anarchist Primer,” RABL offers an initial definition of anarchism:

Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the absence of imposed authority. Anarchy is a society that is built on the principles of respect, cooperation and solidarity. Anarchy is wimmin controlling their own bodies, workers controlling their own workplaces, youth controlling their own education and the celebration of cultural difference.

reprinted in Love and Rage, Aug 1990

RABL gives a short history of anarchism from the 1886 Haymarket Affair to contemporary squatters movements in order to demonstrate that successful movements all share a common thread of people taking power into their own hands and collectively struggling for a new world. RABL rejected the need for a revolutionary vanguard, arguing that “only the masses, completely involved and in absolute control, can make a real revolution.” In the end, “anarchism is about people empowering themselves to take control and to lead their own lives.”

But since those in power will not give it up without a fight, revolution is necessary. The basic point of unity for RABL was an agreement on the necessity of revolutionary action to reach a classless, stateless society. RABL brought together the most pro-organization and anti-imperialist anarchists in the Twin Cities—and eventually across the US—to advocate a combination of direct action and revolutionary organization.

True to their name, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League crew began referring to “going bowling” as a code for direct action, which could be anything from nighttime sabotage (gluing locks, spray painting, etc.) to acting as a militant bloc at a street demonstration. Many anarchists at the time practiced this sort of small-scale militancy, which could be organized in small affinity groups of friends. RABL’s intervention was to pair this individual and small-group direct action with a vision for a broad anarchist federation.

Anarchism could continue to exist forever on the margins of society in small groups, but if anarchists wanted to actually change the world, they needed to get organized and help build militant mass movements.

Despite their roots in a relatively small city, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League played an outsized role in transforming US anarchism and organizing a national movement at the end of the 20th century…

This is the latest in my new series Fragments of an Anarchist Dissertation. Check out the last post here: RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

“We have reached a breaking point” -Nikolas S., Rage! October 1988

“We must still know to direct our anger towards revolution.” -Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League, 1990

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. RABL, acting in a broad progressive coalition, helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America. They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America was threatening to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the first iteration of what became the Love and Rage newspaper was called simply RAGE! It reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad. Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out from political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s—were dead, and the mainstream world offered little of value to save. Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in punk mosh pits and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts consisting of fragments from the dissertation writing process...