“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...
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